Nearly two years on, Climate Home News looks at how these commitments are holding up to the test of time.

• Methane Pledge
• Forest Pledge
• International Fossil Finance Pledge
• Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ)

METHANE PLEDGE

WHAT: Reduce human-made methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030. Cutting the amount of methane present in the atmosphere is important because it is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide despite having a shorter lifespan.

WHO: 104 countries, led by the US and the EU, signed up to the pledge when it was first announced at Cop26 in Glasgow. The number of signatories has since risen to 150. However, they only represent about half of global methane emissions as China, India and Russia – three of the world’s top four emitters – have not joined the coalition.

HOW IT IS GOING: The raw figures paint a fairly grim picture. Since Cop26, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has kept rising fast and it is now more than two and a half times its pre-industrial level.

Over half of the emissions come from human activities, like fossil fuel extraction, farming and landfills, with the rest caused by natural sources. Under current trajectories, total human-made methane emissions could rise by up to 13% between 2020 and 2030 – the pledge’s timeframe.

This graph shows the globally-averaged, monthly atmospheric methane concentration since 1983. Image credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

Targeting the oil and gas sector is seen by many as the easiest and fastest way to bring down emissions in the near term. Experts say existing technologies already provide cheap and effective ways to plug leaky infrastructure like pipelines and gas storage tanks.

However, the technological developments have not yet been converted into real, widespread action. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), methane emissions from oil and gas remained “stubbornly high” in 2022 even as the energy companies’ bumper profits made actions to reduce them cheaper than ever. “There is just no excuse”, the IEA chief Fatih Birol commented.

Raft of initiatives

But judging the pledge’s progress on current numbers only tells half the story, argued Jonathan Banks, global director of the methane programme at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). “Emissions are not going to turn around immediately,” he told Climate Home. “If you look at the work going into the pledge, building the funding and technical resources to bring emissions down, I think it could potentially be on track for success”.

A series of initiatives have been set up to help countries deliver on the pledge. The UN’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) is helping over 30 developed and developing countries to establish plans to achieve the 2030 target.

Canada has set out a strategy that it expects to reduce domestic methane emissions by “more than 35%” by 2030, compared to 2020.

Methane leaking from Chelmsford compressor station, UK on 15 October 2021, picked up by a special camera (Photo: Clean Air Task Force/ James Turitto)

The Global Methane Hub (GMH), a philanthropic organisation, is also supporting signatories of the methane pledge with technical assistance and funding. Carolina Urmeneta, a director at the GMH, told Climate Home News that over the last year, the group has focused its work on developing systems to monitor methane emissions rates from oil and gas and landfill installations using satellites.

She said reaching the 2030 target “is possible and cost-effective, but it is not easy. We need to improve data transparency and increase funding for projects with methane targets.”

Regulations drive

Some progress has also been made on the regulatory front. The USA introduced new rules to address methane emissions caused by oil and gas companies through the Inflation Reduction Act. Using a carrot-and-stick approach, it provides $1 billion in public subsidies to take action, while charging a fee for excessive emissions.

In May the European Parliament agreed on tougher measures to tackle methane emissions in the energy sector. The approved text calls for binding emission reduction targets, stronger obligations for fossil fuel operators to detect and repair leaky infrastructure and the application of the same measures to exporting countries outside of the bloc.

While the final rules are still being negotiated with the EU’s national governments, CATF’s Banks believes they could have a “huge global impact” if introduced in their current form. “The methane emissions associated with the gas Europe buys from the rest of the world is quite large, so such measures could really drive some change”.

New announcements are expected at Cop28 in Dubai, after the summit’s president Sultan Al Jaber set the phaseout of methane emissions in oil and gas by 2030 as one of his priorities. “More than 20 oil and gas companies have answered Cop28’s call,” he said this week. “And I see positive momentum as more are joining”. But the UAE has been accused of double standards as it failed to report methane emissions to the UN for a decade, as the Guardian reported.

While it has not signed the pledge, China is expected to announce its long-awaited methane plan at Cop28.

FOREST PLEDGE 

WHAT: End and reverse deforestation by 2030. Country leaders pledged to conserve forests, tackle wildfires, facilitate sustainable agriculture, support indigenous populations and “significantly” increase the provision of finance towards achieving those goals.

WHO: More than 140 countries joined the coalition. Signatories of the pledge – including large forest nations like Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – cover around 90% of the world’s forests. But major G20 powers such as India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and rainforest nations like Bolivia and Venezuela did not join the group.

HOW IT IS GOING:  Countries remain off track to reach the goal of the Glasgow pledge and end deforestation by 2030, according to an assessment done by a coalition of NGOs.

Across the world, tree loss recorded in 2022 was 21% higher than the level needed to be on course to reach zero in seven years’ time, the report said.

Source: Forest Declaration Assessment

In fact, the situation is getting worse. Global deforestation grew 4% last year, wiping out 6.6 million hectares of forest, according to the study. That’s a tree-covered area nearly as big as Ireland disappearing in one year.

“The world’s forests are in crisis. All these promises have been made to halt deforestation, to fund forest protection. But the opportunity to make progress is passing us by year after year,” said Erin Matson, a lead author of the Forest Declaration Assessment.

Saving the Three Basins means stopping fossil fuel expansion

There are important regional differences, however. While tropical Asia is faring better, with Indonesia and Malaysia on track to hit their targets, Latin America and the Caribbean are farthest off track.

The election of President Lula da Silva in Brazil has led to a reversal in the skyrocketing deforestation rates in the country, which hosts most of the Amazon rainforets.

But efforts to create a regional forest protection coalition have failed. At the Amazon summit in August, eight South American countries failed to agree on a pledge to end deforestation by 2030 following opposition from Bolivia and Venezuela.

An aerial view shows deforestation near a forest on the border between Amazonia and Cerrado in Nova Xavantina, Mato Grosso state, Brazil in 2021 (REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli)

While it included a larger number of countries, the Cop26 commitment was not entirely new: it repeated promises previously made in the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, which by then had already failed to achieve some of its core targets.

Keen to avoid the same fate, self-declared “high ambition” countries launched a new initiative designed to deliver the pledge.

“High ambition” efforts

Chaired by the USA and Ghana, the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership (FCLP) has promised to spur global action and provide accountability.

Only a fifth of the original 140 signatories have joined the group so far, with Russia and Indonesia among the most notable absentees.

Christine Dragisic, who leads the forest team at the US State Department, said the goal is to create a “high-level community” that brings together governments, indigenous people, philanthropies, civil society and the private sector to drive action forward and hit the 2030 target.

“Can we do it? Yes. Is it going to be hard? Definitely. Does it require everybody to be at the table? For sure”, Dragisic told Climate Home.

An Indonesian ranger patrols a forest protected through a carbon credit project. Photo: Dita Alangkara/CIFOR

Since its launch last year, the FCLP has worked on a number of initiatives offering technical and financial solutions to forest nations, looking at the role of carbon markets and the forest economy in averting tree loss.

Finance gaps

As with most climate actions, however, it ultimately comes down to the question of money. “The delivery of climate finance is very important to achieve a lot of these targets and that is still very much lacking”, Roselyn Fosuah Adjei, director of climate change at Ghana’s forestry commission and co-chair of the FCLP, told Climate Home.

“The kind of finance we need is not finance for today or tomorrow, it’s finance for yesterday. We are already behind schedule. If it gets delivered fast there’s lots that we can do to close the gap that is now quite wide,” she added.

The Cop26 pledge was accompanied by a commitment from a group of rich nations to provide $12 billion in forest-related climate finance between 2021 and 2025. The money should be channeled to developing countries enacting concrete steps to halt forest loss.

The donor countries reported last year that they had provided $2.6 billion – over a fifth of the target amount – in 2021. They are expected to provide an update at Cop28.

INTERNATIONAL FOSSIL FINANCE PLEDGE

WHAT: End new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022, except in limited and clearly defined circumstances that are consistent with a 1.5°C warming limit and the goals of the Paris Agreement.

WHO: 34 countries and five development banks – predominantly from wealthy cuontries – signed up to the pledge at Cop26. These included the G7 nations – with the exception of Japan – and most EU member states.

HOW IT IS GOING: Among the signatories that give lots of money to the energy sector, the vast majority have introduced policies in line with the promise made in Glasgow.

The United Kingdom, France, Denmark, New Zealand, Canada, Finland and Sweden have stopped providing loans and guarantees for oil and gas extraction and processing overseas through their export credit agencies.

Their actions have shifted at least $5.7 billion per year in public finance out of fossil fuels and into clean energy, according to analysis by Oil Change International and E3G.

On the other hand, however, the USA, Italy and Germany have continued funding international fossil fuel projects in 2023 in breach of the pledge.

They were supposed to stop funding foreign fossil fuels by December 2022. But since then, they collectively approved over $3 billion in financial support to oil and gas overseas programmes.

Most of the funding comes in the form of state-backed guarantees provided by export credit agencies. These products limit the risk taken by companies selling services and goods in other countries, influencing investment.

Among the projects receiving backing from the US and Italy was the expansion of an oil refining facility in Indonesia’s Borneo.

The US Export-Import Bank justified its backing of the project by claiming it would allow Indonesia to reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels. The Italian agency did not provide a motivation for the decision.

Germany and the US have also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into projects aiming to boost the production and trade of liquified natural gas (LNG), which has been more sought after since Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe cut back on Russian gas.

Political splits and carve-outs

In the US, efforts to comply with the Glasgow pledge have caused a split among senior officials in the Biden administration and in the federal agencies charged with disbursing the money, as Politico revealed.

The White House has drafted guidance underpinning the investments - without making it public -, but the final decisions are made by agencies like the US Export-Import Bank (Exim).

“It is a struggle to get US Exim to comply, so far they’ve ignored the Cop26 commitment”, says Nina Pusic from Oil Change International. “It will require a lot of political weight from the Biden administration and Congress.”

Indonesia delays coal closure plans after finance row with rich nations

Italy looks likely to keep funding fossil fuels overseas for years to come. Its policy guidance lays out a "gradual dismission of public support to new requests of fossil fuel projects", seeing support for gas extraction and production run into 2026. Oil processing and distribution projects should be excluded from the beginning of next year.

But Italy has also carved out a wide range of exceptions that allow its export credit agency to keep greenlighting support for fossil fuel projects on "national energy security" and "energy efficiency" grounds.

The FSRU Toscana LNG regasfication platform off the coast of Italy (Photo: OLT Offshore LNG Toscana)

Germany's main export credit agency has just introduced this month new policies restricting support for fossil fuel projects. However, it allows for financing the development of new gas fields and related transport facilities until 2025 when justified by "national security and in compliance with the Paris Agreement targets".

Investment in new coal, oil and gas production is regarded as incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) and a large number of climate scientists.

"Germany has a vast amount of fossil fuel transactions pending approval", says Oil Change International's Pusic. "The success of the new policy will be judged on the decisions made on those projects".

GLASGOW FINANCIAL ALLIANCE FOR NET ZERO (GFANZ)

WHAT: Commit to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest by aligning their portfolios and investment practices with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

WHO: Over 650 institutions across the financial sector, including banks, insurers, asset owners, asset managers, financial service providers, and investment consultants. Gfanz members represent 40% of global private financial assets. They are grouped together under eight independent net-zero financial alliances focused on specific branches of finance.

HOW IT IS GOING: It is not easy to gauge the progress of a wide-ranging initiative with loosely defined targets and a constellation of constituent parts.

GFANZ says it has made progress over the last two years by raising the ambition of financial institutions and by providing tools and guidance to turn commitments into action.

"Two years ago, not a single bank had set a science-based 2030 target. Now nearly all global, systemically important banks have voluntarily and independently set 2030 targets for oil and gas", a GFANZ spokesperson said.

Above all, the mere fact that the alliance still exists at all is a first - albeit limited - marker of success, after an especially tumultuous year.

The prospect of ending up in legal hot waters in the US, where Republicans have driven an anti-climate investment backlash, has dampened the enthusiasm of many leading signatories. The result is that parts of the alliance have been hemorrhaging members, while other components have resorted to watering down their requirements to assuage concerns.

Mark Carney, former Bank of England governor, launched GFANZ at Cop26. Photo: World Economic Forum/Valeriano Di Domenico

Troubles started brewing in mid-2022 when a group of leading US banks threatened to pull out over fears of being sued because of having decarbonisation policies imposed by external parties. That's after US Republican politicians had accused financial institutions of breaching antitrust rules by grouping together in a climate cartel that limits opportunities for investors.

A month later, in October 2022, Gfanz dropped a key requirement for its members to sign up to the UN Race to Zero initiative - a verification body for corporate and financial sector pledges - which had been seen as a way to prevent greenwashing.

GFANZ told Climate Home that the alliances are still working with Race to Zero and "continue to note" its advice and guidance.

Heading for the door

Those US banks eventually ended up staying in but, despite the less stringent criteria, other influential members began heading for the door in droves soon after.

Vanguard, one of the world's biggest asset managers, quit the Net Zero Asset Managers' initiative - part of Gfanz - saying it wanted to "provide clarity to investors" and "speak independently on matters of importance" to them.

But it's the insurers' coalition, known as NZIA, that has suffered the biggest - nearly fatal - wounds. The group has lost nearly two-thirds of its members since the start of the year, with leading firms like Allianz, Zurich, Munich Re and Lloyd's of London throwing in the towel.

Again a major driver for the mass exit was a letter written in May by 23 Republican attorney generals accusing signatories of advancing "an activists climate agenda" with "serious detrimental effects on the residents" of their states. The spark for this was the alliance's initial obligation to its members to set emission reduction targets by the end of July.

Staring at the real prospect of shutting down, the insurers' alliance again watered down its requirements, becoming effectively toothless.

To triple renewable energy, the Global South needs finance

"NZIA member companies have no obligation to set or publish targets", wrote the UN Environment Programme (Unep) - convener of the initiative -  in a clarification letter. "Each company who chooses to be a member of the NZIA unilaterally and independently decides on the steps on its path towards net zero."

Meanwhile, GFANZ says its members have submitted over 300 interim targets "representing clear progress in implementing commitments" to divert finance in line with net zero goals.

But while plans have been announced, many GFANZ members are also being accused of not putting their money where their mouth is. 161 members of the coalition have collectively invested hundreds of billions of dollars into the expansion of the coal, oil and gas industries since they joined the group, according to research by campaigning group Reclaim Finance.

A GFANZ spokesperson said "it’s clear a lot of work still needs to be done to ensure the world is deploying capital consistent with a 1.5C pathway".

"GFANZ is helping to support financial institutions to each set their own sectoral targets and develop transition plans and release guidance on their plan for a managed phaseout of fossil fuels," they added.

The article was amended on 6/11 to add comments from GFANZ received after publication

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Export credit and development agencies from six developed nations have approved $4.4 billion in funding for oil and gas projects overseas since the start of 2023, research from campaigning group Oil Change International shows.

More than half of the total financing has been provided by the United States ($1.5 billion) and Italy ($1.2 billion), followed by Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Claire O’Manique from Oil Change International said the countries are “going rogue by backtracking on their commitment to end international public finance for fossil fuels”.  “Public money that should be going to support a just transition to renewable energy is instead being pumped into more climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects”, she added.

One pledge, many interpretations

Twenty countries signed up to the Glasgow Statement at Cop26 pledging to end new direct public finance for overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022.

However, the signatories have interpreted the promise in different ways.

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The United Kingdom and France have stopped all public subsidies going to international fossil fuel projects. Italy carved out a wide range of energy security exemptions for the continued support of fossil fuel projects. Germany published a draft policy for its export credit agency last July planning to support new gas projects overseas until 2025. The US has not made its guidelines public.

The Glasgow pledge allowed exceptions in “limited and clearly defined circumstances that are consistent with a 1.5C warming limit”. The International Energy Agency warned last year that investment in new coal, oil and gas production was incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

LNG and oil expansion

The US and Germany have backed projects aiming to boost the production and trade of liquified natural gas (LNG), which has been in heightened demand since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The expansion of an oil refining facility in Indonesia’s Borneo has received support from the Italian and US export credit agencies. The US Export-Import Bank justified its backing of the project by claiming it would allow Indonesia to reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels.

African leaders skirt over fossil fuels in climate summit declaration

Analysts and campaigners told Climate Home News that expansion of oil refining falls within the scope of the Glasgow agreement.

The majority of the $4.4 billion greenlit in 2023 comes in the form of state-backed guarantees provided by export credit agencies. These products limit the risk taken by companies selling services and goods in other countries, influencing investment.

Climate Home News has contacted the export credit agencies of Germany, Italy and the US for comment.

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The government’s export credit agency has released its draft policy for the provision of guarantees in the energy sector in what it described as an attempt to tie them to climate protection targets.

The guidelines were expected to belatedly align the German agency’s operations with a pledge made at Cop26 in Glasgow to end funding for coal, oil and gas projects overseas by the end of last year.

Under the proposal, the German government will no longer support coal and oil operations except when needed to decommission infrastructure or reduce methane emissions.

But the inclusion of a series of exceptions for fossil gas has come under heavy criticism.

‘Anti-science’ policy

Adam McGibbon from campaigning group Oil Change International said Germany’s claims to be a climate leader are “laughable” after the release of this new policy.

“This policy is anti-science, it runs against everything that the world’s scientists are telling us. No new fossil fuel infrastructure can be built if the world is to meet climate targets”, he added.

G20 divisions over key climate goals pile pressure on Cop28 hosts

The agency would continue supporting the development of new gas fields and related transport facilities until 2025 when justified by national security and in compliance with the Paris Agreement targets.

The pledge to end international finance for fossil fuel allows exceptions in “limited and clearly defined circumstances that are consistent with a 1.5C warming limit”. The International Energy Agency warned last year that investment in new coal, oil and gas production was incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

There is similarly a “large consensus” among climate scientists that developing any new gas fields is “incompatible” with limiting warming to 1.5C, according to a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) reviewing energy pathways.

Germany, which relied on Russia for a third of its gas, has opted for alternatives overseas, even equipping itself with new LNG importing capacity with new floating terminals.

In late 2022, the country even signed a 15-year deal to import gas from the UAE’s North Field, deemed a carbon bomb for its large untapped supplies.

2025 deadline

The German guidelines would also allow for the provision of export guarantees for the maintenance of existing gas extraction and transport projects until 2025 in industrialised nations and until 2029 in developing countries. This would only apply to activities that do not extend the lifetime or the production capacity of the projects.

The retrofitting of existing gas power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies would also be eligible for public financing.

The German economy ministry said the sector guidelines implemented international commitments and that conditions for gas were very strict and very limited, Reuters reported.

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The policy is expected to come into force towards the end of the year after undergoing a consultation process.

Export credit agencies, like the German agency, are influential in directing investment towards specific sectors. They do this by offering exporters government-backed loans, guarantees or insurance.

Thanks to those benefits, companies selling services and goods in countries or industries considered high-risk can offset them.

Cop26 pledge

Germany was among 39 countries and financial institutions that signed a pledge at Cop26 in November 2021 to stop public finance for overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022.

Among the biggest signatories, the United Kingdom, France and Canada have published policies that meet the promise made in Glasgow.

Italy has already u-turned on its commitment, carving out a wide range of exemptions for the continued support of fossil fuel projects on energy security grounds.

The United States has not yet published its policy. Last May its export credit agency approved a loan worth nearly $100 million for the expansion of an oil refining facility in Indonesia.

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After more than three years of debate, communities minister Michael Gove approved the Whitehaven coal mine on Wednesday, based on the top planning official’s recommendation.

Climate watchers from around the world accused the UK of hypocrisy. As host of last year’s Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, the UK successfully pushed other countries to agree to phase down coal power.

Coal from the planned mine is destined for export to steel works, not power plants. The UK has slashed its use of of coal for electricity by 95% in the last ten years, by lowering demand and scaling up renewable generation.

That distinction was no excuse to the government’s official climate advisory body, which unequivocally condemned the move. “This decision grows global emissions and undermines UK efforts to achieve net zero,” said Lord Deben, chair of the Climate Change Committee. “It runs counter to the UK’s stated aims as Cop26 president and sends entirely the wrong signal to other countries about the UK’s climate priorities.”

The prime minister of Fiji, Frank Bainimarama, tweeted: “Is this the future we fought for under the Glasgow Pact? Fossil fuels should be phased OUT – not up.”

Is this the future we fought for under the Glasgow Pact?

Fossil fuels should be phased OUT – not up. https://t.co/2BkBLxN6sV

— Frank Bainimarama (@FijiPM) December 8, 2022

Angelique Pouponneau, an adviser to small islands at climate talks from the Seychelles, tweeted: “Huh? Confused – just a few weeks ago we heard 1.5 was on life support…”

That was a reference to UK’s Cop26 president Alok Sharma bemoaning weak language on fossil fuels from the latest UN climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Sharma publicly opposed the coal mine and was demoted by Rishi Sunak when the latter took over as prime minister in October.

Former Liberian public works minister W Gyude Moore tweeted: “Britain approves first new coal mine in decades despite climate targets -(But it’s Africa’s negligible use of natural gas that would threaten the world’s climate budget. Right?)”

The coal mine approval came in tandem with the UK government pledging to ease planning restrictions on building onshore windfarms, prompting speculation it was motivated by party politics.

The ruling Conservative Party is split on the issue of climate change. Dozens of Conservative lawmakers pushed to make it easier to install wind turbines while others affiliated to Net Zero Watch have campaigned against environmental measures.

Green steel dismissed

Justifying the decision, Gove and planning inspector Stephen Normington questioned the feasibility of cleaner methods of steel production to argue coking coal was still needed.

Several climate experts testified during the planning process. They cited the International Energy Agency’s roadmap to global net zero emissions, under which global demand for coking coal falls 88% by 2050.

Arcelor Mittal’s use of hydrogen to decarbonise steel production in Europe was given as a case study for the transition.

Normington was unconvinced, arguing that the small print showed Arcelor Mittal’s technical advances were modest and did not justify the hype.

“The UK cannot go out on a speculative limb that hydrogen will perhaps offer a solution in the next 20 years. If we were to stop making steel we would be one of the few major economies without steelmaking and would just move the issues elsewhere”, Normington said.

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The EU classifies coking coal as a critical mineral, Normington noted, citing a 2020 statement from the European Commission’s that: “There is no other satisfactory material available which can replace completely metallurgical coal in the blast furnace charge.”

Gove concluded “the longer term demand for coking coal cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty”.

The planning inspector also dismissed concerns about the international impact of approving the mine. He wrote: “Despite the so-called expert evidence, no evidence has been called to show how mere signalling has in fact influenced countries such as the China or the USA.”

‘Net zero coal mine’

The Clean Air Task Force’s global director of zero-carbon fuels Magnolia Tovar agreed that decarbonising steel was technically challenging.

“While possible technological solutions exist, the steel industry has no clear route to decarbonising primary steel production at sufficient scale and in the necessary timeframe,” she said. “Action is needed to develop a robust framework to push the global steel industry to decarbonise, facilitating all possible options to reach net zero in the steel industry including through the use of low-carbon hydrogen and carbon capture and storage.”

The company developing the mine has said it plans to offset the emissions it produces from extracting the coal – but not the emissions from burning it in steel furnaces. The offsets will be bought from an organisation like Gold Standard “or equivalent”. The company and Normington claim this will make the project a “net zero mine”.

Gove said that the coal would replace fuel from other mines which are not “net zero compliant” and so benefit the environment. He said the use of offsets was “neither unusual nor inappropriate”.

This clashes with the findings of a recent UN taskforce, endorsed by the UK and all countries at Cop27, which recommended using offsets only as a last resort. “You cannot be a net zero leader while continuing to build or invest in fossil fuel supply,” said the report’s author, former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna.

The coal mine’s use of offsets was also challenged by their favoured offset seller Gold Standard.

The company said it couldn’t stop the mine buying its offsets. But its CEO Margaret Kim told Climate Home: “Justifying the development of a new coal mine with our carbon credits and using them to claim ‘carbon neutrality’ for the project is nonsense. We are in a climate emergency and new extraction of fossil fuels is unjustifiable. Or claims guidelines make it clear that to make an offset claim organisations should prioritise the avoidance and reduction of emissions – something that is clearly impossible for a coal mine.”

Think-tank Ember further argued the environmental impact assessment for the mine underestimated the amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, it would release from its operations. Similar mines elsewhere in the world typically leak four times as much, according to its analysis.

“Coal mine methane is a huge risk to climate. We don’t have time to waste on it being underestimated and under-addressed yet again,” said Ember senior analyst Anatoli Launay-Smirnov.

Green groups are expected to challenge the decision in the courts.

This article was updated on 9 December to include a comment from Gold Standard

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At Cop26, all countries agreed to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 climate plans, to close the gap between national action and the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.

23 September was the cut-off date for inclusion in a UN Climate Change progress report and was highlighted as a deadline by Cop26 president Alok Sharma.

As that date passed, just 23 of the nearly 200 countries which signed the Glasgow agreement had submitted updated 2030 climate plans. Of these, most offered more policy detail rather than strengthening headline targets.

Top three emitters the USA, EU and China worked on implementing pledges made last year but did not increase their ambition. India formalised promises made by prime minister Narendra Modi at Cop26 into an official four-page document.

Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare told a webinar last week: “The bottom line is there has been really little progress since Cop26. Politics and geopolitics is dominated by the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine which then sent energy markets into turmoil but still, we feel countries should be moving ahead.”

He added: “There’s a massive emissions gap remaining and the IPCC assessment has been very clear that we do need to get down and close that gap if we have much of a chance of limiting warming to 1.5C.”

I welcome the updated NDCs from Indonesia UAE & Uganda and Gambia’s Long Term Strategy

23 parties including UK have submitted new or strengthened NDCs to @UNFCCC since COP26

I encourage all countries, and especially major emitters, to do so ahead of #COP27

— Alok Sharma (@AlokSharma_RDG) September 26, 2022

Of the major emitters, Australia stands out for significantly increasing ambition. The newly elected Labor government pushed up its 2030 target from 26-28% on 2005 levels to 43%, a similar level to other developed economies.

Indonesia, Cop27 hosts Egypt and Cop28 hosts the United Arab Emirates submitted stronger targets, while the UK clarified how it would achieve its emissions cuts.

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Indonesia improved its unconditional 2030 target from 29% to 31.89% compared to a business-as-usual predicted level. With international finance, it could achieve 43.2% cuts, up from 41% in the previous plan.

The Cop27 host Egypt quantified its emissions reduction targets for the first time. But the plan only covered certain sectors not the economy as a whole and is entirely conditional on international finance.

The Cop28 host UAE improved its 2030 emissions reduction target from 23.5% to 31%, compared to a business-as-usual baseline.

Brazil raised its 2030 target from 37% to 50%, compared to 2005. But it also changed how 2005 levels were measured, making the target easier to meet. According to Climate Action Tracker, Brazil’s updated climate plan is therefore less ambitious than before.

In June, several major emitters said they were updating their climate plans but have yet to do so. These countries were Chile, Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam.

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The European Union reportedly plans to update its climate plan to capture a step-up in medium-term ambition since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Although countries like Germany have been frantically chasing gas deals to get them through the coming winter, they plan to move faster off fossil fuels by 2030 in response to the invasion.

The USA has not updated its target but has made major progress towards meeting it by passing the Inflation Reduction Act.

Analysis from the Rhodium Group suggests this will reduce the US’s emissions by one billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year by 2030.

When the EU and US score climate points off China, Africa suffers

Climate Action Tracker estimates the gap to being on track for 1.5C of global warming is 17-20 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year by 2030.

At Cop26, Climate Action Tracker predicted the world was on course for 2.7C of global warming based on government policies.

If an optimistic scenario, in which governments implemented all their announced targets, global warming could be limited to 1.8C, they said. That latter forecast was echoed by the International Energy Agency.

Climate Action Tracker’s assement published at Cop26, which will be updated at Cop27 (Photo: Climate Action Tracker)

In some areas, governments have gone backwards since Cop26, Hare said. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provoked a global energy crisis and the overflow from that is from my perspective we’re seeing the oil and gas industry really taking advantage of that and promoting massive gas developments particularly in Africa, Asia, Australia which will render the Paris agreement targets unachievable if implemented.”

Hare added that the European Union had encouraged this gas development by classifying gas as a green investment in its “sustainable taxonomy”. “That’s being used at a rhetorical level around the world to justify gas as green,” Hare said.

UN chief: Windfall tax on oil and gas can pay for loss and damage

Speaking from New York’s climate week, he added: “I was at a reception last night hearing leaders from Latin American countries talking about how green gas was because the Europeans said it. I’ve heard that from Africans as well.”

The European Climate Foundation’s CEO Laurence Tubiana told reporters last week that the energy crisis had pushed governments, particularly in Europe and China, back towards fossil fuels.

That “weakened” pledges made at Cop26 in Glasgow, she said, adding that the real economy continues to move in the right direction.

The post Gap to 1.5C yawns, as most governments miss UN deadline to improve climate plans appeared first on Climate Home News.

As Cop president, the UK made adaptation a priority, establishing a two-year Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh work programme on a global adaptation goal and a target to balance adaptation financing with mitigation financing by 2025. There was substantial participation on behalf of the adaptation community, albeit largely online and outside the negotiating rooms.

These conversations have carried on, for example at this week’s online Gobeshona Global Conference, creating opportunities to make progress before Cop27 in Egypt.

The rising significance of adaptation is underpinned by one key fact: the impacts of climate change are here now and set to escalate. However, despite feeling hopeful at times, the most recent climate negotiations still failed to match words about loss and damage, resilience, and adaptation with actions to actually protect the most affected people and areas.

After US fails to pay its debt, UN’s flagship climate fund warns of austerity

While negotiators have only belatedly started thinking about how best to create the conditions to build greater climate resilience, communities, including our own, have already been doing this for decades.

In Bangladesh, we have been forced to build our resilience by enduring yearly cyclones among other natural disasters and to develop survival techniques like growing vegetables on water, rainwater harvesting, water ambulances, floating schools, and procedures for early warning and evacuation.

Similarly, shack-dwellers globally have learned to build and rebuild their homes in the face of climate disasters. For many the question is not whether the roof over their heads will blow away, but rather when, and how often.

The injustice of climate impacts means the strongest resilience – ‘survival resilience’ built on compound crises – is developed by the world’s poorest communities. It is often informal and deeply local. Crucially, it is not fixed or static, due to the unpredictability of climate change impacts. International agreements require mechanisms that reflect this uncertainty.

They must also ensure that practical, local techniques and indigenous practices are coupled with external intervention. With only 10% of climate finance currently supporting locally-led adaptation, and just 2% reaching the most affected communities, we remain a long way from giving those experiencing the most significant climate-related disruption what they need.

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Yet, the voices of those with the most knowledge to contribute to the discussion on adaptation and resilience continue to be pushed to the fringes of the Cop process and often go unheard worldwide. How can negotiations about the future remain inaccessible to those with the biggest stake?

A summit cannot truly deliver positive outcomes for youth, women, and indigenous people without their meaningful participation, yet at Cop26 they were outside being pushed back by police while big corporations were in the delegations.

The current system, based on the burning of carbon, resource extraction, exploitation of people in informal work and settlements, and concentration of vast amounts of capital, operates by locking out those who need the system itself to change for their survival. If the voices of those people had been given as much importance as those of 500+ fossil fuel lobbyists, Cop26 might have had a very different result.

But the UN’s daily subsistence allowance for delegates from poorer countries is provided only until the official final day of negotiations, forcing many to leave before talks conclude. Covid-19 further compounds the inaccessibility of climate talks for people from the global south: most of our colleagues have yet to be vaccinated and none of us could afford to be stuck for weeks if we test positive at a conference.

Canadian ex-minister Catherine McKenna named to head UN greenwash watchdog

While the media may have labelled Cop26 ‘the most inclusive Cop yet’, that does not mean it was meaningfully inclusive. Recent reports of Egyptian hotels raising their prices for Cop27 suggest the same mistakes risk being repeated.

Finally, the lack of progress since Cop26 indicates still too little sense of urgency. The latest IPCC report reinforced the need for urgent, transformative adaptive action, yet Cop26 concluded with more delay, more long-term targets, and more climate finance directed towards mitigation than adaptation efforts.

We – the global south – have been forced into adapting now, not in a year or two. Delays of even one year mean more people lose their homes and livelihoods, fewer children go to school and more girls end up in child marriage.

Developed nations and the media must change how they talk about climate change and the people it affects. It is not just a scientific issue. It is about jobs, homes, health, and survival. It is about people fleeing their countries as climate refugees.

If there is one thing Covid-19 has demonstrated, it is that the world is capable of rapid and widespread change in the face of a crisis and that solutions start with the community. If we take this approach with climate change, we might just start moving forwards.

Sheela Patel is the founder and director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (Sparc) and Sohanur Rahman is a youth activist from Bangladesh.

The post The world’s poorest have the strongest resilience, yet their voices remain unheard appeared first on Climate Home News.

Countries agreed at the Cop26 climate talks to wind down unabated coal power, albeit with no timeline nor a consensus for a total phase-out.

Asia turned against coal finance. First South Korea, then Japan and finally China, the world’s largest coal financier, put an end to support for new coal power projects abroad, effectively drying up international cash for unabated coal.

But it could be a long goodbye. Plans to exit coal power at home proved a more difficult conversation for coal-dependent governments, including China, India, Russia and Australia.

And promises made throughout the year are yet to be backed with concrete policies and the accelerated roll out of green alternatives. A carbon-intensive recovery to the Covid pandemic, particularly in China, drove global coal power generation to a record high in 2021.

Here were the biggest moments.

January

Data emerged showing China’s biggest coal-producing province, Inner Mongolia, had approved power and industrial facilities in 2020 that would lock in annual coal use the size of Germany’s. It was the most striking example of Beijing’s coal-powered recovery to the pandemic.

February

Central government inspectors slammed China’s energy authority for promoting coal power expansion without regard for Beijing’s environmental goals. The highly critical report was hailed as “groundbreaking” and a show of Beijing’s challenges to reflect president Xi’s climate ambition in all planning decisions.

In Bangladesh, the government announced plans to scrap nine coal power plants. The high cost of imported coal, declining financial support from overseas investors and Bangladesh’s role as chair of the Climate Vulnerable Forum were cited as reasons for the decision.

Plans to build the UK’s first deep coal mine in 30 years for coking coal were suspended after the government was accused of “rank hypocrisy” for greenlighting the project while calling for global climate action.

March

UN chief António Guterres demanded the G7 group of wealthy nations exit coal by 2030 and “cancel all global coal projects in the pipeline” – putting pressure on Japan and the US to produce exit plans.

In its plan for economic development to 2025, China made no plan to halt coal expansion but promoted “the clean and efficient use of coal”. Analysts said Beijing’s climate policy was “crawling” to carbon neutrality.

Ordos, Inner Mongolia, has some of the biggest coal reserves in China (Pic: Robert James Hughes/Flickr)

April

Traditional coal backer South Korea pledged to end its coal funding to other countries during a leaders’ summit hosted by newly elected Joe Biden in April. President Xi Jinping said China would “gradually reduce” its coal consumption from 2026-30 – suggesting a peaking date in 2025.

May

The Asian Development Bank drafted a policy to end all financing for coal mining and power plants, accelerating a shift away from coal across Asia.

The UK Cop26 president Alok Sharma used the momentum of a global shift away from coal to announce the Glasgow summit in November would “consign coal to history”.

In its first 1.5C-aligned scenario, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that fossil fuel expansion had to end this year if the energy sector was to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

After initial resistance, Japan agreed to a G7 pledge to end support for unabated coal power abroad by the end of 2021 – leaving China isolated as the last major coal funder overseas.

June

The head of the Climate Investment Funds, Mafalda Duarte, trails a $2 billion scheme to support coal-reliant developing nations in the transition to clean alternatives, in an interview with Climate Home. This was to include derisking private capital and helping governments create alternative jobs and social security schemes in mining regions.

A woman watches over her sheep that graze near a coal power plant in Jepara, Central Java (Photo: Kemal Jufri/Greenpeace)

July

China’s biggest bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), said it would no longer finance a 2.8GW coal power plant in Zimbabwe, citing “environmental problems” amid a wave of cancellation of Chinese-backed coal projects.

South Africa’s climate advisors urged the government to step up its 2030 climate ambition by accelerating a shift away from coal and ending new coal power projects.

But Indonesia submitted a long-term strategy to the UN showing that the amount of coal used for primary energy would continue to grow until at least 2050.

At the G20, climate and energy ministers, including from Indonesia, came to an impasse on phasing out coal power with China, Russia and India resisting a deadline to wind down the fossil fuel.

August

Brazil defied the Italian G20 presidency’s call for a coal phase out and published a plan seeking investment in coal mining and allowing the fossil fuel to be burnt until 2050.

The Sri Lankan government ruled out building another coal-fired power plant.

A report by Greenpeace found that China only approved 5.2GW coal projects in the first half of 2021 – a 79% decline on the coal capacity that was approved during the same period in 2020. Campaigners said decision-makers were receiving “mixed signals on coal” as local governments slowed the approvals of new projects but were “still anticipating financial support”.

September

President Xi Jinping announced at the UN general assembly that China would stop supporting new coal power projects overseas– effectively drying up international cash for unabated coal. The move came 10 months after China’s environment ministry floated a proposal to ban coal power investment abroad.

The decision was taken amid a severe power crunch across China caused by surging coal prices and supply constraints together with skyrocketing coal consumption across the country. Local media outlets attributed the power shortages to environmental policies, which analysts feared could lead to a backlash against climate action.

Women and children walk past the NTPC coal-fired power plants in Sipat in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh (Photo: Sri Kolari / Greenpeace)

October

Rising energy demand and surging coal prices brought the power crisis to India, with coal stocks shrinking to four days’ worth at one of the lowest points.

During a G20 leaders’ meeting in Rome, some members including China and India baulked at setting a timeline to exit coal. But with China onside, the group committed to end international public finance for unabated coal power generation by the end of 2021.

November

The future of coal dominated Cop26 talks in Glasgow, UK.

More than 40 countries signed a statement agreeing to phase out coal power, including 18 nations promising to phase out or stop investments in new coal-fired plants domestically and internationally for the first time. Australia, China, India, and the US were all missing from the deal.

Despite a last-minute watering down by China and India, the Glasgow climate pact called on countries to “accelerate the phasedown of unabated coal power” – a significant first in the UN Climate Change process.

An $8.5bn transition package to help South Africa wean off coal was hailed a model to support other large emerging economies transition to cleaner energy sources. But questions remain over how it will be delivered.

Indonesia, India, the Philippines and South Africa were named as beneficiaries of the $2bn Climate Investment Funds pilot scheme to support the transition from coal to clean.

At the end of the month, Germany’s newly formed coalition government announced a plan to “ideally” quit coal by 2030 – eight years ahead of schedule.

December

Despite significant policy shift away from coal power, the amount of electricity generated from coal surged 9% in 2021 with overall coal demand heading towards an all-time high in 2022, analysis by the IEA found.

This sharp rebound, led by China and India, follows two years of falling global power generation from coal in 2019 and 2020 and is threatening net zero climate plans, the IEA warned. Electricity demand rising faster than low-carbon supply and soaring fossil gas prices are cited as explanations.

The post 2021 in coal: China’s dirty recovery mars international finance crackdown appeared first on Climate Home News.

To succeed, both summits need to have a golden thread of finance commitments and reform running through them to address climate change. Climate change is the defining issue of this generation of world leaders; finance the most potent fuel for tackling it. 

While Cop26 delivered some good outcomes, it also dropped some balls: a failure to properly tackle loss and damage and a last-minute deal to weaken coal commitments undermined trust.

Next year, Indonesia and Germany will need to mobilise trillions in climate finance to provide all countries with the resources they need to tackle the climate crisis.  Here are four ways to deliver.

1. Financial support for the loss and damage caused by climate change. That should start with understanding what’s achievable outside of UN processes and how world leaders summits can fill in the gaps. Germany should use its G7 muscle to bring round the US and France – two countries most reluctant to make meaningful progress on finance mechanisms for loss and damage. 
2. Build on the potential that glimmered at Cop. We saw commitments to help South Africa finance the transition away from coal. Now, we need more processes, plans and platforms like it. We saw Italian prime minister Mario Draghi call for multilateral development banks – non-commercial banks set up to support development – to play a stronger role in mobilising the trillion for climate needs. Barbados PM Mia Mottley set out a vision for special drawing rights to help countries finance the transition. Leaders should agree to make these reserve assets available to all countries, not just those in IMF programmes, to reflect the fact that climate change impact are largely outside of governments’ control. They should also look at new SDR issuance to address the vast amounts needed for climate transition.
3. Accelerate climate-friendly infrastructure development, specifically zero carbon and resilient infrastructure in emerging and developing countries. Leaders should channel the $130 trillion promised at Cop26 by the private sector into these assets. Meanwhile, the integrity of private sector commitments must be guaranteed to avoid greenwashing.
4. Set up a taskforce to pick up the pace of financial action. The leaders of Germany, Indonesia, Italy and the UK should work together on reforms to the global financial architecture such as making the sovereign debt architecture fairer and more functional and changes to debt sustainability assessments that recognise the need for climate action. Countries should work together to align standards, policy, regulation and mobilise finance to close the 1.5C and resilience gaps.

 The G20’s efforts won’t come to fruition without the G7’s money and influence. The world’s biggest economies are central to public finance, and major shareholders of development banks. Those most powerful countries need to build an open framework to mobilise money – not exclusive climate clubs that only protect them. 

Recent events in Germany and Indonesia should give both presidencies the motivation and mettle to secure results: cars barrelled down German streets this summer in catastrophic floods that climate change made up to nine times more likely. In Indonesia, the fatal fallout from Cyclone Seroja revealed the country’s huge vulnerability to climate catastrophe.

If Cop27 is a success a year from now, it won’t just be because of what happens in Egypt. It will be because of the G7 and G20 leaders’ engagement and agreement on a new “trillion vision” for long term finance and climate needs. It’s only progress like this that will move us closer to a safer world and show that those most responsible for the climate crisis are finally working together.

Luca Bergamaschi is co-founder of the Italian think tank ECCO, working together with Governments, philanthropy and civil society organisations to accelerate climate action in Italy, Europe and globally. 

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The UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s official climate advisory body, said that the UK’s 2030 carbon-cutting goal is already in line with the Paris Agreement.

In a 33-page assessment of what the UK should do at home and internationally to deliver on Cop26 promises, it said that the government should instead focus on delivering on its commitments and “reinvigorate” its diplomatic efforts to support other countries in raising ambition.

The Glasgow deal “requests” countries to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 targets to align with the Paris Agreement goals of limiting global heating well below 2C and pursuing efforts to 1.5C by the end of 2022 in a bid to put the world on track to meeting the goals this decade.

But the UK’s efforts should be focused on delivering its net zero strategy rather than “inflating the gap between ambition and implementation,” the CCC found.

Commenting on the findings on Twitter, the committee’s CEO Christ Stark said some have called for the UK to put forward a tougher 2030 NDC.

“In our view the UK already has one of the most ambitious 2030 emissions targets in the world, designed on a 1.5C pathway. What the UK *doesn’t* have is all the steps in place to deliver it,” he said.

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Climate Action Tracker judges the UK’s domestic carbon-cutting target to be in line with a lowest-cost global 1.5C pathway, but agrees that its policies and actions fall short.

Under an alternative model that gives more weight to historic responsibility for causing the climate crisis, CAT finds the UK’s plan is “insufficient” with “inadequate” climate finance provision to the developing world.

Earlier this year, the CCC warned the UK was not on track to net zero and that it needed to “get real on delivery”.

In its post-Cop26 report, it said it was “important for the UK to demonstrate its support for more global action to 2030 by strengthening its policy to deliver its existing 2030 target”.

This could mean setting stronger adaptation commitments backed by quantitative targets, developing sectoral net zero plans and ruling out the use of international carbon offsets.

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Citing CAT analysis, the CCC singled out Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Turkey as G20 countries with 2030 targets that are not aligned with the Paris goal. They are the ones that should come back with more in 2022, it said.

Australia and the EU have already said they won’t strengthen their targets next year.

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Internationally, the CCC urged the UK to continue to encourage ambitious action to rapidly curb greenhouse gas emissions this decade and strengthen adaptation by using all its diplomatic channels.

“The UK must not walk away after Cop26,” said the committee’s chair Lord Deben. It recommends the government:

• Maintain a Cop team with high-level leadership throughout its presidency and “build on, rather than dissolve, its international climate diplomacy and activities”
• Explore diplomatic and trade levers, such as carbon border taxes, trade agreements and encourage stronger corporate action to decarbonise supply chains, to push others to step up their ambition
• Champion sectoral pledges on coal, methane and deforestation and clarify the governance and delivery mechanisms for each of these commitments
• Review its tax system and increase carbon prices to phase out fossil fuel subsidies
• Ensure donor countries deliver on their adaptation finance pledge and review its own contribution to ensure a 50/50 adaptation split
• Restore its aid spending to 0.7% of GNI “as soon as possible”.

UK lead climate negotiator Archie Young said the focus of the Cop26 presidency over the next year would be on implementation and helping others step up their ambition.

While Cop26 has laid out “ground for optimism… the proof will really be in whether parties and all actors across society step up to deliver,” he told Climate Home News in an interview.

“The important task for everybody is to look at what’s been agreed in the Glasgow climate pact: that people look at how they can strengthen all of their climate plans. That will look different in different places. But that has to be one of the focuses for the next year,” he said.

Part of the job will be transposing sectoral commitments made in Glasgow, on cars, coal, methane and ending deforestation, into national climate plans. “Hopefully that can then lead to enhanced ambition,” he said.

All of the UK’s diplomatic missions are engaged with this effort, Young said.

He added that the UK was “determined” to support Egypt as the incoming Cop27 presidency, including by “giving them the support and the space also to determine how they will take forward the negotiations for Cop27”.

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Anil Jain, India’s coal secretary, made the remarks while launching a report by the National Foundation for India (NFI) on the socio-economic impacts of weaning the country off coal.

“Now there is an international consensus. There is a goal: phasedown, which will happen. India is a signatory to that. I’m sure in the coming years the pressure will be to quantify the phasing down. We cannot escape that and nor does India intend to dilute its commitment,” he said.

India, backed by China, made a last-minute diplomatic push at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow to water down the language of the final agreement from calling for a “phaseout” of unabated coal power to a “phasedown”.

Prime minister Narendra Modi has promoted coal mine expansion, with plans to ramp up domestic coal production from 783 million tonnes in 2019 to one billion tonnes per year as part of his self-reliant India policy.

But analysts say the plans are incompatible with India’s strengthened headline climate targets for 2030 and 2070 net zero goal announced by Modi at Cop26.

The newly launched NFI report says the carbon neutrality goal alone “sounds the death knell for coal expansion in the country” and “puts India on a path to transition towards a cleaner greener economy”. But with millions of people dependent on the coal sector, NFI says India needs a transition plan.

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Ashish Fernandes, a coal expert at Climate Risk Horizons, told Climate Home News negotiations in Glasgow forced India to confront the need to wind down the coal sector, which the government “has been reluctant to address head on”.

Signing up to the “phasedown” language was “huge progress” for a country where energy demand is expected to skyrocket, said Sandeep Pai, a senior research lead with the Just Transition Initiative.

“But there is no trajectory for India to decrease its coal use this decade,” he said. And the absence of a clear “phasedown” timeline means it leaves the text open to interpretation.

At the political level, the very idea of a phasedown is resisted. Environment minister Bhupender Yadav, who negotiated the language change in Glasgow, told an event that the term “phasedown” means India can decrease its share of coal in the energy mix but allow its coal use to rise in absolute terms.

The Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water estimates that to achieve net zero by 2070, India would need to peak its use of coal for power generation by 2040 and drop its overall usage by 99% by 2060.

For Fernandes, there is no space in India’s energy sector for the “all of the above approach” which Delhi has been pursuing, expanding both coal and renewable sources.

A recent study by Climate Risk Horizons and think tank Ember found that 27GW of planned coal power plant capacity were not needed and risked impeding India’s renewable energy ambitions.

Instead, the government should be “more aggressively” shutting down old and inefficient coal power plants and commit not to build any new coal plants, said Fernandes.

Swati D’souza, who led the NFI study, told Climate Home that India’s coal transition conversation was “just beginning”.

NFI’s report is the first comprehensive analysis to map the scale of the transition across all of India’s coal-consuming industries.

It conservatively estimates that more than 13 million people – nearly the size of the population of Zimbabwe – depend on the coal economy, with people in 135 districts depending on two or more coal assets for their livelihoods.

That excludes those working in the informal sector that could grow the number to 20 million people impacted by the transition.

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Not everyone will require the same support. It will be easier to rehabilitate skilled workers in the power sector than the low-skilled and poorly educated workforce in the brick sector, D’souza said. Bricks are made in coal-burning kilns.

The report finds that the government needs to prepare a timeline for closing coal assets that will start with mine closures.

In 2019, 94 open cast mines of the 420 coal mines in India were producing 85% of the country’s coal. Only 128 mines were making a profit. That means that underground mines, most of which are loss-making, will likely shut this decade, NFI found.

“There will be a phasedown for coal mines,” D’souza said. “But, in the medium term, we will definitely see an increase in the amount of coal consumption.”

Ultimately, achieving the transition hinges on a financing which doesn’t currently exist.

Coal secretary Jain said coal mining companies and employers could not be asked to foot the bill or they risked “deserting” the sector entirely.

NFI says India’s domestic resources won’t be enough to implement the transition and it will need to international support.

An $8.5bn transition package mobilised for South Africa could provide a model for India. But the report adds that it will require the government to determine how much money is needed to implement the transition and support existing workers.

The post India ‘cannot escape’ coal phasedown, top coal ministry official says appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the final hours of the talks, the US, backed by the EU, and a group of 134 developing countries known as the G77 remained deeply divided about how to secure support for vulnerable nations to adapt to more frequent and intense flooding, droughts and cyclones.

Wealthy countries pledged a voluntary $356 million to the Adaptation Fund, including first-time contributions from the US and Canada. But developing countries wanted a more reliable source of adaptation finance than the changeable pledges of rich nations.

In a final diplomatic push, the G77 demanded that a share of revenue from voluntary and bilateral carbon trading be provided to the Adaptation Fund. For the African Group of Negotiators that was a red line.

The US, which strongly opposed the idea, refused to back down, seeing the proposal as a tax that infringed on the government’s ability to legislate.

“The developed world was saying ‘trust us, we’ll fund this voluntarily’,” Gabon’s environment minister Lee White told Climate Home News.

At that point, he said, “it was almost certain that if we started reopening the body of the final text of the Glasgow agreement, we weren’t going to get an agreement until Egypt,” where the next rounds of talks will be held in 2022.

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The issue is critical for African countries. A recent study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa found that Cameroon spends 9% of its GDP on coping with climate change, Ethiopia 8% and Sierra Leone, Senegal and Ghana are all more than 7%.

Yet adaptation finance only accounts for around a quarter of climate finance flows.

Under the Glasgow climate pact, donor nations agreed to “at least double their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation to developing countries from 2019 levels by 2025” – but the low baseline means this is a far cry from what vulnerable nations actually need.

African nations estimated their combined adaptation needs to cost between $7-15bn per year by 2020.

Countries agreed in Glasgow to earmark 5% of revenues from carbon trading under a centralised carbon market for the Adaptation Fund but a contribution is only “strongly encouraged” for bilateral transactions.

As the issue came to a head on Saturday, US special climate envoy John Kerry walked across the plenary floor to the G77 lead negotiator Ahmadou Sebory Toure to talk things through.

“It was the first discussion we had had at a political level about the issue,” said White, who was quickly pulled into the huddle.

Mia Mottley: the ‘fearless’ leader pushing a global settlement for the climate frontlines

Several diplomats involved in the discussions told Climate Home that Kerry refused to concede. He said the US had already agreed to doubling its adaptation finance and argued that the developing world had a lot to lose if it rejected the deal on the table.

Recalling the conversation during an interview, White told Climate Home: “I asked [Kerry] very clearly, if he was making a moral commitment to do all you can to make sure that these funds [for adaptation] flow. And he very clearly said: ‘Yes, I am making a moral commitment to Africa.’.”

After a similar conversation with EU green deal chief Frans Timmermans, a meeting was called between developing countries to assess Kerry’s assurances. But views on the US’ trustworthiness diverged.

The Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) and Costa Rica argued that the final draft text was a better outcome than no deal at all, according to sources in the room.

For Africa, the pill was a lot more difficult to swallow. “How can you trust them to deliver? That is naïve if you believe they will,” said one African negotiator, adding that the adaptation money promised by the US was “insignificant” compared with what is needed.

Yet, walking away from the talks is not an option for many vulnerable nations, which have no other international space to make their voices heard, they said.

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Eventually, “we decided that it was more beneficial to the people we represent to move forward with that strong moral commitment then to block everything for another year,” minister White said.

Speaking in Glasgow, Kerry said: “From our friend from Gabon who asked specifically that he have some reassurance before he leaves here on adaptation funding. I can assure our friend from Gabon and from the other countries concerned that every effort in the world will be made.

“There is a commitment that is real to double adaptation finance, including our own and that we will work in other ways to address the challenge of adaptation.”

Ambassador Janine Felson of Belize told Climate Home: “The ball is in the developed country parties’ court,” to present credible plans for delivering.

And there is no time to wait for the next round of talks at Cop27 to announce those plans, she added. “Rather, by the time we arrive in Egypt, they should be able to provide information on how those plans are progressing.”

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Barbados’ prime minister Mia Amor Mottley made her mark on the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow with a rip-roaring speech telling the leaders of the world’s largest economies to “try harder” to avert catastrophic climate change. A 2C overheated world “is a death sentence,” she said.

The first female leader of her country, Mottley is cementing Barbados’ 1966 independence from Britain with a constitutional change to drop Queen Elizabeth as head of state and become a republic.

“Our world stands at a fork in the road; one no less significant than when the United Nations was formed in 1945. But then the majority of countries here did not exist, we exist now. The difference is we want to exist a 100 years from now,” she said.

The survival of small island states like Barbados hinges on unlocking the finance needed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C – the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious goal. Failure to do so “is measured in lives and livelihoods in our community,” she said in Glasgow.

But her impact on the climate conference went beyond the usual pleas for ambition and support. Armed with concrete proposals, Mottley elevated wonky discussions about the global finance system to the highest political level.

Mottley’s popularity started at home. Elected prime minister of Barbados in 2018, she won over 70% of the popular vote and her Labour Party took all 30 seats in parliament.

Her advocacy soon went beyond the island’s shores, speaking up for the Caribbean and small island developing states around the world.

“Anyone who has followed her or who knows her will understand that if she picks up an issue, such as the finance question, she will follow it to its conclusion fearlessly,” Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics and longtime climate advisor to Caribbean states, told Climate Home News.

“She is the real deal,” said Rachel Kyte, who spent years at the World Bank and the UN before becoming dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Kyte described Mottley as one of the most “creative” and “charismatic” leaders on the issue of climate finance.

The breakdown: What is in the Glasgow Climate Pact?

Mottley has been on a mission to seek a new financial settlement for addressing climate change: that those most responsible should pay for those on the frontline.

During the coronavirus pandemic, she championed a call for green debt relief to support debt-laden small island states such as Barbados ineligible for the cheap borrowing enjoyed by rich nations and the concessional financing reserved to low-income countries.

This, she told the UK Cop26 host, requires “new flexible development finance instruments which will support responsible, resilient and inclusive growth.”

In Glasgow, she set out what those new financial instruments could look like.

One of them should address the loss and damages already caused by extreme weather events, droughts, floods and cyclones, an issue fiercely debated at Cop26.

Developing countries that had pushed for the the creation of a loss and damage facility left Glasgow with only “a dialogue” to talk about future funding arrangements.

A loss and damage fund is “imperative”, Mottley told the conference, saying that insurance won’t cut it against escalating impacts.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Dominica inflicting a staggering 226% GDP loss to the island. “What premium would they have to pay to protect them from that?” she asked. 

Instead, she proposed that 1% of revenues from the sale of fossil fuels in countries that contributed most to climate change go into a loss and damage fund. This, she said, would generate over $70bn per year.

Access to the fund would be limited to countries that had suffered a climate-related disaster and incurred losses of more than 5% of their economy.

But the proposal that got her the most attention in Glasgow was for scaling up finance to carbon-cutting projects in the developing world.

The International Monetary Fund has greenlighted the injection of a record $650 billion of reserve assets, known as special drawing rights (SDRs), into the global economy to help countries respond to the Covid-19 crisis.

By default, SDRs are allocated to countries proportionally to the size of their economy, which means richer nations receive most of the support. But wealthy nations in the G20 have agreed to re-allocate some of the money to poorer nations.

One of the vehicles being used to do so is a $50bn facility, known as the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, created by the IMF to boost vulnerable nations’ climate resilience. The IMF said it would reveal details of the facility by its spring meeting in April.

But to be transformational this decade, the world’s needs the financial injection to respond to the pandemic every year, she explained. That, she said, “is the real gap that we need to close,” she said.

On the podium of Cop26, she called for an additional $500bn worth of SDRs to be issued every year for 20 years to unlock the carbon-cutting investments needed to limit heating to 1.5C.

President Biden and I walking out of the US-EU Build Back Better World Forum held in the margins of #COP26 moments ago. pic.twitter.com/pfpUNcBpN8

— Mia Amor Mottley (@miaamormottley) November 2, 2021

The brains behind the proposal is Avinash Persaud, a fellow Barbadian who met Mottley when she was studying law at the London School of Economics.

Persaud, now an emeritus professor at Gresham College, London, serves as her special envoy for investment and financial services.

“The whole framework of [the] Paris [Agreement]… is potentially fundamentally flawed in being based around national pledges. Because these are pledges without any financing plan,” he told Climate Home. “We have a $50 trillion scale of a problem and we’re using a village hall budget to try and address it. That’s not going to work.”

The annual issuance of $500bn SDRs could provide the basis for financing these plans at scale by lowering the cost of borrowing to rates enjoyed by richer nations and therefore incentivising carbon-cutting investments in developing countries and emerging economies, Persaud said.

The money would be redistributed from rich nations to a trust that would allow the private sector to bid for it. Projects with the highest rates of emissions reductions per $1 invested would be rewarded.

Kevin Gallagher, professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University and a champion for green debt relief, told Climate Home Cop26 “was abuzz with the proposal”.

Comment: Oil and gas avoided censure in Glasgow for the 26th time. Let’s not make it 27

The issuance of SDRs requires approval from the US, the IMF’s largest shareholder but unlike other sources of finance, how the money is then used doesn’t require approval at the domestic level.

“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel – we’ve just done it and can do it again and every year,” said Gallagher.

While rich nations have failed to mobilise a long-overdue $100bn in climate finance for developing countries in 2020, that is the symbolic heart of a much bigger issue – the need to shift trillions into cleaning up the global economy.

SDRs “could mobilise orders of magnitude more finance than the climate regime has been able to,” Gallagher added. “It’s analogous to what we do in advanced economies: central banks inject money into the economy to get it going. The IMF is effectively a big central bank for the world.”

But not everyone is thrilled to bolster the role of the IMF, which has a record of imposing steep austerity measures as a condition for accessing its support.

Daniela Gabor, an associate professor in economics at the University of the West of England, told Climate Home that by allowing private capital to bid for the money the proposal “leaves the design of the transition and decarbonisation strategies completely in the hands of private finance”.

This she said risks undermining governments’ role in setting out priorities, coordinating investments and building institutional capacity to manage the transition. “Where are the governments and states from countries in the global south in this decision-making process?” she asked.

Laggards reject Glasgow pact’s 2022 call for new climate plans

Despite some scepticism, Mottley’s proposal found a home in the Glasgow pact. The final outcome of the Cop26 talks specifically refers to the use of SDRs to scale up climate finance for the first time in a decision from the UN Climate Change.

Days after making the speech, she discussed the proposal with EU Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans during a visit to Brussels, who supported the idea.

“If we are really to be on track for the 1.5C we will need a lot more financial firepower, and I salute the creativity of people like prime minister Mia Mottley,” he told Cop26 diplomats.

Great to welcome Prime Minister @miaamormottley to Brussels today. Heading into the second week of #COP26, together we will push to increase climate finance for adaptation, close the ambition gap, and complete the Paris Rulebook. pic.twitter.com/Hp6U9BLZFJ

— Frans Timmermans (@TimmermansEU) November 4, 2021

Whether there is broader political appetite from countries to take the idea further is the key question, said Kyte.

The UK, which remains in the Cop presidency seat until the next talks, could this move agenda on, she said. In Europe, Italy is presiding over the G20 group of major economies and could work to ensure the issue remains on the agenda for next year.

For Gabor, there is “no chance in hell” the proposal will fly among wealthy nations, as it took difficult and lengthy negotiations for the IMF to issue a one-off liquidity injection in response to the pandemic

But Mottley’s team is optimistic. “This is a good industrial strategy” for wealthy countries, Persaud said, explaining that rich countries’ companies and investors are likely to stand as the biggest beneficiaries of being able to cheaply develop carbon-cutting projects in developing countries.

“Effectively, we’re saying to their companies, their investors, and their fund managers, here’s a big slug of demand for you to save the world at the least cost for the rich countries. I think this is actually a compelling economic case, investment case, political case,” he said.

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As Cop26 president the UK was obsessed with getting something on coal at the summit. They were probably hoping it would distract from anyone asking awkward questions about oil and gas, such as why the UK government is legally committed to extracting every last “economic” drop out of the North Sea.

It wasn’t just the UK that was keen to avoid the topic. None of the G20 signed up to join the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance last week, apart from France which produces very little of the stuff and will continue to import.

So, we have to ask why, after 26 UN climate summits have oil and gas, which between them are responsible for more CO2 emissions than coal, been virtually ignored?

To begin to answer we need to look beyond a Saturday evening in Glasgow in November to what’s going on in the capital cities of G20 countries.

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One factor is that while G20 governments increasingly support green technologies, lobbyists have successfully persuaded them to provide:

• $5.9 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2020 (“efficient” or otherwise)
• $300 billion since the Covid-19 pandemic began to expand extraction
• Support for options that will extend the use of oil, gas and coal for decades, like hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and petrochemicals.

My own research on the political power of the oil and gas companies – such as BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron – has highlighted the grip they have on national governments, whom they have lobbied behind the scenes to delay, delay, and then delay some more.

Companies like Saudi Aramco, Shell, Gazprom, BP, China National Petroleum Company and ExxonMobil are in competition but unite around self-interested positions. They jointly operate major infrastructure (for example Gazprom and Shell on Nord Stream 2 or Saudi Aramco and Sinopec on the Yasref refinery in Saudi Arabia) and they lobby together through global, regional and national oil and gas trade associations.

While the differences between investor-owned and state-owned companies are highlighted they are members of the same oil and gas trade associations at the global, regional and national level.

Saudi Aramco and Gazprom join Shell, BP and Chevron as members of trade associations with a big presence at Cop26 such as the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP).

At the national level state-owned companies such as Chinese major CNOOC join ExxonMobil in being members of oil and gas trade associations in Canada, Mexico and Brazil. Shell is a member of Federation of Indian Petroleum Industry and of the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation.

Oil and gas company membership of selected trade associations in G20 countries (Source: trade associations, compiled by Dario Kenner)

They have a common agenda: to stop national governments phasing out the production and consumption of fossil fuels. And it’s working. They are successfully hiding behind G20 governments’ mostly hollow net zero promises.

Several G20 countries including the United States and Saudi Arabia set up the Net Zero Producers Forum earlier this year, which may have looked like climate action. But there has been little sign of follow-up and it was nowhere to be seen at Cop26.

It helps us understand why these same countries pursue common goals such as when the US and Saudi Arabia lobbied against fully recognising the IPCC’s 2018 report, or recent leaks showing Japan and Australia tried to remove language on reducing fossil fuels.

The way in which language on phasing out coal and fossil fuel subsidies got watered down in Glasgow was just the latest outrageous example.

Perhaps it’s not surprising with over 500 fossil fuel lobbyists attending the Cop26 negotiations, many of them registered under 27 national delegations including the UK, Canada, Russia and Brazil.

To give Cop27 a chance of doing better, we need to confront the G20’s close ties to the oil and gas industry.

Dario Kenner is a visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex and author of Carbon Inequality: The Role of the Richest in Climate Change and White Knights, or horseman of the apocalypse? Prospects for Big Oil to align emissions with a 1.5 degree pathway.

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The UK presidency’s aim for the talks was to “keep 1.5C alive”, referring to the most ambitious temperature target of the Paris Agreement.

Analysis by Climate Action Tracker suggests that current policies put us on course for a 2.7C world. The most optimistic reading of national commitments before and during the Cop26 summit bends the curve to 1.8C.

That leaves a gap that the deal seeks to narrow by requesting another round of national climate plans – both stronger 2030 targets and long-term strategies – next year. The package makes incremental progress on how to cope with the impacts already brought by 1.1C warming and mobilise support for developing countries.

“We can say with credibility that we have kept 1.5C within reach but its pulse is weak,” said Cop26 president Alok Sharma as the conference closed. “It will only survive if we keep our promises, if we translate commitments into rapid action and if we deliver on the expectations set out in this Glasgow Climate Pact to increase ambition to 2030 and beyond.”

On the Paris rulebook, common emissions reporting standards aim to prevent cheating. A compromise on carbon trading rules enables cash to flow to climate projects across borders and avoids some of the biggest potential loopholes, while still carrying a risk of greenwash.

Here is a breakdown of what was agreed.

Cop26: After tense huddles in Glasgow, countries strike ‘uncomfortable’ climate deal

Naming coal

The pact states that “limiting global warming to 1.5C requires rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions.” This means cutting emissions by 45% by 2030 and net zero by 2050, compared to 2010 levels.

It gets more specific than previous UN climate agreements on how to achieve that, calling for a scaling up of clean energy and “efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”. The direct reference to coal is a first for the process, with the caveats around it reflecting the fact that many big emerging economies rely heavily on the fuel.

India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav said it was reasonable for developing countries to use fossil fuel subsidies, for example on cooking gas for low-income households. “Developing countries have a right to their fair share of the carbon budget,” he told ministers.

Despite the watered down language, Laurie van der Burg from Oil Change International told Climate Home News the reference to fossil fuels was an “important symbolic breakthrough”.

“This is a foot in the door for an urgently needed conversation about winding down coal, oil, and gas and ending all subsidies,” she said.

As part of the phasedown plans, the pact recognised the need to support a “just transition” away from fossil fuels, which can mean retraining coal miners or providing social security.

In another first, the document stresses the need to cut non-CO2 gases such as methane. And it emphasises the importance of “protecting, conserving and restoring nature” – avoiding the contentious phrase “nature-based solutions”.

India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav talks to Cop26 president Alok Sharma about changing the language of the final text from coal “phase out” to “phasedown” (Photo: Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change)

An extra ratchet

Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to review their climate plans every five years, with a view to raising ambition. Glasgow was the first test of that “ratchet” mechanism. While most countries brought some improvements to their targets and/or policies, there were some notable exceptions and collective action remained well off the pace to 1.5C.

Under the new pact, countries are asked to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 climate plans by the end of 2022 to align with the Paris temperature goals, “taking into account different national circumstances”.

David Waskow from the World Resources Institute said the clear time frame “would put the world on a path that will accelerate action”.

How much it can close the gap depends on which governments heed the call – with Australia for one quick to assert its 2030 target was “fixed”. Major emerging economies have indicated they are not keen to do yet another round of homework, particularly given the developed world has not come up with the cash it promised.

There was also a request for countries that have not yet done so to submit long-term strategies for reducing emissions “towards just transitions to net zero emissions by or around mid-century, taking into account different national circumstances”.

“Despite the Covid-19 crisis, we have accelerated action, the Cop has responded to the IPCC’s call to close the gap towards 1.5C, and coal is in the text,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and one of the architects of the Paris Agreement.

Late payment plan

Wealthy nations arrived in Glasgow having failed to deliver on a pledge to mobilise $100 billion a year between 2020 and 2025 to help countries cut emissions and cope with climate impacts. They were on track to pass the $100bn threshold in 2023 and promised to deliver $500bn over the period 2021-25.

Under the Glasgow climate pact, countries “noted with deep regret” that the finance goal had not been met and agreed to “significantly increase support” for developing countries beyond the $100bn annual target.

The pact “urges” developed countries to fully deliver on the goal “urgently and through to 2025”, emphasising the importance of transparency in setting how the pledge will be met. It “calls” on developed countries to provide greater clarity on their finance pledges.

The agreement doesn’t explicitly refer to meeting the shortfall of the $100bn goal as demanded by vulnerable nations. But Lorena Gonzalez, of the World Resources Institute, said the expression of “deep regret” was “unusual and encouraging”.

Glasgow kicked off a process to define a long-term climate finance goal beyond 2025, with biennial high-level ministerial dialogues on the topic to keep it in the political spotlight, starting in 2022.

China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and the Chinese delegation at Cop26 (Photo: Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change)

Cash to cope

The delivery of finance to adapt to the impacts of climate change was one of the most critical issues for developing countries.  

Developed countries pledged $356 million to the Adaptation Fund at Cop26, including first-time contributions from the US and Canada. While a record, it is far cry from meeting countries’ needs which are estimated in the trillions. The agreement “notes with concern that the current provision of climate finance for adaptation remains insufficient”.

About three quarters of the fund were pledged by the EU and its member states. The European Commission alone committed more than double the US pledge.  

A refusal by the US and other wealthy nations to link the provision of adaptation finance to bilateral carbon trading nearly derailed the talks in the final hours of negotiations on Saturday. African countries, which had pushed hardest for the measure, ultimately made do with a call for doubling adaptation finance from national contributions.

The pact “urges” developed countries “to at least double their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation to developing country parties from 2019 levels by 2025 in the context of achieving a balance between mitigation and adaptation”.  

The late inclusion of the 2019 baseline, the latest finance delivery data, in the text provides a concrete benchmark for quantifying the increase of finance that is committed – a clear call from vulnerable nations. But doubling on a national basis allows low contributors like the US to keep lagging Europe.

Taylor Dimsdale, programme director for risk and resilience at E3G, said: “The most climate vulnerable countries have thrown the major economies a lifeline by accepting an agreement that doesn’t go far enough but does take a step forward, particularly by doubling finance for adaptation. This must be met by more concrete plans and action next year.”

Cop26 president Alok Sharma discusses last-minute changes to the final Glasgow pact with delegates (Photo: Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change)

Defining adaptation

Countries agreed that more work was needed to define what a global goal on adaptation would look like. To do so, they established a two-year Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh work programme, passing the baton to the Egyptian presidency of the next Cop.  

The move was widely welcomed by developing countries.  

While there are well established methods for monitoring emissions and efforts to limit global temperature rise, finding a common metric for various ways of adapting to regional climate impacts is challenging.

As business leaders like to say, what gets measured gets managed – and finding a way to judge performance on adaptation is important for vulnerable communities to be able to hold their governments and the international community to account.

Under the text, countries recognised the value of combining both qualitative and quantitative approaches to review progress on adaptation. The objective of the work programme is to set out methodologies, indicators, data and metrics, and support needed to assess progress and it will aim to strengthen the implementation of adaptation actions in vulnerable countries.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is due to release its next major scientific report on impacts and adaptation in March 2022, has been invited to inform this work.

Carbon trading is go

There were large cheers on the plenary floor when the gavel came down on the rules to establish a global carbon market and govern bilateral carbon trading. The fraught and complex issue had eluded consensus at the previous two UN climate summits.

The core tension was between countries like Brazil and India keen to attract finance for climate projects by selling carbon credits, who wanted to minimise obstacles to scaling up the market, and European and vulnerable countries defending its environmental integrity.

Brazil backed down from a proposal that would have allowed significant double counting of emissions reductions, undermining collective ambition.

But a push by Brazil, Russia, China and India to allow old carbon credits from the Kyoto Protocol era to transition to the Paris carbon market was partially successful. Under the rules, credits registered from 2013 will be allowed to be traded and used by countries towards meeting their climate plans.

Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch, said that would mean around 300 million cheap and poor-quality credits being allowed under the new market. This is “cleansing climate targets on paper but spoiling the atmosphere in reality,” he said.

The deal requires that 2% of credits traded under the centralised carbon market be cancelled, to tighten the overall reduction in emissions, but the measure is voluntary for credits trading bilaterally between countries. Carbon Market Watch says this means markets “will be used to shift pollution from one place to another” with little benefit for the climate.

Carbon market rule negotiators pose for a photo at the end of the Cop26 climate summit
(Photo: UN Climate Change/Flickr)

In a separate dispute over whether to earmark a share of revenues from bilateral and voluntary carbon trading to the Adaptation Fund, the US came out on top, quashing the proposal. African countries had hoped to gain a more predictable source of adaptation finance, but instead had to settle for assurances on voluntary contributions.

Finally, language on respecting, promoting and considering obligations on human rights, the right to health and of indigenous peoples and local communities made it into the text.  

Rachel Kyte, co-chair of an initiative calling for more rigour and transparency in voluntary carbon markets, said the agreement closed down some of the more outrageous loopholes that had been considered, “but the language remains unclear in some areas and we have much to do to stop companies and countries gaming the system”.  

“We have no room or time for markets like buckets of water, with 100 tiny holes. It will spill out and dilute the Paris Agreement and make keeping warming to 1.5C that much harder,” she said.

Dialogue for disaster

One of the most contentious issues during Cop26 was loss and damage: support for the victims of extreme weather and rising seas.

Developing countries fought hard for dedicated funding to those who lose their homes, lives and livelihoods as a result of the global overheating caused by fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

In the final days of the summit, a group known as the G77 and China, which represents 134 developing countries, put forward a proposal for a funding facility dedicated to the issue.

That was blocked by the US and EU. Rich countries have long resisted opening up another channel of climate finance, insisting that humanitarian aid can do the job.

Instead, they conceded to establish a Glasgow Dialogue “to discuss the arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimise and address loss and damage associated with the adverse impacts of climate change.”

Harjeet Singh from Climate Action Network said that some progress had been made, but without finance “we are walking in inches, when we must move in miles.”

There is also a plan to get the Santiago Network up and running to provide technical advice, and provide it with necessary funding. Germany has pledged €10 million ($11.5m) to the network.

“We are leaving empty handed but morally stronger and hopeful that we can sustain the momentum in the coming year to deliver meaningful support which will allow the vulnerables to deal with the irreversible impacts of climate change created by the polluting world who are failing to take responsibility,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Kenyan thinktank Power Shift Africa.

Patricia Espinosa celebrates the signing of the Glasgow Climate Pact (Photo: UN Climate Change/Flickr)

Deadlines optional

Countries agreed to “encourage” nations to set climate plans that cover a five-year time period beyond 2031. The issue of whether countries’ climate plans should cover a 5, 10-year period or whether each country should be free to decide was one of the last unresolved issues of the Paris rulebook.

Developing and vulnerable countries called for the next rounds of nationally determined contributions to cover a five-period, in line with the ambition cycle of the Paris Agreement. With backing from the EU, the US and China, a majority of countries supported the proposal. They see regular reviews as supporting urgent action.

But the language of the text was watered down, allowing nations like Russia wiggle room to determine the length of their next plans, which they are expected to submit to the UN in 2025.  

The final text “encourages” countries to communicate in 2025 a climate plan with an end date of 2035 “and so forth every five years thereafter”. 

“It’s complacency,” Yamide Dagnet, of the World Resources Institute, told Climate Home News.  

The no-cheat charter

Agreeing on a transparency framework to report greenhouse gas emissions reductions may sound like a simple task but it proved one of the most difficult negotiations in Glasgow.  

The US wanted to make sure China was held to rigorous reporting standards, while Beijing was not keen to be pinned down. Arguments came down to details like the structure of spreadsheets.

It matters because weak carbon accounting can allow countries to cheat, particularly when it comes to forests and methane – two areas where many are promising action. An investigation by the Washington Post estimated that global emissions are 16-23% higher than reported.

A push by Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Arab Group and China on behalf of a group of “like-minded” developing countries for nations not to all have to use the same tables and format in their reporting was scrapped from the final deal.

Developing countries with low emissions have been granted some flexibility if they don’t have the capacity to meet all the reporting criteria. The agreement further “recognises” the need for enhanced financial support for developing countries to comply with the rules, including though the Global Environment Facility.  

Countries are expected to use the new framework to report their emissions by 2024.

The post The breakdown: What is in the Glasgow Climate Pact? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Glasgow Climate Pact refers to coal for the first time in the UN process. It asks countries come back with stronger climate plans in 2022. And it finalises the most contentious elements of the Paris Agreement rulebook, six years after the landmark deal was done.

What it doesn’t do is meet calls for climate reparations, to the dismay of developing countries. A proposal for a finance facility to help victims of the climate crisis was quashed by the US and other rich nations, as was a call to earmark a share of carbon trading revenues to fund adaptation.

Addressing the plenary before the text was adopted, US climate envoy John Kerry said: “There is some discomfort. Well, if it’s a good negotiation, all the parties are uncomfortable. This has been a good negotiation.”

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For China, India and big emerging economies, the compromise was accepting language around 1.5C, coal and fossil fuel subsidies despite concerns it could inhibit their development – and a grievance against historic polluters taking up most of the carbon budget.

India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav forced a concession at the last minute, getting a reference to the “phase-out” of coal power changed to “phase-down”. That echoed the wording China agreed to in a bilateral agreement with the US.

Tina Stege, of the Marshall Islands, told the plenary of her “profound disappointment” about the change. “We accept this change with the greatest reluctance. We do so only because they are critical elements in this package that people in my country need as a lifeline for their future,” she said.

Cop26 president Alok Sharma said: “I apologise for the way this has unfolded and I am deeply sorry.” Pausing to fight back tears, he continued, to applause from the crowd, “I think it is vital that we protect this package” before, hearing no objections, he banged down the gavel.

Vulnerable countries also expressed dismay at the incremental progress on scaling up funding to respond to the impacts of climate change. They had to make do with a body to provide technical assistance and a “dialogue” on loss and damage.

Scotland breaks loss and damage “taboo”, raising hopes others will follow

Before the plenary started on Saturday afternoon Kerry and veteran US climate lawyer Sue Biniaz roamed the meeting hall. Their longest and most animated discussions were in a huddle with Ahmadou Sebory Toure, the lead negotiator for the G77+China group of developing countries.

Yet Toure appeared to emerge empty handed. A source in the G77 said the African group had threatened to reject the package, but small islands talked them out of it.

Speaking in the meeting, while Biniaz pored over texts, Gabon’s environment minister Lee White said one of Africa’s red lines had “been rubbed out with no compromise”.

“The [African Group] is quite unhappy,” the source said. “Aosis [group of small island states] managed to convince the rest of the blocs to revisit the issue in Egypt. For now, they believe this is the best deal we can have out of Cop.”

After the meeting, Kerry strode over to Toure and they exchanged a fistbump before walking off talking with Kerry’s arm around Toure’s shoulder.

Thunberg v Carney: tensions flare over net zero and carbon offsets at Cop26

The UK presidency’s stated aim for the conference was “to keep 1.5C alive”, referring to the most ambitious global warming limit in the Paris Agreement.

Announcements last week including India aiming for net zero by 2070 and a widespread agreement to reduce methane emissions led the traditionally cautious International Energy Agency to say that global warming could be held to 1.8C.

Others urged caution. Climate Action Tracker projected current policies put the world on a path to 2.7C warming and strengthened emissions targets for this decade could bend the curve to 2.4C. More optimistic assessments rely on long term – and therefore uncertain – targets.

The carbon trading rules agreed in Glasgow, while stricter than some parties wanted, risk diluting ambition, critics warned. “We have much to do to stop companies and countries gaming the system,” said Rachel Kyte, co-chair of an initiative to boost the integrity of voluntary carbon markets. “We have no room or time for markets like buckets of water, with 100 tiny holes.”

The post After tense huddles in Glasgow, countries strike ‘uncomfortable’ climate deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Developing country negotiators said the refusal of the US and EU to provide reparations for those losing their lives, homes and livelihoods to climate change impacts jeopardised a deal in Glasgow, UK.

The UK presidency was carrying out shuttle diplomacy on loss and damage to help find a landing ground.

“It’s going to be a very tough deal to make because it requires painful political decisions from everybody,” one developing county negotiator told Climate Home. “The question is do we have enough political capital now to make a deal?”

The G77 + China, which represents 134 developing countries, has proposed establishing a funding facility to help vulnerable nations respond to the loss and damages inflicted by an overheating climate.

Despite joining a “high ambition coalition” with small island states and vulnerable nations, the US and the EU have opposed the idea. The most they have shown willing to back is technical assistance.

Loss and damage is one of the most political contentious in the climate talks, because it raises the question of historical responsibility in causing the climate crisis. Rich nations have consistently refused to accept liability or calls for compensation.

‘Nature-based solutions’ prove divisive at Glasgow climate talks

At a plenary session on Friday, several ministers spoke of the losses their people were suffering already under 1.1C of global warming.

For Kenya, this meant people going hungry because of drought. “We bleed when it rains, we cry when it doesn’t,” Keriako Tobiko told the meeting in Glasgow.

For Bangladesh, it was hundreds of thousands of people displaced by sea level rise, flooding and intense cyclones. For Tuvalu, it was islands sinking.

All argued that the loss and damage facility was necessary for the victims of these disasters, and not, as Tobiko put it, “giving money to consultants to fly around the globe and teach us about what loss and damage is”.

A facility 4LD being proposed by G77 representing 6bn people but rejected by the minority taking hostage of global CO2 budget!
climate Justice Now. COP26#LDfacility#must pic.twitter.com/DepnTsf5Vi

— Alpha Kaloga (@KalogaAlpha) November 12, 2021

Developing countries want a concrete proposal for financing to be made available to help them recover from disasters. “We won’t be able to get away with constructive ambiguity at this stage. That’s just not going to cut it,” the developing country negotiator said.

The issue crystalises a perceived imbalance in draft Glasgow agreements. Provisions to accelerate emission-cutting plans, the priority of rich countries, were detailed from the start. Language on boosting finance flows and helping communities on the sharp end of climate impacts has been slower to come together.

The latest draft version of the text on Friday morning asked countries to strengthen their 2030 climate plans by the end of 2022 to align with the Paris Agreement goal. It noted “with deep regret” that a target to provide $100 billion by 2020 to support developing countries’ climate action had not been met.

That imbalance prompted some large emerging economies to insist they would set and deliver climate targets in their own time – and no more frequently than the 5-year cycle agreed in Paris.

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US special envoy John Kerry told the meeting it was “imperative” that the language on coming back with new plans be preserved to close the gap to limit global heating in line with 1.5C.

His remarks were light on what was needed to close the finance gap, which developing countries said was necessary to unlock greater ambition.

EU green deal chief Frans Timmermans told the plenary: “Loss and damage is a key part of our conversation. It’s time to move and find the solutions that will help vulnerable countries respond to the damage and destruction the climate crisis has already caused. We can find a way out of this, I’m sure, together in a cooperative atmosphere.“

But behind closed doors, sources said the EU had been siding with the US against the creation of a loss and damage finance facility.

China-US announce deal at Cop26 to accelerate climate action this decade

Ahmadou Sebory Toure, lead climate negotiator for Guinea, which represents a group of 124 countries and China known as the G77, told Climate Home News the establishment of this facility was a red line for developing countries.

“This is where a deal is to be done,” another developed country negotiator said, adding that the EU had shown weak leadership on the issue.

Wera Mori, Papua New Guinea’s climate minister, stopped the EU’s Timmermans the corridor of the conference. “I pointed out that we need to act together,” Mori told Climate Home.

The sentiment that the EU and the US have not been negotiating in the best interest of vulnerable countries is widespread among developing country negotiators.

“The European Union and the United States, in their role as the largest economies in the High Ambition Coalition, must provide their full diplomatic and financial backing,” to vulnerable countries’ approach, Gamal Hassan, Somalia’s minister for planning and economic development, wrote in an opinion article on Friday.

Scotland breaks loss and damage “taboo”, raising hopes others will follow

“I don’t think we are at the stage where we are talking about a new funding mechanism to be created,” Canada’s newly appointed environment minister Steven Guilbeault told a press conference in Glasgow on Friday.

But he added that he thought a number of developed countries were willing to go further than the latest draft text had shown.

While the form it would take was still under negotiation, five philanthropic funds pledged a total of $3 million to the Glasgow Loss and Damage Facility: Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), the European Climate Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Open Society Foundations and the Global Green Grants Fund. 

This was just the start and must lead to meaningful finance from rich countries, said Kate Hampton of the CIFF in a statement. “The inequity of climate change must be confronted in the final hours of Cop26 and must not be forgotten when the meeting closes. We stand behind all those speaking up for the world’s most climate vulnerable.”

The post Climate reparations become a crunch issue as Cop26 goes into overtime appeared first on Climate Home News.

The document, which is an updated version of an earlier proposal, recognises that national pledges to date are insufficient to hold global warming “well below 2C” and aiming for 1.5C, the goals agreed in Paris.

The text “requests parties to revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets in their nationally determined contributions as necessary to align with the Paris Agreement temperature goal by the end of 2022.”

“This is definitely a stronger and more balanced text than a few days ago,” Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute (WRI), said in a press briefing.

“It maintains the language around coming back to revisit and strengthen targets in 2022. Setting a time frame around that is absolutely essential to putting us on a path that will accelerate action,” said David Waskow of the World Resources Institute.

There was a flurry of debate over whether the verb used – “requests” – was stronger or weaker than “urges” in the previous draft. A Cop26 presidency official said “requests” was stronger and in line with language in the Paris Agreement.

It is all subject to change as Cop26 talks reach their endgame. Experts said many elements of the draft would breach countries’ red lines, requiring negotiators to call their capitals and seek a mandate to compromise.

‘Nature-based solutions’ prove divisive at Glasgow climate talks

The proposal reflects the urgency of the situation and the need for a rapid increase in ambition, the WRI experts said. The latest pledges for action this decade set the world on track for 2.4C of warming, according to analysis published by Climate Action Tracker this week. 

The text states that different national circumstances will be taken into account. “That is helpful for the most vulnerable, least developed countries who are simply not in a position to revisit and strengthen [their targets]. This needs to be aimed at the largest emitters,” Waskow said. 

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However, big emerging economies are resistant to being held to the same standard as the rich countries responsible for the majority of historic pollution.

In a stocktaking plenary on Friday afternoon, China’s environment minister Zhao Yingmin said countries should be allowed “space and time” to implement their climate targets.

Bolivia, speaking for the like-minded developing country grouping, stressed the principle of common but differentiated responsibility: rich countries should act first and fastest.

A space is opening up to discuss oil and gas exit at Cop26. Lobbyists are pushing back

Language around phasing out coal and fossil fuel subsidies remains in the second draft, with more caveats. It calls for the phase out of “unabated” coal power and of “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuels.

The new language could help some countries that try to keep fossil fuel subsidies for low-income households, but it could also allow polluters to retain subsidies, the WRI experts said.

“The key line on phasing out coal and fossil fuel subsidies has been critically weakened, but it’s still there and needs to be strengthened again before this summit closes. That’s going to be a big tussle and one we need to win,” Greenpeace’s Jennifer Morgan said.  

Strong pushback is expected from countries like Australia and Saudi Arabia.

For others like India, acceptance of strong language on cutting emissions will be conditional on clearer commitments by rich countries to scale up climate finance. The draft text “notes with deep regret” that a target to mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020 has not been met.

“With every year of delay in climate action, we are reducing the available carbon space for developing countries to grow,” said Arunabha Ghosh, head of Delhi-based think-tank CEEW, in an emailed statement.

“If developed countries are serious about the climate crisis, they need to fulfil past promises and rapidly scale up support for loss and damage. The delivery of $100 billion can also no longer be delayed.”

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A draft decision published on Wednesday emphasised “the critical importance of nature-based solutions and ecosystem-based approaches, including protecting and restoring forests, to reducing emissions, enhancing removals and protecting biodiversity”.

While the importance of nature featured in the negotiated outcome of Cop25 in Madrid, if adopted it would be the first time “nature-based solutions” made it into a UN climate pact.

On Friday, the term nature-based solutions was replaced with the phrase “protecting, conserving and restoring nature” in an updated version of the text.

Supporters see nature-based solutions as a way to connect the climate and biodiversity agendas, setting the scene for an effective biodiversity deal in Kunming, China next year. Critics object to the implied commodification of the natural world and say the term is misused by big business to justify continued pollution.

Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and an architect of the Paris Agreement, said at a press conference on Thursday that she hoped nature-based solutions would make it into the final pact. “It’s good that we are going away from the vision of nature being offsets – and more towards the idea of restoration, of nature being an important element of the climate package,” she said. 

“More and more we will see that it is impossible to distinguish between biodiversity and climate. They’re two parts of the same problem,” she said.

A space is opening up to discuss oil and gas exit at Cop26. Lobbyists are pushing back. 

An observer of the talks told Climate Home News that the UK, Colombia, France, the EU, US, Singapore, Fiji, DRC, Mexico, Norway, Australia, Canada and Liberia are all pushing for nature-based solutions to be included in the final Cop26 text.

At a meeting of heads of delegation on Wednesday, Bolivian negotiator Diego Pacheco Balanza objected to the phrase on behalf of the like-minded development countries (LMDCs).

“This text assumes that nature is only in service of people’s needs, but nature has an intrinsic value. It is sacred. That must be reflected. ‘Nature-based solutions’ were never negotiated here,” Bolivia’s negotiator said, as reported by an observer who attended the meeting. 

China, the host country for biodiversity talks in April, is a member of the LMDCs. The Chinese delegation did not make anyone available to comment.

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Gavin Edwards, WWF’s nature lead at Cop26, told Climate Home News that the inclusion highlights that “nature has truly arrived in the climate discourse” and helps “bridge the silo between the nature and climate community”.

He said that if the final Cop26 text references nature-based solutions, it will “strengthen the hand for it to be included in the CBD [Kunming biodiversity agreement]”. It was removed from an early draft of the biodiversity convention following opposition by some African governments, Brazil and Argentina.

“It will be very hard for [nature-based solutions] not to be an outcome in the CBD if it is agreed at Cop[26],” said Edwards. “More governments are keen to link these two agendas, of biodiversity and climate. Nature-based solutions [provide] that linkage.”

Indigenous delegates at Cop26 (Photo: UNFCCC/Flickr)

Indigenous leaders from forest regions have mixed feelings about the concept, stressing that it must come with safeguards for their rights.

“Our position is that indigenous governance is the quintessential nature-based solution. Therefore, indigenous peoples’ governance should be recognised and supported as a nature-based solution. For other nature-based solutions projects, there should be safeguards and full respect for indigenous peoples’ rights,” Jing Corpuz, an Igorot leader from the Philippines and policy lead at the non-profit Nia Tero, told Climate Home News.

Genilda Maria Rodrigues, an indigenous observer from the Kaingang community in southern Brazil, said she welcomes nature-based solutions as restoration of forests is urgently needed in her region. “We are approaching the point of no return,” she said. “We want someone to help our community reforest the area…

“But it’s very important that it is done in a transparent way. We don’t want it [done in] any way, but in the right way, with the consultation of the indigenous community,” she added.

China-US announce deal at Cop26 to accelerate climate action this decade

There are also concerns that polluters could use nature-based projects to offset rather than reduce their own emissions.

Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International, told Climate Home News, that nature-based solutions often “become synonymous with carbon offsets”.

“When they do, they end up compounding the injustice of climate change,” she said, adding that there is currently no official definition, criteria or safeguarding mechanism for nature-based solutions. 

“We’d rather see language that recognises the critical importance of biodiversity and ecosystems to addressing the climate crisis, that doesn’t set up nature for being a solution to corporations’ pollution,” she said.

This article was updated on 12 November 2021 to reflect new language in the Cop26 cover text. 

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The world’s two biggest emitters released a surprise joint statement on Wednesday evening setting out their intention to “seize on this critical moment to engage in expanded individual and combined efforts to accelerate the transition to a global net zero economy”.

An unformatted draft was hastily shared through climate communications networks on a Google Doc before the official version was published by the US state department and Chinese environment ministry websites.

Under the deal, both sides promised to act in this “decisive decade” to reduce emissions and keep the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise “well below 2C” and pursue efforts for 1.5C “within reach”.

They recognised that “there remains a significant gap” between current national carbon-cutting pledges and policies and what is needed to achieve the Paris goals.

“The two sides stress the vital importance of closing that gap as soon as possible, particularly through stepped-up efforts,” it reads.

I welcome today's agreement between China and the USA to work together to take more ambitious #ClimateAction in this decade.

Tackling the climate crisis requires international collaboration and solidarity, and this is an important step in the right direction. #COP26

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) November 10, 2021

China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and the US’ John Kerry announced the deal separately, in consecutive press conferences.

Xie told media: “In the area of climate change there is more agreement between China and the US than divergence, making it an area with huge potential for our cooperation.

“We are two days away from the end of the Glasgow Cop so we hope that this declaration can make a China-US contribution to the success of Cop26.”

Kerry said: “This declaration is a step that we can build on in order to close the [ambition] gap. Every step matters right now. We have a long journey ahead of us. We have to mitigate faster, have to cut methane emissions faster, continue to raise ambition and most of all we have to take action in order to keep 1.5C alive.”

The two sides have been discussing the deal “for months,” said Kerry. They held more than 30 virtual meetings and met in Shanghai, London and Glasgow before the agreement was reached on Wednesday afternoon.

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Analysts welcomed the signs of cooperation amid what has been a strained bilateral relationship in recent years.

The two nations struck a deal in 2014 that was widely seen as critical to the success of the Paris climate summit but have since clashed over issues like trade and human rights.

Thom Woodroofe, a senior advisor at the Asian Society, said that while Wednesday’s deal was not such a “gamechanger”, “in many ways it’s just as much of a step forward given the geopolitical state of the relationship”.

“It means the intense level of US-China dialogue on climate can now begin to translate into cooperation,” he said.

Bernice Lee, a China expert at think tank Chatham House, said the joint statement “could only be good news”. “Details remain patchy but this declaration should dissolve any fears that US-China tensions will stand in the way of success at Cop26,” she said.

But “the real test for Washington and Beijing is how hard they push for a 1.5C-aligned deal here in Glasgow,” she added.

Thunberg v Carney: tensions flare over net zero and carbon offsets at Cop26

Beijing-Washington cooperation will accelerate emission reductions, including by setting specific goals, targets, policies, and measures, the statement said.

The document identifies cutting methane emissions as a critical area of cooperation with both sides agreeing to develop additional measures by Cop27 in 2022.

The US has led efforts with the EU to bring together an alliance of more than 100 countries committed to collective cut emissions 30% by 2030

While China hasn’t signed the pledge, it committed to develop “a comprehensive and ambitious” national action plan on methane to cut the potent greenhouse gas’ emissions in the 2020s.

They agreed to convene a meeting in the first half of 2022 to discuss measures and standards through to reduce methane from coal, oil and gas production, the waste sectors and the agricultural sector. 

Good news that US and China have found common ground on climate. This is a challenge which transcends politics. Bilateral cooperation between the two biggest global emitters should boost negotiations at #COP26. Now we must find the global deal that keeps 1.5 degrees alive.

— Frans Timmermans (@F__Timmermans) November 10, 2021

China agreed to phase down coal consumption from 2025 to 2030 as part of its 15th five year plan – a critical document which sets the direction of economic development – and “make best efforts to accelerate this work”.

The joint statement commits both sides to further collaborate on electrification of end-use sectors, the deployment of technologies such as carbon capture and storage and air capture and the integration of renewable energy on the grid.

Both sides said they would submit their 2035 national climate targets in 2025. Discussions on the time period climate plans should cover after 2030 remains one of the last unresolved issues of the Paris Agreement rulebook, with negotiators split between favouring five and 10-year cycles.

Yamide Dagnet, of the World Resources Institute, said the move could see “a possible deal” for climate plans to cover a five-year period to be struck over the next couple of days.

The post China-US announce deal at Cop26 to accelerate climate action this decade appeared first on Climate Home News.

Electrifying the car industry took centre stage on “transport day” of the climate summit, in line with UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s slogan for the summit of “coal, cars, cash and trees”. There were also headline events on decarbonising shipping and aviation.

But an announcement on phasing out the internal combustion engine on Wednesday underwhelmed – leading many delegates to question why bikes, buses, trains and walking had not been given higher billing.

While a group of governments and companies signed up to eliminate new car emissions by 2040, the world’s top two automakers and major markets Germany, China and the US were not among them.

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In European cities, choosing a bike over a car for one journey a day cuts an average person’s transport emissions by 67%, according to research by the University of Oxford.

Outside the conference centre, campaigners gathered on their bikes, calling for increased funding in public transport as well as walking and cycling paths.

How much focus will there be today on #transport day at #COP26 on #bikes #cycling #mobility shift #publictransport #buses #trains or will it be all about #cars? We can’t just replace petrol/diesel cars with #ElectricVehicles pic.twitter.com/A29yfKKXN8

— Philippa Nuttall (@PhilippaNuttall) November 10, 2021

“I’m genuinely shocked by the absence of active travel in the COP26 transport discussions. Decarbonising road transport is a key part in tackling the climate crisis. We need fewer motor vehicles and those we do have, need to be cleaner/greener,” Will Norman, the mayor of London’s walking and cycling commissioner, said on Twitter.

“So unbelievably disappointing and elitist to present EV cars as the solution,” tweeted Sophie Eastwood.

Climate scientist Richard Betts tweeted in praise of the host city’s hire bike scheme and said better infrastructure was needed to make cycling an easier choice.

Public transport must double in cities over the next decade to meet the 1.5C target, according to analysis by C40 cities published on Wednesday.

Daniel Firth, transport and urban planning director at C40 Cities, told Climate Home News: “If we stopped the sale of fossil fuel vehicles tomorrow it would take 15-20 years to have 100% [zero emission vehicles] because of the time it takes to change the whole fleet. So it would take too long if that was our only strategy. Whereas we could start putting in bike lanes and bus lanes tomorrow.”

https://twitter.com/bikingbotanist/status/1458385857338122242

“It’s a missed opportunity,” Henk Swarttouw, president of the European Cyclists’ Federation, told Climate Home News. “Cycling is low-tech, low-cost and low-investment and provides quick climate wins,” he said.

“At the political level, leaders must confirm that the solution to reducing emissions needs to be a package that includes the electrification of vehicles, public transport and cycling,” Swarttouw said. “It’s not either or.”

The coronavirus pandemic led to a huge surge in cycling. In the UK, miles cycled per person increased by 62% during 2020, the highest levels since 2002. Each kilometre travelled by bike instead of car saves an average of 150 grams of CO2 emissions, according to the UN Environment Programme. “You could reach half a tonne over the year,” said Swarttouw.

Transport week at #COP26 so I think it’s time we started talking VERY LOUDLY about this wonderful crisis-beating machine and what it can give us all https://t.co/VCPDFms7mt

— Chris Boardman CBE (@Chris_Boardman) November 8, 2021

Increasing investment in green public transport, cycling and walking is part of the UK government’s 10-point plan for a “green industrial revolution, along with accelerating a shift to zero emissions vehicles. A spokesperson for the Cop26 presidency had not responded to Climate Home’s questions at time of publication.

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The document published early on Wednesday morning includes what would, if adopted, be the first explicit reference to coal and fossil fuels in the UN Climate Change process.

It “calls upon Parties to accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels” without providing a timeline for doing so.

Fossil fuel is a politically loaded term in the UN climate discussions and is not mentioned in the Paris Agreement. Countries agreed to cut emissions without naming the source of those emissions.

“The question is will it stand?,” Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, told a briefing, suggesting there would be strong push back from large fossil fuel producing nations.

Cop26 deal brings support for victims of climate disaster a step closer

Strong pushback is expected from countries with big coal, oil and gas interests like Australia and Saudi Arabia.

The inclusion of coal phaseout language in the draft follows more than 40 countries signing a statement promising to phase out coal in the 2030s for major economies and 2040s for developing countries. But several members had little coal to start with, while big miners and consumers like Australia, China, Japan and India did not join. At least two signatories, Poland and South Korea, later backtracked on the pace of the transition.

Energy minister Angus Taylor told Cop26 last week that the Australian government’s focus was “not on wiping out industries”.

“It’s on bringing down the cost of low-emissions technologies and making sure those low-emissions technologies can deliver for Australians and for our customers throughout the world,” he said. In 2019, Australia was the world’s largest coal exporter.

China has committed to end its overseas financing for coal but has not set an end date for domestic coal use. And Beijing pushed back against language to signal an end to coal power during G20 discussions last month.

The Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) has backed the inclusion of fossil fuel subsidy phaseout language in the text, saying major economies should do so by 2023.

In 2009, G20 countries agreed to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. But since the Paris accord was signed in 2015, the G20 has poured $3.3 trillion into subsidies for coal, oil and gas, according to analysis by Bloomberg NEF.

Lia Nicholson, of Antigua and Barbuda, lead negotiator for Aosis, told Climate Home News the group’s position “has definitely been heard” and received support “from some strong allies,” including a G7 country.

“Aosis’ stance on the phase out of fossil fuel subsidies by 2023 is not extreme or radical. It is simply what the seriousness of our situation calls for. Wilfully going down the path of business as usual, knowing what we know, is what is actually radical,” she said.

Italy, a G7 member and president of the G20 this year, pushed for the group of major economies to agree to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025 but could not get consensus.

Jennifer Morgan, executive director at Greenpeace, told reporters the call for fossil fuel phase out in the draft text was “a small step forward and we need to see more there”.

“I expect this to be a very contentious paragraph… and one to be going down to the wire,” she said. “Having a 1.5C goal and not connecting that to what that means for fossil fuels in the future is an incomplete outcome. This is a major space to watch over the coming days.”

Developing countries put a number on post-2025 climate finance needs: $1.3trn a year

The draft text recognises that holding temperature rise to 1.5C this century – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement – requires reducing emissions 45% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels and “to net zero around mid-century”.

It urges countries to “revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets in their nationally determined contributions, as necessary to align with the Paris Agreement temperature goal by the end of 2022”.

Vulnerable nations have pressed for the summit to agree on a clear time for countries, and particularly major economies, to come back with more ambitious plans in line with 1.5C before the next ambition round in 2025. The text goes some way towards meeting their demands.

But “the question is: can you say much more clearly and crisply that 1.5C is in fact what parties are aiming for,” said David Waskow, of the World Resources Institute.

The latest round of pledges are bending the temperature curve but remain way off track to limiting global heating to 1.5C.

If implemented in full, national 2030 climate pledges and policies put the world on course for 2.4C, according to analysis by Climate Action Tracker. This figure narrows to 2.1C when binding long term targets are counted and 1.8C in the most optimistic scenario.

Laurence Tubiana leads call for crackdown on climate misinformation in Glasgow pact

Analysts have raised concerns that the text is imbalanced between efforts to cut emissions and progress on delivering on the priorities for developing countries, particularly on finance and adaptation support for countries on the frontline of the climate crisis.

The G77 plus China bloc, which speaks for 134 developing countries, warned on Wednesday that they “remain extremely concerned with the lack of progress on finance issues”.

“There is no appetite from our partner to discuss our mandate to work on the definition of climate finance”, the group’s spokesperson Ahmadou Sebory Toure told the Cop26 stock-taking plenary.

“On one side of the scales, [the draft text] advances a detailed process for accelerating climate mitigation goals, but, on the other side of the scales, on finance and loss and damage, it is fuzzy and vague,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa.

The draft text landed as UK prime minister Boris Johnson and UN chief Antonio Guterres were due to return to Glasgow to “energise” the negotiations, according to a UK official.

Cop26 president Alok Sharma told reporters on Tuesday that any decision on the cover text would require negotiating teams to consult with their capitals, and potentially calls between world leaders.

The post Draft Glasgow agreement calls for accelerated coal exit, in UN climate first appeared first on Climate Home News.

Discussions on finance at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow got off to a difficult start after it was revealed donors won’t meet a long overdue collective goal to mobilise $100 billion a year before 2023 – three later than they committed.

While the twelve-year old goal remains unmet, countries are starting to discuss a new collective finance goal from 2025. African nations are calling for at least $1.3 trillion to be mobilised every year for the rest of the decade, meeting certain quality criteria.

Ahmadou Sebory Toure, lead climate negotiator for Guinea, who spoke on behalf of the group of 77 developing countries and China, told the plenary that “adequate and reliable finance” is a precondition for vulnerable nations to increase their goals.

“A Cop without a concrete outcome on finance can never be successful. Finance is an enabler for ambition in developing countries,” he said.

Support for vulnerable nations could ‘make or break’ Cop26 talks

The African Group of Negotiators and a group of 24 “like-minded” developing nations, which includes China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, have called on donor nations to mobilise at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2030, with an equal 50/50 split between money for carbon-cutting and adaptation efforts and at least $100bn delivered as grants.

Developed countries have resisted going into the details of the new finance goal, arguing that the decision taken in Glasgow should be limited to a procedural way forward for a decision to be made by 2024.

“We are disappointed that developed countries are not willing to discuss long-term climate finance matters,” Toure said. “A process that focuses on workshops without clear objective or vague discussions until 2024 is not acceptable.”

His comments were echoed by an Indian diplomat speaking on behalf of the Basic group that represents India, Brazil, South Africa and China.

Meeting India’s updated 2030 goal and 2070 net zero target “requires significantly enhanced climate finance,” she said.

“This is a simple ask from many developing countries parties yet what we are getting is more workshops and in-session seminars to discuss the new goal,” she said.

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The UK presidency insisted that “good progress” was made on finance issues, with UK lead negotiator Archie Young telling the plenary that countries were “able to engage on substance on all issues”.

One of the critical questions for developing countries is what this new finance goal should look like. Vulnerable nations have called for the inclusion of sub-targets for funds for adaptation and loss and damage.

The $100bn was the sole responsibility of a list of developed countries drawn up in the early 1990s. Some are pushing to expand the donor base to include upper middle income countries such as China, South Korea, Mexico and Arab states that are already voluntarily contributing climate aid but have no legal obligation to do so or to report it to the UN.

The Paris accord states that developed countries “shall provide financial resources to assist developing countries”. It adds that other parties are encouraged to do so voluntarily with rich nations to “take the lead in mobilising climate finance… as part of a global effort”.

Lorena Gonzalez, a senior associate on climate finance at the World Resources Institute, told Climate Home News “there are growing tensions” over who should contribute to the post-2025 finance goal. Naming a number now was “premature,” she said, as it should be based on a transparent process to assess need.

From Swiss pianist to Rwandan chemist – meet 15 ministers brokering a Glasgow pact

Climate Home understands that a draft text on the new goal includes a mention that countries “in a position to do so” should put more money on the table. The wording is backed by South Korea, which announced a further $3 million of international climate finance in Glasgow.

Last week, Modi announced the launch of an initiative to provide small island developing states with information on cyclones, co-reef and coast-line monitoring through sharing satellite data.

But Delhi is strongly resistant to having its voluntary aid formalised under UN Climate Change processes.

On behalf of the Basic group, an Indian diplomat said: ”The responsibility of climate finance remains that of developed countries towards developing countries.”

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These ministers will be asked to broker deals on different elements of a Glasgow pact, ranging from finalising rules on carbon markets to keeping 1.5C hope alive.

As is conventional, each pairing includes one minister from a developed and one from a developing country. Island states and Europe are heavily represented. There is gender balance across the team, with eight women and seven men joining Cop26 president Alok Sharma.

Andrea Meza Murillo, Costa Rica – coordinating

Continuing Costa Rica’s record of punching above its weight in climate talks, energy and environment minister Andrea Meza Murillo will have a coordinating role across negotiating tracks, with Sharma.

It’s not the only thing on her agenda at this Cop. Meza is championing the San Jose Principles Coalition, to protect the integrity of carbon trading under Article 6 so that emissions reductions are real and additional.

Along with Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen, she is also trying to persuade countries to sign up to the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance – a group of nations promising to phase out hydrocarbon production.

Meza is a lawyer and was the environment ministry’s #2 on climate, joining just before Cop21 in Paris, before getting the ministry’s top job in 2020. She likes to dance.

Andrea Meza Murillo is Costa Rica’s environment minister (Photo: Julieth Méndez)

Yasmine Fouad, Egypt – Finance

Co-leading on the vital issue of climate finance is Egypt’s environment minister Yasmine Fouad. She is an environmental scientist who was the lead author on a chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on desertification in 2017.

She was the deputy environment minister in 2014 and promoted to the top job in 2018. She’s worked for UN organizations, NGOs and universities and is likely to have a key role when Egypt hosts Cop27 next year.

Fouad is Egypt’s environment minister (Photo credit: Rwanda Environment Ministry)

Per Bolund, Sweden – finance

A recent Overseas Development Institute report found Sweden was one of only three countries (along with Germany and Norway) to be paying its fair share towards rich countries’ collective $100bn goal. Since that report came out, it has pledged to double its climate finance.

As an environment minister from Sweden’s Green Party when this doubling pledge was made, Per Bolund is one of the few developed country ministers with any moral authority on finance. He’s a fan of baseball and football, following Stockholm club AIK.

Bolund is Sweden’s environment minister (Photo credit: News Oresund/Wikicommons)

Grace Fu, Singapore – Article 6

Singapore’s environment minister will co-lead discussions on the most difficult issue of the Paris rulebook – Article 6 on carbon markets. Talks will focus on double-counting, whether old credits from the Kyoto protocol can be used and whether a share of the transactions should go towards adaptation climate finance.

A trained accountant and auditor, Fu has had a stellar business career. She worked for the Har Paw Group, the company which makes tiger balm, before getting to the top of the company which operates Singapore’s container port, the second-biggest in the world.

After taking a pay cut to go into politics herself in 2006, Fu campaigned against cuts to ministers’ pay, saying it would put people off going into public service.

Fu was a high-flying businesswoman before going into politics (Photo credit: Whyohgee Singapore/Flickr)

Espen Barth Eide, Norway – Article 6

Having been Norway’s environment minister for just 25 days, Eide has been thrown in the deep end by the Cop Presidency, as he co-leads talks on Article 6. He takes over this role from Sveinung Rotevatn.

Eide does have relevant experience, though. He’s been the Norwegian Labour Party’s spokesperson on climate for four years and was foreign minister in Jens Stoltenberg’s government before Ban-Ki Moon appointed him the United Nations special adviser on Cyprus. So he knows his way around a tricky issue.

Like many on Norway’s left, he had a brush with tragedy in 2011 when the political camp his teenage son was attending was attacked by neo-nazi Anders Breivik. Married to a woman he met in Barcelona, he is fluent in Spanish and admits to using the smiley emoji excessively when communicating by text.

Eide has been an environment minister for just a few weeks (Photo credit: World Economic Forum)

Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, Rwanda – common timeframes

The Rwandan environment minister will co-lead the talks on common timeframes, the issue of how often countries’ official NDC climate plans should be updated and what time period they should cover. The main options are five years or ten with a half-way point.

More ambitious countries tend to want shorter time periods, while some object to the bureaucracy and say ten years fits better with their domestic planning processes.

As a schoolgirl in Rwanda, Mujawamariya was told that her favourite subject, chemistry, was for men. To prove the teacher wrong, she says she applied to study physical chemistry abroad. “For some reason” she says she chose a Russian university over French ones. She went on to study in India before becoming the Rwandan ambassador to Russia and was the education minister before getting the environment brief in 2019.

Mujawamariya has been Rwanda’s environment minister for two years (Photo credit: Rwanda Environment Ministry)

Simonetta Sommaruga, Switzerland – common timeframes

The other half of the developed-developing common timeframes duo is Swiss environment minister Simonetta Sommaruga. She’s from the pro-European, centre left Social Democratic Party and she was the country’s president between 2015 and 2020.

Sommaruga is a trained concert pianist and her excellent rendition of Finnish trance anthem “sandstorm” is available on Youtube.

Simonetta Sommaruga is the Swiss environment minister (Photo credit: Michele Limina/World Economic Forum)

Simon Stiell, Grenada – mitigation

Stiell is the environment minister for the climate vulnerable Caribbean island of Grenada. Before Cop26, president-designate Alok Sharma has tasked him and Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen with informal consulting with other ministers on how they can reduce their emissions faster this decade, to keep the 1.5C of global warming limit within reach. They will continue this role at Cop26.

Stiell has described Cop26 as “make or break” for Grenada and other island nations.

(Photo: Cabinet Office/Flickr)

Dan Jørgensen, Denmark – mitigation

The other half of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (with Andrea Meza) and the 2020’s ambition team (with Simon Stiell), Jørgensen has made waves internationally in his two-and-a-bit years as environment minister.

Last August, he donned a chef’s hat and threw a courgette around with the farming minister, in a quirky video encouraging Danes to make vegetarian meatballs.

Dan Jorgensen has made waves internationally in his two years as climate minister. (Photo credit: US Deprartment of Agriculture/Flickr)

James Shaw, New Zealand – transparency

New Zealand’s environment minister will co-lead transparency talks, making sure that the information countries present to the UN is comprehensive and accurate (no cheating).

He’s been a member of the Green Party for over 20 years and became the party’s co-leader in 2015. When Labour’s Jacinda Ardern needed Green support to form a government, he became environment minister. The arrangement worked so well that he kept that role after the 2020 election, despite Ardern’s party gaining an outright majority.

Ironically, campaigners have accused the New Zealand government of using “creative accounting” to make its climate targets look better than they are.

Shaw addresses a climate strike rally in Wellington (Photo credit: David Tong)

Molwyn Joseph, Antigua and Barbuda – transparency

Antigua and Barbuda’s long-time environment minister will team up with Shaw on transparency. Molwyn Joseph is a political veteran having first been made a minister in 1984. His career has seen him re-negotiate the country’s debt and promote it as a tourist destination.

His government profile describes Joseph as a “sports enthusiast” who captained cricket and football teams in his youth.

Joseph is a veteran of Antigua and Barbuda’s politics (Photo credit: Commonwealth Secretariat)

Aminath Shauna, Maldives – adaptation

As the environment minister for an island nation which is at risk of sinking into the sea, it’s appropriate that the Maldives environment minister is co-leading consultations on adaptation.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to establish a global goal on adaptation, but six years later it remains unclear what that means in practice. The challenge is to turn a vague aspiration to improve resilience to floods, droughts and storms into measurable targets. The Cop26 president’s summary of what could go into a Glasgow pact, published on Sunday, just has a placeholder on the matter.

After studying in Missouri, USA, Shauna became a journalist for Minivan News before joining the government as an aide to then-president and climate advocate Mohammed Nasheed in 2012. She loves snorkelling and scuba diving.

Shauna was a journalist before joining the Maldives government (Photo credit: Youtube/Screenshot)

Teresa Ribera, Spain – adaptation

Spain’s ecological transition minister and deputy prime minister Teresa Ribera assumed office when the centre-left came to power in Spain in 2018. She is a lawyer by background and has been involved in climate change in government for over a decade.

When Chile was unable to physically host Cop25, Ribera played a key role in bringing the talks to Madrid and took over the chairing of the conference mid-way through the talks.

Earlier this year, Ribera stewarded a climate law through parliament, which included a mandate to end fossil fuel production by 2042. More recently, she approved a subsidy to household gas bills amid soaring market prices.

As the developed country representative of the pairing, Ribera may wish to knock heads together to address the pitiful shortfall in finance for adaptation.

Teresa Ribera is Spain’s ecological transition minister (Photo credit: Rwanda Environment Ministry)

Pearnel Charles Junior, Jamaica – loss and damage

Perhaps the issue where the divide between developed and developing countries is sharpest is loss and damage: whether and how big polluters should support victims of climate disaster.

The developing representative co-leading the talks is Jamaican minister without portfolio in the ministry of economic growth and job creation Pearnel Charles Junior.

Charles Junior is a lawyer by training and politics runs deep in his family. His father, Pearnel Charles Senior, was the deputy leader of the Jamaica Labour Party for nearly twenty years, during a violent and troubled time in Jamaican politics. Charles Junior is a football fan with three children.

Jamaican minister Charles Junior is a lawyer by training (Photo credit: Hbos/Wiki)

Carole Dieschbourg, Luxembourg – loss and damage

Paired with Charles Junior is the environment minister of one of the smallest developed countries, Luxembourg. A member of the Green Party, she has been the country’s environment minister since 2013 is a veteran of Cop talks.

Luxembourg had the rotating presidency of the European Council in 2015 and Dieschbourg was a key figure in the EU’s diplomacy ahead of and during the Paris summit.

In a comment article coauthored with Meza, Ribera and three others on Monday, Dieschbourg emphasised the importance of women’s leadership in tackling the climate crisis.

Dieschbourg has been environment minister since 2013 (Photo credit: EU 2017 EE Presidency/Flickr)

Correction: This article was updated to clarify Andrea Meza previous role in Costa Rica’s environment ministry.

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Diplomats worked through the night on Friday to make headway on some on the last unresolved issues of the rules to implement the Paris Agreement.

But there were still a wide range of options on the table for the most contentious issues, including establishing common rules for a global carbon market, on whether climate plans should cover a five or 10 year timeframe and on the transparency process for reporting progress.

Ministers arrive in Glasgow for week two to broker a political deal. Their ability to reach consensus hinges on all countries feeling their concerns are taken seriously – and support for those on the frontline of climate impacts is a weak link.

Cop26 president Alok Sharma told reporters on Saturday: “Over the last week, I have discussed adaptation finance with a number of countries and I hope we will be able to make progress next week.”

But Matthew McKinnon, a spokesperson for the Climate Vulnerable Forum, which represents 48 developing countries, told Climate Home News discussions on support for those on the frontline of the climate crisis were “not progressing enough”.

While there has been a flurry of pledges on phasing out coal and cutting emissions in the first week of the UN climate conference, announcements on helping developing countries adapt and respond to droughts, flooding, cyclones and sea level rise have been less forthcoming.

The UK presidency has made adaptation, loss and damage the theme for Monday. But it’s unclear what wealthy nations will bring to the table. Unlike with days dedicated to finance and energy, no major announcements have been trailed in advance.

Jennifer Tollmann, of think tank E3G, told Climate Home News what happens on Monday could “make or break” the deal.

The US said this week it would dedicate $3 billion annually for adaptation finance by 2024 pending approval by Congress. That alone won’t be enough to reassure vulnerable nations, which have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of high-level attention adaptation receives.

They are calling for at least a doubling of adaptation funds to help them cope with climate impacts.

South Africa $8.5bn finance package offers a model for ending reliance on coal

On top of adaptation finance, developing countries are calling for additional and dedicated funds to help them recover from loss and damages caused by climate impacts affecting them now – following a precedent set by Scotland at the start of the talks.

“We need to establish a financing mechanism for those that are losing the most,” Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, Fiji minister for the economy and climate change, told reporters on Friday.

“This needs to go beyond access to insurance and risk transfer arrangements to have the impact required and it must be additional and separate to the annual financing target.”

Frances Fuller, of Antigua and Barbuda, an advisor to the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), told Climate Home: “We’ve certainly be having some challenges there,” citing push back from donor countries.

From Chile and Taiwan via Glasgow, youth call for climate justice

What wealthy nations deliver on Monday in support for vulnerable ones will “set the tone for how things progress in the week,” said Fuller. “Finance is a critical part that has not made as much progress and we’d like to see some more there.”

The fact that wealthy nations arrived at the talks not expecting to meet a long-overdue commitment to mobilise $100bn a year from 2020 before 2023 put finance discussions on a back foot.

In a submission to the UN on Friday, the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) called out donor countries that haven’t reported on their climate finance provisions to do so by next year.

“It’s pretty clear that we are so far off the $100bn. I say so far off because it is about the quality [of the finance] as well,” said Fuller.

Developing countries have repeatedly called for a 50/50 split between adaptation and mitigation finance. But in 2019, only a quarter of all finance went to help communities adapt to climate impacts.

“In 2021, we are a lot further behind than we need to be. The response to the challenges that small island developing states are facing is entirely inadequate,” Fuller said.

Comment: To keep 1.5C alive, the super rich must change their high carbon lifestyles

Inside the negotiations, talks on a post-2025 climate finance goal and on defining a global goal on adaptation have been difficult.

Some donor countries are resisting a tighter definition of climate finance, including specific targets for grants as opposed to loans and sub-targets for adaptation or loss and damage.

This lack of predictability of long-term adaptation finance flows is holding hostage parts of the negotiations on carbon markets.

The African Group of Negotiators is demanding a share of revenue from carbon trading deals between countries go to the Adaptation Fund. But the US strongly opposes it, slamming the proposal as a tax.

“The whole world is suffering from climate impacts… it’s not just an African issue,” Mohamed Adow, director of NGO Power Shift Africa, told Climate Home. “It’s in our own interest to detoxify these negotiations and collectively build resilience.”

The post Support for vulnerable nations could ‘make or break’ Cop26 talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

To do so they must find a way to credibly close the gap between projected emissions in 2030, and the level scientists say is needed. But who is really responsible for that gap?

If we look at the world population as though it were a single country, spread between the richest and poorest people on the planet, we can see the stark inequality that is pushing the 1.5C goal out of reach.

Our research with colleagues at the Stockholm Environment Institute for Oxfam estimates the per capita consumption emissions of different global income groups in 2030 based on the unconditional national climate pledges to the Paris Agreement and other national policies.

We find the carbon footprints of the richest 1% in 2030 are set to be 25% higher than in 1990, 16 times the global average and some 30 times above the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5C goal. The richest 10% are set for footprints that are 9 times that level, while those of the poorest half of the global population will still be far below it.

Per capita consumption emissions of global income groups 1990-2030 and the 1.5C-compatible global per capita level

In absolute terms, the emissions associated with the consumption of the richest 10% alone are set to nearly amount to the global total in 2030 compatible with the 1.5C goal, while those of the remaining 90% are set to only just surpass it. The richest 1% meanwhile are set to continue to increase their share of global total emissions to 16% by this time.

Evidently it is not the consumption of the majority of the world’s people that is reflected in the global emissions gap, but the footprints of the rich minority. Tackling this structural inequality is vital to keeping the 1.5C goal alive.

It is striking too that the biggest turnaround in emissions trends is set to come from the global middle classes. This part of the global income distribution saw the fastest growth in emissions from 1990-2015, driven in large part by the rapid GDP growth in countries like China and India.

But over the next decade, per capita emissions of this income group are set to peak and start to decline – still not fast enough, but a clear sign of the impact of the Paris Agreement in transforming socio-economic trends.

Per capita emissions growth 1990-2015 and 2015-30 by global income bracket

Fairness is a pre-requisite for the social solidarity needed to underpin the energy transition. While carbon inequality is often most stark at the global level, we can see it clearly at national level too.

In all major emitters, the richest 10% of national citizens are set for per capita emissions well in excess of the global 1.5C-compatible level in 2030.

Per capita consumption emissions of national income groups in 2030 and the 1.5C-compatible global per capita level

In India, national per capita emissions are on course to remain within this level – likely the only G20 country that can claim that – but the footprints of the richest 10% of Indians are set to be five times higher.

While the poorest half of the Chinese population are set to remain well under the 1.5C global average level, the richest 1% are on course for dramatic emissions growth.

Meanwhile in high-income countries, lower-income citizens are set to get close to the global 1.5C per capita level, but their richer neighbours will still be far from it.

It’s hard for governments to explain to their citizens that they must change their gas-fuelled boilers or cut back on eating meat, while people see higher-income peers in their own country or abroad continuing to free-ride.

None of this implies that individuals are uniquely responsible for cutting their footprints – although the richest have more capacity to do that than anyone else.

It means that governments must get to grips with the inequalities that are accelerating the climate crisis, through regulation and fairer and greener taxation. Fighting inequality and emissions together is the only path to keeping 1.5C alive.

Tim Gore is head of the climate and circular economy programme at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

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At an overflowing event on the sidelines of Cop26 climate negotiations in Glasgow, Canada, the US and Italy joined the UK in promising not to commit any new finance for unabated coal, oil and gas projects in other countries by the end of 2022.

Oil Change International campaigner Laurie van der Burg said: “The signatories of today’s statement are doing what’s most logical in a climate emergency: stop adding fuel to the fire and shift dirty finance to climate action.”

E3G sustainable finance expert, Iskander Erzini Vernoit called it a “historic breakthrough that would not have been possible just a few years ago.”

In total, 20 countries and five development banks signed the pledge on Thursday. Germany, Spain and the Netherlands joined a few days later. Big fossil fuel backers missing from the list include Japan, South Korea, China, France, Australia, the African Development Bank and World Bank.

As a last-minute addition, Italy was left off this map of signatories distributed by the UK government (Photo: Screenshot/Youtube/UK government)

Many developed country governments financially support projects abroad that they expect to benefit their own economies. They do this through offering export credit guarantees, so that their taxpayers bear a project’s risk rather than the private companies, or by offering loans on better terms than private banks.

Research by Oil Change International shows that, in 2018-2020, Canada was the biggest financer of foreign fossil fuels in the G20, contributing $11bn a year.

Speaking at the pledge’s launch event in Glasgow, Canadian minister of natural resources Jonathan Wilkinson cited the International Energy Agency’s recent report on what net zero by 2050 means for the global energy sector.

He said: “The report called for immediate and massive deployment of all available clean and efficient energy technologies combined with a major global push to accelerate innovation… we need to deploy public resources in a way that is consistent with our climate goals”.

The same analysis shows that the US provided $3.1bn a year while Italy contributed $2.7bn and the UK contributed $1.4bn.

John Morton, climate counsellor to the US treasury, told the launch panel: “We don’t want to be using scarce public resources to lock in assets that will become stranded in a relatively short period of time as the world continues to transition.”

Last year, the US, UK and Italy announced $7bn of public financing to a gas project in Mozambique. Maputo-based E3G analyst Jonathan Gaventa told Climate Home News: “Future projects of this type will be much more difficult to finance”.

He added that the announcement puts in doubt whether US oil firm Exxon will be able to get US public finance for its Rovuma gas project in Mozambique. Shell and Equinor’s gas project in Tanzania will be difficult to finance too, he said.

South Africa $8.5bn finance package offers a model for ending reliance on coal

The signatories to this commitment pledged to  “encourage further governments, their official export credit agencies and public finance institutions to implement similar commitments into COP27 and beyond”.

While France did not sign the agreement, E3G’s sustainable finance expert Iskander Erzini Vernoit told Climate Home News he was hopeful that they soon would. He pointed out that French development bank Agence Française de Développement (AFD) had signed the statement.

But analysts said that the big Asian fossil fuel financers – Japan, South Korea and China – are less likely to sign up soon. All three have only agreed to phase out finance for the most polluting fossil fuel, coal, this year.

The World Bank also did not sign up. In 2018-2020, it was the biggest multilateral back backer of fossil fuels, committing an average of nearly $2bn a year.

Van Der Burg told Climate Home News that the US’ changing position could influence the bank. The US is the biggest shareholder in the World Bank and all of its presidents have been US citizens.

This article was updated on 9 November to include Germany and the Netherlands’ signing of the pledge and on 10 November when Spain signed the pledge.

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The nation is at the heart of a string of announcements in Glasgow, UK to support developing countries in ditching the most polluting fossil fuel.

After months of high-level political negotiations, France, Germany, the UK, the US and the EU announced an $8.5 billion package of grants and concessional finance over 3-5 years to accelerate the retirement of coal plants and the deployment of renewable energy.

Crucially, it also targets economic regeneration in coal mining regions, with electric vehicle manufacturing and green hydrogen among the potential alternative job opportunities.

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa described it as “a watershed moment”.

“South Africa has consistently argued that developed economies must support a just transition in developing economies. [This] represents a first-of-its kind partnership to turn these commitments into reality, and a model for similar forms of collaboration globally,” he said.

“We’re witnessing the end of coal power in real-time,” Leo Roberts, research manager for think tank E3G’s coal transition team told Climate Home News. These announcements “point to a shift towards a world in which finance is available to help developing countries move away from coal”.

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The partnership could be emulated by others amid a raft of commitments to ditch coal.

Indonesia, Vietnam and Chile are among 18 new countries that committed not to build or invest in new coal power and phase out coal plants in the 2040s .

Earlier this week, Indonesia’s finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the country could phase out coal power by 2040, with financial support from the international community. That is a major shift from its national climate submission to the UN earlier this year, which sees coal meeting 38% of electricity demand in 2050.

Like South Africa, Indonesia has communities dependent on coal mining, who could suffer from a transition to clean energy in the absence of economic regeneration.

For the first time, financial instruments are being put together to address the issue.

Part of the South African package includes $500 million from a $2bn Accelerating Coal Transition (ACT) initiative launched by the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) in Glasgow on Wednesday.

It is the first dedicated international fund to help developing countries exit coal, with funding from the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and Denmark.

Caught between EU pressure and soaring demand, AIIB weighs end to gas finance

Indonesia, India, the Philippines and South Africa are the first beneficiaries of the scheme that aims to leverage private investments to support the transition from coal to clean energy. Together, they represent more than 15% of global coal-related emissions.

Mafalda Duarte CEO of the Climate Investment Funds, told Climate Home News the fund aims to catalyse at least 10 times its core funding by bringing in private financiers and multilateral development banks.

Duarte told Climate Home the fund aimed to address a gap in the financial architecture by providing support to reskill coal workers and social protection measures such as temporary income support to those losing their jobs.

“If we don’t provide this support, this coal phase out is probably not going to happen in time to meet our climate objectives,” she said.

The $8.5bn package is “groundbreaking”  because it was “co-created” by South Africa and donor countries, rather than imposed by wealthy nations, Maesela Kekana, South Africa’s climate change chief negotiator, told Climate Home News.

Kekana said environment minister Barbara Creecy had been lobbying the CIFs for a coal transition programme to be established.

“We were right at the forefront. We fought for that. That’s how important the ACT programme is for us,” he said.

“There’s nothing like this out there. It’s never been done before. And now we’re going to roll it out,” he said. “We are determined to make this work because we believe that this is a good model.”

Thunberg v Carney: tensions flare over net zero and carbon offsets at Cop26

South Africa pitched for the funds after debt-burdened state utility Eskom said it was seeking $10bn in international finance to help it shut most of its coal-fired power plants by 2050.

The country uses coal for 87% of its electricity generation and 20% of its liquid fuels, drawing on significant domestic resources.

UK climate envoy John Murton and a delegation from the US in September helped to seal the deal ahead of Cop26.

“That was a turning point in our view because we started to realise how serious these countries were. Everyone was working non-stop at the technical and political level to make it happen,” Kekana said.

With Eskom accounting for around 41% of the country’s emissions, decarbonising the electricity grid is a priority for South Africa to meet its climate goal. But the deal goes beyond cutting coal emissions to creating alternative, cleaner jobs and livelihoods.

Jesse Burton, an energy policy researcher focusing on the South African coal sector, said the package could help address some of the technical challenges of the transition, which have been impeded by Eskom’s huge debt.

“But how the pot of money is going to be carved out need to be ironed out. It’s can’t just be about rolling out renewables, it has to be about the just transition,” she said.

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If countries meet their 2030 emission targets in full, global heating could be limited to 2.6-2.7C this century, according to the UN Emissions Gap report. Collective ambition needs to be seven times higher to align with the most ambitious 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement.

So the UK Cop26 presidency is considering a proposal for the final Glasgow outcome to demand another round of updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) by 2023.

It is backed by Christiana Figueres, former head of UN Climate Change and architect of the Paris deal. “At Cop26… there has been to be a clear agreement that governments will come back in 2023… to guarantee that we are on a path to 1.5C,” she said in a press briefing.

But the idea is meeting resistance from emerging economies, who want more support to meet existing targets before rewriting them.

“This talk of another round of [climate plans] will just feed into the hot air which is already plenty in the Cop process,” Pakistan’s climate minister Malik Amin Aslam told Climate Home News.

“The huge gap between what is already in the NDCs and what is actually being implemented needs to be plugged instead of another round of updating NDCs. Let’s talk climate action and not bureaucratic and endless updating of meaningless NDCs.”

‘Chess game’ as negotiators seek elusive carbon market deal at Cop26

Under the Paris accord, countries agreed to ratchet up their plans, or nationally determined contributions (NDCs), every five years. But vulnerable and progressive nations argue that waiting until 2025 to step up ambition is too late to keep 1.5C in reach.

Instead, they argue that countries should revise their plans “as soon as possible and ahead of the global stocktake in 2023,” when UN Climate Change is due to formally take stock of all progress made in meeting the Paris goals.

The UK has made keeping 1.5C within reach this decade the overarching objective for Cop26. While the gap to 1.5C won’t be closed in Glasgow, the hosts want to emerge with a plan for further tightening ambition.

The issue has been gathering steam since a ministerial meeting in July. In a letter to all parties ahead of the Glasgow summit, Sharma said countries will need to agree on a “roadmap for strengthening 2030 NDCs as necessary ahead of, and through, the global stocktake in 2023.”

The Climate Vulnerable Forum, which represents 48 nations on the front line of climate impacts, is going even further with a call for annual updates to NDCs until 2025.

Jennifer Tollmann, a senior policy advisor at think tank E3G, told Climate Home News there is “a real-world need to improve NDCs before 2025,” explaining that “we need at least seven years to make the appropriate economic and investment decisions” to halve emissions this decade.

Australia is relying on offsets and future technology to meet 2050 net zero target

The UK recognised that asking countries to step up their carbon-cutting efforts again in the next two years also required action on adaptation and financial support to the developing world. That could include a commitment for climate finance to be evenly split between adaptation and mitigation for example.

In a policy note shared with leaders taking part in a high-level summit at Cop26, and seen by Climate Home, the UK called on heads of government to give negotiators “a clear direction” to agree on a pathway that accelerates action this decade.

But for Esther Tamara, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia, the lack of finance for developing countries will be “a huge stumbling block” to agree to more climate efforts.

On Monday wealthy nations announced that they won’t meet a long-overdue commitment to mobilise $100bn a year between 2020 and 2025 before 2023 –providing developing countries with no means or incentives to up their targets.

“I don’t think the Indonesian government will respond to another round of NDCs so soon positively. Even now, we can see Indonesia is dragging its feet to pursue transformational climate commitments and emissions reductions target,” Tamara told Climate Home.

Meanwhile the Indian government is unlike to agree to anything more ambitious until “it sees money on the table,” Navroz Dubash, professor at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, told Climate Home.

Like Pakistan and Indonesia, India is a member of a group of “like-minded” developing countries that emphasises the historic responsibility of rich countries to cut emissions deeper and faster. In a statement last week, the group accused the Cop26 host of going “against climate justice” by calling on all to set mid century net zero targets.

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Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to set up a carbon trading system to help decarbonise the global economy at lower cost. It is known as Article 6 and has proved the hardest part of the Paris rulebook to agree.

The market would allow nations to finance carbon-cutting projects in another countries and count the avoided emissions towards their own climate targets. But without robust accounting rules, it has the potential to undermine the Glasgow summit’s key objective: to keep 1.5C – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement – within reach.

If countries want to demonstrate they are serious about “keeping 1.5C alive” then “having good, robust rules on carbon markets is paramount,” Yamide Dagnet, director of climate negotiations at the World Resources Institute, told Climate Home News.

Several experts told Climate Home News the chances of a deal in Glasgow were 50-50. “It’s going to be a real chess game,” said Dagnet.

“We will get the best deal we can and take a decision on this,” Diann Black-Layne, of Antigua and Barbuda, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) told Climate Home. “A delay in getting a deal will only benefit the fossil fuel industry.”

What is Article 6? The issue climate negotiators cannot agree

The UK government has made resolving the issue a critical objective in Glasgow, recognising that several countries intend to use the carbon market to help them meet their 2030 climate targets.

China, which has recently set up its own carbon trading system, and Russia, which hopes to use its forest sink to sell carbon credits, have shown growing interest in getting a deal done.

But the task ahead is significant. The issue dominated the last climate talks in Madrid in 2019, yet after two days of overtime it ended with no fewer than nine draft texts.

Cop26 boss Alok Sharma host tasked Singapore’ minister Grace Fu and Norway’s Sveinung Rotevatn to carry out informal consultations with countries and tease out convergence.

During these meeting, countries largely “repeated previous positions” meaning “more work is clearly required” for a compromise to be found, according to a summary of the final pre-Cop26 ministerial meeting.

Heads of delegations were called in for a final meeting on the issue on Friday before the start of Cop26 on 31 October.

Australia is relying on offsets and future technology to meet 2050 net zero target

The three most contentious issues are likely to require a political resolution. These include whether to accept some double counting of emissions reductions, the transition of old Kyoto-era credits into the Paris regime and whether a share of revenue from bilateral carbon trading agreements should go to the Adaptation Fund.

Brazil and Australia have been among the most vociferous advocates of looser rules, clashing with the EU and vulnerable country groupings over environmental integrity.

There are some signs of Brazil softening its stance on allowing old Kyoto credits to enter the new market. Brazilian business group CEBDS has called on the government to compromise by allowing corresponding adjustments to be made so carbon reductions are not counted twice.

While ministers have recognised possible trade-offs between issues and with the wider Cop26 agenda, how this could be translated into an overall deal still isn’t clear.

One European official told Climate Home some countries were ready to water down some environmental integrity standards to get Article 6 over the line in Glasgow.

And analysts agree that unless countries such as Brazil show a radical change in their positions, any compromise will require loopholes.

“The question is how many loopholes will a deal have and how long will these loopholes last for,” said Lambert Schneider, a carbon market expert at the Germany-based Öko-Institut.

Saudi Arabia pledges net zero by 2060, but no oil exit plan

The chair of the scientific and technological body of UN Climate Change, Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, compiled in an informal paper options that have broad support and which could form the basis for a deal.

Some of the options include introducing time-bound opt-out period that would allow double counting emissions reductions and limiting the number of Kyoto-era credits in the new system by capping them in volume or allowing them for a restricted time period.

Ministers warned that some of the options for compromise are “not consistent with the aim of raising ambition” and the 1.5C temperature goal.

Small island states, Latin American countries and the EU have strongly opposed any double counting of emission reductions. Kelley Kizzier, of the Environmental Defense Fund, said preventing double counting was “a fundamental requirement for any effective carbon market”. With that ruled out, “a deal is certainly within reach,” she said.

But “negotiators may accept some short-term undermining of integrity as long as the system can be fixed in the long term and in the right way,” Schneider told Climate Home.

Demand for Kyoto-era credits is “already sapped,” said Brad Schallert, WWF’s director of carbon market governance, and any country that decides to count these cheap credits with little climate benefits towards its climate plan would suffer “serious reputational risk”.

Donor countries set to reach $100bn climate finance target in 2023 – three years late

The middle ground on allocating a share of the market’s revenue towards adaptation finance is less clear.

The mechanism was designed to ensure predictable adaptation finance for vulnerable nations. If rich countries can’t agree to it in the context of Article 6, “they need to come with an alternative” for meeting that need, Dagnet said.

Overall, the carbon market is supposed to help countries enhance their ambition, not lower it.

Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch, warned that the high-level political attention on Article 6 risked pushing countries to seek a deal at any cost.

“This Cop should not be about Article 6, it should be about finance, ambition and keeping 1.5C alive and not on what extent to compromise on environmental integrity just to have a carbon market,” he said.

The post ‘Chess game’ as negotiators seek elusive carbon market deal at Cop26 appeared first on Climate Home News.

One week ahead of Cop26, the Gulf state announced it will slash its emissions to net zero by 2060 and strengthen its carbon target this decade – subject to revenue from exporting oil and gas.

Neither target counts the emissions from the burning of huge amounts of oil that Saudi Arabia exports to other countries, leaving climate watchers unimpressed. The Gulf state pumps one in 10 oil barrels consumed each day in the world.

Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman announced he would invest 700 billion riyals ($187 billion) in climate action this decade and stressed that Saudi Arabia would continue producing oil and gas. The targets would be achieved “while preserving and reinforcing the kingdom’s leading role in the security and stability of global energy markets, with the availability and maturity of required technologies to manage and reduce emissions,” he said at an environment summit in Riyadh on Saturday, before meeting with US climate envoy John Kerry on Monday.

In its submission to the UN, the Kingdom said that by 2030 it would reduce, avoid and remove 278 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year. That is more than double its previous target of 130 million tonnes, which was ranked “critically insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker.

Observers at the Riyadh event tweeted that this amounted to a 35% reduction in emissions from business as usual.

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Half of the country’s electricity in 2030 will come from renewables, according to the updated plan. Today less than 1% of Saudi Arabia’s power comes from solar, with the rest generated by burning oil and gas. The Kingdom said in March that it would plant 10 billion trees over the coming decades to combat desertification and reduce emissions. 

To cut its emissions, the government said it would use a “circular carbon economy” approach, which means relying on carbon capture and storage to allow continued use of fossil fuels.

Following the government announcement, state oil firm Saudi Aramco said it would cut emissions from its operations to net zero by 2050. That applies to oil production and processing, known as scope 1 and 2, but not the much higher emissions when the fuel is consumed, scope 3.

In its new climate plan, the Kingdom signed up to a global methane pledge, joining more than 30 countries aiming to cut methane emissions 30% by 2030. At the same time, Aramco is considering an increase its oil production from 12 million to 13 million barrels a day.

“The Saudis see robust long-term demand for their crude oil, even as global oil demand shrinks. Saudi Arabia has enormous resources as well as the world’s lowest production costs. As non-Opec supply gradually declines, their comparative advantage will be clear and their market share should grow,” Ben Cahill, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Climate Home News. “At the same time, the net-zero pledge raises the pressure for Saudi Arabia to decarbonise its oil and gas production.”

“Saudi Arabia makes no plan to reduce its fossil fuel exports. In fact the Saudi announcement makes its climate commitments conditional on its ability to maintain its fossil fuel exports,” Karim Elgendy, associate fellow in the environment and society programme at Chatham House, told Climate Home News.

Revealed: Cop26 sponsor National Grid spewing methane across England

Climate campaigners said to be truly ambitious, Saudi Arabia needed to phase down oil production.

“We question the seriousness of this announcement, as it comes in parallel with plans for the Kingdom to increase its oil production to 13 million barrels per day,” Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa campaigns manager Ahmad El Droubi said in a statement. “[It] seems to simply be a strategic move to alleviate political pressure ahead of COP26,” he added.

“Scopes 1, 2 and 3 and then there is Scope Saudi,” Rachel Kyte, former adviser to the UN secretary general on sustainable energy, wrote on Twitter. 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that investors should not fund new oil, gas and coal supply projects beyond this year if the world is to meet net zero by 2050, in line with a 1.5C global warming limit. Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman previously mocked the IEA’s 2050 target, calling it “a sequel to [the] ‘La La Land’ movie”.

The target depends on using oil revenues to diversify the economy. The climate plan outlines two scenarios. In one, oil export revenues are used to build high value industries like financial services, tourism and clean energy. In the other, oil and gas are used at home as a feedstock for petrochemicals or energy source for heavy industry. The speed and extent of economic diversification could depend on oil prices and export revenues, said Elgendy.

According to analysis by the state-backed think tank Kapsarc, oil’s share of Saudi Arabia’s total GDP has declined from 65% in 1991 to 42% in 2019.

Jim Krane, energy geopolitics expert at Rice University in Houston, said: “Saudi Arabia is serious about cutting emissions and fossil fuel use, but mostly inside its own borders. For the Saudi net zero goal to succeed, Riyadh needs the world to continue buying and burning its oil.”

Saudi Arabia and UAE, which made a similar commitment earlier this month, are using their goals to “buy influence in climate talks,” said Krane.

The post Saudi Arabia pledges net zero by 2060, but no oil exit plan appeared first on Climate Home News.

That is the conclusion of a delivery plan compiled by Germany and Canada and commissioned by the UK host of the Cop26 climate talks, which start on 31 October.

In 2009, wealthy nations committed to collectively mobilise $100bn a year between 2020 and 2025 to help developing countries cut their emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

Rich nations were $20bn short of the target in 2019, according to the latest available data analysed by the OECD. And based on recent trends, it almost certainly wasn’t met in 2020.

Using analysis from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the report finds developed countries are anticipated to make “significant progress towards the $100 billion goal in 2022” with an estimated upper range of $97bn of mobilised finance.

The outlook “provides confidence” that the goal will be met and exceeded from 2023 with up to $117bn expected to be delivered in 2025.

Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma said he hoped the finding “will start to restore trust” by providing predictable climate aid for developing countries and “build momentum in this final stretch ahead of Cop26”.

“This plan marks significant progress on a titanic issue, but of course our task and climate finance is far from complete. There is clearly more to do. Crucially, we must increase the sums available for climate adaptation and we must also urgently improve access to finance,” he said.

Revealed: Cop26 sponsor National Grid spewing methane across England

This promise of financial support underpinned the landmark Paris Agreement. It provided vulnerable nations least responsible for causing climate change with an incentive to curb their emissions while developing their economies.

Sharma tasked Germany’s top environment official Jochen Flasbarth and Canada’s environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson to explain when and how donor countries will meet the 12-year-old pledge.

Flasbarth, a co-author of the delivery plan, said the process of trying to reconcile the numbers had led to “substantial increases in the level of ambition” in climate finance but admitted there was “disappointment” that the $100bn goal could be missed three years in a row.

Some donor nations, including Australia, France and Italy, haven’t yet increased their contributions. More pledges are expected this year but weren’t ready in time for the report’s publication.

“Jonathan and I really pushed developed countries during the last few weeks really hard and not all of our conversations were very easy to be polite,” Flasbarth said.

Important update ahead of @COP26 on the work done by @JonathanWNV and @JochenFlasbarth regarding climate finance. Although the world is closing in on the $ 100 bln pledge, it’s clear that developed nations and private finance institutions must do more to #CloseTheGap. https://t.co/5GQ3hE0fIi

— Frans Timmermans (@TimmermansEU) October 25, 2021

All three insisted that the target will be met on average over the period 2021-25.

“Today I think we are telling countries around the world that they can trust in the goals that we collectively established in the fight against climate change,” said Canada’s Wilkinson.

Campaigners have a different view.

Earlier this month, nearly 150 green groups wrote a letter to donor countries, seen by Climate Home News, to demand they mobilise $600 billion in total between 2020 and 2025. This comes down to a different interpretation of the target applying “from 2020”.

Jan Kowalzig, senior climate policy advisor at anti-poverty NGO Oxfam, said the plan fails to mention what poorer nations are owed for every year donor countries fell short.

“This shortfall, which started to accumulate in 2020, will likely amount to several tens of billions of dollars. These are achievable amounts of money — governments have spent trillions on Covid-19 fiscal recovery packages, which show their ability to act in an emergency,” he said.

US climate credibility in doubt as legislative wrangles go down to the wire

David Levai, of the Paris-based think-tank IDDRI, pointed out the quality of expected finance remained unaddressed.

The report doesn’t set out a quantitative commitment to increase the share of adaptation finance but states that “countries’ intentions provides confidence that the scale of adaptation finance will continue to increase”. There are no indications of the share of grants versus loans.

“Developed countries need to answer calls to deliver what was promised, to increase funding for adaptation and to improve access. If not addressed urgently by the UK presidency, this issue risks toxifying the Cop when it opens next week,” Levai said.

And $100bn is a symbolic milestone, far less than what it will take to decarbonise the developing world and protect billions from unstable weather. According to a report by the UN Climate Change standing committee on finance, developing countries will need $5.9 trillion up to 2030 to meet their climate goals.

“The financing announcement asks us, as developing countries, to wait even longer for the delivery of a promise that was first made more than a decade ago,” said Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the Maldives and ambassador for the Climate Vulnerable Forum.

“I know the UK presidency has worked very hard for this, and I appreciate their efforts, but unless more progress is made in the next fortnight, we will all be in trouble.”

The post Donor countries set to reach $100bn climate finance target in 2023 – three years late appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a ministerial statement ahead of the Cop26 climate talks, which start in Glasgow on 31 October, the group of “like-minded” developing countries issued a strong rebuke to the UK host for calling on all countries to cut their emissions to net zero by the middle of the century.

Ministers from the group of 24 nations, which includes China, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, accused rich nations of failing to address their historic responsibility for causing climate change and shifting the burden on developing economies.

“Major developed countries are now pushing to shift the goal posts of the Paris Agreement from what have already been agreed by calling for all countries to adopt net zero targets by 2050,” they wrote.

“This new ‘goal’ which is being advanced runs counter to the Paris Agreement and is anti-equity and against climate justice.”

Instead, developed countries should “aim for their full decarbonisation within this decade” to allow developing countries more time to grow their economies and meet energy demands, the statement said.

UK sets out economy-wide strategy to meet 2050 net zero goal

Scientific models show that the world should achieve global carbon neutrality by 2050 for a 50% chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.

Under the Paris accord, countries agreed to achieve a balance between human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and removals in the second half of the century.

This, the like-minded group argues, is “a global aspiration rather than as national targets for all countries”.

LMDC Minister Statement ahead of @COP26. Glasgow will be one of the most difficult COPs in recent years. https://t.co/pkVFj8rrNO pic.twitter.com/OlDu8eepeJ

— Li Shuo_ASPI (@LiShuo_GP) October 20, 2021

The group argues that historic responsibility for emissions and causing climate change should be a key element to determine how this global aspiration can be achieved in a equitable way.

The statement emphasises that during their industrialisation phase, developed countries overused their share of the carbon budget.

“Promoting distant net zero targets for themselves amount to furthering carbon injustice and inequity,” they wrote. To put this right, they called on rich nations to end their contribution to climate change this decade.

“If they continue to emit and occupy more atmospheric space for the next 30 years, the Paris Agreement’s global goals and the [UN climate] Convention’s objective will not be met,” the group said.

While China has joined the net zero club with a 2060 goal, it endorsed the message that developing countries should not be held to the same standard as industrialised nations.

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With less than three weeks until the UK hosts a critical UN climate summit in Glasgow, it remains unclear where the money will come from to plug a $20bn shortfall. Hitting the threshold, originally promised by 2020, is critical to trust in the process from poorer nations.

In a speech in Paris on Tuesday setting out the expectations for Cop26, president-designate Alok Sharma said delivering on the $100bn pledge was “an absolute priority”.

“Based on the conversations I have had, I am hopeful that more countries will make commitments,” he said, adding that “thinking about this does keep me awake at night”.

German top environment official Jochen Flasbarth and Canadian environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson have been tasked with producing a roadmap for meeting the 12-year-old pledge before Cop26 starts on 31 October.

A spokesperson for Germany’s environment ministry told Climate Home News that the report is “still a work in progress” and a final release date or publication plan hasn’t yet been defined. A source close to the process said the roadmap could be released at the end of next week.

It is expected to set out the year when donor countries will reach the $100bn threshold based on their latest finance pledges.

Japan eyes international carbon offsets to deliver 2030 emission cuts

In a letter sent to all donor countries on Wednesday and seen by Climate Home News, nearly 150 organisations from more than 40 countries told rich nations they should mobilise $600 billion in total between 2020 and 2025 – hitting higher annual figures by the end of the period to make up for earlier shortfalls.

Rich nations were $20bn short of the target in 2019, according to the latest available data analysed by the Paris-based OECD. While the final analysis for 2020 is not yet available, analysts doubt the goal was met last year.

“And it may not be met in 2021 either,” campaigners wrote to governments.

“Success at Cop26 depends in large part upon a successful climate finance package. It is time to prepare a serious delivery plan which fully delivers on your past commitments and allows you to come to Glasgow with renewed trust. We will not be in a position to welcome less,” they warned.

The UK Cop26 presidency has repeatedly pushed donor countries to put more climate cash on the table.

Comment: The IEA is embracing 1.5C ambition, leaving no excuse for new fossil fuel investment

Recent commitments, including a pledge by Joe Biden to double the US’ contribution to $11.4bn a year by 2024, have put donor nations “within touching distance of the $100bn,” Sharma said in Paris.

Sweden announced on Wednesday it would double its finance commitment to SEK 15 billion ($1.7bn) by 2025.

Italy, which hosts the meeting of G20 major economies, is expected to raise its contribution at a leaders’ summit two days before the start of the Cop26 talks. And sources told Bloomberg that Spain and Norway could announce new money soon too.

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The OECD is helping Germany and Canada crunch the numbers and commitments made by multilateral banks and the private sector could further narrow the remaining gap.

At stake is not only how much climate finance rich nations are committing to deliver, but how they intend to do so.

In recent years, the share of loans, rather than grants, grew from accounting for half to nearly three quarters of climate finance. Campaigners oppose the use of loans because it drives vulnerable countries deeper into debt.

In their letter, campaigners said that the $100bn roadmap needs to show how donor countries will achieve a 50/50 balance between funds for cutting emissions and adapting to existing climate impacts by 2025. In 2019, only a quarter of climate finance went to adaptation.

The post Heat rises on donor countries to meet overdue $100bn climate finance promise appeared first on Climate Home News.

Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma announced the latest solidarity measures in a speech in Paris on Tuesday, setting out his priorities and expectations for Cop26.

“It will be an extraordinary Cop in extraordinary times. But collectively, we must pull together to make it work,” Sharma said.

The fund, he said, will be available to accredited party delegates, civil society observers and journalists from developing countries. Participants who contract Covid-19 will be required to isolate for 10 full days in their accommodation, which could extend their stay in Glasgow.

The isolation rules have been laid out in a Covid-19 code of conduct, which all participants are requested to sign and agree to respect in order to attend the summit.

A Cop26 spokesperson told Climate Home News the code of conduct will apply to all participants, including ministers, who are exempt from quarantine requirements when entering the UK.

Xi Jinping announces biodiversity fund to help developing nations protect nature

Cop26 organisers are expecting up to 25,000 people to attend the conference while 120 heads of state have confirmed they will participate in a two-day leaders’ summit on 1-2 November.

The UK has among the highest levels of reported Covid infection in the world, averaging 55 daily cases for every 100,000 people.

For all the efforts to Covid-proof the event, Robert West, professor of behavioural science and health at University College London, told Climate Home that it is “highly likely that there will be some transmission among delegates and that this will spread to the local population”.

The UK host strongly recommends all participants get vaccinated but it is not mandatory and some people are relying on jabs that have not been approved by the World Health Organization.

Under the code of conduct, all Cop26 participants need to wear a face covering unless they are eating, drinking, sitting in an office or meeting space or negotiating and ensure one meter of physical distancing.

They will be asked to self-administer a Covid-19 lateral flow test every day in their accommodation before travelling to the Scottish Event Campus, where the conference is taking place. A negative result will be required to enter the conference center.

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Anyone who reports Covid-19 symptoms or tests positive will need to isolate immediately and undertake a PCR test to confirm the result.

A positive PCR test will require delegates to isolate for 10 full days and prevent them from using public transport. The UK government said it will find suitable accommodation for those who need it.

Diplomats who have travelled to Glasgow but are unable to access negotiations in-person because they are isolating or due to limited room capacity as a result of social distancing, will be able to follow discussions online.

Breaching the rules could lead to a suspension of the summit and possible criminal prosecution.

Lia Nicholson, a climate advisor for the Alliance of the Small Island States, told Climate Home that concerns over contracting Covid-19 were outweighed by the urgency of stepping up climate action.

She said Aosis was “impressed” with the UK’s “above and beyond” response to the challenges of holding an in-person Cop.

“We cannot afford these decisions to be delayed another year. And we expect that parties will of rise to the challenge. We don’t want to be putting ourselves and our communities at risk, and then come away with nothing,” she said.

Nicholson added that delegations will need to show flexibility if some of their negotiators become sick and are out of action for part of the talks – a possibility which she said required greater preparation of the entire delegation on critical issues.

Countries failing to protect forests, 7 years after New York declaration

The announcement of the self-isolation fund brought relief among campaigners which face prohibitively expensive costs to attend the summit.

Adrian Martinez, of the Costa-Rican based organisation La Ruta del Clima, told Climate Home that the risk of contracting Covid-19 at the conference was “a great worry”.

He and his team have been able to purchase health insurance to cover medical attention in a UK hospital but the policy doesn’t cover the cost of extending their stay beyond the end of the conference, which they cannot afford.

The urgency justifies the risk, Martinez said. “If climate change did not involve our survival and the ability of our communities to exist, we would pick another Cop to attend,” he said.

The number of people who will be required to quarantine upon arrival in the UK, a cost which the  government said it will pay, has been dramatically reduced.

Only seven Latin American countries remain on the UK red list after it was updated on Monday.

Alejandro Aleman, Latin America coordinator for the Climate Action Network, told Climate Home that the repeated changes to the rules and the cost of health insurance was preventing campaigners on the continent from attending the conference.

“The general feeling is that action is being taken to prevent participation from civil society in Latin America,” he said. CAN Latin America’s participation at Cop26 will be reduced by two thirds compared with previous years, he estimated.

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Xi announced the ¥1.5 billion ($230 million) Kunming Biodiversity Fund to help implement a new framework for protecting nature this decade. He called on other countries to contribute to the fund.

China is presiding over critical UN Convention on Biological Diversity talks, known as Cop15. Countries are negotiating a set of targets and objectives to prevent the destruction of the Earth’s plants and wildlife by 2030. The agreement, which has been compared to the Paris Agreement for nature, is expected to be finalised in Kunming, China, in April-May next year.

“The new environmental protection targets we set need to be ambitious, on the one hand, and pragmatic and balanced on the other, so as to make the global environmental governance system fairer and more equitable,” Xi told the meeting in Kunming via video link.

“Faced with the dual tasks of economic recovery and environmental protection, developing countries need help and support,” he said.

Xi further announced the creation of national parks covering an area of 230,000 square kilometers.

Countries failing to protect forests, 7 years after New York declaration

In a statement, Greenpeace East Asia said the Kunming Biodiversity Fund “should jump start an urgently needed conversation on biodiversity finance”, adding that “Cop15 needs to see donor countries from the developed world contributing in this regard”.

“Finance and a strong implementation mechanism should be the biggest legacy of China’s CBD presidency. Our planet needs not just another set of targets on paper, but their actual fulfilment.”

Greenpeace welcomed the establishment of national parks. “China’s domestic efforts in setting up natural reserve systems should help it to spearhead the march towards a goal to protect 30% of land by 2030” – one of the global targets up for negotiation.

There was no climate announcement but President Xi said China “will release implementation plans for peaking carbon dioxide emissions in key areas and sectors as well as a series of supporting measures”.

As part of the G20, Beijing signed a ministerial statement in July stating that it intended “to update or communicate an ambitious [2030 climate plan] by Cop26” but it is yet to do so, with three weeks to the UN climate summit in Glasgow, UK.

Xi made no mention of when these plans will be published. Li Shuo, a long-standing observer of China in the climate talks, told Climate Home News the timing for their release remains “very unclear” but “the good news is it will be out before Cop, so we only have less than 20 days”.

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The Cop26 host has repeatedly said it wants the summit to “consign coal to history” and has been working with Italy to seek agreement among major economies to end unabated coal power.

But the UK’s ambition goes beyond coal. It is seeking to build an alliance of nations and institutions willing to commit to end the financing of oil and gas projects internationally.

The UK is working with the European Investment Bank (EIB) to convince both developed and developing countries along with large financial institutions such as multilateral development banks to sign a statement on aligning public finance with accelerating the clean energy transition.

They are asking donors and lenders to prioritise support for clean energy, to end public finance for fossil fuels and to press others to do the same. Climate Home News understands the UK is hoping to launch the statement on the energy-themed day at Cop26 on 4 November.

In a comment article published in Project Syndicate on Friday, John Murton, the UK government’s Cop26 envoy, and Werner Hoyer, president of the EIB, wrote that at Cop26 “governments and financial institutions must commit to supporting cheaper, cleaner, no-regrets energy, and to ending all international support for fossil-fuel-based power”.

“This should not be too difficult, given that many legacy energy investments will inevitably become stranded assets,” they said, adding that “the cost of inaction would be catastrophic”.

China’s power crunch could fuel anti-climate backlash, analysts warn

As of March this year, the UK has ended all direct government support for the extraction, production, transportation and refining of crude oil, natural gas or thermal coal internationally. In some limited circumstances, it will still back gas-fired power plants if it aligns with a 1.5C long-term pathway.

In 2019, the EIB, the world’s largest development bank, announced it would stop funding unabated oil and gas projects by the end of 2021 in a major overhaul of its lending policy.

While there is broad agreement that funding for coal should stop, ending support for oil and particularly gas is much more politically sensitive.

In a letter sent to Cop26 boss Alok Sharma last month, seen by Climate Home News, campaigners from more than 200 organisations called for strict restrictions on all fossil fuels, including gas. They argue renewables are cost competitive and can meet the global south’s electricity and clean cooking needs.

Source: Step Off the Gas report/IISD

But gas dominates international energy finance flows from multilateral development banks (MDBs) and G20 countries. From 2017-2019, low and middle-income countries received an average of nearly $16 billion in international public finance a year – four times as much as wind or solar, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

The US was the third largest gas funder after China and Japan, contributing an average $2.4 billion per year in overseas gas finance.

Jake Schmidt, who heads the international climate programme at the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told Climate Home the US should be able to sign up to the statement before Cop26 but that the wording on ending gas finance could be contentious.

On expert advice, South Africa cuts its 2030 emissions cap by a third

Last month, the US Treasury instructed its representatives at MDBs to rule out support for gas production and coal and oil across the value chain.

The policy allows investments for gas infrastructure to continue in fragile and conflict-affected countries and in small island developing states if analysis shows there is no feasible clean energy alternative and the project would have a significant positive impact on energy access — giving more wriggle room than the UK stance.

“I don’t think the US will sign up to something that is more aggressive than its own guidance,” Schmidt said.

Joe Biden’s administration is expected to publish more guidelines on how the US “can promote ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy” ahead of Cop26. The State Department is likely to wait for the announcement to be made before pledging anything on the international stage, Schmidt added.

And Washington DC is not the only one likely to negotiate the language around gas. Germany’s state-owned development bank KfW will continue to support gas projects and some oil and diesel power plants on case-by-case basis, with support limited by quotas until 2029, under guidelines that entered into force on 1 September.

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Some developing countries like Nigeria are likely to defend finance for gas. Around 43% of Nigeria’s 200 million people don’t have access to the electricity grid, making it the country with the largest energy access deficit in the world, according to the World Bank.

The country’s environment minister Mohammad Mahmood Abubakar told a UN meeting in June that an international crackdown on gas funding threatens Sub-Saharan Africa’s ability to achieve a fair and equitable energy transition.

Chukwumerije Okereke, a Nigerian professor in environment and development, told Climate Home that the government is backing increased gas production to meet energy demand.

“While we are in the midst of encouraging rural populations to stop cooking with wood fuel and transition to gas and the government is trying to increase energy supply to the population, the international community is pulling the plug on gas investments while donor countries are still using it. That’s not my definition of climate justice,” he said.

Okereke said any initiative to cut emissions needed to take into account development needs. “Otherwise, it’s not going to fly,” he said, adding that investments in renewable energy on the continent were still falling short.

The post UK seeks alliance to end public finance for coal, oil and gas projects overseas appeared first on Climate Home News.

Brussels expects Washington to follow suit and step up its climate finance contribution ahead of Cop26 climate talks this November. This, she said, is critical to plug an estimated $20bn shortfall to the $100bn goal rich nations promised to mobilise annually by 2020.

Addressing the EU parliament on Wednesday, Von der Leyen told lawmakers major emitters like the EU and the US have “a special duty to the least developed and most vulnerable countries”.   

“The EU contributes $25bn a year but others still leave a gaping hole in reaching the global target,” she said. “Europe is ready to do more but expects the United States and our partners to step up too.” 

Developing countries have made closing the gap a condition for success at Cop26 in Glasgow, UK.

An EU Commission spokesperson told Climate Home News the €4bn is additional climate cash that will come out of the 2021-2027 EU budget and doesn’t involve new contributions from member states.

Jennifer Tollmann, senior policy advisor at think tank E3G, said this was “a strong move when the [EU is] already the world’s largest climate finance donor”, adding it was great to see Von der Leyen calling out the US.

Norway: Leftwing election victory puts oil exit at the heart of coalition talks

Von der Leyen said that by closing the finance gap together, the US and the EU would send “a strong signal for global climate leadership”. “It is time to deliver now,” she said. 

Recent analysis by the Overseas Development Institute found the US paid only 4% of its “fair share” towards the $100bn goal as of 2017-18. Around $40bn would be a reasonable contribution to the total based on the country’s relative wealth, population and historic emissions, they said.

While the gap can largely be attributed to Donald Trump, who reneged on the US climate finance commitments, observers say president Biden hasn’t done enough to restore US credibility on finance since coming into office.

At the US leaders’ summit in April, Biden pledged to double US climate finance contributions by 2024 from an annual estimated baseline of $2.8 billion.

Observers are hoping to see Biden promise additional money at the UN General Assembly, where he is due to speak on Tuesday.

Rachel Kyte, who advises the UN secretary general on clean energy and finance, told reporters earlier this week that climate envoy John Kerry has been “working furiously” to find a way for the US to make bolder finance commitments.

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Momentum for climate action has stalled since May, with no major emitters putting forward stronger climate targets. This means there has barely been any improvement to put emissions for 2030 on track to limiting global heating to 1.5C, according to analysis by the Climate Action Tracker released on Wednesday.

“Anyone would think they have all the time in the world, when in fact the opposite is the case,” said Niklas Höhne, of NewClimate Institute.

Von der Leyen urged the US and China to step up their ambition and back their net zero emissions goals with “concrete plans in time for Glasgow,” adding that “current commitments for 2030 will not keep global warming at 1.5C within reach”

The EU Commission boss described China’s pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 and peak emissions before 2030 as “encouraging” but added Beijing needed to set out how it will get there. 

“The world would be relieved if they showed they could peak emissions by mid-decade and move away from coal at home and abroad,” she said.

Observers had hoped China would reveal plans for further climate action in the next decade at the UN general assembly next week, but a provisional list of speakers obtained by news website PassBlue shows vice premier Hang Zheng, not president Xi Jinping, is due to speak — reducing the likelihood of a major climate announcement.

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Climate Action Network (CAN), a global alliance of more than 1,500 climate and environmental campaign groups, urged organisers to postpone the Cop26 summit scheduled for 31 October to 12 November. They cited stark vaccine inequity, rising travel and accommodation costs and high rates of Covid-19 infection in many parts of the world.

“With just two months to go, time has run out for the UK’s vision for a ‘normal and inclusive”’ Cop26,” CAN said in a statement on Tuesday. “It is evident that a safe, inclusive and just global climate conference in early November will be impossible.”

In response to CAN’s concerns, Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma pushed back. He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report last month “underlines why Cop26 must go ahead this November”. The summit has already been delayed by a year.

“We are working tirelessly with all our partners… to ensure an inclusive, accessible and safe summit in Glasgow with a comprehensive set of Covid mitigation measures,” he said.

What is Cop26 and why does it matter? Your guide to the Glasgow climate summit

CAN argued that going ahead with an in-person event would exclude many government delegates, campaigners and journalists, particularly from developing countries on the UK’s “Covid-19 red list“.

All Cop26 delegates arriving from a red list country will be required to quarantine for five days if they are vaccinated and 10 if they aren’t.

CAN says this would pose “serious and long-lasting implications” for some of the key issues and developing country priorities under negotiations at the talks, including on climate finance, loss and damage and the design of new carbon market rules.

Under the current circumstances, a full and meaningful representation of those on the frontlines of the climate emergency is not possible, it said.

There is mounting frustration among developing country delegates over the slow delivery of vaccines Cop26 organisers promised. Many are worried they will be unable to get jabbed in time for the conference, or face prohibitively expensive travel costs.

The UK government has repeatedly said it wanted to host the “most inclusive Cop ever”. Last week, it said the first doses of AstraZeneca would be administered from this week to every delegate who requested them through the UN Climate Change registration portal.

Frustration mounts as Cop26 delegates wait for the UK’s promised Covid vaccines

In his statement on Tuesday, Sharma said the UK government will cover the full quarantine costs of delegates coming to Cop26 from developing countries on the “Covid-19 red list”, regardless of their vaccination status. This will apply when quarantine stays are booked through the government’s MQS system.

One source told Climate Home News this would cost around £11 million ($15m). A spokesperson for the Cop26 team declined to give an estimate.

“Ensuring that the voices of those most affected by climate change are heard is a priority for the Cop26 presidency, and if we are to deliver for our planet, we need all countries and civil society to bring their ideas and ambition to Glasgow,” Sharma said.

Campaigners in developing countries previously told Climate Home they could not book their travel and accommodation to Glasgow until they were sure they would receive vaccines and could secure funding for travel costs.

Last week, Aimé Mbuyi Kalombo, who will lead the Democratic Republic of Congo’s climate team in Glasgow, told Climate Home that without support from the UK government to pay for the cost of quarantine, several of the delegation’s climate finance negotiators would be unable to attend.

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“The climate talks are important but against the current context of vaccine apartheid they simply cannot proceed by locking out the voices of those who especially need to be heard at this time,” said Tasneem Essop, CAN’s executive director.

CAN said that to host any in-person event at scale, rich nations needed to support a swift and lasting patent waiver, allowing vaccines to be manufactured in developing countries. It said the call to postpone Cop26 did not imply a postponement of climate action or a boycott of the climate talks.

“If Cop26 goes ahead as currently planned, I fear it is only the rich countries and NGOs from those countries that would be able to attend. This flies in the face of the principles of the UN process and opens the door for a rich nations stitch-up of the talks,” warned Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa.

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Delayed by a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, heads of state, diplomats, business leaders, campaigners and journalists are due to meet in person in Glasgow, UK, from 31 October to 12 November.

The hosts are aiming to mobilise a step up in climate action and keep hope alive of meeting the tougher goal of the Paris Agreement: limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C.

That means curbing emissions deeper and faster, adapting to a new era of climate impacts and scaling up the financial support developing nations need to build low-carbon and resilient economies.

Here is what you need to know about the conference.

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First things first. What is a Cop? 

“Cop” is short for Conference of the Parties, which refers to the meeting of the 197 members to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as UN Climate Change.

The talks are hosted every year by a different country and bring together delegates from every national government to advance global efforts to prevent dangerous climate change.

Cop1 was held in Berlin, Germany, in 1995. This year, the 26^th session of the talks is known as Cop26.

At the core of the Cop are negotiations on the legal mechanisms for governments to hold each other accountable. Orbiting that core are politicians, business leaders, campaigners and journalists, engaged in a lively discourse on what climate action means in the real world.

Who is in charge at Cop26?

The UK and Italy are joint presidents of Cop26. As host of the main event, the UK government has the bigger role, in coordination with the devolved administration in Scotland. Italy is due to hold some pre-Cop meetings in Milan.

Alok Sharma, a politician with the UK’s ruling Conservative Party, was appointed Cop26 president in February 2020. For nearly a year, Sharma also served as business and energy minister before dropping ministerial responsibilities to focus exclusively on Cop26 preparations.

UN Climate Change is responsible for keeping the climate negotiating process running year to year, led by Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa.

Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma of the UK meets China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua in Tianjin, China (Photo: Alok Sharma/Twitter/Flickr)

How is ambition measured at Cop26? 

A key responsibility of the Cop26 presidency is to mobilise greater ambition from other nations. This is primarily measured against the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.

In 2015, in Paris, 197 countries agreed to collectively cut emissions to limit global temperature rise “well below 2C” and strive for 1.5C. To meet this goal, every country was asked to contribute emissions reductions and set out targets for doing so by 2025 or 2030. These plans are known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

This bottom-up approach means governments decide how fast to decarbonise their economies. But the plans submitted so far will lead to a lot more than 1.5C of warming by the end of the century – 2.4C if implemented in full, according to analysis published by Climate Action Tracker in May.

UN Climate Change found that updated plans by the end of 2020 put the world on track to stabilise emissions by 2030. To halt heating at 1.5C, scientists say global emissions need to fall 45% from 2010 levels in that time.

Cop21 president Laurent Fabius holds up the text of the Paris Agreement (Photo: IISD/ENB/ Kiara Worth)

What needs to happen now? 

Under the Paris Agreement, every country agreed to update their NDCs every five years, with each plan more ambitious than the last and reflecting their “highest possible ambition”.

Cop26, which was due to take place in 2020, is the first test of this “ratchet mechanism”.

The US, Canada, the EU and the UK are among 110 countries, largely developing economies, to have formally submitted improved plans to the UN by the end of July. But many of the world’s largest emitters missed the repeatedly extended deadline. China, India and Saudi Arabia’s plans are notably absent from the list.

Others like Australia merely reaffirmed old targets with no increase in ambition. Brazil even weakened its commitment by changing its baseline.

Ahead of Cop26, the UK will need to use its diplomatic clout to get Beijing, New Delhi and others to commit to stronger targets.

What else are the organisers trying to achieve? 

UK prime minister Boris Johnson has summarised the host nation’s agenda for the conference as: “coal, cash, cars and trees”. Let’s unpack that.

Coal: The UK wants to make Cop26 the summit that “consigns coal to history”. The G7 agreed in May to end new direct government support for unabated coal power by the end of 2021 – but avoided setting an exit timeline for burning the fuel. Italy is trying to orchestrate a similar pledge from the G20, against resistance from members like China, Russia and India.

Cash: Developed countries agreed in 2009 to mobilise $100 billion a year in climate finance to the developing world by 2020. At the last count, they were $20bn short. Germany and Canada have been tasked with making a plan to plug the gap ahead of Cop26. This is critical to trust in the process for recipient nations. Negotiations are due to start on what the next collective finance goal beyond 2025 should look like. Then there are various initiatives to “shift the trillions” of private sector cash towards achieving global net zero emissions by mid-century.

Cars: The UK is hoping to speed up a switch to electric vehicles, proposing a 2040 deadline for selling the last petrol cars. It established a Zero Emission Vehicle Transition Council bringing together ministers and representatives of major car markets – although China was not on the list.

Trees: “Calling time on deforestation” is another Cop26 goal. Together with the US and Norway, the UK launched the Leaf Coalition, which aims to mobilise $1 billion of public and private finance in 2021 to cut emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Did they miss anything?

That four-word soundbite does not cover everybody’s priorities. The world’s poorest countries, which don’t have too many cars or coal plants to worry about, want to see more action to address the impacts of climate change they are already experiencing.

The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation to climate impacts, but six years later it is still unclear what that means in practice. The agreement has a section on loss and damage, in recognition that people are already losing homes, lives and livelihoods to extreme weather turbocharged by the fossil fuel burning of the industrialised world, but practical support has been slow to follow.

With those climate vulnerabilities compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, the least developed countries are calling for a solidarity package that includes progress on these neglected topics.

It remains to be seen how progress on any of these elements will be packaged into a meeting outcome. Some climate thinkers are proposing a Glasgow PACT.

UN talks in Copenhagen in 2009 (Photo: UN Climate Change/Flickr)

What do negotiators need to agree on?

There are technical issues negotiators in Glasgow will need to address.

The Paris Agreement rulebook was due to be finalised three years ago at Cop24 in Katowice, Poland, but a number of contentious items remain unresolved.

These include the rules of a new global carbon market, under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. How to avoid double counting emissions reductions, the role of old credits from the Kyoto climate regime under the new system and whether to allocate a share of proceeds from the market to the Adaptation Fund are among the stickiest issues.

Negotiators will also need to find agreement on the transparency rules for reporting emissions reductions and whether countries’ future climate plans should all cover the same time period of 5 or 10 years.

A passenger has his temperature checked at Incheon airport, South Korea (Pic: Jens-Olaf Walter/Flickr)

What about the Covid-19 pandemic? 

The organisers are planning for around 20,000 people to attend Cop26 in person, despite the ongoing threat of Covid-19 infections. They insist the health and safety of participants and the host community is paramount.

But stark inequalities of the vaccine roll out between rich and poorer nations have raised serious concerns about participation from developing countries. As of 4 September, 64% of the UK population had been fully vaccinated. For many African countries, the figure was less than 5%.

While vaccines are not mandatory to attend the summit, the UK host “strongly encourages” all delegates to be vaccinated. With the UN, the UK government set up a Cop26 vaccination programme to provide jabs to delegates who aren’t able to access vaccines in their home country. The first doses are expected to reach delegates in September.

There are other financial and logistical barriers to participation. Delegates travelling from countries on the UK’s “red list” will need to isolate in a quarantine hotel facility for five days if they are vaccinated and 10 if they aren’t. The UK government has offered to foot the bill.

A Covid-19 protocol is also being put in place for the conference with regular testing, masks and social distancing.

The post What is Cop26 and why does it matter? Your guide to the Glasgow climate summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

With a four-week gap before the second dose, that leaves just enough time to get full protection by the end of October.

Organisers of the Glasgow summit insist that all delegates who applied for vaccines have been contacted about next steps. But earlier this week, campaigners in developing countries told Climate Home News they still hadn’t heard anything about how to get jabbed. Many are still waiting on the details.

Less than two months before the negotiations start in Glasgow, frustration is mounting among developing country delegates.

Ongoing uncertainty around vaccines and prohibitively expensive quarantine requirements for those coming from countries on the UK’s red list mean participation from some of the world’s most vulnerable nations risks being limited.

“The biggest frustration is the feeling that some are trying to organise the summit without the participation of certain countries – the feeling that the UK government is telling us: don’t come,” one negotiator from the Democratic Republic of Congo told Climate Home.

The UK has repeatedly said it will deliver “the most inclusive Cop ever”. The developing world has already had a taste of unmet promises.

Failing to deliver the jabs on time risks exacerbating tensions between rich and poor even before delegates arrive at the conference centre. What happens over the next few weeks, the UK will need to get right.

This week’s news…

• Conservation summit opens amid debate over role of indigenous people
• New York floods show subway systems must be prepared for climate change
• Frustration mounts as Cop26 delegates wait for the UK’s promised Covid vaccines
• Leaked IPCC draft: Lifestyle change can cut double the emissions of Brazil by 2030
• The future of humanitarian aid? Pilot scheme stops drought leading to hunger

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