In a landmark judgment issued on Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a complaint brought by more than 2,000 older Swiss women, saying their government had violated the right to respect for family and private life under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). 

It ruled that Article 8 of the ECHR, which refers to the right to a private and family life and home, “encompasses a right to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being and quality of life”.

Anne Mahrer, co-president of the Swiss KlimaSeniorinnen group that brought the case, said the ruling is a “landmark in the struggle for a liveable climate for everyone” as “the ECHR has now confirmed that climate protection is a human right”.

The decision is likely to encourage other campaign groups to bring cases against governments that are parties to the ECHR. This includes all European Union states, the United Kingdom, Norway, Turkey and some Central Asian states. A number of climate lawsuits had been adjourned at the court pending decisions in this and two other cases ruled on this morning. 

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Climate litigation is a growing trend around the world, and courts have previously linked climate with human rights violations. But this is the first time an international court has ruled on whether climate change infringes human rights.

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said heatwaves, droughts, floods and forest fires are already threatening human lives today, and will worsen as climate change intensifies, making it urgent for states to take action to reduce planet-warming emissions.

“Climate lawsuits can put pressure on governments to increase their climate policy efforts and thus advance diplomatic negotiations,” he said in a statement after the ruling.

Swiss seniors

The KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, an association of older women, argued that those it represents are particularly vulnerable to climate change and presented scientific evidence showing that older people – particularly women – are more likely to die during heatwaves. They wanted the Swiss government to do more to meet the tougher 1.5C warming goal it signed up to in the Paris Agreement. 

The Swiss government had agreed that rising temperatures were harming people’s health – but denied that the KlimaSeniorinnen should be treated as victims under the law and said the link between its actions and their suffering was “too tenuous and remote”. 

It maintained that some of the claimants – several of whom were over the age of 80 and some of whom had died since the case was first filed – were unlikely to be alive by the time the global temperature rise breaches the 1.5C threshold. 

KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz activists outside the courtroom in Strasbourg 9/4/24 (Photo: Global Legal Action Network)

On Tuesday, the 17-judge panel ruled that there were critical gaps in Switzerland’s attempt to put a domestic climate regulation framework in place.

It said Swiss authorities had failed to quantify how they would cut national greenhouse gas emissions, through a carbon budget or otherwise, and had failed to meet past emission reduction targets.  

While recognising that states have wide discretion in setting their own laws and developing measures to cut national emissions, the court said Swiss authorities had not acted quickly or decisively enough. 

The court did not say what Switzerland should do to solve the problem, leaving it to the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers to come up with a solution.

The judgment, which follows hearings last year, cannot be appealed. 

Sébastien Duyck, human rights and climate campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, said the decision has implications “way beyond Switzerland” because all members of the Council of Europe have the same human rights obligations.

Outside of Europe, he said it would also influence how other courts interpret the human rights obligations of states on climate action. 

Two failures

The court in Strasbourg ruled on two other climate-related lawsuits on the same day. 

One, brought by former French mayor and current member of the European Parliament Damien Carême against the government of France, was deemed inadmissible because he no longer lives in France and could not show that he was a victim. 

19-year old Portugese applicant Sofia Oliveira in the court room in Strasbourg 9/4/24 (Photo: Global Legal Action Network)

It also threw out a case brought by six Portuguese young people against 32 countries, including all EU member states, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and Turkey.

The judges ruled that the plaintiffs could only bring a case against their home country of Portugal, striking out their case against other states. But action against Portugal was not allowed to proceed at the European level because legal avenues in Portugal had not been exhausted.

Although she was disappointed that her lawsuit was not successful, 19-year-old Portuguese applicant Sofia Oliveira expressed solidarity with the Swiss women. “Their win is a win for us too, and a win for everyone,” she said.

This article was amended on April 11 to clarify details of the European court’s ruling. The original said the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Swiss government had violated the Swiss womens’ right to life as well as the right to respect for private and family life. This has been corrected to remove right to life.

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During the opening of a two-week meeting in Hamburg today to clarify state duties to protect the marine environment, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne told the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) that it was time to speak of “legally binding obligations, rather than empty promises that go unfulfilled, abandoning peoples to suffering and destruction”.

Antigua and Barbuda formed an alliance with Tuvalu in 2021 called the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law (COSIS), which has since been joined by Palau, Niue, Vanuatu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and the Bahamas.

They have asked the tribunal for its formal opinion on state responsibilities on climate change under the UN maritime treaty that it is responsible for upholding – the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

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The group of small islands wants the tribunal to clearly set out their legal obligations to protect the marine environment from the impacts of climate change, including ocean warming, acidification and sea level rise.

“Empty promises”

During the first day of oral hearings, Kausea Natano, prime minister of Tuvalu, said vulnerable nations had tried and failed to secure action to cut global greenhouse gas emissions during years of international climate talks.

“We did not see the far-reaching measures that are necessary if we are to avert catastrophe,” said Natano. “This lack of political will endangers all of humankind, and it is unacceptable for small island states like my own, which are already teetering on the brink of extinction.”

Browne told the tribunal it now had the opportunity to issue a “much-needed corrective to a process that has manifestly failed to address climate change. We cannot simply continue with endless negotiations and empty promises.”

Speaking after a summer of record-breaking temperatures on both land and sea, Browne said small island nations had come before the tribunal “in the belief that international law must play a central role in addressing the catastrophe that we witness unfolding before our eyes”.

Influential opinion

COSIS members hope that a strong opinion from the tribunal will prompt governments to take tougher action on climate change. While not legally binding, the opinion could also form the basis of future lawsuits.

The alliance stresses that it is looking to the court to explain existing state obligations, rather than creating new laws.

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ITLOS does not have as high a profile as the International Court of Justice, which earlier this year was tasked by the UN to provide an advisory opinion on climate change and human rights. Nor are there as many states under its jurisdiction; the US is notable by its absence.

But the tribunal is expected to come to a conclusion much earlier – potentially within the next year. And experts say its opinion could influence that of other courts including the ICJ as well as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which has been asked by Chile and Colombia to provide a similar advisory opinion.

Thirty states that have signed the law of the sea, as well as the EU, submitted written statements to ITLOS before the deadline.

China is one of the few to explicitly challenge the tribunal’s jurisdiction. It does not consider ITLOS to have the power to issue advisory opinions, but only to resolve disputes.

While expressing its “heartfelt compassion for developing countries including small island developing States…. confronting our common climate change challenge” China maintains that the UNFCCC is the only proper channel for addressing it.

The UK does not dispute the tribunal’s jurisdiction, but it does warn ITLOS to have “particularly careful regard to the scope of its judicial function”. The country also raised concerns about the fact that the request for an advisory opinion was raised by only a small number of states.

Limited reach

Written responses show general agreement among states that greenhouse gas emissions are a form of pollution and that they will have a serious impact on the health of the marine environment and its ability to act as a carbon sink.

But they disagree on the extent to which they are required to act on this.

In its statement, COSIS notes that the law of the sea requires states to adopt and implement “all measures that are necessary to prevent, reduce, and control pollution of the marine environment”.

Under the EU’s interpretation, however, this does not totally ban pollution of the marine environment or require states to immediately stop all pollution.

It points to existing international cooperation under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement and says the law of the sea does not require more stringent action.

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COSIS, however, is keen to focus on the science, saying this shows the necessity of keeping global warming to a maximum of 1.5C.

Experts speaking at the tribunal outlined the ways in which climate change was already affecting the world’s oceans and how these are likely to worsen in future.

“Science has long confirmed these realities, and it must inform the content of international obligations,” said Arnold Loughman, attorney general of Vanuatu.

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Leaders will be meeting next month at the Amazon Summit in Belém, a city also due to host the Cop30 climate talks in 2025, to discuss the 45-year-old Amazon Cooperation Treaty for the first time in several years.

The final guest list is not yet clear, but nations across Latin America are expected to be represented as well as some from Europe.

Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has rebooted the summit in the hope of using it to build support for his commitment to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, but curbing fossil fuel extraction does not appear to be on the agenda.

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However, a grassroots campaign led by Indigenous groups and civil society argues such a move is essential to combat climate change, and to protect biodiversity and the Indigenous people that live there.

The campaign builds on an existing effort to get a global pact for the permanent protection of four-fifths of Amazonia by 2025. Focusing specifically on oil and gas, it calls for an Amazon exclusion zone where no fossil fuels can be exploited, in line with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be no new fossil fuel projects if the world is to stay under a 1.5°C warming threshold.

Domestic exploitation

A number of South American countries in which the Amazon rainforest lies have been trying to boost domestic oil and gas exploration and extraction in recent years. 

Peru is proposing to place 31 oil blocks over 435 indigenous communities, while Bolivia recently finalised an ‘Upstream Reactivation Plan’.

Meanwhile, the result of a forthcoming Ecuadorian referendum about oil exploitation in the Yasuní rainforest will be hugely significant for that part of the Amazon but will also send a wider message about the region’s priorities.

In Brazil, a far-right Congress is proposing to gut the powers of both the ministries of the environment and Indigenous peoples, throwing Lula’s deforestation pledge into doubt. 

The Brazilian president’s own ambitions of positioning himself as climate leader have also been called into question over his stance on an oil drilling project at the mouth of the Amazon river. He recently said he found it “difficult” to believe that oil exploration in the Amazon basin would damage the region’s rainforest.

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Ahead of the Amazon Summit, Indigenous groups will be meeting in Brazil to share fossil fuel resistance strategies, with the support of campaign group 350.org. 

“From this we hope will come a very powerful document that will inform the discussions of the presidents in Belém,” said Ilan Zugman, 350.org’s Latin America managing director. “Hopefully it will have some very strong messages saying no new fossil fuel projects in the Amazon.”

Petro’s lead

Zugman said Colombian president Gustavo Petro had been a “very loud voice” in support of this idea. In January, Petro announced a halt in all new oil and gas exploration contracts, keeping 380 currently active contracts. 

In a recent opinion piece for the Miami Herald, Petro called on Amazon countries and their partners in the Global North to follow him on ending all new oil and gas exploration in the Amazon.

He said that, while ending deforestation was “fundamental”, it had to be accompanied by “an ambitious transnational policy to phase out fossil fuels”. Oil, gas and coal accounts for about half of all Colombian exports.

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Petro said some countries, like Colombia, could allocate a “substantial amount of resources” to protect the Amazon. 

But he stressed that curbing oil and gas exploitation would have a big economic impact on poorer South American nations and called on countries like the US to help with financial mechanisms such as debt-for-climate swaps, a multilateral fund that funds environmental protection services by inhabitants of these territories, or the kind of financial reforms being progressed by the Bridgetown initiative. 

At a recent meeting, the Colombian and Brazilian presidents pledged to cooperate to protect the Amazon but the latter did not appear to make any concessions on oil and gas.

“We need to convince other presidents like Lula.. to step up as well and really play this leadership role,” said Zugman, “to not allow fossil fuel exploration in one of the most important places of the world.” 

Banking spotlight

Campaigners are also stepping up pressure on financial institutions to stop financing oil and gas projects in the region.

A report, published today by NGO Stand.earth and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), shows that US$20 billion has been provided to explore and exploit reserves in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador over the past 15 years.

More than half of this (US$11 billion) came from just eight banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Itaú Unibanco, HSBC, Santander, Bank of America, Banco Bradesco and Goldman Sachs.

Six of these banks are either headquartered in the US or act through their US subsidiary and operate in deals across the region, while the two Brazilian companies – Itaú Unibanco and Banco Bradesco – are highly connected to specific oil and gas projects in that country. 

The report is accompanied by a database of all the banks involved in Amazon oil and gas through directly traceable and indirect financing, for example by providing loans or underwriting bond deals for upstream and midstream development and transport of oil and gas in Amazonia. 

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JPMorgan Chase tops the list, having directly provided US$1.9 billion in direct financing to oil and gas in the region over the past decade and a half.

Together with HSBC, it was a major backer of Petroperú’s Talara refinery expansion project, which is driving the exploitation of oil on Indigenous land in the Peruvian Amazon.

JPMorgan Chase has ruled out support for the highly controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline project, but made no such commitment on oil and gas activity in the Amazon or wider fossil fuel expansion. 

The Stand.earth report says an Amazon exclusion for financial institutions is an “essential strategy” to protect the region from oil, gas, and other extractive industries.

Although no banks have completely ruled out funding fossil fuels in Amazonia – the geographic region around the Amazon basin – the report does praise some companies for starting to recognise the risks involved. 

Exclusion policies

 In May 2022, BNP Paribas pledged to no longer finance or invest in companies producing from oil and gas reserves in the Amazon or developing related infrastructure, becoming the first major bank to adopt a geographical exclusion of oil and gas in this area.

And in December 2022, HSBC amended its policies to exclude all new finance and advisory services for any client for oil and gas project exploration, appraisal, development, and production in the Amazon Biome.

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Stand.earth says these two companies, along with some others, are “sending important signals” that banks should be willing to review their relationship to Amazon destruction and take steps to manage that risk.

These also go some way towards the Exit Amazon Oil and Gas principles devised by international advocacy groups including Stand.earth and Amazon Indigenous leaders.

Clear boundaries

Angeline Robertson, lead researcher of Stand Research Group, said efforts to restrict fossil fuels should cover the wider Amazonia area “to avoid confusion or allow banks to define the exclusion zone themselves.

This was an issue with Arctic exclusions, where banks used different boundaries in their policies.”  Standard Chartered’s and BNP Paribas’ exclusions, for example, cover the ‘Amazon’ or ‘Amazon Basin’, while Société Générale and Intesa Sanpaolo’s policies include only the Amazon regions of Ecuador and Peru.

Zugman said both governments and financial institutions had a big role to play in protecting the region. “Governments need to step up first. And banks… should be there by their side to support these bold decisions and to help accelerate the just energy transition.”

He added that banks could play an important role in the Amazon by supporting a just energy transition. “Energy access is still a big deal in the Amazon and banks could, in consultation with communities, be helping them have clean access to energy instead of investing in businesses that are going to destroy their lands.”

Zugman said the Belém summit was vital because it would inform about protection of the Amazon at Cop28 in December as well as the next G20 meeting which Brazil is due to host. “We’re really pushing together for this moment.” 

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It published a draft version of an updated climate and energy plan yesterday, which toughens the 2030 emissions target from the previous 23% to the new 32% compared with 1990.

It has tougher targets too for increasing energy efficiency and renewables and new measures to boost green hydrogen and biomethane.

However, campaigners do not think this is ambitious enough and say it doesn’t represent a “fair share” of the country’s global responsibility for climate change. They are calling for at least 55%.

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Greenpeace Espana, Ecologistas en Acción and Oxfam Spain first challenged the government on its climate measures in 2020, filing a lawsuit because it had not approved a national climate and energy plan that covered the period to the end of 2030. Such a plan was required under EU law by the end of 2019.

While the case was going through the courts, Spain agreed a long-term decarbonisation strategy and passed its first climate law – a decade after it was first called for – which included a net zero target for 2050. It also finally approved a national energy and climate plan in March 2021.

Campaigners dropped part of their claim about the existence of the plan, saying it “represented an important advance compared to the policies of previous governments”.

But they continued to argue that the plan was too weak and that the goal of cutting emissions by “at least” 23% by 2030 compared with 1990 was not consistent with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C global warming threshold. They called instead for a goal of at least 55%, consistent with the wider EU target for that year.

Together with campaigners from Coordinadora de ONG para el Desarrollo they filed a second case making these arguments.

Compromised objectives

The Spanish government, in its responses to the court, stressed that the Paris Agreement did not impose specific levels of emission cuts on state signatories.

It said the EU target of a 55% cut by 2030 was a bloc average, which had to take into account cost efficiency, justice and individual state economies.

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Spain said the 55% EU-level cut had been pushed for by a group of like-minded countries, including Spain, which it described as “ambition leaders”.

It also claimed that the invasion of Ukraine had caused a serious energy crisis which would “undoubtedly” compromise climate objectives.

This has been contracted by the International Energy Agency’s head Fatih Birol who said that “the crisis is set to accelerate the clean energy transition”.

Javier Andaluz, of Ecologistas en Acción, did not expect the latest version of the climate plan to include such a big jump in the 2030 target but said it still falls well short of Spain’s fair share based on climate science and its contribution to global emissions. From a climate justice perspective, he maintains “Spain has to lose at least 55%”.

Spain’s Supreme Court voted on the pair of lawsuits last week, although its decision is not yet public.

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The lawsuits are the first climate litigation against Spain and campaigners hope to build on previous legal successes against European states, including in the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Germany, the landmark ruling led the government to raise its 2030 emissions target to 65%.

But Ana Barreira, founding director of environmental law organisation IIDMA, does not think there is a strong legal case against Spain.

She pointed out that, since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 governments have generally accepted the principle that they have “common but differentiated responsibilities” to protect the environment, a principle that carried through to the Paris Agreement.

Barreira added that the EU accepted Spain’s original climate plan and its contribution to the bloc’s emission cuts.

The slow pace of developing climate policies in Spain was largely due to deadlocks in parliament where for months no political party held a majority.

The incumbent government has done a substantial amount of work over the past two years. Spain is about to take over presidency of the EU for the next six months, and has made efforts to accelerate the climate transition one of its key priorities.

The government has also been forthright in attributing extreme weather and disasters on the ground to climate change.

More drought

The country is currently in the grip of a long-running drought that threatens its agriculture, industry and domestic water resources. Minister for ecological transition Teresa Ribera recently said climate change was leading to “a much greater incidence of more frequent and intense episodes” of such episodes.

Spain is particularly vulnerable to global warming. This year’s spring was the hottest ever – a record made “almost impossible” without climate change, according to a scientific attribution study. Deaths from heat soared during last summer’s heatwave.

Andaluz said the impacts of climate change were already “quite clear” in Spain, and there was a widespread acceptance of the causes.

However, the issue of water management to tackle drought was an issue during regional and municipal elections earlier this year and is likely to crop up again ahead of a general election in December.

The post Spain proposes improved 2030 climate target as it awaits Supreme Court ruling appeared first on Climate Home News.

Franklin Steves, senior policy adviser at E3G, said the summit is “first and foremost” about trying to heal the rift between developed and developing countries that started with the Covid-19 pandemic. This gulf “has widened since then over perceptions that the rich world has failed to deliver on its commitments on climate, development, poverty and debt”, he said.

But it is also an opportunity to make tangible progress on filling the glaring gap in climate finance. 

Bridgetown initiative

Although the summit will be hosted by French president Emmanuel Macron, the key figure behind these talks is Barbados’ prime minister Mia Mottley. The leader of the climate-vulnerable nation has been working hard to build a global coalition of nations committed to overhauling the financial system and unleashing trillions of dollars of investments to the climate frontlines.  

Mottley’s finance adviser Avinash Persaud told Climate Home that Macron has been “quite excited” by this agenda.  

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Persaud would like to see a huge increase in money lent by development banks for projects to help improve resilience to climate change and to help adapt to climate change. 

To achieve this, the major change currently on the cards at the World Bank is to slightly lower the equity-to-loan ratio of its biggest subsidiary bank (IBRD) from 20% to 19%.

This would free up cash for climate financing, although Persaud and some campaigners think the ratio could be tilted further. Others want rich governments to give the bank more money, rather than focusing on accounting tweaks.

Fossil fuel tax

Civil society is keen to advance some form of fossil fuel tax at the Paris talks. There are many disparate ideas for how this could be done, including taxing exports or production, or even a levy offsetting drops in fuel pricing.   

Researchers recently mooted the concept of a climate reparations scheme for big polluters, putting a price tag for the first time on damages owed by leading fossil fuel firms.  

But experts do not see enough traction behind any of these yet, and the subject is unlikely to be top of the discussion list in Paris.  

An idea elevated by United Nations secretary general António Guterres is for developed economies to tax the windfall profits of oil and gas companies and redirect some of the revenues to help nations affected by climate disasters recover. 

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A number of countries have imposed some form of windfall tax in recent years, often in response to the cost of living crises.

But the money returns to the state and does not provide the steady streams of revenue required to tackle the climate crisis, particularly the growing problem of loss and damage, in the years to come. 

‘Moral case’

Tessa Khan, founder and executive director of Uplift, believes there was a “strong moral case” to link windfall taxes with loss and damage funding.

But ultimately she would like to see a permanent change in the tax regime for fossil fuel companies that allocates a proportion of the receipts for international climate finance. 

Also likely to be discussed in Paris is an idea to “modernise” the existing International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds to levy a tax on exports of oil and coal, with a proportion going to fund loss and damage.   

“This already exists and would build on existing international cooperation,” said Persaud. He said the idea has also had “a lot of interest”, although he recognises that big oil producers and consumers might be hesitant to back it.   

Financial transaction tax

Another solution could be a financial transaction tax, which takes a tiny sum each time a company’s share is bought or sold in stock markets.

Many countries have such taxes but so far only France earmarks part of the proceeds for climate and development, said Global Citizen’s Friederike Roder.

Her organisation is pushing for more states to take up the baton, and either implement a new tax or reform existing ones to apportion some for social purposes. But it is not prescriptive about what states should spend the money on. 

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Roder suggests such a tax is easy to implement, would raise a lot of revenue and is “painless” because each individual sum is tiny and taxed at source.

Previous attempts to institute it at EU level faltered. But Roder remains optimistic that it will garner some support in Paris ahead of Cop28 in the winter. 

Shipping levy

The most advanced tax proposal under discussion in Paris is imposing a levy on the shipping industry.   

Last year, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) agreed that some form of climate action was needed. It said this would include a market-based economic element, such as a levy, emissions cap and trade scheme or a reward system, and a technical element, most likely a global fuel standard.  

A decision on a shipping levy is expected at IMO talks in London. Photo: JoachimKohlerBremen

Ana Laranjeira, shipping manager for NGO Opportunity Green, said there is growing support for a universal greenhouse levy among IMO members.

A number of African States, including Angola, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Namibia and Sierra Leone, have cited its importance in meeting the Paris Agreement goals.   

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Laranjeira said there was also rising support for the idea among the shipping industry, including big players such as Denmark’s Maersk.  

Persaud believes a shipping levy could “breathe life” into the international carbon credit market.   

Divisions over funds destination

However, governments and companies do not agree on what the levy should look like or what level it should be set at. The issue of how it will affect remote states that rely more heavily on shipping also remains to be addressed.   

Nor is there yet consensus on what the money should be spent on.   

Tristan Smith, reader in energy and shipping at UCL, said some countries still do not want revenues collected at all, while others are split between preferring the money to be spent on decarbonising ships themselves – for example by allowing them to run on cleaner fuels – decarbonising the wider shipping industry or broader spending on climate mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.   

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Analysis by the World Bank found that using revenues from a shipping levy to support developing countries would be a much fairer use of the money.    

Laranjeira agrees. “While the main aim of such a regulation will be to reduce shipping emissions, the distribution of part of the revenues for supporting developing countries is crucial for our collective climate and sustainable development goals.” 

While the topic will be on the table at the Paris summit, however, the decisions will be made at the IMO meeting in London next week.

Plane tax

A parallel idea under discussion is for an aviation tax. Campaigners have long called for the aviation industry to be taxed more fairly.

And they and academics have suggested introducing a frequent flyer levy to bring down demand in an equitable way, potential through a reform to the existing air passenger duty.  

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A paper by the International Council on Clean Transportation Funding explored how the proceeds of a frequent flyer levy could support alternative fuels, while others have suggested using a portion to fund loss and damage.   

But in general, the idea of taxing aviation is nowhere near being implemented at an international level. “Policymakers are focused on technological solutions to try to avoid demand management policies,” said Warrington.   

Tackling currency risk

Another idea being floated is for an exchange guarantee within the multilateral development banks, which would allow private investors to hedge the risk of foreign currency fluctuations.  

Persaud said this would provide a lifeline for emissions-cutting projects that can make money, such as solar farms, given the scarcity of available grant funding and to avoid governments piling on new debt. He is cautiously hopeful that it will receive an endorsement from some parties in Paris.

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The trickiest aspect of climate financing remains loss and damage. There are no revenues to be made through this and no likely savings. And, if financing for emissions cutting and adapting to climate change remains inadequate, the sums required for loss and damage will only grow. 

Steves said there are a number of proposals under consideration to implement global levies on carbon-intensive economic activities.   

Disaster debt clauses

Another idea is to extend the use of natural disaster clauses in debt agreements. This idea has been pioneered in the Caribbean, with Barbados now entitled to defer repayments due for two years after an earthquake, tropical cyclone or heavy rainfall.  

Flooded village in Haiti following the passage of Hurricane Tomas. Photo: DVIDSHUB

Persaud said this “not sexy but powerful” idea has garnered a lot of support and expects to see a number of countries endorsing it in Paris. “No other instrument comes close in terms of the amount of liquidity this provides for countries facing disaster.”   

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Whatever innovative options are advanced, however, experts warn that it should not replace public funding.  

Egyptian climate negotiator Mohamed Nasr, who is on the loss and damage transitional committee and was a key part of the Cop27 presidency, told a press conference at the recent climate talks in Bonn that the core obligations of loss and damage remain on developed governments.  

A distraction?

“We must also understand that all those very good ideas – fossil fuel, aviation, whatever – has a very long process that is behind it that is based on countries’ local and national regulations.”   

Nasr said the focus should remain on getting the loss and damage fund up and running and ensuring developed country governments stump up the cash.  

“I’m not against any of the innovative ideas on sources,” said Nasr. “But we must always.. focus on the main source which is contributions by those who cause the problem where we are now – complemented by industries, innovation.”

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A study recently published in Nature calculated that wealthy nations will owe developing countries a sum of US$192 trillion for appropriating their “fair shares” of atmospheric emissions in the years leading up to 2050.  

Developed countries will face pressure in Paris to increase their climate finance and particularly to set out how they will meet their promise to reallocate $100 billion in special drawing rights, the IMF reserve asset issued as relief during the pandemic, to lower income countries. 

E3G’s Steves said it was vital the summit reflects and reinforces the level of ambition in the Bridgetown Initiative but remains concerned that it will end up as just another talking shop. “In which case it would only end up worsening, rather than addressing, the distrust across the developing world,” he said.  

But Persaud is optimistic about what the event can achieve, saying campaigners and developing country advocates now have a clearer idea of how money is really needed and what it should be used for. “I think there is more progress today than before as there’s greater convergence around the fact that we need to do it, can do it and we’re making the ask as reasonable as possible.”  

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The International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) board was initially due to vote at its 30 April meeting on a BRL160 million ($32 million) loan to Alvoar Lacteos intended to help the company expand its operations in Brazil and support wider food security.

Alvoar Lacteos owns and manages industrial facilities in the Midwest and Northeast regions of Brazil, making products such as UHT milk, powdered milk, yogurt, cheese and sweets. The money would be used to install new equipment, renovate existing industrial units and build a new unit for cheese production, as well as for improving the company’s environmental and social standards.

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A group of 16 Brazilian and international organisations, including Friends of the Earth, the Global Forest Coalition, the International Accountability Project and the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, wrote to the IFC in April urging it to reject the loan, arguing it had not properly accounted for the project’s environmental and social impacts.

The decision has since been rescheduled to the end of May. Emails sent by IFC and seen by Climate Home News imply is so the IFC board can consider evidence presented by the group, although an IFC spokesperson told Climate Home “the timing of when projects are taken to the board is dependent on numerous factors”.

Neither the IFC nor Alvoar Lacteos responded to questions about the concerns raised or the delay.

Suppliers emissions ignored

Civil society groups raised numerous concerns about the loan, including a claim that it is incompatible with the IFC’s commitment to align investments with a 1.5C global warming threshold.

The only current climate-related requirement in the project’s environmental and social action plan is for Alvoar Lacteos to prepare its first greenhouse gas inventory and estimate the emissions under its direct control (scope 1 and 2) “following an internationally recognized methodology, and local regulations”.  It has until April 2024 to do this.

There is no requirement for the company to monitor scope 3 emissions from its suppliers, like the chopping down of forests to graze cattle, which comprise the vast majority of a dairy company’s climate impact. The civil society organisations argue these emissions should be “the focus of reduction and mitigation measures”.

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Kelly Anne McNamara is a senior research and policy analyst in the international climate and agriculture finance programme of Friends of the Earth, one of the organisations that has challenged the loan. 

She told Climate Home the IFC had clarified that it was working with Alvoar on addressing its scope 3 emissions by avoiding deforestation on dairy farms and farms associated with sourcing feed. But she pointed out that no actual mitigation or reduction is required under the terms of the loan.

Paris alignment

Two years ago, the World Bank pledged to align all its financing with the goals of the Paris Agreement and it says it is on track to do this for all its new operations from July 2023. The IFC has a weaker target of aligning 85% of new operations by that date and 100% from July 2025.

However, a new climate framework for multilateral development banks is under development which the IFC will be using to assess its investments. It says that”non-ruminant livestock” are consistent with the Paris agreement’s goal but it does not mention ruminant livestock like cows and sheep.

G7 calls on all countries to reach net zero by 2050

Campaigners said the framework suggests that such projects will require evaluations against specific greenhouse gas reduction criteria but have seen no evidence that the IFC has assessed the Alvoar project in this way.

“Had IFC done so, it might understand that there is a need for a major reduction in production in the cattle sector in the [Latin America and the Caribbean] region, along with a heightened focus on measures to significantly cut the [greenhouse gas] footprint of existing operations through better management practices,” they wrote in their letter.

This, they said, could include a shift away from intensive feed and milk production, toward silvopasture and agroforestry practices that increase sequestration and do not rely on fossil fuel-based fertilisers and pesticides.

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International development banks, including the IFC, have spent billions supporting the meat and dairy industries over the past decade. Although the IFC stopped supporting new coal projects in April, it has made no explicit restrictions on other activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions.

The civil society groups also pointed out that Alvoar has not set itself a net zero target, and said this should be a requirement for the project.

And they criticised the IFC for not doing enough to understand other potential environmental and social issues linked to dairy supply chains, such as child and forced labour, land rights and deforestation.

Alvoar does not own any cattle farms so its milk is sourced from 5,500 farmers, including dairy cooperatives and individual farmers, as well as middlemen. Campaigners say it has no supply chain management system in place to address these.

No hard requirement

Although the IFC expects Alvoar to develop such a system if the loan is approved, campaigners note that there is no hard requirement to achieve full supply chain traceability or zero deforestation by a specific date.

Campaigners argue the IFC was wrong to conclude that any risks from the project would be short-term and localised and said it should have required a more comprehensive environmental and social assessment and mitigation plan.

Although the loan is in part intended to help Alvoar boost its environmental and social standards, critics said the onus was on the IFC to understand those risks in advance.

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Campaigners also question whether the loan will actually help increase food access for the neediest Brazilians.

IFC loans are normally approved without controversy. But last year a decision on whether to approve another agricultural project – soy and corn feed sourcing by the Brazilian arm of a major European meat producer – was also delayed after campaigners expressed doubts about its impact on deforestation.

McNamara said that, although the earlier loan was eventually approved, some IFC board directors abstained and several encouraged campaigners to keep raising concerns. In the case of the Alvoar project, however, she thinks food security arguments are likely to over-ride other considerations.

The IFC board is made up of 25 representatives of different governments.

This article was updated on 26 May 2023 to include IFC’s statement

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NGO Feedback has launched a formal legal challenge against the UK government, arguing that it risked flouting its international climate obligations by not properly assessing the environmental impacts of the deal.

The UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which enters into force at the end of the month, gives Australian producers better access to the UK market to sell beef, lamb and dairy.

Then UK prime minister Boris Johnson, trade secretary Liz Truss and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison celebrate the trade deal in London in 2021 (Photo credit: Number 10/Flickr)

Agreeing the deal in 2021, the UK government said Australia shared domestic “beliefs in high standards in areas such as animal welfare and the environment” and maintained that the deal would uphold these.

Brexit dash for deals

But critics believe it was passed in haste and risks undercutting UK producers with food that does more damage to the environment.

Carina Millstone, executive director of Feedback, said the UK government had recklessly sacrificed both British farmers and the climate in a rush for positive headlines after the UK left the European Union and faced accusations that it was now globally isolated.

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“At a time of crisis in food and farming,” she said “the government must ensure all trade deals work towards our emissions reduction targets rather than towards further catastrophic heating.”

A government impact assessment of the free trade agreement suggested there would be an increase in transport-related greenhouse gas emissions as more goods are moved between Australia and the UK.

They estimated that increase would be 0.1-0.3 MtCo2 a year, about the annual emissions of Liechenstein.

Claims of uncertainty

But it said data uncertainties on the emissions impact of farming, particularly of beef, made drawing conclusions on these emissions difficult.

Campaigners instead point to a 2021 independent review of the UK’s national food strategy. It used a 2020 study in Global Environmental Change to conclude that carbon emissions from UK beef was 30kg Co2/kg compared to 45kg Co2e/kg from Australian beef.

The authors of that study found that these differences between different countries were “largely attributable to deforestation for grazing lands and higher methane emissions from…belching”.

Campaigners said the food strategy clearly shows that the free trade agreement will have a material impact on the UK’s legally binding climate targets.

Cheap meat

They also say the impact assessment fails to quantify the carbon impact of any changes to overall domestic UK meat and dairy consumption. 

Cheaper Australian goods were touted as one of the key benefits of the agreement for the UK. Australia’s biggest cattle farmer suggested that the trade deal could result in Australian beef exports to the UK rising tenfold. 

However, Feedback says the greater availability of cheap meat on UK supermarket shelves and in the food service industry will increase the amount that gets eaten.

This would go against recommendations from both national food strategy review and those of the UK’s advisory Climate Change Committee that substantial reductions in meat and dairy are essential to tackle climate change. 

G7 calls on all countries to reach net zero by 2050

Feedback sent a letter to environment secretary Thérèse Coffey last year, warning that it was prepared to take legal action, and said the response it received was unsatisfactory. 

Rowan Smith, a solicitor for law firm Leigh Day which is representing Feedback in the case, said they would be arguing that the legislation implementing the new tariff rules was based on an impact assessment that completely ignored the science.

“It is argued that this irrationality renders the statutory instrument unlawful, and our client is asking the court to quash it,” he said.

The government would not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

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Their study, published today in journal One Earth, finds 21 coal, oil and gas companies responsible for $209 billion a year in compensation for extreme weather and other climate change impacts predicted to occur around the world between 2025 and 2050.

Emissions from these companies’ operations and the use of their products between 1988 and 2022 contributed significantly to that harm, the study concludes. Global emissions surged over that 34-year period, despite the IPCC’s increasingly urgent warnings about the need for concerted action.

Cop28 moots oil and gas initiative despite greenwash accusations

The study was led by Marco Grasso, professor of political geography at the University of Milan-Bicocca, and the Center for Climate Accountability’s Richard Heede. Heede produced the landmark Carbon Majors study, which in 2013 quantified for the first time the amount of historical carbon emissions attributable to the fossil fuel industry.

Building on the Carbon Majors database, which continues to record data on emissions from the largest polluters, and a survey of 738 climate economists, the new study estimates climate change will cause $99 trillion global economic damages between 2025 and 2050. 

Of this, it attributes a “conservative” $23.2 trillion per year in GDP loss to the coal, oil and gas industry, and the rest to non-fossil polluters, governments and consumers. That works out at $893 billion a year. The study then focuses on the world’s 21 largest fossil fuel companies, pinning them down to a collective $209 billion annually.

By far the biggest sum ($43 billion) is attributed to Saudi Aramco, which produced the most emissions between 1988-2022. The researchers describe this as “substantial but low” compared to the $161 billion the company made in profit last year.

Exxon is next with attributed annual reparation payments of $18 billion.

However, the researchers exempted four state-owned fossil fuel companies in low-income states: National Iranian Oil Co, Coal India, Petroleos de Venezuela and Algeria’s Sonatrach. And they halved the liability for companies in six middle-income countries. 

They did this to avoid penalising people in poorer countries who are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and have contributed much less historically.

'Tip of the iceberg'

While substantial, the researchers say the sums do not take into account the value of lost ecosystem services, extinctions, loss of human lives and livelihoods, and other aspects of wellbeing not captured by GDP. “This is only the tip of the iceberg of long-term climate damages, mitigation and adaptation costs,” said co-author Heede. 

The study only includes emissions from 1988 because that's when "claims of scientific uncertainty about the consequences of carbon emissions [became] untenable", as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up and scientist James Hansen testified on humans role in causing climate change to the US Senate. Many of these firms were polluting long before 1988.

The researchers say fossil fuel companies have a “moral responsibility” for remedying climate harm through their contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, and their history of climate denial and misinformation which has slowed down global action.

They do not see a global reparations scheme as a substitute for climate finance under the United Nations (UN). But, with the UN's Green Climate Fund failing to provide sufficient funding for adapting to climate change and the loss and damage fund agreed at Cop27 yet to get up and running, they conclude that existing mechanisms should be complemented by money from fossil fuel firms.

Lead author Grasso said he hoped the work would inform future efforts to direct payments towards harmed parties. “The proposed framework for quantifying and attributing reparations to major carbon fuel producers is grounded in moral theory and provides a starting point for discussion of the financial duty owed by the fossil fuel industry to climate victims”, he said. 

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Nations vulnerable to climate change have increasingly been calling for polluting companies like fossil fuel producers to pay for the loss and damage caused by climate change. The influential prime minister of Barbados Mia Mottley, in particular, has led the debate on this issue, while United Nations secretary general António Guterres suggested a windfall tax on oil and gas profits to fund loss and damage.

Mottley's finance advisor Avinash Persaud told Climate Home: "I don’t feel talking in terms of compensation is helpful to achieving the contribution we want. Issues compensation raises is should it be producers or consumers, current or past shareholders? Gas versus oil?"

"But," he added, "the industry and its consumers do have a responsibility and a contribution of $209bn would meet the bill for those things that you can’t easily borrow against without sinking under oceans of debt, like loss and damage and biodiversity protection".

"If spread across global exports, linked to carbon content, and supplemented with contributions from other sectors, I feel this number is in the right ball park for those things that cannot be borrowed for," he said.

Regulators crack down on corporate carbon neutrality claims

A UN-commissioned report estimated that developing countries need to spend $2.4 trillion a year responding to climate change. But of this, Persaud estimates that all but around $350 billion can be funded by private companies seeking profit.

This includes projects like solar farms, which companies can develop and make money from, but excludes projects which are harder to profit from like re-training fossil fuel workers and building seawalls to protect people and property from rising sea levels.

A reparations scheme would also exist alongside the wave of climate-related litigation occurring around the world against fossil fuel companies.

The researchers said that, while a reparations scheme would not indemnify the industry from legal action “it may, for companies that pay reparations and show strong progress on reducing operational and product emissions, defer or even avoid being named as defendants in future law”

As an incentive to act, the researchers propose that companies could be eligible for reduced  payments if they stop producing polluting fuels soon or meet their verified net zero targets.

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The European Parliament last week supported new rules that would make it harder for companies to make misleading claims about the climate impacts of their products.

The draft law, which updates previous directives on consumer rights, aims to help the public make more sustainable choices and encourage companies to offer them more durable products.

It bans companies from using terms such as ‘climate neutral’ if they cannot be backed by detailed evidence. It also aims to ban environmental claims that are based solely on carbon offsetting schemes, which have come under growing criticism for misleading consumers and failing to represent actual cuts in carbon.

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Legal action is already being taken over climate marketing claims under existing EU consumer law.

A case against the TotalEnergies oil company in France was admitted by the court yesterday.

Another against KLM in the Netherlands recently resulted in the airline pulling advertising bearing the slogan ‘Fly Responsibly’ in the country.

But the proposed rules more clearly explain what companies can say about their products. They are also tougher than those in a draft Green Claims Directive tabled by the European Commission earlier this year, which was criticised for failing to meaningfully address misleading environmental statements.

Hiske Arts, a campaigner with Fossielvrij NL, which brought the case against KLM, said the new law would be a “great step forward to protect citizens from greenwashing by large polluters”.

The changes are clearly in step with national regulators, which in many EU countries are already cracking down on such claims.

False impression

Earlier this year, European dairy company Arla Foods was banned from using the term “net zero climate footprint” when marketing its products in Sweden.

The Swedish Patent and Market Court agreed with the country’s consumer watchdog that Arla had misled consumers by giving the impression that making and transporting its products did not create any carbon emissions or that the company had fully offset those impacts.

Lindsay Otis, a policy expert on global carbon markets for Carbon Market Watch, said this was a key case. “The court really highlighted the difficulties that consumers are often faced with when critically evaluating the plausibility of these claims,” she said, “and they pointed out the lack of permanence in forest-based offsetting projects.”

Shell has also been repeatedly called out over the past couple of years by the Netherlands’ advertising watchdog for a campaign that promotes its sustainability efforts.

The Advertising Code Committee ruled four times in 2022 that the company’s advertising of carbon offsets misleadingly implied it was fully offsetting the greenhouse gas emissions from driving.

And Ryanair had to adjust its carbon offset compensation scheme following an investigatory sweep of the aviation industry by the Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers & Markets.

Consumer decisions

Otis stressed that corporate advertising influences consumer decisions. “If consumers are given incorrect information they potentially think they’re making green decisions when in reality it’s not really the case”, she said.

Analysis of corporate climate plans by Carbon Market Watch and the New Climate Institute shows nearly all rely heavily on offsetting.

Their report, published in February, says offsetting remains the “dominant and relatively easy option for companies to wipe away large chunks of their overall climate impacts at low cost and with appealing short-term marketing value” which is a “major stumbling block” for the credibility of those plans.

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Carbon Market Watch’s report found that many companies still see huge marketing value in making these statements.

But it says that could change if governments and courts regulate more strictly or if consumers and investors send a signal that they are unwilling to pay a premium for claims that rely heavily on contentious offsetting practices.

The UK could be moving in that direction. Earlier this year, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), issued guidance warning marketers to be clear about whether and how much the products they advertise are actively reducing carbon emissions or are basing claims on offsetting.

The ASA has since banned adverts by German and Abu Dhabi-based airlines Lufthansa and Etihad for making unjustified claims about the sustainability of flying in the UK, and is now understood to be considering stricter enforcement of terms such as “carbon neutral”, “net zero” and “nature positive” in product marketing.

Connecting the world. Protecting its future. On Earth Day, we reaffirm our commitment to become Carbon Neutral by 2050. Happy #EarthDay#EarthDay #MakeChangeFly #Sustainability #CarbonNeutral pic.twitter.com/VU1qOJFoYh

— Lufthansa India (@Lufthansa_India) April 22, 2023

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Advertising Standards Authority partially upheld a complaint against energy firm Firstgas over an ad campaign about “zero carbon gas”.

They agreed that it was misleading because it implied that consumers did need do “absolutely nothing” to avoid adding carbon to the atmosphere and suggested the company’s proposed change to zero carbon gas was imminent.

Over the water, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) began investigating suspected corporate greenwashing last October. It found a large number of “concerning” claims, many of which referred to emissions reduction, offsets or carbon neutrality.

“It can be difficult for consumers to understand the differences between these terms,” the ACCC concluded. “Many businesses also did not explain how their emissions reductions and offsets were calculated, the steps being taken to reduce their carbon footprint, or the types of offsetting projects being funded.”

The ACCC has already been asked by campaigners to scrutinise claims that airline Etihad and car manufacturer Toyota have made misleading claims about their climate impacts and strategies, and says it will be investigating others too.

Helping marketers

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently closed an extended public consultation on reviewing its Green Guides, which aim to help marketers avoid making environmental marketing claims that are unfair or deceptive.

The current guides already provide guidance on carbon offset and renewable energy claims, but the FCC invited views on whether it should provide extra information on claims such as ‘net zero’, ‘carbon neutral’ and ‘carbon negative’.

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South Korea is also getting tougher on misleading corporate climate claims. A draft law would give the Ministry of Environment power to fine companies up to three million won ($2,270) for misleading the public about their environmental impacts. If passed, it would be the first such law in Asia.

The country’s Fair Trade Commission has already been asked to investigate claims by activists from Solutions for Our Climate that SK Lubricants is using an unreliable carbon offsetting project to advertise its products.

Jihyeon Ha, head of legal at Solutions for Our Climate, said penalising corporate greenwashing is a necessary step towards achieving net zero.

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But she warned that the South Korean government is “giving mixed signals” about corporate climate responsibilities by downgrading an industrial emissions reduction target in its latest carbon neutrality roadmap.

“The government needs to take further steps if they want companies to actually begin shifting their business practices to decarbonisation”, she said.

Otis said it was too early to say if the global crack down on greenwashing was effective but government intervention was essential.

As such, she urged the European Commission and the European Council to approve the rules and institute a complete ban on offsetting claims. “If the other institutions do not shift their position during upcoming negotiations, it will undermine the EU’s ability to genuinely crackdown on this kind of greenwashing,” said Otis.

A recent report by a United Nations taskforce into corporate greenwash said that offsets should only be used as a last resort, if a company’s own emissions can not be reduced.

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Prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir told a high-level conference today that there is a “pressing need for an autonomous right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment” to help address climate change and other environmental crises and pledged to send “a strong message on future challenges” at a forthcoming leaders’ summit.

Recognition of the right to a healthy environment would shift political priorities, say legal experts, and open up the potential for environmental lawsuits at both national and regional levels.

The island nation made promotion of the links between human rights and the environment one of the key aims of its six-month presidency of the Council of Europe, which since 1949 has been tasked with upholding human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

The end of Iceland’s presidential stint in May will be marked by a summit in its capital Reykjavik, where leaders are expected to seriously discuss the prospect of enshrining the right to a healthy environment in law.

Such summits are rare – this is only the fourth to take place since 1993 – and Iceland describes it as a “historic opportunity for the Council of Europe to refocus its mission, in the light of new threats to democracy and human rights”, as well as to support member state Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.

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A healthy and sustainable environment is increasingly being seen as a fundamental human right around the world.

Last summer, the UN General Assembly passed a landmark resolution recognising it as a universal right. However, subsequent attempts by the UN Human Rights Council to crystallise this political statement into something more tangible have proved more problematic.

The Council of Europe endorsed a set of guidelines on human rights and the environment in 2022. But it held back from unambiguously restating the existence of the right to a healthy environment, even though all member states had voted in favour of the UN resolution.

Instead, a technical body has been tasked with exploring the need and feasibility of a legal tool to protect the right, and is due to report on its findings in September.

New protocol

The strongest way such a right could be recognised within the Council of Europe would be by adding a new protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, which would then be enforced by the European Court of Human Rights.

All 46 member states are subject to the rulings of this Strasbourg-based court, which recently heard its first climate-related cases and has scheduled another for the autumn.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is the organisation’s parliamentary arm albeit without the power to make law. It has urged Council of Europe leaders to support a legally binding framework and to place the issue high on the agenda at the Rejkjavik Summit.

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In a letter to the permanent representations of member states of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, dated 12 April, a coalition of civil society groups also called for recognition of the right “without delay”.

They note that the right to a healthy environment is already recognised by all other regional human rights frameworks, making the European Convention on Human Rights “an outdated exception”.

The groups say recognition of such a right would grant the “greater unity” among European countries that the Council of Europe is mandated to achieve. “Not recognising the right… would signify that the Council of Europe is unable or unwilling to address the most pressing dangers in the 21st century to the rights it must protect.”

Real impacts

Sébastien Duyck, human rights and climate campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, believes some countries are nervous of the European Court of Human Rights’ power.

“Strasbourg is where the rubber hits the road,” he said. “That’s where you have those great international principles on human rights that are converted into something with real impacts on member states.”

He said there were legitimate concerns about how such a right would be implemented, such as the question of what type or scale of ecosystem harm would allow someone to bring a claim.

“But these should be addressed by a negotiating committee,” said Duyck. “If you were to have government structuring a protocol, that’s what they would be doing.”

Iceland is treading carefully on this potentially sensitive issue, and experts say today’s conference is one way in which it is trying to build support for the idea.

Mitsubishi bets on carbon removal while keeping coal plants

Opposition to idea

Robert Spano, former president of the European Court of Human Rights, who gave a keynote speech, was wary of the idea.

He said it was justified for the international community to “robustly debate” the need for adopting a binding right to a healthy environment.

But he did not think it as “sound policy” to incorporate it into the European Convention on Human Rights, saying climate change is too broad an issue for the court to deal with and suggesting it should remain a political – not a legal – matter.

But Jakobsdóttir maintained that the organisation must follow in the “very important footsteps” of the UN if it is to continue to hold its role as one of the leading human rights institutions worldwide.

Amnesty International said this shows the presidency is putting a big emphasis on the issue.

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Failure at home

Domestically, Iceland is one of 14 members of the Council of Europe, alongside the UK, Germany and Switzerland, not to explicitly recognise the right to a healthy environment in domestic law.

There appears to be public support for the idea, said Jóna Þórey Pétursdóttir, an associate at Icelandic law firm Réttur.

But in 2021, prime minister Jakobsdóttir failed to pass a constitutional reform bill recognising the right. “Hence, the seriousness of the government on the topic can easily be questioned, unfortunately,” she said.

Icelandic MP Andrés Ingi Jónsson of the Pirate Party agreed that the issue remains a “fairly high priority” for Jakobsdóttir, “although she usually adds the caveat that Russia‘s attack on Ukraine is likely to take center stage”.

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Duyck said the war between Russia and Ukraine, both of which were members of the Council of Europe until Russia was expelled last year, had left the alliance “soul-searching” about its fundamental role and looking to reaffirm what its shared values are.

As well as providing a new tool to hold Russia accountable for the damage it is causing in Ukraine, he said, recognising the right to a healthy environment could provide just such a unifying cause.

Duyck believes the right will be recognised among Council of Europe members in one way or another. “The question is, is the [European Court of Human Rights] going to continue to have its creative interpretation of the convention by incorporating the right to a healthy environment more and more explicitly? Or are governments going to actually play the policy-making role that’s expected of them and just tell the court how this should be done?”

The Pirate Party’s Jónsson said the legacy of Iceland’s presidency of the Council of Europe would depend on the strength of the summit’s declarations and how well its results are followed through.

“This is not just the role of a single state,” he said, “but also something that civil society throughout the member states will have to hold their governments to account.”

The post Pressure builds on Council of Europe to put right to healthy environment in law appeared first on Climate Home News.

The company has teamed up with carbon offset provider South Pole to buy nearly 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal credits from technological schemes, about a quarter of all such purchases to date.

They hope to sell these credits for millions of dollars. Companies like UBS bank, Mitsui shipping line and the Bosting Consulting Group have already promised to buy them.

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But New Climate Institute researcher Takeshi Kuramochi, who has studied carbon capture, told Climate Home that Mitsubishi’s involvement was “disturbing”.

“If Mitsubishi is to strengthen its ‘commitment to the sustainable future’, they would better contribute to [emissions reductions] by first accelerating its transition of fossil fuel-heavy energy business to renewables,” he said.

Major polluter

According to Global Energy Monitor, Mitsubishi currently operates nine coal power stations in Japan and Taiwan, and is building two in Vietnam and two in Indonesia.

But although the company says it has stopped taking on new coal projects, at least without carbon capture technology, it has not put any restrictions on oil and gas expansion.

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Carbon emissions from using Mitsubishi’s products are 381 million tonnes – more than Nigeria and its population of over 200 million people. The conglomerate does not include these emissions in its climate targets, which focus solely on the 23 million tonnes from its companies’ operations.

Big deal

Mitsubishi’s new joint venture with South Pole will be called NextGen. The joint company said the carbon removal projects it is investing in will remove “significant” volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help scale up the market.

It plans to buy one million credits by 2025. With an average target price of $200 per tonne, it is hoping they will be worth $200 million.

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Carbon removal technology is still in its infancy around the world and none of the three projects NextGen has bet on are up and running yet.

The projects plan to either suck carbon from the atmosphere and bury it, or to burn dead plants without oxygen, in a process known as pyrolysis, to turn it into carbon-rich charcoal which can be buried. The latter method stops the plants from releasing the carbon into the atmosphere as they rot.

Better than forests?

Carbon offsets that rely on protecting forests are coming under increasing scrutiny, with critics often arguing that the forests weren’t in as much danger of being cut down as the offset sellers made out.

Although he recognised that carbon removal technology faces its own challenges, NextGen’s chair Philip Moss told Climate Home it “can ensure a higher degree of carbon permanence in many cases than nature-based removals and avoidance projects”.

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“Technological carbon removal projects can also avoid some of the scrutiny around measurement,” Moss said, “as the quantity of carbon removed can be metered and measured as opposed to having to work on modelled assumptions.”

NextGen’s projects will be certified and verified under standards endorsed by the International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA).

Contentious topic

However, government and scientists’ discussion of carbon removal technology at the recent IPCC meeting was highly politicised, with Japan and others emphasising it and others playing it down.

Yesterday, US special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry described relying on technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as “dangerous” and a cause for “alarm”.

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Although they recognised carbon removal technology would be needed, IPCC scientists also stressed that cutting back on emissions being produced in the first place “would limit peak warming levels and reduce the requirement for net negative CO2 emissions”.

This would, they said, reduce “feasibility and sustainability concerns, and social and environmental risks associated with [carbon  dioxide removal] deployment at large scales”.

Only the hard stuff

Kuramochi said carbon removal technology should be reserved for neutralising left-over emissions from the hardest to clean up sectors.

While electricity and light transport can be cleaned up relatively cheaply and easily, other sectors like flying and heavy industry are finding it harder to go green.

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Kuramochi said emissions in the easier industries to clean up have to be “completely eliminated”.

“Depending on who buys the [carbon dioxide removal] credits,” he said, “such projects may even result in slowing down the companies’ effort to reduce their own value chain emissions.”

Mitsubishi could not be contacted for a response.

The post Mitsubishi bets on carbon removal while keeping coal plants appeared first on Climate Home News.

Archi Rastogi, lead author of the independent report, said there were clear risks in implementing climate-related projects such as new infrastructure. But projects could also result in maladaptation, where instead of helping communities adapt to climate change they actually make the effects worse, and may have more complex fiduciary risks.

Not recognising or properly managing these made the organisation too cautious, he said. 

Developing nations have long pushed the fund to take more risks and provide grants to smaller, more innovative schemes that other funds won’t back.

In 2016, the GCF board agreed that it should “take on risks that other funds/institutions are not able or are willing to take” and adopt a “high level of risk appetite”.

Projects gone wrong

The Green Climate Fund was set up in 2010 and formed part of a compact between poor and rich countries that was the basis for the Paris climate agreement in 2015. It has spent around $12bn so far funding climate projects around the world.

But although the latest review accused it of being overly cautious, some of the fund’s investments have been controversial and former employees have raised concerns about the GCF’s project vetting.

In 2021, concerns were raised about a $66 million flood management project financed by the GCF in Samoa, after river walls failed to protect a hotel from flash flooding. 

The fund was also recently in the spotlight for greenlighting a Nicaraguan project which Indigenous people have accused of exacerbating violence with settlers invading their land. At its latest meeting, the board deferred a decision on the complaint until July. 

Speaking at the board meeting, outgoing executive director Yannick Glemarec accepted that the GCF was responsible for projects that it was financing along with other organisations, saying that, when it comes to a violation of Indigenous people “it’s irrelevant where the money comes from”.  

But he said the GCF was a very large international financial institution with “maybe a third” the level of risk of a social impact investor, and suggested it could take on more. “It’s extremely important to ensure that your risk management system will keep pace with your ambitions,” he said.  

Notable progress

The review team analysed reams of documents, carried out case studies and interviewed more than 700 people around the world, and found the GCF had made “notable progress” in its governance procedures since 2020.  

It found no “insurmountable” challenges in the way the GCF is run, saying the organisation managed to effectively carry out its key roles of accrediting institutions to apply for funds and approving funding proposals. 

Andreas Reumann, head of the GCF’s independent evaluation unit, said it shows that the fund plays a “central and successful role in global efforts to combat climate change” and has responded positively to recommendations for improvement.  

This paints a more favourable picture than a 2021 staff survey which found that 40% of staff had a negative impression of senior management while just 24% had a good impression. Some people within the organisation have also been critical of the way the board responds to feedback.

The organisation has just appointed Mafalda Duarte as its new head.

Unrealistic expectations

The review helped counteract a “persistent false narrative” about the fund’s governance caused in part by unrealistically high expectations of what it would do, said Liane Schalatek, a civil society observer on the GCF board.

Developing countries had anticipated it would provide a large amount of readily available grant funding, while developed countries had wanted it to massively leverage private sector funding and thereby reduce their own financial liabilities. “Those have obviously not come to pass.”  

However, the review said the time had come to “clarify the GCF’s vision” over how it balances the urgency of the climate crisis and the long-term need to build climate finance capacity, and the extent to which it takes a direct and strategic role.  

It concluded the fund should do more to “catalyse” climate finance by, for example, investing in projects that have bigger impacts down the line even if the projects themselves run at a loss. 

But Schalatek warned that it should continue to be a core source of public climate funds, “with a focus on simplified and enhanced direct access and ensuring that affected communities and people through devolved financing have more of a say on how GCF funding support can better address their needs and priorities”.  

Efficiency compromised

A core principle of the GCF is to give developed and developing countries an equal say in board meetings, unlike donor-driven funds.  

The review says this novel governance structure “brings legitimacy but compromises efficiency”, especially given the fund’s proximity to UN climate change politics, posing challenges in setting a strategic vision and key policies.  

Rastogi suggested that more informal meetings between board members would help improve relationships and smooth negotiations.

The review also shows that less money went to adaptation projects than mitigation. With under 7% of global climate finance currently directed towards adaptation, it says the GCF’s impact on this topic is much more important than it is for mitigation, and hints that the board should reconsider how it balances these two key areas of climate action.  

Schalatek said civil society has pushed unsuccessfully for a more even split for some time. “In terms of adaptation it’s barely doing what’s under its mandate,” she said. 

GCF respond

In its formal response to the review, the GCF’s secretariat said the findings and recommendations “broadly resonate” with its experience and would incorporate most of them into its decision-making, management, operations, strategies, budgets and practices. It has, for example, already begun to update its risk register, which the review had found gaps in. 

However, it only “partially” agreed with the recommendation to reconsider civil society’s role in its work. Schalatek said it was difficult for observers to have a meaningful influence on GCF policies and the cost of travelling to board meetings was prohibitive for some developing country representatives. The secretariat countered that some of these issues had previously been considered. 

The review will inform the GCF’s next strategic plan, which is expected to be approved in the summer, and will also be part of negotiations over how much countries will commit to funding it over the next four years.

Going into the review, Rastogi said he was “a bit scared” of what he might find. But he was generally pleased with how the GCF was being governed and noted that all similar institutions go through a teething period in their first few years. “It’s going to get stronger,” he said, while its new executive director would bring in “new blood and a fresh perspective”. 

This article was amended on 3 May 2023 to correct the figure on how much the GCF has spent so far. It originally incorrectly said $20 billion but the real figure is $12 billion.

The post UN’s Green Climate Fund too scared of risk, finds official review appeared first on Climate Home News.

An update to the organisation’s ‘green equity approach’ policy, which is aimed at intermediary clients such as commercial banks, explicitly states that IFC investment will no longer support new coal.

The policy previously only required financial clients to reduce their exposure by half by 2025, and to zero by 2030.

Financial intermediaries represent more than half of IFC’s investments and have received almost $40 billion of IFC support since May 2019.

The loophole had allowed the IFC’s financial clients to support a number of substantial new coal projects over the past five years.

OECD reforms set to give “green” projects better export finance

Hana Bank in Indonesia, for example, financed a 2 GW coal power plant in Indonesia in 2019. The plant is predicted to release 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, a similar amount to the the whole of Jamaica, for 25 years.

PVI Holdings, another IFC client, provided insurance to the Vung Ang II coal power plant in Vietnam in 2021.

Kate Geary, co-director of sustainable finance watchdog Recourse, said the change in policy sent a signal to the wider investment community that “the era of coal is over” and called on the IFC to extend the exclusion to oil and gas investments too. “This is a welcome step but a long time coming.”

David Pred, executive director of NGO Inclusive Development International, said it needed to enforce the new policy with its existing financial intermediary clients like Postal Savings Bank of China, which is among the leading financiers of coal in Asia.

Private backers

A growing number of financial institutions around the world have committed to ending support for coal.

But a report published today by Global Energy Monitor found that, while international public coal financing has all but dried up, new and expanded projects are still being backed by private money.

Of 99 private financial institutions that adopted new or updated coal policies in 2022, the report found most were “insufficient to align banks, insurers, and investors with climate science”. Only 12 of these policies were considered strong enough to halt support for the developers of new coal mines and power plants or set deadlines to end all coal power-related finance in the timeframe required.

Migrant workers face risks building Europe’s new gas supplies in the UAE

The IFC is expected to publish a plan to align its portfolio with the Paris Agreement during next week’s World Bank meetings.

The Compliance Advisor Ombudsman has received several complaints about the environmental and social impacts of the IFC’s support for coal. The Centre for Financial Accountability filed the first such complaint in 2011 over the backing of a coal project in India’s Odisha state, which the ombudsman is still monitoring.

Joe Athialy, the centre’s executive director, noted that it had taken over a decade for the IFC to finally end its support for new coal. “In the meanwhile, communities got scattered, their livelihood stolen and the climate crisis made more severe, with nobody held accountable for all these, and more. We can only hope it moves faster to stop funding oil and gas.”

As well as fossil fuels, the IFC has been involved in other controversial projects such as a hydropower project that threatens to displace thousands of people in Mozambique.

The post World Bank’s private sector arm to stop supporting new coal   appeared first on Climate Home News.

The resolution passed today, led by Costa Rica, the Maldives, Morocco, Slovenia, and Switzerland, reaffirms the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and called on states to protect environmental defenders trying to uphold it. It also calls on UN treaty bodies to promote its implementation.

John Knox, professor of international law at Wake Forest University School of Law and the UN’s former special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, said it marks a turning point from recognising the right “to actually starting to take steps to implement it”.

“It identifies concrete steps to make this right a reality, beginning with protecting environmental defenders and communities facing the deadly impacts of the ongoing triple planetary crisis,” agreed Sébastien Duyck, human rights and climate campaign manager at the Center for International Environmental Law.

International Court of Justice to advise states on climate duties: ‘A turning point for climate justice’

The US had been expected to withdraw its support for the resolution at the last hurdle and to call on others to join it, which would have resulted in a vote. However, it changed its mind following late-night negotiations.

Duyck said the US likely realised that isolating itself on “such an important resolution” would be diplomatically and publicly untenable. “Perhaps they had underestimated previously the resolve of other states but also civil society to see progress on the issue.”

Disassociating from consensus

In a statement to the council today, US ambassador Michèle Taylor, said her nation had “long recognised” the relationship between human rights and environmental protection and continued to support development of a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment “in a manner that is consistent with international law”.

But she said it would “disassociate from consensus” on the subject because it has “significant concerns” about the resolution getting “ahead of the proper development of such a right”.

The Human Rights Council, made up of 47 member states elected by the General Assembly, has long acknowledged a link between climate change and human rights, with frontline nations carefully building a broad coalition of support on the subject.

The US is currently a member, but has not always been and has accused the institution of bias on a number of previous occasions.

Insurer quits climate alliance, citing legal fears

In 2017, it agreed to support a resolution calling for the protection of human rights from the impacts of climate change following intensive but constructive negotiations over the wording led by Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Four years later the council recognised access to a healthy and sustainable environment as a universal right, followed in July 2022 by a similar landmark resolution by the whole UN General Assembly.

The US was one of several states – alongside the UK – to initially oppose this. But, unlike China, India, Japan and Russia all of which abstained, it ultimately supported the decision – a move described by academics as a “striking exception” to its long-standing resistance to recognise ‘new’ human rights.

However, the US caveated its approval by stating that there is “no legal relationship between a right as recognised under this resolution and existing international law” and said it “does not recognise any change in the current state of conventional or customary international law”.

Last week, the US also joined the whole UN in asking the International Court of Justice to advise on states’ legal obligations to tackle climate change.

But US delegate Nicholas Hill warned the general assembly that “launching a judicial process, especially given the broad scope of the questions, will likely accentuate disagreements and not be conducive to advancing our ongoing diplomatic and other processes”.

‘No legal relationship’

In its latest statement to the Human Rights Council, the US appeared to be trying to head off any suggestion of legal obligations at all.

“Unless and until there is a transparent process through which governments have consented to be bound by such a right, a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment has not yet been established as a matter of customary international law,” said Taylor.

She added that treaty law “does not yet provide for such a right” and “there is no legal relationship between such a right and existing international law”.

The US has suggested creating an intergovernmental working group to discuss this, but has had little support from other nations.

“I think the United States is out of step with the other countries of the world in suggesting that the right to a healthy environment is not binding as a matter of treaty law or related to other rights that are binding as a general matter,” said Knox.

“That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily binding on the United States, but it is binding on states that have accepted it; most countries in the world have done so.”

The US was not the only country with concerns about the latest resolution, with the UK, Australia, China and India also voicing some degree of doubt. Russia tried to table a number of amendments, but is no longer a member of the Human Rights Council so was not successful.

Work to be done

Lucy McKernan, deputy director for the UN at Human Rights Watch’s office in Geneva, pointed out that these are all countries that do not recognise the right to a healthy environment in domestic law.

“They’re worried about the idea that… if there is a sort of a recognition at the international level, these rights might then be justiciable at the national level and national courts,” said McKernan.

The resolution, in particular, suggests the right to a healthy environment should be part of the universal periodic review of all UN nations’ human rights records.

McKernan said there was a tension between countries that insist these statements are simply political declarations and those that are trying to evolve the law via UN-level resolutions.

“Even though we have the recognition of the right by two significant bodies there’s still work to be done to ensure all states are moving forward together on this.”

David R Boyd, current UN special rapporteur on human rights and environment, said the last-minute change of heart by the US “avoided a colossal embarrassment”.

“Going forward I really hope that the US will join the overwhelming majority of states that not only support the recognition of this right but are willing to make the transformative changes needed to ensure it is enjoyed by billions of people currently suffering the adverse impacts of the planetary environmental crisis.”

This article was amended to add additional comments from David R Boyd

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The two lawsuits, heard today in Strasbourg, accuse the governments of France and Switzerland of breaching the human rights of their citizens by not doing enough to cut national emissions.

It is the first time climate change has come before the European Court of Human Rights, but is unlikely to be the last.

The lawsuits were filed by a former French mayor and a group of Swiss seniors, all of whom argue that their governments have breached their rights to life and to respect for private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The judgements could set a “pivotal” precedent for climate action, campaigners told Climate Home News, as they could make states take more ambitious climate action as part of their human rights obligations.

International Court of Justice to advise states on climate duties: ‘A turning point for climate justice’

Elders facing extreme heat

In the first case, an association of 2,038 older women called the KlimaSeniorinnen, as well as four individual applicants, argue that they are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

They presented evidence to the court that older people – particularly women – are more likely to die during heatwaves.

The group, which has an average age of 73, first petitioned the domestic courts for action but its case was dismissed.

Switzerland does not dispute that climate change is real and could affect human health. But the government’s legal team told the court its carbon emissions could not be directly linked to the health of older women and said they were not the only ones affected.

Furthermore, it maintained that its existing climate targets and policies are sufficient and said it should not be asked to do more if it was not technically and economically feasible.

Jessica Simor, a lawyer representing the KlimaSeniorinnen, said Switzerland itself had never assessed the fairness of its climate targets and policies, pointing to independent research by Climate Action Tracker that deems the country’s current efforts ‘insufficient’.

Vidéo : Audience Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz et autres c. Suisse https://t.co/fFghE94vTl | Video: Hearing Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and others v. Switzerland https://t.co/LQsm3aMC56#ECHR #CEDH #ECHRhearing pic.twitter.com/JSJASyX5em

— ECHR CEDH (@ECHR_CEDH) March 29, 2023

Switzerland currently aims to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 34% by 2030, which is lower than its formal international commitment of cutting “at least 50%” of all greenhouse gas emissions by the same date.

In 2021, the Swiss government held a referendum to align its domestic target with the more ambitious 50% cut, but voters rejected it.

Marc Willers, a barrister representing the KlimaSeniorinnen, told the court that blaming the referendum was “plainly a bad argument” and claimed Switzerland was responsible for its violations “irrespective of how they came about”.

The KlimaSeniorinnen want Switzerland to cut its domestic emissions by above 60% below 1990 levels by 2030, which they say is more in line with similar nations and the EU itself.

Willers said Switzerland’s approach undermined global trust and efforts to combat climate change. If a nation as rich and technologically advanced as Switzerland does not do its fair share, he argued, “what hope is there that other countries will step up?”

Climate victim?

In the second lawsuit, against the government of France, the former mayor of the commune of Grande-Synthe argues that he is personally vulnerable because his home is at risk from flooding.

Damien Carême, now a green MEP for France, had also brought a domestic case against France to the country’s top administrative court. In 2021, the court ordered the government to act immediately to meet its climate commitments, or risk potential fines.

But Carême is challenging the French court’s assertion that he is not directly affected by the country’s failure to take sufficient action on climate change.

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The French government contends that Carême should not be considered a victim under the law and asked for the case to be struck out.

Diégo Colas, director of legal affairs at the French foreign ministry, told the court that France had recently enhanced its emission reduction measures and compliance with its objectives was already being scrutinised by the domestic courts.

New cases coming

The 17-judge panel will now consider its ruling, which is not expected until next year.

In the meantime, the court will hear a third climate case, filed by six Portuguese young people against 32 countries, including all EU member states, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, Ukraine and Turkey, which has been scheduled for the autumn.

The group, now aged between 11 and 23, claims that government inaction on climate change discriminates against young people and poses a tangible risk to life. It refers in particular to forest fires that killed more than one hundred people in Portugal in 2017 and which were worsened by climate change.

Gerry Liston, senior lawyer at Global Action Legal Network, which is supporting the Portuguese case, said the lawsuits gave the court “power to direct a major acceleration in European action on the climate crisis”.

Sébastien Duyck, human rights and climate campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, described the hearings as a “pivotal moment” in the fight against climate change and said the resulting judgments would be carefully monitored by governments and civil society organisations around the world.

“They have the potential to set an influential legal precedent that would further confirm that states must take more adequate action against climate change as a matter of their human rights obligations,” said Duyck.

If the court finds human rights have been breached, it could open the floodgates to similar litigation before the European Court of Human Rights and national courts in all member states of the Council of Europe, said Annalisa Savaresi, associate professor in international environmental law at the University of Eastern Finland.

NOTE: Expenses for attending the court hearing were supported by a grant from the Foundation for International Law for the Environment

The post European court hears landmark lawsuits that could shape climate policy appeared first on Climate Home News.

At a general assembly meeting in New York today, governments approved a resolution recognising the huge challenge of climate change and calling on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to provide an advisory opinion on how it intersects with international law.

Ishmael Kalsakau, prime minister of Vanuatu, which led the initiative alongside a group of young people, called the decision “a win for climate justice of epic proportions”.

The Pacific island nation is currently in a national state of emergency after two tropical cyclones devastated the island in the space of just a week.

‘A turning point’

An advisory opinion from the ICJ interprets existing international law rather than creating new legal obligations, and it is not legally binding. But it is highly influential.

Nilufer Oral, a member of the UN International Law Commission and director of the National University of Singapore’s Centre for International Law, said the opinion would “provide clarity and guidance on the legal obligations of states when it comes to climate change, and the legal consequences of failing to act”.

Among other things, it will consider states’ human rights responsibilities and their intergenerational duties.

The resolution marks “a turning point in the pursuit of climate justice,” said Caio Borges, law and climate coordinator at Brazil’’s Institute for Climate and Society.

“The court’s opinion will undoubtedly shape the trajectory of future international climate negotiations and climate litigation at both domestic and international levels,” Borges added.

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Vanuatu’s climate change minister Ralph Regenvanu said there had been “overwhelming global support” for the resolution, which was co-sponsored by the vast majority of UN states. But it took four years to get to this point.

Cynthia Houniuhi was in her final year of law school at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji campus, doing a course on international environmental law, when her classmates began discussing ways of promoting climate justice. One of the ideas on their list was seeking an advisory opinion from the ICJ.

“To be honest, at first I was very hesitant when this idea was being discussed,” said Houniuhi. “I mean, let’s be real here; it was too ambitious. How can a small group of students from the Pacific region convince the majority of the UN members to support this initiative?”

What moved her, in the end, was seeing communities already doing their best to adapt to climate impacts, and watching the advocacy efforts of civil society and her government.

BREAKING: The UN General Assembly has passed by consensus the resolution calling for an ICJ advisory opinion on climate change and human rights pic.twitter.com/XgTF1M4el3

— Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (@pisfcc) March 29, 2023

“What is the use of learning all this knowledge if it’s not for our people to fight the single greatest threat to their security?” she asked herself. “This was an opportunity to do something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our fears.”

Houniuhi was one of 27 students to form Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, who petitioned their teachers and lecturers about the idea, and crowdfunded 80 Fijian dollars to pay for a banner.

With growing support, they approached the Vanuatu government, which welcomed the idea and galvanised a core group of 18 countries. Houniuhi, who is now studying for a masters in environmental law at Sydney University, said the support shown her group has been “overwhelming”.

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Getting the explicit support of so many nations was the result of a huge diplomatic effort around the world, said ambassador Odo Tevi, Vanuatu’s permanent representative to the UN.

The resulting opinion will undoubtedly be used as a key piece of evidence in the growing number of climate lawsuits against domestic governments. Earlier today, for example, the European Court of Human Rights heard its first two climate cases against Switzerland and France.

But those behind the initiative made a concerted effort to avoid laying blame on states. Oral said the aim should not be to sue states, noting that previous advisory opinions from the ICJ have not sparked a swathe of legal actions.

Experts say it could encourage reviews of national climate plans, and push states to look hard at their domestic targets, aiming for stronger policies to cut emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

“It’s really being able to give… that extra legal incentive for states to understand that they have to take action now. We know from the most recent IPCC report, they have very little time,” said Oral.

Vanuatu took a long look at its own international obligations and last year submitted a more ambitious NDC , which included over 140 commitments on mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. “This is exactly the kind of outcome we hoped for from the ICJ’s advisory opinion,” said Regenvanu.

Regenvanu said states might also use the opinion to negotiate a complementary legal instrument like a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty; an international campaign for such a treaty is rapidly building with the forthright support of Pacific island nations. Or it could add fuel to efforts to add the crime of ecocide to the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute.

Complementing loss and damage

The ICJ has not been specifically asked to provide an opinion on the highly politicised issue of loss and damage, although the resolution emphasises the urgency of “averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with those effects in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to these effects”.

But Regenvanu said it would complement efforts to roll-out loss and damage finance and might affect rules around it are interpreted.

Speaking at the Economist Impact’s sustainability week today, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres said the opinion would help the UN and member states take “the bolder and stronger climate action that our world so desperately needs”.

The court will organise hearings over the next few months, and an advisory opinion will be issued between six and 12 months later.

Pacific island students and other young people are writing a handbook explaining how young people and civil society organisations can contribute to the process, which will be published soon.

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As governments met in Switzerland to approve the report, a group led by Saudi Arabia pushed for an emphasis on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere through carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

But a group of mainly European nations pushed for the report to emphasise the role of wind and solar power in fighting climate change and note how much cheaper it has got recently.

Government influence

The IPCC synthesis report summarises the latest scientific knowledge on climate change.

Alongside the full report, the IPCC publishes a shorter document called the “summary for policy-makers” which is approved by governments at a week-long session in the Swiss city of Interlaken.

Nations fight to be called climate vulnerable in IPCC report

Although the scientists who wrote the report are in the room to push back, government negotiators regularly try to lobby for the inclusion of their priorities in the text. The report needs to be approved line-by-line.

Cost-effectiveness

A think tank called IISD is the only organisation allowed to report on the talks.

According to their summary, a group of European nations wanted the report to say that solar and wind electricity “is now cheaper than energy from fossil fuels in many regions”.

Germany said this sentence was of “paramount” importance but, according to IISD, Saudi Arabia “strongly opposed inclusion of the sentence”.

IPCC highlights rich nations’ failure to help developing world adapt to climate change

The Bahamas’ representative called for the report to say specifically that CCS technology, unlike wind and solar, is not getting cheaper.

But Saudi Arabia pushed back, saying that CCS and CDR are “in fact unavoidable”.

The paragraph they were debating ended up referring to “sustained decreases” in the cost of solar, wind and batteries without mentioning CCS or CDR.

Carbon capture

While CDR sucks carbon out of the general atmosphere, CCS sucks it out of a polluting source like a power plant’s smoke-stack.

Lili Fuhr, from the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home that CCS was the “first line of defence” for the fossil fuel economy.

Saudi Arabia has a history of promoting CCS in IPCC reports and in UN climate talks.

In April 2022, it successfully lobbied for a stronger emphasis on CCS in the IPCC’s report on solutions to climate change.

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When Germany tried to reduce the emphasis on CCS in one paragraph and called for the inclusion of more information on the limits of the technology, Saudi Arabia pushed back.

According to IISD, the oil-reliant nation said “any additional context on CCS should include benefits”.

In an extensive footnote, the final report notes that implementation of CCS currently faces “technological, economic, institutional, ecological-environmental and socio-cultural barriers”.

It describes CCS as a “mature technology” for gas processing and enhanced oil recovery, but less so in the power, cement and chemicals sectors “where it is a critical mitigation option”.

The report says CCS deployment should be sped up to help the world limit global warming to 1.5-2C.

Carbon removal role

CDR, which is less linked to high-carbon industry and fossil fuels than CCS, was supported by a broader range of countries.

IISD reports that France and Germany “cautioned that CDR deployment at scale is unproven and risky” and “asked for more detail on their limits and risks”. Mexico, Kenya and Bolivia also raised concerns about CDR’s role.

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But Saudi Arabia and China fought to have the document describe the technology as necessary to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than humans are emitting.

Switzerland, which hosts CDR company Climeworks, argued that CDR may be required “for hard to reduce emissions”.

Japan, New Zealand and the Netherlands also defended the report’s emphasis on the role of CDR technology.

The final report says “CDR will be necessary to achieve net-negative Co2 emissions”.

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Duncan Mclaren is a climate intervention fellow at University College Los Angeles who has criticised previous reports for skirting over the limitations of CDR.

He said this report treats it better. But he said it still gives too great a sense of possibility of the future role of CDR, “even as it very clearly calls for accelerated, immediate emissions cuts”.

The post Governments battle over carbon removal and renewables in IPCC report appeared first on Climate Home News.

Representatives of countries from an array of different regions, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and small island states, pushed to be singled out as particularly vulnerable.

Tanzania and Timor-Leste asked that the world’s poorest countries, known as least developed countries (LDCs), be added to a list of impacted communities, according to a report of the meeting by think-tank IISD.

Africa and small island developing states (Sids) were nearly cut out of one section on vulnerabilities, the IISD report says, and replaced by a reference to “developing and least developed countries”.

UN tells governments to ‘fast forward’ net zero targets

But there was a strong push from many delegates to retain them, particularly as most of those regions’ representatives had already left the talks to approve the report, as they had to catch flights home from Switzerland.

Mexico and Chile wanted to add Latin America to the list of regions that are particularly vulnerable while India wanted Asia included, according to IISD’s report.

The final document lists Africa, Sids, LDCs, Central and South America, Asia and the Arctic as particularly vulnerable.

The benefits of vulnerability

What makes some communities more vulnerable than others is not just physical factors like sea level rise but also social factors like poverty, governance, building standards and infrastructure.

This makes naming specific parts of the world as vulnerable a politically sensitive topic.

The inclusion of the Arctic as one of the most climate vulnerable places in the world, for example, was significant because it came just days after the US approved the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s north slope.

There are various reasons for wanting to be named as vulnerable, including global recognition and better access to climate finance.

Last year’s Cop27 climate talks agreed that a new fund for climate victims should be targeted at countries who are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change.

Loss and damage committee ready to start talks following Asian nominations

Samoan ambassador Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr. Pa’olelei Luteru, who chairs the alliance of small island states (Aosis), said making specific note of the risks to these islands was “imperative in the context of climate justice”.

“The fact is that we are already facing devastating losses and damages of great magnitude, and funds we should be investing into sustainable development initiatives must be diverted to help us cope with climate change impacts,” he said.

IPCC highlights rich nations’ failure to help developing world adapt to climate change

But recognising growing impacts also gives states the responsibility of acting on them.

Jörn Birkmann researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and was coordinating lead author of one of the underlying IPCC reports.

He told Climate Home: “It seems like governments fear that if their country is not mentioned, they could receive less support (e.g. global adaptation funds),”

He added: “Or vice versa; if they are mentioned it might lead to a stigmatisation or might raise questions about the role of governance.”

Measuring vulnerability

Birkmann said studies on human vulnerability all point to the same global hotspots, particularly Africa.

But even though many governments acknowledge this, there are significant tensions when measuring and mapping human vulnerability.

“It is still difficult in [a summary for policymakers report] to name specific global regions that are more vulnerable than others,” he said.

“The synthesis report is mentioning some regions, but it seems to be much easier for governments to agree on general sentences, rather than pointing to areas or countries where such deficits are evident.”

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Although it misses a lot of nuance about who is vulnerable, Birkmann welcomes the fact that the report recognises global hotspots, “since the success of adaptation and resilience building also depends on the starting point communities and countries have”.

He believes adaptation strategies should not just focus on physical phenomena and climatic hazards such as storms, but also on structures and interventions that reduce human vulnerability, such as poverty reduction, education or fighting corruption – the latter being “a very controversial topic in the political arena”.

Furthermore, when new financial mechanisms for loss and damage agreed at Cop27 are being put into practice, he said it would be helpful to define adaptation goals, not just those on emission reduction.

“These goals should also take into account the very different starting points of regions/countries/communities to build resilience,” he said.” The level of human vulnerability might be such a benchmark of the different starting points.”

The post Nations fight to be called climate vulnerable in IPCC report appeared first on Climate Home News.

The multi-million-dollar finance packages vary for each country, from $183 million for Barbados to $1.4 billion for Bangladesh, and recipients have different ideas of how they will spend the money.

The RST fund, set up last year, was aimed at redistributing affordable finance from rich to poorer countries, along with policy support to manage macro-economic climate risks. The IMF believes it can also catalyse essential private sector financing to boost climate action and to decarbonise financial markets.

Experts hailed the move as “pivotal” in helping vulnerable nations address the triple crises of debt, Covid and climate change, and said it could fill a gap in climate finance architecture.

Commenting on Jamaica’s $764 million agreement, Bo Li, deputy managing director and acting chair of the IMF board, said the funding would create incentives to “switch to renewables, reduce energy consumption, develop green financial instruments, and require proper management of climate risks in the financial sector”.

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But there was concern that the strings attached would exclude many nations in need. Countries need to show they can repay the loan to the IMF, present a package of policy measures for how they would use the support, such as carbon-cutting and adaptation measures, and already have a programme of policy reforms with the IMF.

‘Major accomplishment’

Ronan Palmer, clean economy director for think-tank E3G, took “great heart” from the fact that RST money had so far been approved for a diverse range of countries, including fossil producers such as Barbados, and countries at significant physical risk from climate change such as Bangladesh.

“This shows that the trust does have capacity to reach across the issues in climate,” he said.

He said Jamaica’s loan could help protect it against climate risk “so vital in a country at increasing risk of Caribbean storms” and its economy from the risks of transition.

“A small economy like Jamaica will be very exposed to the kind of price and exchange rate pressures that could come as the world moves on from fossil fuels, or changes production patterns, [for example] in the shift to EVs from internal combustion engines.” 

John Hicklin, non-resident fellow of the Center for Global Development and a former senior IMF official, wrote in a blog that getting this far was a “major accomplishment”.

But he said the conditions built into the loans would not necessarily help in their aim of helping countries become more resilient to external shocks and grow sustainably.

Austerity measures

Anaitee Mills, a sustainable development expert who helped develop Jamaica’s disaster risk financing policy, said the approval of that policy was one of the milestones it had to achieve to be able to draw money from the RST.

Other conditions, such as liberalising domestic power sectors or imposing strict public spending austerity measures, are more problematic.

Lara Merling, senior policy advisor at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, said the RST does not resolve existing structural problems with IMF funding. According to its own report, only about a third of IMF programmes are ever completed.

“All of these programmes are fiscal consolidation, austerity-based programmes,” said Merling. “So it’s not exactly the type of programme that creates an environment that’s favourable to more investment and climate investment.”

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The IMF hoped to lend $30 billion initially through the RST, increasing to $50 billion in the medium term. The first five packages approve about $3.4 billion of loans.

As of the end of February, however, no money had yet been disbursed, because it is contingent on the completion of other IMF programmes.

One expert told Climate Home News there had been low uptake for the RST so far because it had not been designed with the interests of the countries that really need it. It is not available to those without existing IMF programmes and the quota system means smaller countries have little to gain.

Furthermore, it can add to the underlying debt burden. This, the IMF itself recognises, exacerbates a country’s vulnerability to climate impacts because “debt problems reduce fiscal space for climate mitigation and adaptation investments”.

‘Vicious cycle’

A recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report warns against “a vicious cycle of perpetual vulnerabilities and economic stagnation” across indebted economies on the front lines of climate change, saying the two issues have to be tackled in tandem.

Merling said it was not clear how the fund would be evaluated in terms of climate resilience.

She noted that some countries have detailed ideas of how they will spend the money. Costa Rica, for example, plans to issue guidelines for climate budget tagging so that it can better integrate climate risks into its fiscal planning.

By comparison, Rwanda and Barbados refer to vaguer World Bank country climate development recommendations.

“No one will be upset about the idea of having cheaper long-term loans and climate is macro critical,” said Merling. “But how are they actually going to follow this type of conditionality and know if it really helping or not?”

Building global resilience

Critics also note that the sums involved are a drop in the ocean when compared to the huge amount required to build global resilience. UNEP estimates $340 billion will be needed every year for adaptation, but only about 7% of climate finance flows are currently spent in that direction.

Merling believes it is not enough for the IMF to sideline climate into one discrete fund, adding that all economic policy measures must allow countries to invest in climate resilience and emissions reductions.

“You can’t really have this little climate fund on the side and then in your main projects and operations just ignore climate or do things that leave countries behind from being able to finance their transition,” she said.

Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a liberal Washington-based think tank, has a bolder suggestion to reform the IMF; give more decision-making powers to countries most affected by climate change and those that contributed least to the problem.

The post IMF approves first batch of climate resilience loans appeared first on Climate Home News.

Seo-kyung is now a 21-year-old adult but the court has still not made any decisions about the case. “As individuals, there is not much we can do that is different from before,” she told a press conference on Monday. “I earnestly hope that the constitutional court can play a role while there is still something that can be done.”

In the three years since the lawsuit was filed, the Korean government and the national assembly have announced a target to be carbon neutral by 2050, passed a climate change law and strengthened the country’s nationally determined contribution under the UNFCCC.

The government is currently working on its first detailed carbon neutrality strategy, as required by the legislation, which is expected to be published at the end of the month.

Vanuatu gathers support for UN climate justice statement

But campaigners are not satisfied. Climate Action Tracker deems the country’s progress “highly insufficient”, saying it lacks the necessary speed and stringency needed to be compatible with Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature limit.

Most of Korea’s emissions come from the energy sector, which is highly dependent on fossil fuels for electricity generation. In 2021, the country was the third largest gas importer in the world, behind China and Japan.

Climate lawsuits

Youth4Climate’s petition in 2020 argued that the Korean government wasn’t doing enough to curb rising global temperatures and to protect their basic constitutional rights, including the right to life and pursuit of happiness, from the effects of climate change.

The group’s lawyers have sent ten further submissions to the constitutional court since, adding new information to their case. Among other things, they drew the court’s attention to landmark rulings in the Netherlands, Ireland, France, and Germany, all of which have recognised government responsibility to address climate change.

Yoon Se-jong, a lawyer for Plan 1.5 and one of the main legal representatives for the Youth4ClimateAction case, says German justices visited their Korean counterparts last November and climate litigation was one of the key topics under discussion.

A further three climate lawsuits have also been filed challenging the constitutionality of the government’s emission-cutting commitments. One, submitted last year, was fronted by a group of small children and what was then a 20-week-old foetus.

Swift ruling

Becoming increasingly frustrated at the court’s silence, Youth4ClimateAction campaigners delivered a letter earlier this week urging it to make a “swift ruling”, which was signed by more than 200 legal professionals from Korea and abroad.

Signatories included Baek Bum-seok, professor at Kyung Hee University and a UN Human Rights Council advisory member, and So Byung-cheon, president of the Korean Environmental Law Association and a professor at Ajou University Law School.

Legal professionals from France, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Nepal also voiced their support, including Roda Verheyen, a lawyer involved in Germany’s landmark climate lawsuit.

Sejong said the delay was understandable given the gravity of the issue and the implications the court’s decision could have on Korean policy and law. “But what we are really emphasising is that every month and year we lose is a lost opportunity for litigation that we really, really need. Leaving this question to the political process is not going to be enough.”

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Youth climate campaigners filing the case who had initially been buoyed up by the idea of taking legal action were despondent at the press conference.

“When I first learned about the enormous problem of climate change, I felt that I had to do something, and I participated in the climate lawsuit with the hope of making a practical change,” said Oh Min-seo, a 17-year-old from Chuncheon city.

“However, over the past three years, as I witnessed people dying in unprecedented floods and the Soyang River drying up due to the worst drought, my fears about climate change became more tangible, and the feeling of powerlessness has been accumulating in my heart because politics and law don’t seem to exist for our benefit.”

Their legal team seems more optimistic. Sejong noted that abortion was only decriminalised in Korea two years ago only after the constitutional court deemed it was infringing people’s rights.

‘Fundamental obligation’

In December, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea said the government had a “fundamental obligation” to protect human rights from the climate crisis and must actively respond to it. “It is necessary to set higher national greenhouse gas reduction targets and also to set reduction obligations for the post-2030 period to protect the basic rights of future generations,” it concluded.

Lucy Maxwell, co-representative of the Climate Litigation Network, noted that the lawsuit was the first of its kind in East Asia and said it offers “a really important opportunity to clarify the governmental obligations to protect constitutional rights in the face of the climate crisis”.

She said affected communities and even courts in other countries would be looking to the court for a judgment.

The post Lawyers and activists build pressure on Korean court to rule on climate appeared first on Climate Home News.

The EU Council approved a common position on climate and energy diplomacy, which sets out the bloc’s priorities ahead of the Cop28 summit.

Member states agreed to “systematically promote and call for a global move towards energy systems free of unabated fossil fuels well ahead of 2050” but recognised “a transitional role for natural gas”.

The text stresses that “a dependence on fossil fuels leaves countries vulnerable to market volatility and geopolitical risk” and that climate neutrality “will require the global phase-out of unabated fossil fuels”.

It repeats a Cop26 commitment to “close the book” on unabated coal power and calls for an immediate end to international financing for coal.  This, however, does not extend to ending financing for overseas oil and gas – despite a pledge to do so signed by 10 EU countries in Glasgow.

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Alex Scott, who leads think tank E3G’s climate diplomacy work, told Climate Home News the agreement formalises the position the EU adopted at the Cop27 talks in Egypt but left room for improvement. 

The bloc was among a coalition of more than 80 countries that took up a call by India to extend Cop26’s groundbreaking call to phase down coal to other fossil fuels. But faced with opposition from oil and gas producers, Egypt didn’t include the proposal in the final text.

The issue is set to dominate discussions at Cop28 in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers.

The pledge to actively pursue a global fossil fuel phase out  “is a step up in EU climate diplomacy,” Scott said. But the timeline “needs to be clearer and sooner to set the direction” and the term “unabated” needs to be defined to avoid loopholes, she added.

China strengthens role of courts in meeting carbon targets

Sven Harmeling, a campaigner at CAN Europe, said the deal “sends an important signal that the EU is speaking out on the need to move away from fossil fuels”.

“What is of course missing is a clearer signal by the EU that it needs to be quicker than ‘well ahead of 2050’ because of its historic emissions and its capacity to decarbonise,” he said.

He added that the focus on coal should not distract from the need to wind down oil and gas production.

Nuclear divisions

The document, initially expected in February, was delayed because of a dispute over the role of nuclear-derived hydrogen in meeting carbon targets. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine compelled many EU countries to reconsider their long-standing opposition to nuclear power as they seek alternatives to Russian energy imports. 

France, which relies heavily on nuclear energy, argues that nuclear-made hydrogen should be considered green. Germany and Spain fear this would distract from efforts to boost renewables. 

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On Thursday, an advisor to German chancellor Olaf Schulz, told an event in Paris that Berlin was not opposed to hydrogen made from nuclear energy and would import it from France. 

The final text doesn’t specify the type of hydrogen the union will back. But countries agreed to “promote the deployment of safe and sustainable low-carbon technologies” – language which usually refers to nuclear energy.

Alternative gas supplies

The EU said it remains steadfast to its commitment to phase out its dependency from Russian fossil fuels “as soon as possible”.

Eurostat figures show coal imports fell from 45% in 2021 to 22% in 2022, and gas from 36% to 21%.  Ministers said volumes have continued to decline in recent months. 

While countries are still seeking to diversify their gas supplies, ministers agreed there was “no need for a one-to-one replacement of former Russian natural gas import volumes” and warned against creating “fossil fuel lock-ins and stranded assets”.  

Recent analysis by Climate Action Tracker found that the global dash for gas that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is threatening the world’s ability to keep global temperature rise to 1.5C.

Call for cooperation

At a time of deepening geopolitical tensions, the EU emphasised the need for cooperation between nations.

In addition to the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, the bloc wants to increase cooperation with its coal-reliant neighbours, including in the Western Balkans, and with other developing countries with high energy-related emissions.

The emphasis on cooperation comes as the EU is scrambling to respond to the US Inflation Reduction Act – a $370bn green subsidy package with generous climate incentives for products “made in America”. Brussels is concerned the incentives will encourage companies to relocate production to the US.

The post EU agrees diplomatic push for fossil fuel phase out ahead of Cop28 appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a significant legal intervention, the Supreme People’s Court issued new guidelines that say judges should balance development and corporate emission reduction when ruling on lawsuits.

The 24-article document gives courts across China the green light to hear cases related to energy conservation and emission reduction, low-carbon technology, carbon trading and green finance, and to promote climate change mitigation and adaptation.

It sets out 11 examples of climate-related lawsuits that judges might encounter, including contractual issues, implementation of carbon emission quotas, air pollution liability and deforestation. The document says courts should focus on the carbon trading market, in particular, which has been the subject of a wide variety of legal disputes in recent years.

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Liu Zhumei, chief environmental judge at the Supreme People’s Court adjudication tribunal for environment and resources, told media that the new guidelines are a key step to implementing environmental protection pledges in the report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

This promised to boost low-carbon industries and improve the system for market-based allocation of resources, as well as reduce environmental harms.

“The guideline is also the first judicial document made by the top court to regulate case handling on the carbon peak and carbon,” she added.

‘Dual carbon’ goals

President Xi Jinping recently reaffirmed a pledge that China would peak its carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and be carbon neutral before 2060, known as the “dual carbon” goals.

But experts say decarbonising the country will be a major challenge.

A recent report by Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found permit approval, construction and new project announcements for coal in China accelerated “dramatically” last year, with new permits reaching the highest level since 2015. Coal power capacity starting construction in China was six times bigger than all the rest of the world combined.

Central government appears to be supportive of the new projects, the report finds, with the energy regulator aiming to have 165GW of coal power construction starting in 2022-23. Chinese provinces too are expected to focus their energies on a mix of both coal and renewable power in the coming year.

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China signalled the continued importance of coal to its domestic energy security in a government work report presented at the beginning of the National People’s Congress annual meeting on Sunday.

However, minister of ecology and environment Huang Runqiu also recently said the development of industries with high energy consumption and emissions, projects in areas with fragile ecosystems and the transfer of projects with high emissions from eastern China to the west of the country would be “highly restricted”, according to China Daily.

Whether the judiciary can temper the country’s coal drive remains to be seen.

Dimitri de Boer, Asia regional director of programmes for environmental law NGO ClientEarth, told Climate Home that the involvement of courts in implementing the dual carbon goals would likely “increase the level of scrutiny on newly proposed high emissions projects, and help to ensure a smooth low-carbon energy transition”.

Proactive role

Climate litigation has been difficult in China because, unlike many other countries, it does not have specific legislation to combat climate change. But the judiciary has signalled a willingness to engage with the issue.

The 2021 Kunming Declaration called on courts to play a proactive role in tackling climate change and encouraged greater coordination of domestic and foreign rule of law.

A judgment on cryptocurrency mining last year was the first time a ruling of final effect explicitly mentioned China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, and experts think it is unlikely to be the last.

Lu Xu, senior lecturer in property law at Lancaster University’s law school, said the new guidelines largely summarised what the judicial system in China was already doing but do send a strong signal to the lower courts.

“Guidelines are not law,” he said. “But lower courts will understandably pay attention to all of them. In turn this will create pressure on litigants to accept or accommodate the values of the guidelines, as lower courts would not want to decide cases in blatant defiance to them.”

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The taxonomy report, produced by Canada’s Sustainable Finance Action Council (SFAC) and published today by the Department of Finance, approves investment in two different categories for activities considered consistent with meeting the country’s climate targets.

A ‘green’ label is awarded to activities that emit little or no carbon, such as solar and wind, or activities that enable them, such as hydrogen pipelines.

Unlike the EU’s taxonomy, which was formalised last year, Canada does not give a green investment label to nuclear and gas. Those definitions opened the EU up to a swathe of ongoing legal challenges by NGOs and European governments.

Canada’s is also one of the first taxonomies in the world to set criteria for ‘transition’ activities, which aim to decarbonise emission-intensive activities.

The document excludes investment in new coal, oil and gas projects, but it does potentially include carbon capture and storage (CCS) upgrades to oil sand production, concrete production with sequestration, blue hydrogen production and electrification of steelmaking.

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The report says all investment activities need to be consistent with Canada’s target to be net zero by 2050 and must address scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

Some of its authors say it will reduce uncertainty in the market and fill a $115-billion-per-year spending shortfall needed to meet the country’s climate goal.

“It’s been great to see the 25 financial institutions sign on and endorse this framework,” said Jonathan Arnold, research lead for clean growth at the Canadian Climate Institute who provided advice on climate science for the taxonomy.

‘Endorsement for greenwashing’

But Adam Scott, director of Canadian non-profit Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health, said some of the transition activities listed do not have a “credible” decarbonisation route.

“Steel and cement and fertiliser and other hard-to-decarbonise industries will need continued finance to make a transition, but there’s a credible argument that they have a pathway or they could reach their emissions through technology.

“If you continue to finance oil and gas, though, you’re actually delaying the transition. You’re essentially saying: ‘We’re going to bet against electrification by making marginal emissions reductions which have no path to zero’.”

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Julie Segal, climate finance senior manager at Environmental Defence, said the taxonomy gives a helping hand to Canada’s oil sands and promotes the dubious use of methane-derived blue hydrogen, which scientists say is potentially dirtier than burning fossil gas.

The taxonomy could also have international implications. Segal said it would weaken the OECD’s definition of transition, which rules out emissions-intensive lock-in. And, given the size of Canada’s pension funds, could muddy the waters globally as an “endorsement for greenwashing”.

Arnold recognised these concerns, and said the transition label should not lead to a lock-in of emissions or extend the fossil fuel industry’s social licence. “At the end of the day, [you want to] have a framework that’s credible and scientifically robust.”

He contended that there is no blanket approval for particular activities, saying investment decisions on projects will be made on an individual basis. There are strict criteria for meeting these, he added, although the thresholds have not yet been set.

‘Differences of opinion’

The taxonomy has been in development for several years, led initially by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), but hit a roadblock due to “fundamental differences of opinion”.

Scott said that project was aimed at legitimising Canada’s carbon-intensive resource industries and was “basically a private table with banks and other financial institutions” to draw up a voluntary taxonomy.

The federal government subsequently took over under the banner of the SFAC, but some groups fear it is still over-represented by the finance and resource sectors and did not allow civil society or climate experts to make meaningful contributions.

“We’ve been complaining since it was created that that’s self regulation,” said Scott. “Essentially, the industry is able to create its own rules through the SFAC and present them directly to the finance minister.”

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“The process for drafting this taxonomy has been much weaker than in the EU,” agreed Segal.

She said prime minister Justin Trudeau should be paying attention to this given his efforts to position Canada as a global climate leader.

Scott said the lack of consultation and transparency in developing the taxonomy meant the end result would lack legitimacy.

But Arnold noted that Canada had been “playing catch up” as one of the last wealthy countries to develop a taxonomy. “It’s a difficult balancing act between moving very quickly on this and and doing robust engagement and I think the process was largely successful in that regard.”

He said the process would now be taken over by a taxonomy council, led by regulators with civil society having more of a voice alongside the financial sector. That, he said, would work out the remaining details and hopefully address all the “valid concerns that have been raised”.

The post Canada sets out green investments guide amid complaints of industry capture appeared first on Climate Home News.

Of the 193 United Nations member states, 105 have now supported Vanuatu’s call to request that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) gives an advisory opinion on states’ legal obligation for climate action and the consequences of causing harm.

Nations large and small, including most of Europe, Australia, Canada, Vietnam, Colombia and Bangladesh, are now co-sponsoring the draft resolution, which must be put to the whole UN to approve.

Incredible effort by the #ICJAO4Climate Core Group () and UN member states, after we issued the L doc we had 105 co-sponsors! Appreciate the active engagement here at the UN during consultations, as well as Vanuatu’s diplomatic envoys around… https://t.co/H4WRaKbOpr pic.twitter.com/Nf2OTTID20

— Vanuatu UN (@VanuatuUN) March 1, 2023

Among the nations who have not yet backed the plan are big wealthy economies like the USA, Japan and South Korea, oil and gas producers like Saudi Arabia and big emerging economies like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and Russia.

Student project

It is significant milestone for the plan, which began as a class exercise by environmental law students at Vanuatu’s University of the South Pacific campus.

They put the idea to their foreign ministry, which gathered support from other island nations and has now built an international coalition.

Vanuatu said it had taken a “Herculean team effort” to reach this point, involving active engagement during consultations at the UN, diplomatic envoys around the world, and the advocacy civil society and youth groups.

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“Today countries from North America, Latin America, Africa, Northern Europe, Asia and the Pacific have come together to demonstrate that we all share the value of upholding the rule of international law”, said Vanuatu prime minister Ishmael Alatoi Kalsakau Maaukoro.

Vulnerable Vanuatu

Vanuatu, a small island nation in the Pacific, is particularly vulnerable to climate change and has long been at the forefront of efforts to fight it.

News that it had gathered international support for its ICJ resolution came as it was hit by a category 4 cyclone, with another possibly on its way,

“Vanuatu is out of time,” said Kalsakau. “We are doing all we can, yet losing this battle for which we are not responsible. There must be some accountability for the significant harm now being experienced by vulnerable people across the globe.”

Vanuatu expects many more states to confirm their support for the motion in the next few weeks, which may mean it can be adopted without a vote.

State responsibilities

Under the proposal, the ICJ would be tasked with interpreting what international human rights and environmental laws mean for states’ responsibility to act on the causes and consequences of climate change.

It has no enforcement powers and the exercise is not designed to win reparations for victims of climate disasters.

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But an ICJ opinion could inform climate lawsuits around the world and – Vanuatu hopes – strengthen vulnerable countries’ position in international negotiations.

Experts have argued that it could give prominence to the question of support for victims of climate disaster. Nations agreed to create a bespoke loss and damage fund at last year’s Cop27 climate talks and have recently set a date for crunch talks on the issue. 

Legal opinions

The ICJ is not the only international court asked to consider this subject.

Total escapes court censure over East African oil pipeline

The governments of Chile and Colombia have asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for an advisory opinion on state obligations on climate change, including the upholding of human rights and potential legal action, as well as legal clarity about shared responsibilities between the countries.

The Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, backed by Antigua and Barbuda and Tuvalu, is seeking an opinion from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea on what impact a key UN treaty governing maritime activities has on efforts to curb climate change.

The post Vanuatu gathers support for UN climate justice statement appeared first on Climate Home News.

A group of French and Ugandan campaigners argued in court that Total did not do enough to stop environmental and human rights problems in its East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (Eacop) and the associated Tilenga oilfield.

They asked the court to order the company’s vigilance plan, meant to address issues like environmental risks and community displacement, to be rewritten.

But judges decided they did not have the power to conduct the in-depth examination neccessary and said the campaigners’ legal case had changed too much since they first filed.

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A Total spokesperson defended its plan and highlighted the judgment’s ruling that it was “sufficiently detailed to not be considered as summary”.

But campaigners pointed out that judges did not rule on the details at the heart of the case. They denied their case had significantly changed and said they were considering an appeal.

Dickens Kamugisha, director of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (Afiego), described the decision as a “huge disappointment for the associations and communities affected in Uganda and Tanzania who had placed their hopes in French justice”. 

The judgment, published earlier today, was the first test of France’s novel corporate duty of vigilance law.

This requires all large businesses headquartered in France and international corporations with a significant presence there to set out clear measures to prevent human rights violations and environmental damage – even among their subsidiaries. 

Huge pipeline

In 2021, Total signed an agreement with Uganda and Tanzania to start building the $3.5 billion, 1,443-kilometre pipeline alongside the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Uganda National Oil Company. It will transport crude oil from the Tilenga oilfields being developed in north-western Uganda to a Tanzanian port on the Indian Ocean. 

The project has proved hugely controversial for its contribution to climate change and the impacts on people living along its path.  

Research by the US-based Climate Accountability Institute concluded it would emit 379 million tonnes of carbon over its 25-year lifespan – much more than laid out in the project’s environmental impact statements, which only account for the pipeline’s direct construction and operation. 

In a resolution last year, the European Parliament expressed “grave concern” about alleged human rights violations in Uganda and Tanzania, linked to the project. And Ugandan protestors concerned about its impact on the local environment, displacement of communities and the lack of benefits accruing to Uganda have accused police of brutality towards them. 

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Campaigners have put huge pressure on financial institutions and insurers not to support Eacop for environmental and human rights reasons, and many have publicly distanced themselves from the project.  

But with both the Ugandan and Tanzanian governments have given formal construction approval in the last few months, work on the pipeline is now expected to progress. 

Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni has accused Western critics of the project of hypocrisy because only a handful of nations have committed to ending their own fossil fuel production.

Other Eacop lawsuits are still pending. One was filed by Afiego in Uganda against the country’s environmental and petroleum authorities for approving Tilenga’s environmental and social impact assessment. And another brought by civil society organisations from Uganda and Tanzania is at the East African Court of Justice, although this has been bogged down by jurisdictional arguments.   

Duty of vigilance? 

Although the lawsuit against Eacop was unsuccessful, several other environmental lawsuits have been filed under the same French law. 

In 2020, a coalition of NGOs and local authorities filed a separate case against Total, claiming it is legally required to identify the risks resulting from its contribution to global warming and to take the necessary measures to reduce its emissions. The case was joined two years later by Paris, New York, the city of Poitiers and Amnesty International France. They recently asked the courts to order the multinational to take provisional measures such as the suspension of new oil and gas projects pending the court’s ruling. 

A coalition of Brazilian and Colombian indigenous peoples’ organisations and international NGOs have also sued supermarket chain Casino under the duty of vigilance law, accusing it not having taken the necessary measures to exclude beef linked to illegal deforestation, land grabbing and violations of indigenous peoples’ rights from its supply chain in Brazil and Colombia. 

Two months ago, food corporation Danone was sued by ClientEarth, Surfrider Foundation Europe and Zero Waste France, who accused it of not doing enough to reduce its plastic footprint and so failing to live up to its duties under the law. 

And in the last week alone, two duty of vigilance claims were filed against French bank BNP Paribas. Oxfam France, Friends of the Earth France and Notre Affaire à Tous are suing it for supporting companies that aggressively develop new oil and gas fields and infrastructure, while Notre Affaire à Tous and Brazilian NGO Comissão Pastoral da Terra have taken aim at its provision of financial services to companies they allege contribute to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.  

The post Total escapes court censure over East African oil pipeline appeared first on Climate Home News.

With flooding in Pakistan “likely” made worse by global warming and droughts in the Northern Hemisphere exacerbated by high temperatures, the idea that climate change is already having serious impacts around the world that can’t be adapted to is no longer up for debate. 

But who will pay for all this damage is much less certain.

The most vulnerable countries have been trying to get concrete action on loss and damage for three decades. Early proposals sought to set up a global fund, initially framed as “insurance”, that nations would pay into based on their contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions and their capacity to pay (see this timeline by Carbon Brief). 

Later attempts to use the language of compensation and liability proved to be a red line for wealthy nations that were historically high emitters. Experts put this partly down to a fear that it would expose countries to huge legal and financial risks, opening the floodgates for litigation.

Cop27 movers and shakers: Nine people shaping the climate agenda

When the Paris Agreement was finally thrashed out in 2015, it recognised the importance of “averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage” through the Warsaw International Mechanism but clearly states that this “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation”. 

At the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow last year, wealthy countries finally agreed a framework for the concept of loss and damage, but not how it would be funded or who should contribute to it. 

A trickle of donations

In September, Denmark became the first UN member to offer direct cash – $13.3 million – for loss and damage, following similar pledges by Scotland and the Belgian region of Wallonia. This is a tiny amount compared to the more than $500 billion in loss and damage that the Climate Vulnerable Forum and the V20 countries calculated that they had already suffered over the past two decades, but it was hoped the move would put pressure on other wealthy nations to follow suit. 

However, they are still proving extremely reticent. Human rights lawyer Harpreet Kaur Paul fears that early industrialisers will keep conversations about loss and damage at Cop27 “centred around information and knowledge sharing – or insurance approaches that do not work”. 

“The history of UNFCCC negotiations is riddled with wealthy countries escaping their responsibility to decarbonise nationally, help other countries do the same, as well as fund measures to adjust and adapt to climate impacts, and now increasingly to address loss and damage too,” she says. “Their refusal to engage on loss and damage is a continuation of that plagued history.” 

The issue of liability hasn’t gone away. “I cannot in good conscience put Canadian taxpayers at liability risks that could be limitless,” Canada’s environment minister Steven Guilbeault told the National Observer in May.

In numbers: The state of the climate ahead of Cop27

Not everyone buys this argument. In an article for E&E News last year, legal experts doubted that simply creating a loss and damage fund at the UNFCCC would increase liability for climate-related damages. Wealthy countries had that fear “because you knew that you will not keep your word of using international cooperation and solidarity as a way to address loss in time”, says a characteristically blunt Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network.

Frans Timmermans, the EU’s top climate envoy, has admitted that European citizens’ willingness to pay is limited “because their worries are linked to their own existence in this energy crisis, in this food crisis, in this inflation crisis”.

Floodgates of litigation

In fact, the floodgates of litigation feared by wealthy nations have now well and truly been opened – as a result of international inaction rather than action. The losses have mounted to a level “where people will become so desperate that the only thing that they can do now is go to the court”, says Singh.

Climate lawsuits have been most successful in getting governments to cut national emissions. Increasingly, many are seeking compensation from historic polluters.

Early cases seeking damages from fossil fuel companies for Hurricane Katrina and for rising sea levels affecting the Alaskan coastal village of Kivalina failed. A lawsuit against German energy firm RWE by Peruvian farmer Saúl Luciano Lliuya, whose home could be flooded by a melting glacier, is still being fiercely fought and could set an important precedent for corporate liability.

Small island states have set up a commission on climate and international law. Vanuatu is campaigning for an advisory opinion on human rights and climate change from the International Court of Justice. The LSE’s Grantham Research Institute expects these initiatives to move the debate “beyond the largely theoretical realm in which it has existed to date”. 

Compensation cases cover much of the same ground as loss and damage talks and can help vulnerable nations in their international negotiation strategies. 

They raise legal and financial risks for companies and financial institutions. They lend a voice to victims of the climate crisis. And they help unravel knotty questions about causality – once thought to be insurmountable – by using attribution science and shedding light on who is legally responsible for paying out.  

Who deserves compensation?

However, litigation poses some risks for wider loss and damage negotiations. 

For a start, a lawsuit lost in court could send the wider message that the victim doesn’t deserve compensation anywhere. 

Conversely, successful litigation for liability and compensation threatens to undermine the UNFCCC’s authority and legitimacy – and particularly the Warsaw International Mechanism as a political forum to address loss and damage – argues Patrick Toussaint, PhD candidate at the University of Eastern Finland Law School. “This rings especially true from the perspective of climate victims,” he wrote in law journal Reciel.

Comment: Climate finance isn’t reaching African communities – Cop27 must fix this injustice

And there’s another problem. When lawsuits started to be filed in the US against fossil fuel firms – cases that are now reaching a jurisdictional crunchpoint – some argued that compensation should not be going to relatively wealthy Global North governments but instead to communities who would suffer the brunt of climate impacts and could least afford to pay for them. 

“If these cases become part of the global climate narrative, what message do they convey about who is deserving of compensation and restoration from fossil fuel companies and other major emitters?” Dr Kim Bouwer asked in a 2020 paper in Transnational Environmental Law. 

“I still think that to some extent,” Bouwer, now assistant professor of law at Durham Law School, tells The Wave. 

She has “a great deal of sympathy for the point that international negotiations have not resulted in any money or any plan”. But while she thinks it would be a fantastic achievement if Peruvian farmer Lliuya wins his case against RWE “the proportion of damages are so small, it’s not going to be enough to properly ameliorate the risk”.

A ‘vital but imperfect’ tool

Paul believes climate litigation can help set the norm that climate losses and damages must be redressed by those who disproportionately increased the risk of the problem. 

“But it is piecemeal, expensive and takes time,” she argues. “A multilateral mechanism – which provides public grant funding – has the potential to operationalise responsibility and equity, and to be accessible by all those communities on the frontline of impacts.”

Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy programme at the Center for International Environmental Law, describes litigation as a “vital but imperfect mechanism for distributing climate justice”.

She says the prospect of liability adds much-needed pressure for more ambitious climate action and finance for loss and damage, but “the courthouse door is not equally accessible to all”. “That’s why legal action needs to be accompanied by advocacy for systemic change, policy measures and negotiated solutions that can ensure more far-reaching and equitable remedy.”

Rich nations deflect GCF climate finance burden to private sector

A new NGO called Systemic Justice, which seeks to radically transform how the law works for communities fighting for racial, social and economic justice, has stronger criticism. It describes the wider climate litigation movement as being dominated by “a white, middle-class and able-bodied perspective” and says many more cases could be built to tackle the climate crisis’s compounding injustices. 

Although they have similar aims, there is little overlap between the insular worlds of climate litigation and policy negotiations. Toussaint found a “significant disconnect between the two spheres”, noting that none of the loss and damage lawsuits he analysed referred to the UNFCCC’s Warsaw International Mechanism at all. 

“The only benefit for claimants to refer to the UNFCCC’s work on the topic would be to support the argument that the international policy response as it currently stands is woefully inadequate to protect those in harm’s way,” he concluded. 

Lived experiences 

Toussaint saw several ways in which those involved in climate litigation and policy can work better together, including targeted NGO advocacy, support for vulnerable country delegations to employ litigation as a negotiating strategy, and litigation networks that enhance the contribution of expert climate lawyers (like that set up by Urgenda). 

Meanwhile, Paul asks strategic litigants to speak to their lived experiences of how climate change is harming access to homes, land, livelihoods, water, health and healthcare, education and much more. Lawsuits brought by islanders, in particular, are starting to do this. 

Singh’s appeal to litigators is to eventually point towards a global mechanism under the UNFCCC. “Imagine you take a country to court and the court says you have to pay for the damage, but then they decide who to pay it to. I believe paying through a system which is fair and just would be so helpful.” 

But even an international agreement is unlikely to mean an end to lawsuits. Toussaint, now associate expert at the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, wrote in his paper that, even if new loss and damage funding were to be agreed at international level, “question marks remain as to how the funds would be distributed and accessed by affected communities locally”. 

He said people might still sue if they thought internationally agreed funds had not been properly allocated or in cases of non-economic losses that can’t easily be compensated with cash. 

Vulnerable nations never wanted things to get so combative. Singh sees climate litigation as one tool useful for putting pressure on polluters over loss and damage, but would really rather peoples’ energy was invested more constructively. “We want a cooperative approach,” he sighs.

A version of this article was originally published on The Wave, a newsletter on climate litigation.

The post See you in court: how climate lawsuits could sharpen Cop27 loss and damage talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Indonesian environment minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, who opened the one-day meeting as part of her country’s presidency of the G20, warned the world’s leading economies that they must act together to combat a warming planet or risk plunging it into “uncharted territory”. But officials were unable to agree a joint communique.

The country submitted an updated nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the UN last year, which brought forward a headline target for reaching net zero by ten years to 2060. It plans to cut national emissions by 29% by 2030 against the business-as-usual scenario. Under a “conditional” scenario, which includes international funding, the target goes up to 41%.

While public perceptions about climate change in Indonesia are mixed, campaigners are mobilising and some are resolutely unconvinced by the government’s rhetoric.

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In July, 13 citizens, including children, young adults, farmers and fishers, filed a formal petition to the National Commission of Human Rights, asking it to call on Indonesia’s president to stop violating Indonesians’ human rights by failing to adequately fight climate change.

The petitioners argue that even the updated NDC is inconsistent with a 1.5C pathway, and will lead to national emissions growing rather than falling in the short to medium term. According to Climate Action Tracker, the country’s NDC is “highly insufficient” and its plans to continue to expand coal generation until 2027 are “completely diverging” from the Paris Agreement’s goals.

Low-lying Indonesia, which is made up of more than 17,000 individual islands, is particularly vulnerable to climate change and the petition to the human rights commission documents the impacts that people living there are already experiencing.

Radith Giantiano, a 29-year-old fisherman and free diver from Kupang, was one of many to experience the devastation of cyclone Seroja in 2021, which destroyed fishermens’ boats and homes, as well as fish feeding and spawning grounds.

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He has also seen serious coral bleaching as a result of ocean acidification, which makes it much harder for fish stocks to recover. Although he and others are trying to transplant corals from healthy locations, he said the free diving community feels a “tremendous loss” of the beauty that was once there.

Young people also describe their fears for their own future. Fifteen-year-old petitioner Rasya Assegaf lives in Jakarta, which has seen record high temperatures in recent years. “I never thought that I’d be able to make a change through an official pathway, so when I was given this chance, I really jumped on it.”

The petitioners want to see more mitigation ambition, including a solid government commitment to ending new coal and decommissioning existing power stations. Inspired by a similar petition brought by citizens to the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, they also want Indonesia’s commission to make recommendations for greater transparency about the root causes of climate change.

Margaretha Quina, a Jakarta-based environmental lawyer who works for EarthJustice and is supporting the petition, said one of the low-hanging fruit would be for Indonesia to increase its conditional emission target. “The international community can support this through forestry carbon reduction efforts, encouraging Indonesia to readopt and strengthen its palm oil moratorium and by speeding up clean investment to meet international standards,” she said.

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Campaigners note that most of Indonesia’s contribution to climate change comes from deforestation, and that in terms of land use, land-use change and forestry it is one of the world’s top emitters.

The country has been using its G20 presidency to encourage the rehabilitation of mangrove ecosystems, but at the same time it is trying to push through an LNG terminal in a protected mangrove forest on Bali. The plans are being fiercely opposed by local residents, which point out that it is a carbon sink and also protects the island against erosion and extreme weather.

The Indonesian government has been approached for comment.

The post G20 Bali meeting highlights Indonesia’s weak climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

The judgment last week shows judges in China are starting to make a link between national carbon targets and energy-intensive activities. 

The case relates to a dispute between one company that contracted another to buy and operate cryptocurrency mining machines but did not get all the bitcoin it believed it had paid for. The first company sued. Its claim was rejected by a court which judged the mining agreement itself invalid because it harmed the public interest.

On 11 July, the Beijing Third Intermediate People’s Court upheld the verdict, ruling that mining cryptocurrency threatens national economic security and social order. This is consistent with a decision by the People’s Bank of China last September to ban all cryptocurrency transactions, citing their role in facilitating financial crime and growing risks to the country’s economy.  

The court added that mining cryptocurrency wastes energy resources in a way that is incompatible with China’s path to carbon neutrality. “Judging from the high energy consumption of ‘mining’ and the impact of bitcoin trading activities on the country’s financial and social order, the contract involved should be invalid,” it ruled.

Mining cryptocurrency like bitcoin is hugely energy-intensive. A study published in Nature Communications last year found that about 40% of China’s bitcoin mines are powered with coal, while the rest use renewables. Given that Chinese mines power nearly four fifths of the global trade in cryptocurrencies, the study concluded that the industry risks undermining Chinese climate goals and wider global action.

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Experts said the latest court ruling is primarily about enforcing the ban on cryptocurrency activities, since covert mining is on the rise again. But growing environmental and energy security concerns among the public do have a role to play.

With restrictions on activism and wider public debate, litigation has proved a powerful route for public prosecutors and NGOs to enforce environmental measures.  

Lawsuits about climate change are only just starting to emerge, in part because China lacks any national climate legislation. But following president Xi Jinping’s commitment to peak national emissions by 2030 and reach climate neutrality by 2060, courts are starting to consider non-legal policy documents or statements by leaders in cases before them.

Danting Fan, climate and finance lawyer at ClientEarth China, said that, in the absence of a national climate law, the latest judgment was the first time a ruling of final effect explicitly mentioned China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals and “determined a commercial contract to be null and void because of the high energy consumption of the bitcoin mining process, among other reasons, and required parties to promote sustainable development”.

She noted that Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the Supreme People’s Court, has encouraged judges to understand the climate implications of the cases before them. “This is the first example we know of where the judge picked up on this.” 

How the decision will affect China’s cryptocurrency market is unclear. Alex de Vries, data scientist at De Nederlandsche Bank, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the man behind Digiconomist, said that because miners have scaled down their operations to stay under the radar it is hard for the authorities to weed them all out.

The price of bitcoin dropped from an all-time high of over $65,000 in November 2021 to $18,000 in June, slashing the margins for miners. But de Vries said that, under the right conditions, mining can still be very profitable.

“The price crash hit older and less efficient mining operations hard, but those operating with very cheap electricity and the latest mining devices can still make good money,” he said. “It really depends on what machines you have, how efficiently you can cool them and how much you pay for electricity.”

The post Chinese court rules bitcoin mining harms the climate appeared first on Climate Home News.

The declaration was made as part of the court’s first climate change ruling, which ordered the Brazilian government to fully reactivate its national climate fund.

“Treaties on environmental law are a type of human rights treaty and, for that reason, enjoy supranational status. There is therefore no legally valid option to simply omit to combat climate change,” the ruling said.

The judgment last week was the culmination of a lawsuit filed two years ago against the Brazilian federal government by four political parties: the Workers’ Party, Socialism and Liberty Party, Brazilian Socialist Party and Sustainability Network.

They pointed out that the climate fund (Fundo Clima) set up in 2009 as part of Brazil’s national climate policy plan was inoperative in 2019; annual plans had not been prepared and money had not been disbursed to support projects that mitigate climate change.  

The court held a public hearing in September 2020, which included scientists, academics and people representing civil society and Indigenous groups.

In the judgment, endorsed by ten out of 11 presiding justices, Justice Luís Roberto Barroso noted the huge increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 2021 – a problem that has shown no sign of slowing down. Brazil is the world’s fifth largest carbon emitter and deforestation is its largest source of emissions.

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The Supreme Court recognised the climate fund as the main tool available to cut Brazil’s emissions. Not using it was therefore a breach “by omission” of the national constitution, which requires the state to protect the environment for current and future generations.

The judgment notes that the government “hurriedly” resumed some of the climate fund’s activities after the legal challenge was filed, but not all. It ordered the state to properly reactivate the fund, prepare and present annual plans for allocating resources and disburse funds to projects.

The Brazilian government has been approached for comment.

Brazil is one of the global hotspots for climate litigation outside the US, Australia and Europe, but this was the first case that had made it to the country’s Supreme Court.  

The court has yet to rule on at least two other climate lawsuits. One calls for proper implementation of the Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon, a package of measures and financial directives agreed in 2004 by the federal government to combat Amazonian deforestation and degradation.

Another challenges the government’s failure to properly manage the Amazon Fund, a forest preservation initiative created in 2008. International funding for it has declined since the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president.

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The cases have all been brought by political parties because it is the only way allegations of fundamental rights breaches can be heard directly at the Supreme Court.

Caio Borges, law and climate portfolio manager at the Instituto Clima e Sociedade (iCS) in Brazil, told Climate Home that the court’s declaration that the Paris Agreement is a human rights treaty gives it legal status above national law. “So in future cases, if there is a challenge to a policy or a law in relation to the Paris Agreement, then the courts will apply this understanding and there will be a presumption that the government will need to demonstrate that the challenge law is not in conflict with [it].”

Coming in the same week as the US Supreme Court’s decision to hamper the power of its Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions, the Brazilian ruling could also have implications outside its own borders.

Borges noted that human rights organisations had been unhappy with the final text of the Paris Agreement, which relegated explicit mention of human rights to the preamble. “So having a constitutional court qualifying the Paris Agreement as a human rights treaty may spur a global movement for the courts to follow suit in that recognition.”

The post Brazilian court world’s first to recognise Paris Agreement as human rights treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a judgment published today, the supreme court said Ireland’s existing emission cutting plans fell “well short” of what was required to meet its climate commitments and must be replaced with a more ambitious strategy.

Ireland is obliged to cut its emissions by 80% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels, under its Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015. In 2017 it published a National Mitigation Plan explaining how it intended to meet that goal.

But Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE), which brought the legal case dubbed Climate Case Ireland, argued that the plan was not “fit for purpose” because it was not designed to achieve substantial emissions reductions in either the short or medium term. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NGO said developed countries like Ireland should be cutting emissions 25-40% from 1990 levels by 2020.

Today’s judgment overturns a decision by the high court last September, which had rejected the case.

Greenpeace takes Arctic oil lawsuit to Norway’s supreme court

The Irish government has not denied the importance of tackling climate change. But in court its lawyers had contended that the state is not obliged to respond to climate change in any particular way and said even a 25% reduction in emissions by 2020 would cause an “extreme alteration” to Irish society.

FIE appealed the high court decision before a socially distanced panel of seven supreme court judges in June.

Their final judgment states that the National Mitigation Plan should cover the full period remaining to 2050. “While the detail of what is intended to happen in later years may understandably be less complete, a compliant plan must be sufficiently specific as to policy over the whole period to 2050.”

While the high court had also raised concerns about how the case affected the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive, the supreme court pointed to the fact that emission targets are set in legislation. “What might once have been policy has become law by virtue of the enactment of the 2015 Act,” its judgment said.

The decision did not tackle issues of constitutional and human rights, which FIE had also invoked, saying these should be reserved for future environmental cases.

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Clodagh Daly, a spokesperson for Climate Case Ireland, described the judgment as “really significant”. “The unanimous ruling by seven supreme court judges has made it crystal clear that the government cannot set long-term commitments without showing how they will be achieved in the short term,” she said. “The government needs to step up. It has a legal obligation to do so.”

Tessa Khan, a lawyer with the Urgenda Foundation, described the judgment on Twitter as “absolutely historic”, noting that it is only the second time a country’s supreme court has held that a national climate policy is not ambitious enough. In December, Urgenda won a landmark victory against the Netherlands government.

Daly noted that the public conversation around climate change had shifted significantly since Climate Case Ireland began three years ago. The incoming coalition government has promised to set annual emission cutting goals and strengthen the 2050 target to net zero.

“There are some interesting new objectives that were agreed upon by the coalition; it’s good to see those conversations happening,” said Daly. “But ultimately we need to see reductions in emissions in the short term. With the new government the devil will be in the detail.

“What is significant is that Ireland contributes disproportionately to the climate crisis but we have the means to lead the now dangerously overdue transition to a low-carbon society.”

Eamon Ryan, the Irish government’s minister for climate action, communication networks and transport, welcomed the judgment and congratulated FIE for taking the “important” case. “We must use this judgement to raise ambition, to empower action and to ensure that our shared future delivers a better quality of life for all,” he said in a statement.

The post Ireland forced to strengthen climate plan, in supreme court win for campaigners appeared first on Climate Home News.

The government of conservative Prime Minister Mark Rutte is working out new measures after the Dutch Supreme Court in December ordered it to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by the end of 2020, compared with 1990 levels, as its fair share to combat climate change.

It is a daunting task – latest official figures showed only a 15% drop on 1990 levels by the end of 2018, meaning sharp cuts will be needed in an economy where major emission sources are manufacturing, energy generation, transport and agriculture.

The case marked the end of a six-year legal battle by the non-profit Urgenda Foundation and was seen as a landmark moment for climate justice. UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment David Boyd called it the “most important climate change court decision in the world so far”.

The Supreme Court stressed that the Dutch government and parliament had a great deal of freedom to choose how to meet the 2020 goal. At 12 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person in 2017, Dutch emissions per capita are one of the highest in the EU and have barely fallen over the past decade.

“It really is a test case for very rapid emission reductions,” said Christiana Figueres, an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and former head of the UN climate change secretariat. “Of course the Netherlands is actually quite vulnerable because quite a lot of the territory is below sea level. This is in their interest to do so.”

Switzerland joins few nations confirming to UN it will enhance climate action plans

Figueres said other governments will be watching, even if they are not under the same legal pressure, because they are likely to have to take similar radical action if they are serious about limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C – the tougher goal of the Paris Agreement.

According to UN Environment’s latest emissions gap report, this will require unprecedented global greenhouse gas cuts of 7.6% a year over the next decade. World emissions have risen in most of the recent years.

The Netherlands has produced a more ambitious carbon plan for 2030 and recently passed a law to end all coal power generation by that date. But these will not help it meet the 2020 deadline.

And the Dutch government has been tight-lipped about extra plans so far. In a letter dated 31 January, economic affairs and climate minister Eric Wiebes said the cabinet would continue to work on emission-cutting measures while ministers met with Urgenda director Marjan Minnesma in February to discuss options.

When asked to comment, the government said it “keeps developing measures to reduce greenhouse gases emissions” and would regularly inform parliament about them. A more detailed update is expected in March.

With about 10 months to go, , a member of Urgenda’s legal counsel, still believes the goal is realistic.

“The unfortunate thing is they postponed [it] for too long. They could have started in 2015…. But if they look seriously at the list of measures we provided to them they can do this,” he said.

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Urgenda and around 800 stakeholders have produced a set of actions they believe would effectively close the gap between forecast emissions and the 2020 target. These include shrinking the livestock sector, making industrial electricity generation more efficient and managing forests sustainably.

They also recommend shutting the country’s remaining three large coal plants, which opened in 2015 and 2016, ahead of schedule. This could be problematic because the plants’ operators – Germany energy companies Uniper and RWE – have threatened legal action if they do not receive adequate compensation for early closure.

Van Berkel noted that the government had not discounted any options yet. In fact, last year, it made the unpopular move of reducing national road speed limits in response to a separate court decision on nitrogen oxide emissions.

“The same government that increased the maximum speed and promoted it as one of its national achievements… now lowered the maximum speed. It shows that if you really want to you can do things that have never been done before,” he said.

But Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said it is “highly unlikely” that the Netherlands will rise to the challenge, saying a 10% emissions reduction by the end of 2020 would “require shutting down a substantial part of the economy”.

Tol has contributed to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but has also been accused of underplaying climate change’s physical and economic impacts. He pulled out of an IPCC report writing team in 2014, calling the draft “alarmist”.

Public opinion in the Netherlands will undoubtedly play an important role. Van Berkel said the initial 2015 judgment “really changed the political debate” in the Netherlands and made it more difficult for the government to avoid action.

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But recent months have also seen a backlash from farmers opposed to policies aimed at cutting agricultural nitrogen oxide emissions.

The Urgenda decision has also made waves in the wider climate litigation field.

As well as confirming the state’s obligation to cut emissions urgently, it was the first time any court in the world ruled that a government had explicit duties to protect its citizens’ human rights in the face of climate change.

Last week, Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) announced their challenge to the Irish government’s 2017 National Mitigation Plan would be heard in the Supreme Court of Ireland. It is only the second case in the world to reach this point.

Stijn Franken, partner at law firm NautaDutilh, which represented Urgenda, said it is unclear what would happen if the Netherlands failed to meet the 2020 target as there are no legal precedents.

But a recent ruling by the EU’s Court of Justice suggests the court may have powers to fine the government for inaction if follow-up legal action is taken.

Campaigners are keen to keep a positive face on the situation. Van Berkel pointed out that, to date, the Dutch government has always complied with court rulings.

“That’s the precedent. The extraordinary thing would be if the government doesn’t do that. If you stop playing by the rules of the game then you have bigger problems.”

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