The global push toward renewable energy, intended to reduce climate-aggravating emissions, has revealed how the environmental and social costs of extracting the minerals it requires fall disproportionately on local communities and ecosystems.  

Many argue that electromobility and renewable energy technologies will help mitigate climate change – but adopting them on a large scale would require a massive increase in the mining of minerals such as lithium, which are key to their development.  

According to the World Bank, the extraction of 3 billion tons of minerals over the next 30 years is crucial to powering the global energy transition. The International Energy Agency further predicts a four-fold increase in mineral extraction by 2040 to meet climate targets.  

However, the rush for these so-called “critical” minerals risks amplifying the very crises it seeks to help solve, exacerbating ecological degradation and perpetuating socio-economic injustice in the Global South. 

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

The very naming of these transition minerals as “critical” creates a false sense of urgency, reinforcing the current damaging system of extraction, and failing to consider the protection of communities, ecosystems, and species in areas of exploitation. 

While mainstream strategies emphasize technological fixes, a deeper examination reveals that, without addressing the broader implications of mineral extraction, the quest for a greener future may only deepen existing environmental and human rights violations.  

UN-backed principles 

The UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals was formed in April this year to identify common and voluntary principles that will help developing countries benefit from equitable, fair and sustainable management of these minerals.  

The Panel brings together strange bedfellows – not least China and the US – and will need to work hard to create consensus to identify principles and recommendations for governments, companies, investors and the international community on human rights, environmental protection, justice and equity in value chains, benefit-sharing, responsible investments, transparency and international collaboration. It must raise the level of ambition and listen directly to civil society organizations and rights-holders, including local communities.  

Our reflection on what the Panel cannot ignore points to three elements: a status quo approach to “development”; a high level of technological optimism concerning mining; and a lack of urgency regarding ecosystem limits and communities’ rights.  

Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone

First, we acknowledge that the Panel is under pressure from powerful actors, but it will need to resist the assertion that mining is always beneficial to the economic growth and prosperity of nations. This status-quo perspective reinforces the notion of unlimited natural resources for human consumption, mirroring the economic development promises of the early 20th century, which contributed to the current climate crisis.   

The Panel must not fail to consider the possibility of degrowth or the imposition of limits on mining activities that could lead to reduced material and energy consumption. Nor should it neglect other forms of traditional and local knowledge that may offer possibilities for alternative development. 

Then, on the impacts, pollution and other ecosystem disruptions caused by mining, it is consistently stated that assessments and evaluations are necessary – and that these can preserve ecosystem integrity.  

The Panel must acknowledge the irreversibility of certain mining impacts on ecosystems, which are already evident. This belies the optimistic view that all mining problems can be resolved through technology, a notion that is both false and unrealistic. What’s more, it undermines the precautionary principle, which calls for protective action from suspected harms, even before scientific proof exists.  

Finally, in the dominant narrative, transition minerals are found in “empty” places, deemed void of life, where only the resources to be extracted are counted. This ignores both the biodiversity and traditional communities that inhabit these areas.  

Indigenous rights at risk 

More than half of the minerals needed for the energy transition are found in or near indigenous territories, which are already facing the consequences of the climate and ecological crisis, such as extreme aridity, permanent water shortages and scarce water availability.  

These impacts may be increased by mining project pressures and mineral extractive activities, which are already facing the impacts of the climate and ecological crisis, such as extreme aridity, permanent water shortages or scarce water availability.  

It is essential to ensure respect for the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination; to obtain their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) before projects are begun; to carry out human rights and environmental due diligence; and to ensure not only remediation of impacts but also the ability of local people to maintain their own cultural, social, economic and political ways. 

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

In addition, current plans for the extraction of transition minerals are limited to the scale of the mining concession in question, without considering the cumulative impacts derived from others operating in the same area and ignoring the socioeconomic activities already taking place in these ecosystems.  

Instead, it is essential to ensure the bio-capacity of ecosystems to maintain their life-supporting functions and the diversity of uses by communities in territories, not just industrial ones. Decisions on mineral extraction should not be based solely on market demand, but also on the biophysical limits of ecosystems and, more sensibly, on the balance of water systems.    

The UN Panel has been established at a time when we can apply the lessons learned from the historical impacts of mining worldwide. This calls for the Panel to raise the level of ambition of its work by generating and advancing binding guidelines and mechanisms.  

Gathered this week in Nairobi, the Panel is working to set the rules of the game, defining principles and recommendations which will be officially presented in September during the UN General Assembly. It has a unique opportunity to oversee substantive changes to the global energy system – one that we cannot afford to miss. 

The post The UN can set a new course on “critical” transition minerals   appeared first on Climate Home News.

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

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

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

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up for free to get our weekly newsletter and occasional extra bulletins

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

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

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

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

World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions

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

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

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

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

Tech fixes  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the case for meat 

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

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

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

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

ILRI did not respond to a request for comment.

IPCC’s input into key UN climate review at risk as countries clash over timeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No ‘carte blanche’ 

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

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

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

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

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

The post FAO draft report backs growth of livestock industry despite emissions  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Gathered in NYC in mid-April, 87 Indigenous leaders from 35 countries met to hammer out a set of demands to address a common scourge: the green energy transition that has our peoples under siege.  

Worldwide, we are experiencing land-grabs and a rising tide of criminalization and attacks for speaking out against mining and renewable energy projects that violate our rights with impacts that are being documented by UN and other experts. Their research confirms what we know firsthand.     

And yet political and economic actors continue to ignore the evidence, pushing us aside in their rush to build a system to replace fossil fuels, while guided by the same values that are destroying the natural world.  

Ironically, we released this declaration amid the UN’s sustainability week – renewable energy was on the agenda. We were not.  

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

Indigenous peoples are not opposed to pivoting away from oil and gas, nor are we opposed to investing in renewable energy systems as an alternative.  

But we must have a say. More than half the mines that are expected to produce metals and minerals to serve renewable technologies are on or near the territories of Indigenous peoples and peasant communities.  

Resource extraction causing triple crisis  

In the words of the UN’s Global Resource Outlook 2024, released in March with little fanfare by the UN Environment Programme: “the current model of natural resource extraction…is driving an unprecedented triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution”. 

Mining companies have been offered a path to sustainability. Few have started down that path.  

And they won’t unless global and national decision-makers take advantage of this key moment in history to demand change. Indigenous leaders need to be at the table too.

As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance

We are not willing to have our territories become the deserts that mining companies create, leaking toxins into our rivers and soils and poisoning our sources of water and food, and by extension our children. 

The playing field for Indigenous peoples is massively unjust. The authors of the Global Resources Outlook cite evidence of national governments that favor companies’ interests “by removing the judicial protection of Indigenous communities, expropriating land…or even using armed forces to protect mining facilities”.  

Why should this matter to people on the other side of the planet? 

Proven to outperform the public and private sectors, Indigenous peoples conserve some of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Negotiators at global climate events do cite our outsize conservation role, but treaty language allows our governments to decide when and whether to recognize or enforce our rights.  

Companies are advised to “engage” with our communities – not so they can avoid harming us, but to prevent costly conflicts that arise in response to outdated and destructive practices. 

These “externalities” that chase us from our ancestral homes and damage our health and the ecosystems we treasure are revealed only when they become “material”, of concern to investors and relevant to risk analysts. 

Tensions rise over who will contribute to new climate finance goal

Our resistance is costly and material. Failure to properly obtain our consent before sending in the bulldozers can bring a project to a halt, with a price tag as high as $20 million a week. And communities are learning to use the tools of the commercial legal system to defend themselves. 

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School report that, over time, shareholders benefit most when companies heed the demands of their most influential stakeholders. Indigenous peoples are the stakeholders to please.  

Our communities disrupt supply chains, but when our rights are respected, we can also be the best indicators of a company’s intention to avoid harm to people and planet. 

Call for ban on mining in ‘no-go’ zones 

In the declaration we released in New York earlier this month, we called for laws to reduce the consumption of energy worldwide, and we laid out a path for ensuring that the green transition is a just one. 

We urged our governments to recognize and protect our rights as a priority; to end the killings, the violence and the criminalization of our peoples; and to require corporations to secure our free, prior and informed consent, and avoid harming our lands and resources. 

A growing body of evidence suggests that Indigenous peoples rooted to their ancestral lands can draw on traditional knowledge, stretching back over generations, to help nature evolve and adapt to the changing climate. We understand the sustainable use of wild species and hold in our gardens genetic resources that can protect crops of immeasurable economic and nutritional value. 

Current practices for extracting metals and minerals put our peoples at risk and endanger climate, biodiversity, water, global health and food security. Researchers warned earlier this year that the unprecedented scale of demand for “green” minerals will lay waste to more and more land and drive greater numbers of Indigenous and other local peoples from our homes. 

Q&A: What you need to know about critical minerals

So our declaration also calls on governments to impose a ban on the expansion of mining in “no-go” zones – those sites that our peoples identify as sacred and vital as sources of food and clean water. Indigenous communities, rooted in place by time and tradition, can help stop the green transition from destroying biomes that serve all humanity. 

The UN Secretary-General launches a panel on critical minerals today that seems to recognize the importance of avoiding harm to affected communities and the environment.  

This is a step in the right direction, but Indigenous peoples and our leaders – and recognition and enforcement of our rights – must be at the centre of every proposal for mining and renewable energy that affect us and our territories. This is the only way to keep climate “response measures”, made possible by the Paris Agreement, from harming solutions that exist already. 

The post Indigenous lands feel cruel bite of green energy transition  appeared first on Climate Home News.

With vast sunbaked, windswept deserts and 2.5 million people, the southern African nation has plenty of renewable resources to go around. 

Meanwhile rich, densely populated Europe, South Korea and Japan are crying out for clean fuel to decarbonise hard-to-electrify sectors like fertilisers, steel and shipping. Their net zero plans depend on it. 

Keen to secure pole position in the global race for green hydrogen, last year the EU began reaching agreements with prospective producers. One of the most trumpeted deals was signed with Namibia on the sidelines of Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. 

“We want to fight climate change. We want to have clean energy. And as I said, you have all the resources in abundance. So let us team up,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in the direction of her Namibian counterpart, hailing the partnership as a “big win-win situation for all of us”. 

Tapping into solar and wind energy for export is central to President Hage Geingob’s economic strategy. Namibia is seeking $20 billion of investment in green hydrogen – more than its entire GDP of $12 billion in 2022. Government authorities are negotiating funding options with the EU. 

As with any heavy industry, though, the hoped-for boom will come at a cost to local communities and ecosystems. The benefits to ordinary Namibians are less certain. 

Namibia is planning a series of projects to catapult the country into becoming a major green hydrogen exporter. (Credit: Fanis Kollias/Spoovio)

In a months-long investigation, Climate Home News and Oxpeckers visited the site of the flagship project, a $10 billion complex near the southern coastal town of Lüderitz, which is being developed by a Namibia-based company called Hyphen Hydrogen Energy.

The reporter on the ground found a community largely in the dark about the development and nervous about the impact on fishing and tourism. Experts shared frustration at the secretive tender process, scepticism about job prospects for Namibians and concerns for the area’s unique wildlife. 

The green hydrogen complex 

Perched between the Namib desert and the Atlantic Ocean, Lüderitz is named after a German colonist. It was the centre of a diamond rush in 20th century and of a colonial history that repressed indigenous Africans. Germany officially apologised in 2021 for colonial-era atrocities, recognising them as “genocide”. 

Today, its Art Nouveau architecture, fresh seafood and wildlife draws a modest number of tourists, who can visit ghost towns abandoned after the diamond rush. The town is surrounded by the Tsau//Khaeb National Park, home to seals, penguins, flamingoes and ostriches. The park and surrounding lands are off-limits to residents to prevent illegal diamond mining. 

Green hydrogen is set to to transform the character of this small enclave once again. 

Hyphen’s plans show an initial 5GW of wind turbines and solar panels to supply power, according to the project’s factsheet published by the Namibian government. In this arid region, a desalination plant is needed to supply fresh water. An electrolysis plant will split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, before the hydrogen gas is converted into liquid ammonia. A new deepwater port will accommodate tankers to ship the end product around the world. The company aims to produce 300,000 tons of ammonia a year, commissioning the first phase by 2026, Hyphen’s website says. 

To build all this, Hyphen expects to bring in 15,000 workers, roughly doubling Lüderitz’s population. Lüderitz Town Council is planning a new town in the desert to house the influx, immediately south of the historic Kolmanskuppe ghost town. 

An opaque tender process 

“We were a little surprised at the government’s choice of a partner,” said Phil Balhao, an opposition party member of the Lüderitz Town Council.  

Other bidders like South Africa’s Sasol and Australian Fortescue Future Industries had an “established track record” that “seemingly just got ignored”, he said. 

The tender process was overseen by the Namibia Investments Development & Promotions Board (NIDPB), which sits in the president’s office. In September 2020, the board appointed James Mnyupe as green hydrogen commissioner. It launched the first call for proposals in early 2021. 

In a televised speech, Mnyupe said the tender was exempt from public procurement rules. Instead, he cited tourism and conservation laws as the basis to hold a closed selection process. 

Graham Hopwood, director of the Institute of Public Policy Research, a public-interest think-tank based in Windhoek, was not impressed.

“With such a major and strategic project, there needs to be transparency and accountability from the outset. The fact that this project is mired in secrecy is raising red flags,” he said.

The Namibian government published a list of six bidders, who submitted nine bids between them. However, the content of the bids was not made public, nor the reasoning for Hyphen’s selection. 

Hyphen said this was standard practice, given the commercially sensitive data contained in the bids. They added the process was “competitive”. 

“It would be irresponsible and to the detriment to the development of the Hyphen project and Namibia’s broader green hydrogen industry for it to publish commercially sensitive agreements in the public domain that competitor projects/countries could use to compete against Namibia,” Hyphen said in a statement. 

The Namibian government said the tender was “conducted with the utmost transparency and fairness”. 

They said that the three-person bid evaluation committee did a “detailed and comprehensive evaluation” of the proposals, supported by independent experts from the US government’s national renewable energy laboratory and the EU’s technical assistance facility on sustainable energy.

Who is Hyphen? 

Hyphen is a joint venture between two companies – Enertrag and Nicholas Holdings Limited. 

Enertrag, owned by a 59-year-old East German nuclear physicist called Jörg Müller has a long track record of building renewables. It is pursuing green hydrogen projects across the world in Uruguay, Vietnam and South Africa. 

Nicholas Holdings Limited is a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, which owns its stake in Hyphen through a special purpose vehicle based in Mauritius. The ultimate owner of the company is a South African investor called Brian Myerson.

The CEO of Hyphen is South African businessman Marco Raffinetti. 

Myerson is a South African who spent decades as an investor in the UK, where he made headlines for battling the business establishment.

In 2010, Myerson was found by a panel of top UK lawyers to have behaved dishonestly in averting a takeover of Principle Capital, the investment firm he co-founded.

The Takeover Appeal Board found that Myerson and co-conspirators made a “deliberate attempt to circumvent” rules around taking over companies and then attempted to cover up their rule-breaking when the authorities began to investigate. He was banned from getting involved in mergers for three years. 

Dishing out the punishment, the panel said it was only the second time it had done so, which it said, “is some indication of the extreme nature of the sanction”. 

A spokesperson for Hyphen, Enertrag and Nicholas Holdings Limited described this incident as a “historic matter” over “an alleged technical infringement” which “remains contested”. It should not be used to draw conclusions about Myerson’s character, they argued. 

They added that the Takeover Appeal Board had no formal regulatory powers and UK financial regulators took no action in respect of the alleged breach of the rules. 

A spokesperson for the Namibian government said it these were “historical legal matters, that to best of our knowledge have since been resolved”. 

Myerson’s previous ventures on the African continent include a failed bid to scale up bioethanol production in Mozambique. Like today’s green hydrogen push, this was driven by EU demand: in 2007, the bloc set a to blend a percentage of biofuels into petrol. Investors piled into Mozambique, touting it as a “biofuels superpower”.

Myerson set up Principle Energy, based on the Isle of Man. It made bold promises to plant sugarcane over 20,000 hectares of land, build one of the top production facilities in the world and employ 1,600 people. Then the global bioethanol market collapsed and by 2013 the company closed, having planted just 136 hectares, according to a report by GRAIN. 

His involvement in Hyphen is likely to be of concern, said IPPR’s Hopwood, adding Hyphen’s leadership was “questionable”.

Use of tax havens

Myerson’s investment in Hyphen is structured through the British Virgin Islands and Mauritius. Both rank poorly in the Tax Justice Network’s financial secrecy and corporate tax haven indexes. 

Raffinetti said that Mauritius and the British Virgin Islands were “tax neutral jurisdictions with efficient financial markets”. A lot of infrastructure investment in Africa goes through Mauritius, he said, and investors are subject to tax in the countries where they are registered. 

Tax Justice Network analyst Bob Michel said that investment into Africa goes through Mauritius because of its tax rules. “Mauritius is a corporate tax haven,” he said.

“(Mauritius’) domestic tax regime combined with its vast tax treaty network allow third country investors to use it to siphon profits from operations in Africa with the least of taxes paid in the countries where the operations take place,” Michel said by email.

A spokesperson for the Namibian government said it was “aware of the jurisdictions through which certain Hyphen shareholders hold their equity in Hyphen”.  

The spokesperson added: “Should [the Namibian government] come across any conduct that is unbecoming of its laws and global best practice, rest assured [we] will take the necessary swift corrective action.”

Great expectations 

Raffinetti, Hyphen’s CEO, previously developed gas power and rooftop solar bids in South Africa. The Richard Bay gas project he co-led is facing legal challenge by environmental activists due to its climate impact.

Wearing glasses and a black turtleneck, Raffinetti joined a video call with Climate Home in late October. He warned interviewers the internet might cut out due to the power cuts his native South Africa is plagued with.

The interview was granted, through a PR agency, on condition Hyphen could vet the quotes used. Some of the more colloquial soundbites reporters transcribed came back replaced with cautious jargon, and an admonition to put everything in its full context. Hyphen separately responded in writing to detailed concerns raised by sources.

“There’s an enormous amount of expectation in Namibia around this project. So there’s a huge amount of media attention,” Raffinetti said in one approved quote. “As the first large-scale project in Namibia’s green industrialisation strategy, we have an enormous obligation to get it right.”

Biodiversity concerns 

Dr Jean-Paul Roux, a retired marine biologist working in the area for decades, pointed to where the Luderitz peninsula ends at Angra Point. It is the northernmost tip of the Karoo ecosystem, he explained, unique to southern Africa.

In the dry summer season, the desert landscape looks drab and lifeless. Winter rains bring a green explosion of rare plants such as the endemic Lithops optica, a tiny succulent that gets as old as 90 years. 

“Here you can find up to 1,000 different plant species in just one square kilometre, some so small no bulldozer operator will even notice them,” he said. He spots signs of hyenas and porcupines. 

This is the area earmarked for the deepwater port, desalination and ammonia plants. 

Roux said the development would have a massive impact on Shearwater Bay and the adjacent Sturmvogelbucht, a lagoon teeming with flamingos and a heavy-sided dolphin population that he has been studying for years and visits every day. 

“This is the only place along the southern African coast where you can watch them from your car,” he said as this smallest of all dolphin species approached to within a few meters of the beach. He fears that once developers start blasting rock for the port construction, dolphins will leave and never return. 

The Tsau//Khaeb National Park is classified by Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism as a biodiversity hotspot. (Credit: Fanis Kollias/Spoovio/Luderitz Marine Research)

Dr Antje Burke, a veteran botanist, is working as a consultant to Hyphen. She said at a conference of the Namibian Scientific Society in July that Hyphen was trying to avoid the most sensitive areas, but “one big problem” is that a species of parsley “overlaps almost completely with the concession area”. 

She added that “even more concerning” was the future development plans. “The Hyphen project is developing the service infrastructure really keeping the future developments in mind… That means the entire area will be developed.”

Burke indicated some adjustments that could mitigate the environmental impact.

“No green energy project can be implemented without some environmental impact and Hyphen’s objective is to minimise environmental impacts to the largest extent possible,” Hyphen CEO Marco Raffinetti said in an interview with Climate Home. 

The company has hired consultancy SLR to prepare an environmental and social impact report and lead a “comprehensive stakeholder engagement process”, Hyphen added in a written statement.

Consultants are currently gathering meteorological data and reporting a baseline of wildlife and plants in the area, SLR reports say. The formal environmental impact study is expected to start next year, the official documents add.

A group of Flamingoes at a lagoon within the Tsau//Khaeb National Park in Namibia, where green hydrogen developments are meant to ship the gas to the EU. (Photo: John Grobler)

Loss of access 

Aside from the northern end of the bay, the peninsula is the only publicly accessible area of the Lüderitz region. The rest is Sperrgebiet or “forbidden area” – a legacy of the diamond rush. 

Some of Hyphen’s infrastructure will reduce public access to the peninsula. Hyphen’s Raffinetti said this was “unavoidable” as it was “the only location feasible for a deepwater port”. 

The other access to the sea is the four-kilometre Agate Beach to the north of the enclave, downwind from the last few local fishing factories and an overflowing municipal sewage plant. 

Residents fear this would impact lobster fishing and rock angling. Crayfish fisheries, one of the area’s tourism attractions and an informal source of income would also be affected, locals said. 

“The people in the township’s poorest areas [have] got nowhere else to go. They are going to strip this bay [Agate beach] clean of everything,” said Gerd Kessler, a fourth-generation Buchter as locals call themselves, referring to a potential concentration of fisheries in the area.  

As owner of Five Roses Aquaculture and three smaller oyster-breeding operations, Kessler employs 100 people. 

Felsenkirche, a Lutheran church built in 1912 in Lüderitz. (Photo: SkyPixels/Wikimedia Commons)

A massive new seawall and harbour at Angra Point could have unpredictable impacts on currents in the bay, he cautioned. When the existing shallow port was expanded in the late 1960s by filling in the channel between the town and Shark Island, the sea quickly stripped away the town’s little beach inside Robert Harbour. 

Kessler’s biggest concern was how Hyphen planned to dispose of the brine from their desalination plant. “You can’t just dump that anywhere, you have to make sure you use the currents to disperse it,” Kessler said. 

Questionable job prospects 

Hyphen expects to create 15,000 jobs in the construction phase and 3,000 to operate the finished complex. It is aiming for 90% of these jobs to go to Namibians, and 30% to youth. 

There is a huge skills gap, Namibian business groups warned. 

“We do not even have a category for petrochemical or petroleum engineers at the moment,” said Sophia Tekie, chairperson of the Engineering Council of Namibia (ECN). “If we have any, they are registered as [one of 40] chemical engineers.” 

“Although the ECN has 2,015 registered engineers in eight disciplines at present, about 30 to 40% of them were already retired and only did part-time consultancy work,” said her predecessor, Markus von Jeney. 

Local construction capacity did not look much better: according to Bärbel Kircher, director of the Construction Industry Federation (CIF), their membership had declined from 480 companies in 2015 to 240 member companies, operating at only 50% capacity, she said.  

“Currently, our local contractors are largely displaced by foreign contractors, excluding them from opportunities. This is often due to conditions set by external financiers,” said Kircher.  

In the past, the country has struggled to complete large projects due to corruption charges.  

Since 2013, the Namibian Ports Authority, the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia and the Ministry of Agriculture have borrowed over N$21 billion (about US$400 million each, mostly from the African Development Bank) for infrastructure projects, including the 3MW Neckartal dam.  

The Namibian High Court declared the dam was commissioned in 2008 under corrupted circumstances. The project was eventually completed at three times the original price in 2017. 

Namibian construction companies were not likely to benefit from the green hydrogen projects, the CiF said. “The current procurement methods and trends do not provide a promising outlook for the future,” said Kirchner. 

Hyphen said the company would implement “targeted training interventions at various levels” including “specialized Masters’ programs, internships and apprenticeships”. 

The Karoo ecosystem is unique to Southern Africa. The Tsau//Khaeb National Park is a biodiversity hotspot hosting a part of this ecosystem. (Photo: John Grobler)

European support 

Under the memorandum of understanding signed in Sharm el-Sheikh, the EU will provide technical expertise, trade incentives and, crucially, help to secure infrastructure finance. 

Moments after von der Leyen and Geingob inked their deal, the European Investment Bank promised loans of up to €500 million ($528m) for renewable hydrogen investments in Namibia. “Let’s bring flesh to the bone,” the bank’s chief Werner Hoyer told the audience. 

Shortly after the event, Hyphen announced that it had “signed a €35 million agreement with the European Investment Bank to finance the early development of our project”. This was somewhat premature. The bank had supplied a letter of intent, not a firm commitment of funding. 

Since the initial announcement, European institutions, Namibian government officials and private actors have been working out the details of the partnership. 

Hyphen is looking for €100 million to start work on the project.

“We have been very grateful to the EIB and the European Commission for making available the initial funding to share the early development risk,” said Raffinetti in late September, suggesting a firm commitment from the European backers. 

The Hyphen CEO went on to outline what the deal with the EIB should look like: a €10 million ($10.5 million) grant – “still to be finalised,” he added – and a €25 million ($26.4 million) “soft loan”, meaning it would come with favourable terms for the company.

An EIB spokesperson said no agreement has been signed yet. “We are in the process of completing our due diligence, after which the project will be presented to the EIB’s governing bodies for approval,” they said.

“Potential financial support at this early stage would be for site studies and feasibility studies. Any support for implementation will be conditional to the project complying with the Bank’s environmental and social (E&S), procurement, compliance and other standards,” they added.

Namibia’s president Hage Geingob, EIB president Werner Hoyer, Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croco and EU president Ursula von der Leyen announcing the EU green hydrogen partnership with Namibia at Cop27. (Photo: EIB)

On top of the cash injection, the EU’s international partnership division could provide a first-loss guarantee. If the project does not go to plan and the borrower cannot pay back its debt, the EU will pick up the tab – or at least part of it. 

Without the “bedrock” of public money it would be impossible to lure in commercial lenders and leave a huge funding gap, Raffinetti said. 

A European Commission spokesperson told Climate Home that “at present, there is not yet any financial assistance under the EU budget mobilised in favour of the Hyphen project”.

The Netherlands is also supporting the project. Dutch companies like the Port of Rotterdam and gas pipeline operator Gasunie see a business opportunity to offload the green ammonia from ships and pipe it to industry inland.

In June, green hydrogen commissioner Mnyupe told a national newspaper that the Dutch government had given Namibia a €40m grant to develop green hydrogen. He said the government would use €23m of this to buy a stake in Hyphen.

The Dutch said the money was not Namibia’s to spend. The €40m grant comes from Invest International, a public fund set up in 2019 to advance Dutch interests abroad and promote economic growth in the developing world. 

Invest International’s lead on hydrogen Bart De Smet told Climate Home that the €40m grant will be distributed by a fund manager independent of the Namibian government and won’t necessarily go to Hyphen. 

Who benefits? 

The big question for Namibians is whether the inevitable disturbance of a unique ecosystem and small-town culture will be worth it. 

The Namibian government is taking a 24% stake in Hyphen through its sovereign wealth fund. It is expected to raise further revenues through taxes, royalties, land rental and environmental levies on the project, Hyphen said. 

“The benefit for the country in terms of economic upliftment is enormous. Because Namibia is only 2.5 million people. So if you’re successful, your impact on each human being’s life can be enormous,” Raffinetti said. 

Patrick Neib, an unemployed resident of the Nautilus township behind Luderitz, could certainly use some upliftment. He moved to the area in 2015 in search of a better job that has yet to materialise. 

Like many residents, he found out about Hyphen from social media. Most of Hyphen’s public meetings took place in Keetmanshoop, the regional capital 350 km away. 

The secrecy and technical jargon used by Hyphen and its consultants made it impossible for the ordinary layman to understand or access any opportunities, Neib said.  

“There is just no public discussion about the benefits for ordinary people like me, or what price we are to pay for green hydrogen development,” he said. “My question is, who or what is really behind all of this?” 

This story was reported in collaboration with Oxpeckers Investigative Journalism Centre and was supported by a grant from Journalismfund Europe.

The post Shades of green hydrogen: EU demand set to transform Namibia appeared first on Climate Home News.

The plan, announced in late August by the country’s Minister of Transportation, Renan Filho, was met with suspicion by environmentalists who are familiar with the fund’s guidelines.

During a press conference announcing new infrastructure investments, Filho said he plans to pitch the fund’s governing board a project to pave BR319, a road that cuts through the Amazon forest and connects two major cities in the north of Brazil — Manaus and Porto Velho. 

But environmentalists argue that this is not the kind of project that the fund is supposed to support. 

“The Amazon Fund is meant to keep the forest standing, to maintain its biodiversity, and to fight climate change. I don’t see its resources being used for paving. It would be completely incompatible with its guidelines,” says Sila Mesquita, president of the NGO Amazon Working Group and current representative of civil organisations in the Amazon Fund committee. 

One of the fund’s creators, forest scientist Tasso Azevedo also disagrees with the Ministry of Transportation’s plan. 

“I don’t think it makes any sense. This project does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines,” says Azevedo, currently coordinator at MapBiomas, an initiative to monitor land use in Brazil developed by a network of universities, NGOs, and technology companies. 

Created in 2008, the Amazon Fund has over $1.2 billion available for projects that prevent, monitor and combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The fund gets its money mainly from its largest donors — Norway, Germany and state-owned oil company Petrobras.

Controversial comeback

In 2019, the Amazon Fund was virtually paralysed by former president Jair Bolsonaro, who dissolved the committee that sets guidelines on how the money should be spent. 

Because of this political move, the money was frozen for over three years, since new projects could not be analysed. Donor countries Norway and Germany also suspended new contributions during Bolsonaro’s term. 

Revived by president Lula on his first day in the office, new potential investors have lined up.

Last week, Denmark announced a donation of $22 million, joining the UK, USA, Switzerland, and the EU, all of which advertised new contributions since Lula reinstated the fund. 

The initiative had funded 102 projects amounting to over $360 million until it was paralysed by Bolsonaro. 

But none of the supported projects were related to road infrastructure, according to the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), which manages the fund. 

“So far, the BNDES has not received any requests for financing a road infrastructure project using resources from the Amazon Fund,” BNDES told Climate Home News.

New guidelines

The bank also highlighted that any requests are processed “in accordance with the strategic vision, guidelines and focuses” outlined in the 2023-25 ​​Biennium, a new set of guidelines created by the Amazon Fund’s Guiding Committee. 

The new rules for how the money should be spent in the next two years were set by a committee formed by representatives of NGOs, environmental agencies and governmental institutions such as Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Environment. 

One of the members of this committee, Sila Mesquita, believes that the guidelines do not align with the project presented by the Ministry of Transportation.

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

“Our commitment, in addition to guaranteeing economic and social development by granting citizens the right to come and go, is also to ensure that the BR319 is a model in terms of environmental conservation,” the Ministry of Transportation told Climate Home News. 

Road through the rainforest

The BR319 is a federal highway that serves as the only link between two large states in the North of Brazil: Amazonas and Rondônia. 

Built during the 1970s, the road was delivered completely paved, but was closed a decade later due to lack of maintenance. Since then, only branches of the highway are paved and allow for regular traffic.

According to BR-319 Observatory, a collective of organisations that operate in the highway’s area, re-paving the road without conservation measures and proper consultation to indigenous communities can be prejudicial to the Amazon and encourage deforestation. 

The BR319 cuts through several conservation areas, including indigenous territories. Its indirect impact spans an ever larger perimeter

Several studies show that proximity to transportation networks is a major proximate driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Recent research has pointed out that 95% of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon happens within 5.5 km of a legal or illegal road. Considering only the official road network, most of the deforestation happens within 50 km of the nearest road. 

The complete paving of BR319, planned by the current Ministry of Transportation, still depends on several approvals from the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama).

“For this road to be sustainable, like the government says, it needs to be beneficial for all those conservation parks and indigenous territories that it cuts through. We have to ask the people who live there what is sustainable for them. It’s not about being for or against the paving of a road: it’s about taking into consideration science, technology and the local communities as well,” says Sila Mesquita.

The post Brazilian government eyes money from Amazon Fund for controversial road appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) aims to help countries reach the nature protection targets set by the breakthrough Kunming-Montreal biodiversity deal signed last year.

The fund, which will contribute to the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s land and water ecosystems by 2030, has been set up by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), a multilateral financial partnership.

Cooking the books: cookstove offsets produce millions of fake emission cuts

Its 185 member countries officially approved the creation of the financial mechanism at the GEF’s meeting in Vancouver, Canada, on Thursday.

At the opening plenary, Canada and the United Kingdom announced initial contributions of C$200m ($147.3m) and £10m ($12.6m) respectively.

Small initial contributions

Ahmed Hussen, Canada’s international development minister, said his government is making “a significant contribution” to this new fund, which “will play a key role in addressing biodiversity loss”.

To light applause, the UK’s nature minister Trudy Harrison told the GEF assembly that the money is “a downpayment” which will “ensure that the fund is open for business as quickly as possible”.

She said that the UK was “deep in its current fiscal cycle” which “limits its ability for financial manoeuvre” but “we look forward to making further payments in future”.

Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, CEO of the GEF (left) opens the Assembly meeting alongside Canada’s Steven Guilbeault and Ahmed Hussen. Photo: IISD/ENB | Angeles Estrada

The fund needs at least $200m from three donors or more before December to get up and running, according to GEF rules. Japan, the USA and others have indicated they will support the fund, but haven’t committed any money yet.

After this start-up phase, however, the fund will have to attract much more substantial resources if it wants to fulfill the “game-changing” role its creators touted.

Rich countries obligation

As the main mechanism to deliver the Kunming-Montreal deal, it is expected to ramp up financial support for protecting nature.

Governments agreed last December to mobilize at least $200 billion a year from a variety of sources including public and private finance and philanthropies.

Soy, beef and gold gangsters: Why Bolivia and Venezuela won’t protect the Amazon

The biodiversity fund is set up to draw in money from all of those actors, but initially, the bulk of the capital should come from the public purses of wealthy nations.

At the COP15 biodiversity summit, developed countries agreed to provide at least $20 billion a year by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030.

Michael Degnan from the Campaign for Nature advocacy group told Climate Home News that the target has to be achieved if countries are serious about making biodiversity conservation a priority.

“Launching the fund is a really important first step – but it’s only half of the equation,” he added. “The next step is for donor countries to outline their plans.”

Funding compromise

The make-up of the new biodiversity fund was one of the major sticking points during negotiations last year. Many Latin American and African countries had pushed to create a new financial mechanism separate from the GEF.

The issue came to a head on the final day of the talks when the negotiator from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) appeared to block the final deal, telling the plenary that they could not support the agreement in its current form because it did not create a new fund for biodiversity. But minutes later the meeting’s chair brought down the gavel, effectively overruling the objection.

EU puts Maroš Šefčovič in charge of climate policy

The final text put the GEF in charge of creating the new fund in 2023 and running it until at least 2030.

Juliette Landry from think-tank IDDRI thinks this was a “rational compromise”. “It would have been hard to create out of nothing a new fund that has a relatively short implementation period”, she added, “but there is still room to improve procedures within the GEF”.

Some developing countries have called for a “simplified process” to access the money during Thursday’s opening session. The representative from the DRC said the fund “must be accessible to all”.

Indigenous communities role

The GEF’s historical top recipients – China, Brazil and Indonesia – are expected to receive the lion’s share of the money, experts told Climate Home News.

But the GEF says a third of the resources will go to least developed countries and small island states, while as much as 20% of the fund should support Indigenous-led initiatives.

“Indigenous communities with their generations of land stewardship and fire management expertise hold the key to preventing catastrophic wildfire and other environmental contingencies,” said Dario Jose Mejia Montalvo, chair of the UN permanent forum on Indigenous Issues. “Yet, despite their unparalleled understanding, they continue to be overfunded and overlooked”.

This is an opportunity to rectify that, he added.

The Indigenous Peoples press conference following the launch of the new biodiversity fund. Photo: IISD/ENB | Angeles Estrada

Midori Paxton, head of biodiversity at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), hopes the new fund will change the attitude of politicians and business leaders towards financing nature protection.

“It sends a signal that biodiversity loss and deterioration of nature is a critical global issue”, she told Climate Home. “We often hear ‘we are busy with climate, nature can wait’, as if they are totally separate things”.

But the biodiversity and climate crisis are very much interlinked, Paxton added.

The post Nature fund launched but financing questions remain appeared first on Climate Home News.

Eight years after, the Indonesian government claims to have made huge progress, with as much as 3.66 million hectares of peatland declared “restored” in areas managed by plantation companies. But these claims are not supported by data the government has made public, an analysis by The Gecko Project has found. 

The government’s statements appear to hinge on a narrow definition of “restoration” that deems peatlands restored when groundwater levels have been raised to 40 centimetres below the surface.  

The analysis of government data indicates that even by this measure, the areas “restored” have never reached the figures cited in official documentation and may in fact be far lower. Many of these peats sit on land licensed to timber companies. 

​​The data also shows that the area of peatland that meets this 40cm threshold also fluctuates wildly as water levels rise and fall, sometimes dropping as low as half a million hectares – a fraction of the area claimed as “restored” by the government.

​​The Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry, known as KLHK, did not respond to written questions, or to extensive attempts to seek comment on our findings.​ 

Environmental researchers who spoke to The Gecko Project viewed the implementation of a system to monitor peatland restoration as a positive step. But some also expressed scepticism about the government’s claims of success and how it was arriving at its figures. 

In the meantime, with Indonesia heading into what meteorologists predict could be an extreme dry season this year, the findings suggest that large areas of peatland could be far more vulnerable to burning than the government has acknowledged.  

The coming months, said David Taylor, a professor and peatland expert at the National University of Singapore, would serve as “a good test” of the government’s claims. 

An excavator operates in peatland covered by haze from fires in a concession belonging to PT Kaswari Unggul (KU) in Sumatra, Indonesia. (Photo: Greenpeace)

The repair job starts 

Despite covering only around three percent of the planet’s land surface, peatlands store around a third of all the world’s soil carbon.  

In Indonesia, where they cover more than 20 million hectares, peatlands have long been prone to fire during the dry season, especially during El Niño events. But the risks have ​been worsened by the draining of peatlands ​to allow cultivation of oil palm and timber plantations. 

The government set out to undo some of that damage by issuing a series of decrees and regulations, beginning in 2016, which aimed to rewet drained peatlands and replant vegetation.  

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

According to these guidelines, success would be assessed through multiple metrics, including plant growth and keeping the groundwater level at no lower than 40cm below the surface. Some research has suggested that higher water levels offer better protection against fires. 

A specially-established government body, now named the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency, or BRGM, was given authority for overseeing peat restoration in land controlled by communities or the government. 

However, several million hectares of peatland fall within land already licensed to plantation companies. ​KLHK​ ordered companies to restore peatlands within their concessions and report back their progress.  

Mission accomplished? 

According to KLHK reports, companies have made progress in restoring peatlands. The KLHK website, for example, states that 3.4 million hectares of peatland within concession areas were “restored” between 2015 and 2019. 

A more recent KLHK report from 2022 states that “as of December 2021 (peatland restoration) had reached 3.66 million hectares.” 

But the KLHK’s methods for assessing which peatlands are restored can be narrow, experts say, as they appear to focus only on rewetting lands and not on other metrics. 

While companies are required to raise peat groundwater levels to at least 40cm belowground, other phases of restoration work, such as replanting native vegetation, appear to have been sidelined, leaving “rewetting” to be used as a proxy for restoration.  

In a 2022 report, the ministry registered fewer than 6,000 hectares as having “vegetation rehabilitation”. 

“Green” finance bankrolls forest destruction in Indonesia

A data analysis by The Gecko Project also shows that, even under the more generous approach of counting only rewetted peatlands as restored, the numbers still fall short of what the government says has been restored. 

Still, KLHK has claimed that by 2019, rewetting work alone had already reduced carbon dioxide emissions by more than 190 million tons – equivalent to the annual national emissions of the United Arab Emirates. KLHK did not respond to questions about the data supporting these calculations. 

Restoration falls short? 

KLHK has not made public a list of areas deemed to be restored and did not respond to requests for this information. However, it has published the areas that have been rewetted to various levels. 

Using this data, The Gecko Project identified peatlands within concession areas and compared their water levels to the 3.66 million hectares that KLHK claims have been restored.  

At a more detailed glance, the data shows big fluctuations in the “rewetted” area, suggesting that water levels are not being maintained on a stable basis.  

For example, at the beginning of 2019, during a wet season that saw torrential floods in many parts of the country, KLHK registered that around 3.5 million hectares of peatland inside concession areas had groundwater levels at 40cm belowground or higher.  

But in the middle of the 2022 dry season, the area rewetted was down to around just half a million hectares. 

Fire risk 

The data analysis also identified multiple “dry” concession areas in which water levels fell consistently below 40cm in the past year, highlighting a possibly heightened fire risk as this year’s El Niño event progresses.  

As an example, PT Rimba Hutani Mas, a pulpwood plantation company and supplier of the major paper and pulp firm Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), manages nearly 70,000 hectares in South Sumatra province, the majority of which is on peatlands according to government maps.  

Large sections of PT Rimba Hutani Mas’s peatland had water levels below the 40cm threshold​ over the last year​, KLHK data shows. According to ​the ​ministry, concession holders that have groundwater at this level “should carry out field checks immediately and improve or repair water management infrastructure in the field.” 

In 2015, army officers and firefighters try to extinguish fires in peatland areas outside the city of Palangka Raya in Borneo’s Central Kalimantan province. Photo: (Aulia Erlangga/CIFOR)

But the company was subject to legal action by Singapore’s National Environment Agency after evidence emerged that fires in its concession had contributed substantially to the haze of 2015. APP argued at the time that almost all the fires in its concession areas had been started outside those areas. 

APP did not respond to specific questions about water levels in this supplier’s concession area. The company said it has been submitting “all the required data” to KLHK and pointed to its 2022 Sustainability Report. 

Job not done 

Peat researchers agree that fluctuations in water level are to be expected in peatlands, whether or not land is being managed. This complicates the use of groundwater level as a standalone measure of restoration success.  

Water levels are highly dependent on external climate conditions, noted Muh Taufik, a tropical peatland researcher at IPB University. In the wet season, the water table could be at ground level or even above ground, while in the dry season it can fall to a metre or more below the surface, he said. 

The topography of the land itself can influence the water table, too – valleys are more likely than slopes to remain wet. “It’s very difficult to maintain the water table around 40cm,” Taufik said. 

Such variability reinforces some researchers’ concerns about judging restoration success on the basis of water level data alone. 

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

While getting water back into dried-out peatlands is important, “it’s definitely not ‘job done’” once the water table reaches 40cm, said Dominick Spracklen, a professor of biosphere-atmosphere interactions at the University of Leeds. Rather, he said, “it is a good proxy for things moving in the right direction.” 

David Taylor, from the University of Singapore, suggested that rewetting should be seen as a first step.  

While having a monitoring system for peat rewetting is a positive step, he said, it’s important to take a more holistic approach to peat restoration that acknowledges the time and multiple steps involved – particularly reintroducing plants and allowing natural vegetation to grow in the absence of peat-damaging plantation activities. 

Uncertain figures 

Gusti, the professor at Tanjungpura University said it’s “very complicated” to determine whether the ministry’s peatland restoration claims have been achieved or not.  

Separate KLHK documents appear to acknowledge much lower success rates than claimed by officials. A 2020 report, for example, noted that, out of 280 concession areas, just 60 were found to have “actually improved their performance of peatland ecosystems management.” 

Fieldwork published in 2021 by the nonprofit Pantau Gambut concluded that “most companies” had failed to implement plans to restore peat. 

The implications of these failings, and the fluctuations in water levels, may become apparent in the coming months, as dry weather continues to intensify in Indonesia in the first El Niño year since 2019.1 By mid-June, KLHK reported that fires in 2023 had already affected more than 28,000 hectares of forest and other land. 

“Big El Niños over the last thirty years or so have been associated with drought here in southeast Asia [and with] peatland fires,” said Taylor.  

Fires can burn even on pristine peatlands, he said, but if Indonesia’s restoration work has been successful, it should help limit some of the damage. “I think it’s going to be a test of claims that have been made that these peatlands have been restored.” 

This story was published in partnership with The Gecko Project.

The post Indonesia falls short on peatland restoration, risking destructive fire season appeared first on Climate Home News.

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

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

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

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

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

Slow action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oil in the Amazon?

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

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

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

G20 climate talks fail to deliver emission cuts despite leadership pleas

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

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

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

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

Illegal mining

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

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

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

The post Amazon nations fail to agree on deforestation goal at summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

The stalemate is dragging on as attempts to formally discuss a precautionary suspension of mining activities have been thwarted by nations in favour of exploiting the ocean’s mineral resources.

Over a dozen countries spearheaded by Chile, Costa Rica and France want to officially debate for the first time in history the possibility to halt deep-sea mining until its full impact on the ocean’s biodiversity is understood.

Hervè Berville, the French Minister for Marine Affairs, told the Assembly on Wednesday that the world “must not and cannot embark on a new industrial activity without measuring the consequences and taking the risk of irreversible damage”.

For the past decade, the mining industry has proposed to extract minerals from the deep seabed that can later be used to make batteries for electric vehicles.

However, the potential impacts of mining the ocean floor are largely unknown, putting biodiversity at risk. More than 750 marine scientists signed an open letter calling for a ban on the practice until robust scientific evidence can back it up.

High Seas Treaty exempts deep-sea mining from stricter environmental rules

Mining industry pushback

China and the island-state of Nauru have so far blocked the motion for a moratorium discussion, preventing agreement over the agenda. Both countries sponsor companies pushing for the exploitation of seabed minerals. Mexico also initially opposed but then retracted.

Gina Guillén, head of the Costa Rican delegation and one of the leaders of the coalition calling for a pause on mining, said one sole country was fiercely blocking the agenda item, even after offering a lighter discussion than expected.

“Just one country is opposing (the agenda item on the discussion). We hope it does happen. One country can’t hijack the most important body of the (ISA) just for being a big economy. That goes against all principles of multilateralism,” Guillén said.

‘We are not ready’: Divisions deepen over rush to finalise deep sea mining rules

Calls for a so-called moratorium have been gathering pace during the annual meeting of the ISA, the little-known UN body tasked with regulating the vast ocean floor in international waters.

This year’s week-long summit, set to end on Friday, comes at a pivotal time. Any member state could theoretically apply for a full-blown mining contract on behalf of a company, after a deadline triggered by Nauru lapsed earlier in July.

So far the ISA has only handed out ‘exploration’ permits which do not allow commercial exploitation of the minerals.

Mining code delayed

But several operators have already been exploring an area of the Pacific Ocean floor known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone. The region is rich in polymetallic nodules containing nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, which are critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

Among the most active is Canada-based start-up The Metals Company, whose license is sponsored by Nauru. After the island nation triggered an obscure provision two years ago, the ISA accelerated the pace of its negotiations to establish mining rules before a July 9th, 2023.

The Metals Company, and its partner Nauru, hoped to begin industrial-scale mining as early as 2024, following the expected approval of a mining code.

But their ambitions were cut back last week after the ISA delayed timeline for the regulations. The 36 members of the body’s council gave until 2025 to adopt the mining code.

It is now a question of when — rather than if — commercial scale nodule collection will begin. https://t.co/oWI8AOZPBR

— gerard barron (@gtbgtb) July 24, 2023

Blow to industry

Nauru’s president Russ Joseph Kun expressed disappointment on Wednesday that the ISA did not complete the process within the two-year deadline.

Member states in fact could still apply for a mining licence despite the rules not being in place. This would push the body into uncharted territory without clear guidelines on how such a request would be examined.

The Metals Company said it reserves the right to submit an application in the absence of a mining code. “It is now a question of when — rather than if — commercial-scale nodule collection will begin”, its CEO Gerard Barron said in a statement.

But the listed company’s stock tumbled by over 20% this week, hinting at investors’ diminishing confidence in its mining prospects.

Guillén from Costa Rica said approving the new 2025 deadline was “critical”. “They wanted a 2024 deadline, but we said no way,” she said.

Moratorium discussion

Campaigners opposed to deep-sea mining viewed the new 2025 deadline for the mining code with optimism but repeated their pleas for a moratorium, which would block any attempt to start commercial operations.

“This unprecedented agenda fight comes as a coalition of nations from Latin America, the Pacific and Europe try and wrangle the debate away from serving narrow corporate interests towards the public good”, said Louisa Casson from Greenpeace, who is attending the talks in Jamaica.

If the agenda is approved, it would mark the first time countries hold a formal discussion on suspending deep sea mining, although this discussion would not necessarily lead to a moratorium.

Still, Gillén said this is an important precedent, and said “we cannot destroy the seabed by taking a rushed decision”.

Last year, countries agreed to a treaty for the high seas, which creates international marine protected areas. However, this milestone could be undermined if deep sea talks end up with a bad deal, the Costa Rican negotiator added.

“Even after having agreed to the (high seas) treaty, if we don’t have strong safeguards for the seabed in those same areas, then we won’t have achieved anything,” Guillén said.

The post UN deep-sea mining talks deadlocked over agenda clash appeared first on Climate Home News.

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.

G20 divisions over key climate goals pile pressure on Cop28 hosts

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.

EU and Argentina strike gas, hydrogen & renewables deal

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.

Dozens of oil & industry lobbyists attended secretive shipping emissions talks

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. 

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

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.

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

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.” 

The post Pressure grows on governments and banks to stop supporting Amazon oil and gas  appeared first on Climate Home News.

It is the first time that Ecuadorians will vote on an ecological issue of this magnitude. Experts consulted by Climate Home News said the referendum will define the economic model for the country’s future.

The environmental referendum is a first of its kind for Ecuador and, if approved by a simple majority of Ecuadorians, would ban all new oil wells in the Yasuní park, as well as phasing out existing concessions.

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

Pedro Bermeo, spokesperson for Yasunidos, a coalition of NGOs that led the call for the vote, said the public debate around climate change is already a victory. He added the referendum is a “milestone in the history of Ecuador”.

“Beyond the result, we must see this as an opportunity to value what this referendum has already provoked: a national debate that has never existed before,” Bermeo said.

The vote is scheduled to take place on August 20. At the time of publication, there have been no public opinion polls.

Vote for the rainforest

The Yasuní National Park, Ecuador’s largest, hosts one of the largest biodiversity hotspots on Earth, and is the home of the Tagaeri and Taromenane people in voluntary isolation. 

For decades, Yasuní has been threatened by extractive industries, such as mining and oil. For over six years, Ecuador’s State oil company, Petroecuador, has been operating in this territory. 

According to reports from the Andean Amazon Monitoring Project, at least 689 hectares have been deforested in the Yasuní, most of it, by the oil industry.

This is the size of 1,200 American Football fields and exceeds the 300-hectare limit established after a previous referendum in 2018.

Ecuador, Amazon Rainforest, Rio Napo, Near Coca, in the Yasuni National Park, on November, 14 2022. (Photo: Reuters / Stevens Tomas / ABACA)

Data provided by the Ministry of Environment, shows there have been more than 1,500 oil spills in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the last decade, which means at least 12 occur every month. 

Experts warn that both deforestation and oil spills threaten the unique biodiversity of the Amazon.

Activists have called for a vote on whether to keep drilling for oil in this region but, in 2013, the country declared Yasuní as an area of national interest and began extracting crude soon after. 

Bermeo’s Yasunidos proposed a referendum to nullify the declaration, but the process was blocked by an electoral court.

Threat of EU carbon tax prompts dubious “green aluminium” claims in Mozambique

Climate debate

The current government says approving the referendum can have “catastrophic” effects on the economy. Still, they’ve claimed they won’t campaign against it.

Fernando Santos, Energy Minister, has said in several interviews that the country “won’t gain anything by not producing [the Yasuní] ITT oil”. He has also argued that removing existing infrastructure will actually have negative costs for the country.

But experts claim the benefits from oil in Ecuador’s Amazon could be short-lived. 

During a hearing at the Constitutional Court, Petroecuador’s technicians explained the oil from Yasuní is low-quality “extra-heavy crude”, which requires high investments to process and sell.

When drilling began in Yasuní, Petroecuador expected to reach a daily production of 200,000 oil barrels by 2022. However, official data shows it has remained at 55,000 — about a quarter of what was expected. Pedro Bermeo says that the “figures they [the government] are giving are false”. 

As a result, a 2019 study by the Geological and Energetic Research Institute, a public research institution in Ecuador, estimated that by 2029, “oil could no longer be the main source of income” in the country. The study called for a change in the economic model.

Latin America leads resistance to global shipping emission tax

An important precedent

Luis Suárez, Executive Director at Conservation International Ecuador, said the referendum is an opportunity to rethink the country’s future, and suggested a move to tourism and bioeconomy. “What is the country going to bet on?”, he asked.

Domingo Peas, Territory Coordinator for the Cuencas Sagradas Initiative and a longtime leader of the Achuar nationality, says the vote will be “historic for Ecuador and the world” because “it will frame strategies for the next generation”. 

For the indigenous nationalities living in the Amazon, including the Tagaeri and Taromenane, the referendum is a way of respecting their human rights, he added.

“We, indigenous people, have said that we only want a dignified life”, and the approval of the referendum will grant that, Peas said.

Still, all experts consulted said the referendum will not stop oil production overnight. “We know these changes take time”, said Peas, “but it is imperative that they occur eventually”.

The post ‘Historic milestone’: Ecuador nears vote to keep Amazon oil in the ground appeared first on Climate Home News.

Medco had initially planted a vast timber plantation to produce wood chips for exports. Then, in 2017, Indonesia injected Medco with $4.5 million to build a biomass plant in the area and committed the state-owned electricity company to buy the energy it generated. In 2021, the government gave the plant an extra $9 million. 

The company said it needs to almost double the size of its plantation to meet the demands of the power plant, and that it would continue to use wood harvested from the forest as it is cleared. 

Ultimately, the most affected were local villagers depending on the forest. The project has made it harder for Marind people, hunter-gatherers indigenous people to the lowlands of Papua, to find food to eat. 

This story is the result of a new Climate Home News investigation in collaboration with The Gecko Project and Project Multatuli, both publications based in Indonesia. 

This week’s news:

• “Green” finance bankrolls forest destruction in Indonesia
• FSC’s rehab scheme for forest destroyers under fire after fresh allegations
• Amazon gateway city Belém will host Cop30 climate talks
• Comment: Climate movement must switch on to UAE threat

Our reporter Joe Lo is in Paris covering key UN plastics treaty negotiations. Check out our coverage:

• Row over veto powers holds up Paris plastic treaty talks
• Comment: How a local victory against petrochemicals can spur global action on plastics

Forest protection has been on our radar recently, as allegations surged that forest logging companies were using a sustainability certification scheme called the FSC to brand themselves as sustainable while continuing to clear forests. 

At its assembly last year, the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) agreed to give their stamp of approval to companies that have cut down trees between 1994 and 2020 if they restore part of the forests and compensate communities.  

These companies include two Indonesian pulp and paper giants, Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (April) and Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), which had cleared vast areas of the tropical rainforest for decades. 

But environmental groups accused both companies of sourcing wood from suppliers which continue to cut down intact forests. One of the suppliers, they found, cut down an area equivalent to 20,000 football pitches. 

FSC told Climate Home News it “will not engage with any organisation that continues to be part of destructive activities”. “The FSC should prepare itself not to be fooled,” one campaigner responded. 

The post “Green” funds destroy Indonesia’s forests – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a joint statement, the countries said they “intend to engage collaboratively in support of eliminating global illegal logging and deforestation through effectively enforcing their respective laws on banning illegal imports and exports”.

Brazilian President Lula da Silva met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during a visit to China, in a bid to strengthen ties. China is Brazil’s largest trading partner and a major importer of commodities such as soy and crude petroleum.

Both countries added they will cooperate with satellite information, “which will enable enhanced monitoring”. China and Brazil share the CBERS satellite program, which made its first launch back in 2001.

Brazil bids to bring Cop30 climate talks to Amazon’s Belem

Cyntia Feitosa, international relations advisor at the Brazilian think tank Instituto Clima e Sociedade, said the joint statement was “a very good signal”, but warned there’s still questions about how it would be put into practice.

“It would be very good to see some joint traceability strategy, for example, to avoid the export of any product that has deforestation in its supply chain,” Feitosa said.

A 2019 report by the Brazilian NGO Amazon Watch showed that companies charged with environmental crimes in the Amazon were still able to export their products to the international market, in particular to Brazil’s three main trading partners — China, the EU and the US.

Climate leadership

With the arrival of Lula da Silva to Brazil’s presidency, the country resumed its efforts to influence global climate action. Da Silva also retook a closer relation with China, which at times was tense under the last government of Jair Bolsonaro.

Both countries now agreed to establish a Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change and support Brazil’s bid for Cop30. Back in January, Da Silva expressed his desire to host the UN climate talks in Belem, the second-biggest city in the Amazon region.

Lula revives $1 billion Amazon Fund and environmental protections

“China welcomes the Brazilian candidacy to host COP30, as the 2025 summit will be key to the very future of the global response to climate change,” the statement said.

Feitosa welcomed the countries’ collaboration with climate action at the center. “I hope this is reflected in a collaborative posture in the negotiations and the search for effective solutions at a crucial moment for the next steps in the implementation of the Paris Agreement,” she said.

Li Shuo, policy advisor for Greenpeace East Asia, said Brazil and China hold a big sway among develpoping countries, putting them in a unique position to lead initiatives coming from the Global South.

“A Brazil that is back to international scene and a China that seeks to enhance developing country solidarity should not just imply a fortress position, but rather a stance that champions global south concerns while at the same time advances their own action,” Shuo said.

“What we need is a more forward looking position from them that says developed countries need to act and so do we. Let’s hope the joint statement is a starting point to get us there,” he added.

This story was updated to include comments from Li Shuo.

The post China and Brazil to cooperate in stopping illegal trade fueling deforestation appeared first on Climate Home News.

Wedged between Brazil and Suriname, the overseas department has little in common with mainland France bar the name. The Amazon rainforest covers more than 90% of the territory.

However, French Guiana is critical to Europe’s soft power. It is home to the continent’s spaceport where the European Space Agency launches its satellites.

Now, the French government is seeking exemptions from proposed EU rules that would restrict the use of bioenergy on the territory. The loophole would allow French Guiana to receive public financing to produce biofuels “especially for the space sector”.

Azerbaijan weaponises conservation law in conflict with Armenia

Local lawmakers argue the dispensation is necessary to protect French Guiana’s forestry sector and accelerate its energy transition. But campaigners have warned the exemption risks setting an incentive for increased logging in Europe’s corner of the Amazon forest.

“Thousands of hectares of Amazon forest could be cleared to be replaced with monocultures designed to produce energy… with the help of public financing,” Marine Calmet, a lawyer specialised in environmental law at NGOs Maiouri Nature Guyane and Wild Legal, told Climate Home News

Rules for biofuels

The EU considers burning wood a renewable energy and subsidises its production. Bioenergy accounts for almost 60% of the EU’s renewable energy mix. But a mounting body of evidence is showing that burning wood emits more carbon dioxide than coal per unit of energy – worsening climate change.

Regrown trees may eventually remove the emitted carbon from the atmosphere but the process could take decades to a century – time which scientists say the world doesn’t have to prevent the worst impacts of global heating. To start addressing the issue, the EU is negotiating stricter sustainability criteria for producing and using bioenergy.

DR Congo delays rainforest oil auctions

Draft legislation adopted by the EU parliament proposed to exclude “primary woody biomass” – untransformed wood such as whole trees, logs and stumps – from receiving renewable energy subsidies, with limited exceptions. It also caps the amount that can count as renewable energy to current use.

Biomass from agricultural crops can’t be considered renewable if they are grown on land of great biodiversity value or replacing primary and ancient forests.

But French lawmakers introduced an exemption for “an outermost region where forests cover at least 90% of the territory”. It would allow biomass fuels and biofuels “especially used in the space sector” and regardless of their origin to receive public financing if they incentivise the transition away from fossil fuels.

Analysts told Climate Home French Guiana is the only known EU region where this could apply.

The Guiana Space Center is surrounded by 90% of forest covered territory in the Amazon. (Photo: CNES/ESA/Arianespace/Optique Video CSG/P Baudon)

Biofuels in the rainforest

The loophole would allow France to count woody bioenergy production in French Guiana towards its own renewable energy target – despite a cap in the rest of the continent. In 2020, France was the only EU member state to fail to achieve its renewable energy target.

Authorities in French Guiana argue the EU’s proposed rules threatened the territory’s goal to move away from fossil fuels, including at the spaceport, which consumes 18% of the electricity produced locally.

Two biomass plants, totalling 9MW, are being built to produce electricity and cooling for operations at the space station. By 2030, French Guiana wants 25% of its electricity mix to come from woody biomass.

Thibault Lechat-Vega, a local official responsible for European affairs, told Climate Home that halting subsidies to the sector would require the territory to import wood pellets from Canada and China “at a catastrophic carbon cost”.

EU plans restrictions on climate-wrecking fishing method

“There is clearly no question of cutting the forest to produce biofuels but to support research to green the European space launcher,” he said, adding that the logging sector in French Guiana followed some of the world’s strictest sustainability criteria.

Waste from forest clearance to give way to agriculture and to build homes and infrastructure would be used, he explained.

But Calmet said these assurances were insufficient. “Elected officials are providing no guarantees about the origins of the biomass. On the contrary, they want to contravene all legal obligations designed to protect primary and old forests, and ecosystems with high biodiversity value,” she said.

Cleaner rockets

While rocket launches account for a tiny fraction of the space industry’s emissions, a number of companies are developing greener propellants, including using biofuels. In French Guiana, researchers are working to scale up biofuels production from micro algae.

Andreas Schütz, a chemical propellant expert at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), told Climate Home that producing rocket fuels from wood, using a process known as gasification, is feasible.

But Mike Mason, an engineer who researched biomass at Oxford University, said the process was “very expensive” and that burning wood to produce electricity remains inefficient.

“Wood is a renewable resource but burning it has a global warming impact,” said Mason, warning of the risk of creating a precedent for climate-damaging activities in the Amazon.

Negotiations on the draft rules are ongoing. Sources close to the discussions told Climate Home that while the EU Council showed willing to accommodate France’s request, the Commission was concerned about the biodiversity impacts.

France recently closed a consultation on requesting the waiver. The government said “minimal environmental guarantees” would be put in place to limit tree clearance for energy production purposes.

The post France seeks EU loophole for French Guiana to power space sector with biofuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

As part of the package, Brazil’s new leader reinstated the Amazon Fund, a $1.2 billion fund to protect of the world’s largest rainforest, after a three-year period of inactivity.  

Donors Germany and Norway suspended transfers to the fund in 2019, under the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, after the former president unilaterally suspended the board of directors and the technical committee of the fund.

On Monday, Lula reinstated the fund’s governing body, which Norwegian environment minister Espen Barth Eide said “allows for an immediate reactivation of the fund”.  The UK’s environment minister Therese Coffey said the UK was “seriously looking at” joining the fund.

Destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado savanna soars for third year in a row

The fund, which was established during Lula’s second term in 2008, supports 102 conservation projects in the Amazon, among them forests managed by indigenous people and small-scale farms. 

Among the first executive mandates, Brazil’s new president also moved the Rural Environmental Registry —which tracks all rural land-ownership— from the agriculture to the environment ministry, extinguished the possibility of conciliating environmental fines and reactivated a plan to prevent and control deforestation in the Amazon. 

“There is still a long way to go, but what we’ve seen at the beginning of this mandate is a right start and demonstrates the importance that the issue has gained on Lula’s agenda,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian NGO Climate Observatory. 

Green promises 

Lula was sworn into office for a third term on Sunday, after defeating rightwing incumbent Bolsonaro by a thin margin in October’s general election. Bolsonaro’s policies led to a 60% increase in deforestation in the Amazon.

Brazil’s new president promised to achieve zero deforestation in the Amazon and 100% renewable electricity during his inaugural speech, adding “Brazil does not need to cut down forests to keep and expand its strategic agricultural frontier”.

“The world expects Brazil to once again become a leader in tackling the climate crisis and an example of a socially and environmentally responsible country, capable of promoting economic growth with income distribution,” he said.

Lula will update Brazil’s ‘insufficient’ climate plans if elected: advisor

Lula appointed former environment minister and activist Marina Silva to once again lead the country’s green efforts. He also created the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, to be led by the influential Amazonian leader Sônia Guajajara.

The new government’s environment team is promising, said Astrini, but he also warned that Lula will have to negotiate without a majority in Congress, which is dominated by legislators linked to Bolsonaro’s party and to the “ruralist” movement defending agribusiness in the Amazon.

A package of three Bolsonaro-era bills being discussed in Congress could trump Lula’s efforts to control deforestation in the Amazon. These projects would respectively allow for the relaxed use of pesticides, land-grabbing in public forests and weaker regulations for environmental permits.

“Our current Congress is extremely hostile to indigenous and environmental affairs. We have grown used to that. We need a government that defends the environment and that can face that Congress,” said Astrini.

This article was updated on 4 January to add that the UK is considering joining the fund

The post Lula revives $1 billion Amazon Fund and environmental protections appeared first on Climate Home News.

Chinese minister of ecology and environment Huang Runqiu, who is leading the meeting of the UN-backed Cop15 biodiversity conference, brought down the official gavel and declared a proposed deal passed, minutes after the Congolese representative expressed their objection.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, reflecting the joint leadership of China and Canada, is the culmination of four years of work toward creating an agreement to guide global conservation efforts through 2030.

The countries attending the conference had been privately negotiating a text proposed on Sunday and talks addressing the finer points of the deal dragged on until Monday morning.

As the members returned to the public hall, Huang began presenting the outcome of the meeting. Then, a representative of the delegation from Congo objected to the text, raising concerns about developed nations’ responsibility to fund conservation in developing countries.

“The parties which are developed nations should provide resources to parties which are developing,” the Congolese representative said through a translator.

However, the Mexican delegation said they supported the presidency and the prepared text.

Huang acknowledged the Mexican remarks and then brought down the gavel declaring the deal adopted, drawing outraged comments from other African delegations.

A representative from Cameroon said via translator: “What we saw was a force of hand.”

The representative from Uganda declared that they did not accept the spirit and the manner at which the gavel fell and requested to put on record it did not support the procedure, invoking fraud.

Finance agreement

The agreement, based on the last two weeks of talks, sets a crucial financial target of $200 billion per year for conservation initiatives, though it demands less from wealthy countries than some developing states had wanted.

It recommends allocating $200 billion per year from all sources, including the public and private sectors, for conservation initiatives – a target seen as critical for the successful implementation of any deal.

Developing countries were pushing for half of that – $100 billion per year – to flow from wealthy countries to poorer nations. However, the text mentions only that $20 billion per year comes from developed countries by 2025 – and $30 billion per year from 2030.

The draft also notes that the money could come voluntarily from any country – a nod to developed nations’ desire that large economies such as China also contribute funds.

Having China and Arab countries joining would be “a huge step forward,” EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius said.

Asked whether China should be considered a developing country, as still defined by the World Bank, he said: “I think we should not stick to 1992 descriptions but see the reality on the ground, and it’s very different from 1992.”

One of the greatest points of contention among delegates has been whether a new fund should be established for that money, improving on an existing structure. On Wednesday morning, developing country negotiators walked out of a financing meeting in protest. The draft deal does not mention setting up a separate facility.

30 by 30

It lays out support for protecting 30% of land and waters by 2030, a landmark goal informally known as 30-by-30, and suggests restoring 30% of degraded lands.

“We were surprised that (the text) is actually capturing most of the things we want to go for,” a delegate from a European country said. On restoration, he noted the text went with a more ambitious target of 30%, instead of 20%, which “is really good and ambitious and necessary”.

Businesses should also be asked to assess and disclose how they affect and are affected by nature loss, but the agreement does not make such reporting mandatory.

The text suggests harmful subsidies should be reduced by at least $500 billion per year by the end of the decade.

The post Cop15 global nature deal passes despite DR Congo’s objection appeared first on Climate Home News.

Behind security barriers, hundreds packed the Blue Zone pavilion where he was giving his first speech at the summit. One indigenous woman Facetimed a relative in Brazil: “Can you see him? Can you believe he’s right there?” she shouted over the phone.

At the Cop27 climate summit, expectations are high for Brazil’s newly elected leader. Lula won last month’s election promising a dramatic shift in rainforest protection. The outgoing government of Jair Bolsonaro leaves the country’s deforestation rate on a 12-year high.

“Brazil is leaving the cocoon where it was for the past four years,” he said in his first public appearance in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Wednesday. He started the previous evening, meeting with climate envoys from China and the US. 

Lula even announced a bid to bring Cop30 to the Amazon, in the state of Amazonas or Pará. It is the turn of a Latin American country to host in 2026. “People who defend the climate should know closely what is that region,” he said. 

Lula will update Brazil’s ‘insufficient’ climate plans if elected: advisor

How much he can live up to the task is yet to be seen. He has no majority in Congress and inflation is driving the country to the brink of recession. He admitted high expectations “scare” him in an interview with The New Yorker.

Still, the fate of the Amazon rainforest depends in great part on Lula. The world’s biggest rainforest basin is at a tipping point.

Recent studies found that, over the last decade, the Amazon started to emit more carbon than it absorbs through photosynthesis. This is mainly as a result of rainforest clearance for cattle ranches and soy plantations.

Politically motivated charges

In a previous term as president 2003-10, Lula cracked down on deforestation. Since then, the leftist politician has spent time in prison before dramatically resurrecting his reputation.

Four years ago, Lula was jailed in federal police headquarters in the state of Curitiba, charged with corruption and money laundering. The Supreme Court revoked his sentence, judging it biased by political opponents. Now, he’s back at UN climate talks having won a tight election against Bolsonaro.

“We have certainty that [Lula] will protect the indigenous territories, and that he will have a ministry for indigenous people. That is a relief for us,” said Thiago Yawanawá, an indigenous activist from the Amazonian state of Acre, while waiting for Lula’s speech. 

Latin America closes ranks at Cop27 around climate finance

Other biomes could also benefit from a Lula presidency, said Shirley Krenak, an indigenous leader from the state of Minas Gerais. “We are very hopeful with the new president. It was with Lula that we had more opportunities for dialogue,” she added. 

Lula’s approach goes further. Marina Silva, a lawmaker tipped for the environment ministry, said the government does not want “an isolated protection only in Brazil. We want protection in all mega-forested countries.” 

Two days earlier, at a G20 leaders summit, Brazil signed a pact with Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to tackle deforestation.

DRC vice-minister Eve Bazaiba hinted on Twitter this should inspire rich countries to deliver finance “proportional to the ecosystem services given to mankind”.

Contributors to the Amazon Fund froze payments during Bolsonaro’s term – but were quick to congratulate Lula on his win.

Challenge ahead 

Bolsonaro’s policies left a destructive trail in the Amazon. His administration defunded environmental protection agencies and rolled back indigenous rights and environmental protections.

A legislative package that would allow farmers to claim rainforest land is ready to vote in the Senate and could pass before Bolsonaro’s term ends.

Brazil can only protect the Amazon with consistent policies over time, the head of the Global Environmental Facility Carlos Manuel Rodríguez told Climate Home.

Silva, on her part, said she’s aware of the challenge ahead. On one hand, inflation is driving the country towards a difficult economic situation. On the other, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Resources saw a recent 24% slash in its budget. 

In the past, under Lula, Brazil was able to drastically reduce forest loss with its own resources, said Tasso Azevedo, former chief of the Brazilian Forest Service. The new government now has the experience to do it again, he said.

“A lot of things can be done with the right political decisions. Once they start to have results, it’s kind of easy to push for funds.”

The post Lula charms UN climate summit, bringing hope for rainforests appeared first on Climate Home News.

The biodiversity conference, or Cop15, is a moment for countries to agree on a global framework to halt the destruction of nature by the end of this decade. Negotiators meet in Montreal, Canada, 7-19 December, to finalise the deal, widely billed as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.

But after four years of talks, the issue has failed to gain the attention of world leaders. First the coronavirus pandemic, then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring inflation pushed nature conservation down the agenda.

That is unlikely to change as China, which presides over the talks, hasn’t invited political leaders to attend the conference. President Xi Jinping isn’t expected to show up amid deteriorating relations with host Canada.

“As the plans go, we may not have the heads of state and government,” Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, head of UN Biodiversity, told Climate Home News during an event at think tank Chatham House in London.

But “pressure from many quarters” is building on China and Canada to reconsider, she added.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up for free to get our weekly newsletter and occasional extra bulletins

Campaigners have warned that without political leadership, the talks risk collapsing with no deal.

The draft deal outlines 21 targets but nearly all the text remains disputed. The version dated 26 June has more than 900 pairs of square brackets, enclosing proposed language that hasn’t got consensus.

Fraught relations

China officially presides over the negotiations but handed over the hosting to Canada because of Beijing’s zero-Covid policy. The invitation list is officially China’s call.

Relations between the two countries have been fraught ever since Canadian authorities arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in 2018, at the request of the US, for allegedly violating sanctions against Iran.

Days later, China arrested two Canadian nationals on accusations of spying. The detainees on both sides were allowed to return home in September 2021 but tensions remain high.

A spokesperson for the Canadian government didn’t address Climate Home’s question on whether world leaders would be invited.

Eyes on Trudeau

Campaigners are urging Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to gather leaders on the sidelines of the summit, regardless of what China decides.

“Trudeau cannot and should not allow a global political failure of these negotiations in his own watch and in his own country,” Oscar Soria, Avaaz’s campaign director, told Climate Home

“Right now, this conference is barely known in certain diplomatic circles and despite some isolated announcements in the last UN general assembly, the overall process is lacking momentum,” he said. Without “the highest political attention,” the summit risked being further overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and even the football World Cup.

“Biodiversity cannot be an afterthought, it cannot be a low-priority issues. Nature is the foundation of our economy, our food, and our survival,” Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, told Climate Home.

By attending Cop15, heads of state will “significantly improve the likelihood an ambitious global agreement can be reached,” he said.

O’Donnell also called on the UN secretary general António Guterres to attend the talks.

EU ministers back €20 billion plan to ditch Russian fossil fuels

Last month, the Chinese government invited ministers to attend the high-level segment at the end of the summit on 15-17 December.

While negotiators lay the technical groundwork, political agreement between capitals is what gets these deals over the line.

In a note to governments, Mrema said participation in the high-level segment was “of vital importance to secure an ambitious and achievable post-2020 global biodiversity framework” and urged ministers to attend in person.

The Chinese Cop15 presidency didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The post World leaders not invited to attend critical UN biodiversity summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

Last year, the small island state of Nauru, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters, until July 2023 to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules.

Countries have discussed mining the bottom of the oceans for years but no commercial extraction has started in international waters. The ultimatum would allow the nascent industry to apply for mining permits as soon as next year.

The move has led to growing calls from nations, scientists and campaigners not to rush the approval of a mining code that risks negatively impacting the deep marine environment, of which still little is known.

During three weeks of meetings at the ISA’s headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, which ended last week, some member states issued multiple calls for a discussion on the implication of the two-year ultimatum to be added to the agenda.

Chile, Costa Rica, South Africa, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Italy and Spain were among countries voicing frustration at being forced to negotiate such a complex piece of international law under an artificial timeline.

But the ISA secretary and officials refused to add the issue to the official agenda, stripping the body’s 167 member states of the ability to meet and express their views before the deadline next year.

Between a wolf and its food: as one deep sea miner flops, others eye the prize

Deep sea mining companies have been carrying out exploration of an area of the Pacific Ocean floor, known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone. 

There lies a concentration of black mineral concretion, known as polymetallic nodules, which are rich in nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese: minerals critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

Following the triggering of the two-year-rule, the ISA secretary has rushed to design a roadmap that could allow the nascent deep sea mining industry to begin commercial operations as soon as next year.

Under procedural rules, the ISA will have to “consider and provisionally approve” requests for exploitation licences regardless of whether the mining code is finalised.

Since then, calls for banning the practice have grown. Scientists have warned that far too little is known about the deep ocean, its biodiversity and the role it plays in storing carbon to allow companies to mine the seabed. Mining would result in biodiversity loss “that would be irreversible on multi-generational timescales,” they say.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up for free to get our weekly newsletter and occasional extra bulletins

The Chilean delegation, which formally requested for the implication of the July 2023 deadline to be discussed at the meeting, described it as “an elephant in the room”.

In June, Chile called for a 15-year moratorium on adopting regulations, expressing concerns of environmental damage and the lack of scientific data.

“Are we willing to be accomplices to the unknown and irreparable damages submarine mining might cause?” Chile’s ambassador Constanza Figueroa, asked.

“We are not ready” to allow deep-sea mining, Ecuador’s delegation told the meeting in support of Chile’s call for a moratorium. “If we act with haste, we could put ourselves in irreversible situations with respect to the marine environment.”

“The famous two-year clause does not oblige us to move to the exploitation phase if the environmental measures are not adequate,” insisted a representative from Spain.

Gina Guillen-Grillo, Costa Rica’s permanent representative at the ISA, called for “a precautionary pause” on agreeing the rules.

The Seabed Authority has a mandate to effectively protect marine environment.We don’t have the science to take informed decisions,so how can we authorize to start Mining before we can fully comply to protect our Ocean & its biodiversity. We must apply caution! #PrecautionaryDelay https://t.co/fEjeRmi5MJ

— Gina Guillen-Grillo (@gina31854903) August 5, 2022

But the ISA didn’t heed the call to allow adequate time to discuss the deadline and its feasibility.

Instead, it relegated the discussion to “any other matters” to be discussed at the end of the meeting. That conversation lasted just about an hour before it was cut short by officials citing time concerns.

As a result, the assembly body of the ISA, which compromises all 167 states, won’t have an opportunity to discuss the issue again before next year’s deadline.

Campaigners have accused the ISA of being blindsided by the pursuit of greenlighting the industry at the expense of protecting the marine environment.

Diva Amon, a deep-sea biologist representing the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, an observer at the talks, said: “Pushing through regulations without allowing ISA member states and observer organisations to properly debate the mining regulations and the consequences of proceeding without a robust understanding of important but vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems will not be to the benefit of humankind.”

The ISA didn’t respond to Climate Home News’ request for comment.

The post ‘We are not ready’: Divisions deepen over rush to finalise deep sea mining rules appeared first on Climate Home News.

In his right hand, he held up to the camera a black mineral concretion about the size of a potato, known as a polymetallic nodule.

Found on the deep sea floor, these nodules are rich in nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese: minerals critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

The Australian entrepreneur, who cast himself as the face of the nascent deep sea mining industry, has pitched these nodules as the only sustainable option to meet the world’s electrification needs.

His company argues that “the world’s largest estimated source of battery metals” lies untouched on the ocean’s floor – enough to electrify 280 million vehicles.

“Whether you invest in a company like DeepGreen or not, everyone is a sucker for the story,” Barron said.

Three years on, the story Barron has to tell is one of struggle, verging on collapse. His company, which triggered a rush to open the deep seabed to mining, is in dire straits. Its share price is sinking, funds are dwindling and it’s embroiled in multiple lawsuits against investors.

The Metal Company’s (TMC’s) survival is staked on receiving a green light from the international regulator to mine the ocean’s deep. As the company flounders, the pressure on nations to agree mining rules hasn’t eased and other prospectors are waiting in the wings.

Did you know that #Polymetallic nodules sitting on top of the seabed are made of almost 100% usable minerals? These nodules are from the latest collection on our current #DeepGreenExpeditions pic.twitter.com/699vV80Ydw

— gerard barron (@gtbgtb) December 16, 2019

Countries have been discussing mining the bottom of the oceans for years. While some exploratory activities are under way, no commercial extraction has started in international waters.

Scientists have warned that far too little is known about the deep ocean, its biodiversity and the role it plays in storing carbon to allow companies to mine the seabed. Mining would result in biodiversity loss “that would be irreversible on multi-generational timescales,” they say. Calls for a ban on the practice are growing.

In many ways, Barron has put the spotlight on the frontier mining sector. He was a major investor of Nautilus Minerals, which aimed to carry out the world’s first commercial deep sea mining around hydrothermal vents off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Barron pulled out before the company went bust.

As CEO of Vancouver-based TMC, Barron continued to argue that deep sea nodules were a more scalable and sustainable option than mining battery minerals on land.

A rush to mine the deep ocean has environmentalists worried

His public interventions drew attention to the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters which, until then, had operated under little scrutiny.

TMC had one objective: accelerating the approval of a mining code for the deep seas.

The company struck deals with Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati to explore an area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone, where a high concentration of nodules has been found.

In 2021, Nauru, a vocal supporter of the emerging industry, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the ISA two years, until July 2023, to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules. If the rules aren’t finalised by July 2023, the ISA will have to “consider and provisionally approve” licencing requests regardless.

The ultimatum allows Nauru Ocean Resources Incorporated (Nori), a TMC subsidiary sponsored by the Nauru government, to apply for a mining permit as soon as next year.

It sent the ISA into overdrive. But as the ISA council is meeting this month, in Kingston, Jamaica, to progress the rules, it is uncertain that TMC will have the financial backing to take advantage of the resulting opportunities.

TMC listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York in September 2021 gambling that it could start mining the deep sea in 2024.

Things got off to a bad start. Two large investors withheld $220m of promised investment. TMC is suing the investors to recuperate the money.

A month later, a shareholder filed a class action against TMC and its CEO Barron. It accused the company of making “materially false and misleading statements” and having failed to disclose information about its operations.

The allegations include that TMC “significantly overpaid… undisclosed insiders” for the acquisition of an exploration permit for its Tonga-sponsored company.

The plaintiff claims that the company “artificially inflated” the expenditures of its subsidiary in Nauru ”to give investors a false scale of its operations” and “significantly downplayed the environmental risks”. They added that TMC “would not have the cash necessary for large scale production”.

A second shareholder case with the same allegations was filed and the two suits are being addressed together.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up for free to get our weekly newsletter and occasional extra bulletins

The allegations were made based on a report by market research firm Bonitas Research. It alleges that TMC siphoned $43m in cash during its acquisition of its Tonga subsidiary.

TMC denied all allegations of wrongdoing and is defending itself in court. But it did clarify to investors the risks associated with the enterprise.

In its recent filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), TMC details 25 risks to investors buying into the company, taking up 24 pages of the 179-page document.

Among them: environmental liabilities, the absence of guarantees that the nodules will be suitable for commercialisation, the risk of having overestimated the quality and quantity of nodules, the negative reputation the industry is gaining and the company’s lack of funds.

Farreid glass sponges found at about 2,360 meters deep pictured at the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)

This hasn’t contributed to investor confidence.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative published a briefing paper arguing that the practice cannot be considered sustainable and that investors should avoid the industry.

TMC’s share price collapsed from a high of $12 at its launch last September to less than a $1 since the start of July.

Under Nasdaq rules, if the share price doesn’t rebound above $1 for 30 consecutive days, the company faces delisting – a significant reputational blow to the company.

“There is not a lot of confidence in the marketplace that TMC can deliver what it has hyped it can do. Investors are not buying it,” Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, told Climate Home.

Analysis: As Xi Jinping seeks more power, the world’s window into China’s climate action narrows

Last months’ filing with the SEC shows that as of March 2022, TMC had $69m in cash in the bank. In 2021, the company estimated it needed $7bn for large-scale production.

TMC recognises that “failure to obtain additional financing on a timely basis could cause us to reduce or terminate our operations”.

For Duncan Currie, a legal advisor to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, the firm’s dwindling funds pose another issue.

“The company is obviously undercapitalised. If there is environmental damage, who will end up paying for that?” he asked.

The ISA is discussing a proposal for a compensation fund to address damages to the marine environment which would be funded from the proceeds of mining. “But that means there will be no money in the fund on the first day of mining and that is when damage is likely to be caused,” said Currie.

Rolling in the deep! Allseas engineers have successfully driven the pilot nodule collector across the seafloor at depths of ~2,500m, bringing us ever closer to responsibly unlocking the world’s largest undeveloped source of battery metals.

Learn more: https://t.co/ush2xTeaDj pic.twitter.com/fqG0RMBybG

— The Metals Company (@themetalsco) May 5, 2022

Publicly, TMC remains bullish about its financial situation. The money in its account “will be sufficient to meet our working capital and capital expenditure requirements for at least the next twelve months from today,” it said about its quarterly results.

It added that it was still testing its nodule collection system and exploring a potential processing plant in India.

But the management has been avoiding tough questions. Its online annual general meeting at the end of May lasted a mere 13 minutes. A question about when the company’s cash might run out was ignored.

Andy Whitmore, finance advocacy officer at the Deep Sea Mining Campaign, told Climate Home the company is “running out of money” and is “closer than they admit” to bankruptcy.

“They have an ambitious plan, which requires moving forward at speed” to start mining, he said. But “the loss of share value both indicates that investors are not sure about this, and also makes their position more precarious.”

“It’s sort of like the Wizard of Oz, you have to look behind the curtain,” said Catherine Coumans, of MiningWatch Canada.

Coumans said CEO Barron, had cast himself as “the hipster dude who is going to save the world with this cool new thing” and put himself forward as “poster boy” for the frontier industry.

As a result, TMC’s fate could reflect badly on the nascent sector, she said.

A yellow glass sponge observed at a depth of 2.5km in the Sibelius Seamount in the Pacific (Photo: NOAA Ocean Exploration/Flickr)

But public attention has highlighted its potential as a lucrative industry. An MIT cost-benefit analysis found that mining nodules could generate annual revenues of $2.3bn a year.

“It’s like getting between the wolf and its food,” Coumans told Climate Home. “One company may go down but another will come back.”

Belgian company Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR), which is sponsored by Belgium and the Cook Islands, is already testing technology to collect nodules from the sea floor 4.5 kilometres beneath the surface.

The UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of the US arms conglomerate Lockheed Martin sponsored by Britain, is another frontrunner in the field.

“There’s a whole bunch of big companies that have very deep pockets and the patience to wait this one out,” said Coumans. “They don’t want to rock the boat and would have perhaps preferred [for the issue] to be way more under the radar than it’s become.”

Fiji has banned deep sea mining in this Decade of #OceanScience because we’ve chosen discovery over destruction.

We know more about the moon’s surface than the deep seabed. Until we learn more, short-term profits can’t win out over priceless ocean-based knowledge.

— Frank Bainimarama (@FijiPM) October 5, 2021

While the industry is gearing up for mining to start in the next few years, a growing number of countries have expressed reservations about opening up the world’s most remote ecosystem to mining.

During a UN conference on the Oceans in Portugal last month, Palau and Fiji launched an alliance of countries calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining endorsed by Samoa, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands and the Federal States of Micronesia.

French president Emmanuel Macron called for the creation of “the legal framework to stop the high-sea mining and not to allow new activities putting in danger these ecosystems”. While France sponsors two exploration contracts, these activities should remain “pure scientific missions,” he said.

More than 210 lawmakers from 47 countries have joined a parliamentarian alliance supporting a ban.

And recently, the EU Commission said it intended to “prohibit deep-sea mining” until scientific gaps are filled and show it can be done without harmful effects.

Gianni said despite signs that a large number of nations are not ready to allow deep sea mining from next year, how this translates in the technical negotiations remain unclear.

“If mining starts, it will prove nearly impossible to rein it in,” he said.

The Metals Company did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.

The post Between a wolf and its food: as one deep sea miner flops, others eye the prize appeared first on Climate Home News.

The fourth round of negotiations to agree on an international framework to halt the destruction of the earth’s ecosystems ended in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday, with virtually no progress being made.

“It’s a bleak picture,” Brian O’Donnell director of the Campaign for Nature, told Climate Home News. “Negotiators resorted to technical bickering rather than aligning on ambition. There has been no discernible movement on the most important issues.”

The meeting was the last planned before negotiators meet at Cop15 in Montreal, Canada, from 5-17 December, to finalise the agreement which has been widely billed as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.

But four years since the start of the process, the biodiversity pact barely registers on the international agenda, as governments wrangle with the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine and soaring inflation.

Eight conservation groups have urged UN chief António Guterres to convene political leaders to “step in and help get it done” in an open letter. “We must sound the alarm that this process has reached a crisis point,” they wrote.

Comment: It’s time to put Indigenous Peoples first at the UN biodiversity talks

The summit was initially scheduled to take place in October 2020 in Kunming, China, but has been repeatedly delayed by the pandemic and eventually relocated to Canada because of Beijing’s zero-Covid policy.

“Cop15 is the least well-prepared major environmental conference in recent memory,” said Li Shuo, of Greenpeace East Asia, who has been tracking the talks under China’s presidency.

The draft agreement on a biodiversity deal includes four goals and 23 proposed targets. The meeting in Nairobi was supposed to narrow options and identify common ground for an agreement in Montreal.

Instead, parts of the text became even more complicated. The latest draft shows that all but two of these goals and targets remain in brackets, which means they are disputed.

This leaves ministers, who don’t have technical expertise on each of the contested issues, with a huge task.

Unresolved issues include the rights and roles of indigenous peoples and local communities, a proposal to protect 30% of the planet’s lands and oceans by 2030, and how much funding rich countries will pledge to help poorer ones meet their nature goals.

Tanzanian authorities seen opening fire on Maasai people in game reserve dispute

Finance is critical to an ambitious deal.

Developing countries have called for $700bn annually to restore nature. NGOs tracking finance commitments from countries, philanthropies and companies have counted $5.2bn annually in pledges as of March this year – “substantially more than what has been done in the past but woefully short of what is needed,” said O’Donnell.

Wealthy nations have avoided the conversation in Nairobi altogether. While developing countries want funding to come through development aid channels, richer ones sought to shift the conversation away from their own budgets, and proposed that cash could come from redirected harmful subsidies and the private sector.

One proposal suggests that $500bn should come from subsidy reforms and the remaining $200bn be raised for conservation action.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up for free to get our weekly newsletter and occasional extra bulletins

Brazil has been accused of blocking the overall ambition of the deal, in line with president Jair Bolsonaro’s enthusiasm for opening the Amazon rainforest to business. But that shouldn’t deflect from other countries’ responsibilities, said Greenpeace’s Li, who described “systematic” problems with the way the talks were run that go beyond a single party.

For example, unlike in the climate negotiations, countries rarely organise into negotiating blocs, leading to long and repetitive statements in plenary sessions. A lack of political direction means negotiators have no power to broker compromises. “Biodiversity seems to be left as an orphan on the global stage,” said Li.

And yet, the stakes are high. In 2019, the world’s leading scientific body on biodiversity known as Ipbes, published a landmark assessment on the state of nature. It found that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history” and “around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history”.

Climate change is a key factor behind these losses, along with localised drivers like pollution and deforestation.

To break the deadlock, the UN Convention of Biological Diversity bureau suggested holding a three-day meeting of negotiators before the December summit. There has also been talk of informal regional discussions.

Without a change in approach, observers were skeptical this would achieve anything.

Despite the ominous signs, UN biodiversity head Elizabeth Maruma Mrema told the closing plenary “significant progress” had been made during the talks and that “a new global framework for nature and a beacon of hope for humanity is coming into view”.

The post Campaigners call on António Guterres to rescue ‘imperilled’ biodiversity deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Footage shared on social media shows people running from gun shots in the Loliondo area. Further images shared with Climate Home News showed people with small bullet wounds on their leg, feet, top of their back and even on someone’s head.

“It started with tear gas and it turned to live bullets,” Joseph Oleshangay, a Maasai lawyer, activist and resident of Ngorongoro, who witnessed the scene, told Climate Home.

“At least 10 people have been wounded. Eight of them are women and two are men, including one who is 70 years old. These are not people who were there to fight,” he said. Climate Home could not independently verify these numbers.

Tanzanian police and game wardens arrived in the area on Tuesday to demarcate a 1,500 square kilometres of “village land” as a game reserve for trophy hunting, he said.

The move would ban all human settlements and grazing in the area, effectively evicting semi-pastoralist Maasai communities.

Shocking violence happening now in Loliondo, Tanzania – military firing on Maasai, who are being evicted from the area for conservation zones & trophy hunters.
If you’re thinking of going on safari to Kenya/ Tanzania – this is the reality behind the tourist photos.
Sound on pic.twitter.com/WD0yvGBsf2

— Survival International (@Survival) June 10, 2022

Loliondo is an important area for grazing in the dry season because it contains the only permanent water point in the area.

Climate change is forecast to lead to more erratic rainfall and longer drought periods in northern Tanzania, making access to a water source crucial to the survival of the Maasai pastoralist tradition.

“By attacking pastoralism, you are attacking the Maasai cultural and spirituality,” said Oleshangay.

In recent days, Maasai people gathered to protest the plans and defend their land.

The highest level of torture and intimidation in grabbing the community land in loliondo. The community of loliondo protested against placing of beacons 1500Km which is the community land. @Oleshangay @AnethStanley @SusannaN2 @SuluhuSamia @ThabitSenior pic.twitter.com/SBoY5wVWLm

— Alakara Ole lemoloo (@alakara_shayo) June 9, 2022

Earlier on Friday, prime minister Kassim Majaliwa told parliament that despite police presence, the situation in Loliondo wasn’t dangerous.

But on Saturday, Arusha regional commissioner John Mongella said that a police officer had died in the confrontation with a Maasai community after being shot by an arrow. He claimed that there had been no other casualties from the incident and that footage shared on social media showing authorities opening fire on Maasai people was several years old.

Opposition leader Tundu Antiphas Lissu, of the Chadema party, accused the Tanzanian government of “waging a violent war” against the Maasai people.

“The international community has a responsibility to intervene & end these human rights abuses & hold the govt accountable!” he tweeted.

‘Politically motivated’: Russian authorities seek to remove climate activist’s citizenship

“Despite earlier pauses, the Tanzanian government is blindly moving ahead with plans to remove Maasai pastoralists out of their land to clear the way for trophy hunting,” said Anuradha Mittal, of the environmental think tank Oakland Institute. “International mobilisation on these developments is imperative to help stop this disastrous and illegal move.”

Mittal argued that the forced evictions in the area would violate a 2018 East African Court of Justice injunction, which prohibited the Tanzanian government from evicting Maasai people or engaging in harassment against those living on the contested land.

Yet, the Tanzania government is seeking to relocate more than 73,000 pastoralists out of an estimated 93,000 living in the Ngorongoro conservation area.

This goes against a rapidly growing body of evidence which shows that indigenous people have a vital role to play in protecting biodiversity.

Human rights organisations such as Survival International have warned against the rise of “fortress” conservation, which closes off land and forests to human activities, at the expense of communities with roots there.

Fiore Longo, campaigner with the NGO, told Climate Home: “I think that what is happening to the Maasai today should be put in the wider context of human rights abuses in the name of conservation. This violence that we see in Tanzania is the reality of conservation in Africa and Asia: daily violations of the human rights of indigenous peoples and local communities so that the rich can hunt and do safari in peace.

“These abuses are systemic and are explained by a dominant model based on racism and colonialism. We can no longer turn a blind eye to human rights abuses committed in the name of ‘conservation’. This model of conservation is deeply inhumane and ineffective and must be changed now.”

The Tanzanian government has been approached for comment.

The story was updated on 13 June to reflect Arusha regional commissioner John Mongella’s comments. 

The post Tanzanian authorities seen opening fire on Maasai people in game reserve dispute appeared first on Climate Home News.

The IUCN Congress closed in the French port city of Marseille on Friday after a week of discussions between campaigners, indigenous groups and governments, eager to influence the UN biodiversity talks, which are due to open in Kunming, China, in October and finish in May 2022.

In its final hours, the Congress overwhelmingly endorsed a blueprint to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It calls for a deal to “ensure there is more nature globally in 2030 than there was in 2020”.

The verdict has been largely welcomed by campaigners who earlier in the summit expressed “deep concerns at the lack of ambition” of the draft framework for protecting biodiversity under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The framework is billed as the equivalent of the Paris Agreement for nature.

Gavin Edwards of WWF, which co-sponsored the motion, told Climate Home News the proposal aimed to plug the gaps of the agreement with “very specific guidance” to governments and establish “a unifying direction” for the talks.

“It takes us a necessary step closer to a more equitable, nature positive and net zero emissions world, but there are still a few critical steps ahead to truly secure this. Governments and civil society organisations must translate the intent shown in the motion into concrete action,” he said.

Conservationists back indigenous peoples’ call to protect 80% of the Amazon by 2025

In response to the stalled biodiversity talks, IUCN members urged countries to adopt a “transformative” global framework for nature that addresses all the drivers of biodiversity loss and contains “an inspirational and easy to communicate 2030 mission”.

“The current draft agreement lacks a clear ambition mission, it doesn’t address the drivers of biodiversity loss and lacks clarity on implementation mechanisms,” Edwards said.

The concept of “nature positive” could be for nature what the 1.5C goal has become for climate ambition, he explained. It could be measured by the population of species and the number of protected and restored ecosystems, as well as reducing drivers of nature destruction such as harmful agricultural subsidies.

Borrowing an idea from the climate process, the motion further calls for a “ratchet” mechanism to regularly review and strengthen national and sectoral targets.

Watchers of the biodiversity talks have repeatedly warned that the draft biodiversity deal fails to provide a concrete action plan to meet its aspirations for 2030 and beyond.

Although none of the motions agreed by the IUCN Congress are legally binding, Edwards said they would become a powerful lobbying tool ahead of Cop15 in Kunming.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up for free to get our weekly newsletter and occasional extra bulletins

Indigenous groups took part in the Congress as full members for the first time and won backing for a motion to protect 80% of the Amazon by 2025.

In the Marseille manifesto, the summit’s main outcome document, IUCN members recognised and supported indigenous peoples’ rights and roles “as leaders and custodians of biodiversity”.

The Congress agreed that targets for protected areas had to reinforce their rights as set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Participants of the IUCN Congress conferring during a break (Photo: IISD/ENB)

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, told Climate Home the IUCN Congress had been an opportunity to push for a rights-based approach to conservation to thread through the biodiversity treaty.

The latest draft of the biodiversity agreement refers to indigenous peoples in three of 21 targets and only mentions the need to “respect their rights over lands, territories and resources” in the last one.

Last month, the Chinese presidency of the talks published the draft Kunming declaration, the summit’s high-level political statement – an unusual move which took observers by surprise.

The four-page document merely “acknowledges that indigenous peoples and local communities have contributed to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity through the application of traditional knowledge, innovations and practices”.

It makes no mention of indigenous peoples’ rights nor does it commit countries to recognising them.

To close the climate ambition gap, we must look beyond national targets

Judith Shapiro, of the American University, Washington DC, told Climate Home that China speaks of “minority nationalities” rather than indigenous people and has no tradition of prior consultation.

“China would argue that minority nationalities already enjoy unusual protections within a country that is essentially one big happy family,” she said, adding that Beijing would oppose any overarching framework that would be seen as interfering with sovereign rights.

In the name of “going green”, China has exploited the territories of ethnic minorities through mineral extraction and dam building, and relocated nomadic peoples away from lands designated as nature reserves.  “It is extremely unlikely that China would accept any framework that would interfere with that agenda,” she said.

Her colleague Yifei Li, of New York University Shanghai, told Climate Home the language around indigenous rights was unlikely to lead to open confrontation at the talks “because China is uninterested in having a substantive discussion about this issue”.

Tauli-Corpuz said indigenous peoples’ rights needed to be reflected across the entire treaty and not in isolated targets. While there is a broad consensus for adopting a rights-based approach among the conservation community, she said, “there are still a lot of governments that don’t want it to be mentioned”.

The post Conservationists set out ‘nature positive’ vision for global biodiversity deal appeared first on Climate Home News.

The world congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature overwhelmingly voted for a global pact to protect the world’s largest tropical forest — putting conservationists on a collision course with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

The proposal was submitted by the Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (Coica), whose members erupted in joy when the vote results were announced. The motion was formally supported by 17 civil society groups from across the world.

José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, general director of Coica, described the proposal as “a plan for the salvation of indigenous peoples and the planet”.

“We have achieved a first step. For the first time in the history of the IUCN, a motion by indigenous peoples has been approved; a proposal that was not born in Europe but in our territories,” he told Climate Home News. 

Coica members erupt in joy as IUCN approves their motion (Photo: Coica)

In total, 61 countries members of IUCN backed the motion, which is not legally binding, and 42 abstained. None voted against.

Brazil, which is not an IUCN member, could not participate in the vote. But Brazilian experts say president Jair Bolsonaro is highly unlikely to take notice of the verdict, which clashes with his agenda to open up the Amazon to business interests.

Displaced Afghan negotiator calls for climate aid to war-torn states

The motion urges governments to promote efforts to restore at least half of the Amazon’s degraded forests by 2025 and to work with indigenous peoples’ to fully recognise and delimit all their ancestral land and territories.

Coica said Amazon countries must enable indigenous peoples and local communities to govern protected areas that overlap with their territories. They further called on states to ban industrial activities in primary forests and mobilise more funding to restore ecosystems.

But in Brazil, the opposite is taking place. The Bolsonaro administration is pushing through a series of laws to roll back indigenous rights, environmental licensing standards, and land grabbing legislation, all of which prevent forest clearance, campaigners say.

Deforestation in the Amazon rose 17% in 2020 compared with the previous year. The world’s largest rainforest is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs. Humid primary forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon increased 15% during that time.

The UN backed Science Panel for the Amazon, which is composed of 200 scientists, found that 17% of the Amazon basin’s forests have been felled. It warned that if combined deforestation and degradation surged to 20-25%, the forest could reach a tipping point. Rainfall would dry up and large swaths of the forests could turn into savannah, resulting in massive carbon emissions.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up for free to get our weekly newsletter and occasional extra bulletins

Paulo Moutinho, senior researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), told Climate Home he didn’t expect any reaction from Bolsonaro’s administration.

Global efforts and initiative to protect the Amazon have usually been met with claims about foreign interference and breach of sovereignty, Moutinho said.

However, outside of Brazil, the vote “certainly could reinforce the view that to protect the Amazon forest, we urgently need to protect indigenous rights to their lands,” he said.

Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former environment minister and co-chair of the International Resource Panel, told Climate Home the motion could be used by civil society groups in Brazil to call for environmental protection ahead of next year’s presidential election – an issue she said will be “critical”.

Mirabal, of Coica, said he hoped the motion could be translated into an action plan and implemented. He said Coica would take it to governments in South America and beyond to Europe, the US and China to drum up support.

“We want this motion to generate projects and political support for our territories, but also conserve and protect our home,” he said. “Trust us, we are going to do everything possible. But we need financial and technical support, the political will of governments, and of all the allies who today voted for us,” he said.

The post Conservationists back indigenous peoples’ call to protect 80% of the Amazon by 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.

On Thursday, 104 ministers and heads of delegation met virtually and gave a conditional blessing to the text of an agreement to remove harmful fishing subsidies.

This means delegations can now negotiate the nine-page draft text line by line for approval at the WTO ministerial conference in Kazakhstan, which starts on 30 November.

The talks aim to eliminate harmful subsidies such as for overfishing and for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told a Geneva press conference: “For the first time in 20 years, we have a text which has been blessed by all the ministers and heads of delegations.”

While experts said this progress was encouraging for the climate, it remains open to what extent the rules will apply to China, the world’s biggest backer of unsustainable fishing practices.

Chileans look to new constitution to return water to communities

Rashid Sumaila, professor of fishery economics at the University of British Colombia, told Climate Home News: “I was gearing up for more bad news than I got. I’ve been following this for 20 years and they’ve come the furthest [now] because they have a text, so I’m reasonably happy.” But, he warned, it “doesn’t mean anything until we get it over the line” so “it’s all hands on deck”.

Sumaila said that the appointment of former Nigerian finance minister Okonjo-Iweala as Director-General had sped up negotiations as she “stuck her neck out” for the talks, placing fishing subisidies as her second priority behind Covid-19. He also praised the talks’ chair, Colombian ambassador Santiago Wills.

Fishing subsidies encourage overfishing, which is bad for fish stocks and for the climate. A 2018 study found fishing at the current scale is “enabled by large government subsidies”. Without them, as much as 54% of high seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable.

Fishing can harm the climate in several ways. Burning ship fuel releases greenhouse gases. Methods like bottom-trawling, where a big net is dragged along the sea bed, stir up buried carbon from the seabed. Fishing can damage seagrasses, which store carbon. Fish themselves store carbon on the seabed when they die naturally and fall to the bottom of the sea.

Developing nations put numbers on the table for the next climate finance goal

Global fishing subsidies were $35bn in 2018, of which harmful subsidies that increase the scale of the industry were $22bn, according to a study in the Marine Policy journal.

The same study found that China provides the most subsidies, with 21% of the total. EU states, the USA and South Korea are next with 11%, 10% and 9% respectively. The next biggest are Japan, Russia, Thailand, Canada, Indonesia, Norway and Taiwan.

Most subsidies provided by China are classified as harmful capacity-enhancing subsidies, for example making ship fuel cheaper. In the US, the study found subsidies were mostly spent on positive measures like fisheries management and stock enhancement.

While all of the draft text is still up for debate, square brackets indicate where divisions are expected. Contentious issues include to what extent poor and developing countries should be exempt and how developed countries should help developing ones implement the rules.

In the WTO, countries decide themselves whether they are developed or developing and China classifies itself as developing although the US says it is developed. China argues subsidies are a way of helping poor fishers but Sumaila said his research shows the subsidies go to large fleets.

Great to address the @WTO this morning on the UK’s strong stance against illegal and subsidised fisheries.

Good to make pragmatic proposals on how the SDT rules should benefit small, artisanal fishers from genuine developing countries – and not larger, ocean-going vessels. pic.twitter.com/VSrp6anjxm

— Greg Hands (@GregHands) July 15, 2021

A clause being considered would allow developing countries including China to continue to subsidise increased fishing capacity. The exceptions to this would be if that developing country does distant-water fishing, has an income of more than $5,000 per capita, produces more than 2% of the world’s fish and gets more than 10% of its income from fishing, farming and forestry. China would not meet the threshold as just 8% of its income is from fishing, farming and forestry.

Other contentious issues include what information should be made transparent, how to judge when a ship is carrying out illegal, unreported or unregulated fishing and whether countries should be able to subsidise ships registered with another countries’ flag.

Okonjo-Iweala said there was unanimous agreement among countries that small-scale fishers, particularly in developing countries, should be protected from the change in rules.

Among those most in favour of reducing fishing subsidies are the “friends of fish” group, which consists of the US, several South American nations, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Norway and Iceland.

India was among those pushing for a slower phase-out of subsidies, according to Indian website LiveMint. Commerce minister Piyush Goyal said: “India is committed to concluding the negotiations, as long as it provides for balancing current and future fishing needs, preserving space for equitable growth in fishing capacities in future, and an effective [special and differential treatment] without any imbalances”.

The post After 20 years, talks on scrapping fishing subsidies enter final stretch appeared first on Climate Home News.

The document will form the basis of negotiations ahead of a biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, where governments are due to agree on a post-2020 framework to protect life on Earth.

“This is meant to be both a summary of the current state of the discussion but also a way to elicit more discussion and negotiation,” Basil van Havre, co-chair of the open working group in charge of overseeing the negotiations at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity wrote on Twitter.  

But while the draft text sets out aspirations and objectives for 2030 and beyond, it fails to provide a concrete action plan to meet them, campaigners say.

“This is just about targets without really anything on how to get there,” Li Shuo, of Greenpeace East Asia, who is closely following the biodiversity discussions, told Climate Home News. There is “no strategy behind actual delivery”.

G20 backs carbon pricing, ‘raising stakes’ among emerging economies

The 12-page document sets out 4 long-term goals to 2050, 10 milestones against which to assess progress at the end of the decade and 21 targets addressing the drivers of biodiversity loss to be met by 2030.

These include protecting at least 30% of the Earth’s land and seas, cutting pesticide use by two thirds, and halving food waste and overconsumption by the end of the decade. At least $500 billion of harmful subsidies annually would also need to be eliminated by 2030.

Measures to restore ecosystems and ensure sustainable agriculture, forestry and aquaculture practices could reduce at least 10 gigatonnes of CO2 per year by 2030 – about a third of the reductions needed to limit global heating to 1.5C – although how the accounting will be done remains unclear.

Only a page and a half of the text is dedicated to a mechanism to deliver on these goals. It says countries have “a responsibility” to translate the global goals into national targets and transparently monitor and report on their progress in meeting them.

Georgina Chandler, senior international policy officer at bird charity RSPB, said the language was not strong enough. “It is hard to see how the effort that has been put into trying to strengthen the implementation mechanism has translated into the latest draft. It seems to be business as usual,” she said.

Comment: EU must use its carbon border tax to support a just transition around the world

Van Havre told Climate Home last month negotiators were struggling to make progress in online negotiations and an in-person meeting would be needed before the deal could be finalised.

The Kunming summit could be postponed for a third time, amid concerns uneven access to Covid vaccines makes it hard to to convene safely and inclusively in October, as planned. The CBD bureau is meeting on Thursday and may decide to push the conference to 2022.

“While the targets are much improved, there is still a lot of work to do,” said Andrew Deutz, director of global policy at The Nature Conservancy. “We are concerned that not all the implementation provisions are embedded in the core document, and that the monitoring and reporting framework is still incomplete.”

Deutz said he was “pleased with the level of ambition in the proposed targets,” noting the call to plug a $700 billion annual funding gap for nature by 2030.

“Then again, we said the same thing in 2010 when the world adopted the Aichi targets,” he added, referring to the previous set of biodiversity goals, which the world failed to meet in 2020.

Want more climate news? Sign up to get updates straight to your inbox

For Brian O’Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature, a proposed goal to increase rich countries’ support to developing nations by $10 billion a year is not enough to ensure robust implementation of the deal in developing countries.

“Now it’s time for wealthy nations to commit the additional funding necessary to meet the targets laid out in this framework,” he said.

He added the draft made “important progress” in recognising the central role indigenous peoples and local communities must play in conservation decision-making and management.

The text recognises the need for “equitable and effective participation” by indigenous and local communities and includes a goal to ensure their traditional knowledge and practices guide decision-making with communities’ free, prior and informed consent.

The post UN draft accord sets out new biodiversity goals but delivery plan is lacking appeared first on Climate Home News.

Countries are due to meet in Kunming, China, 11-24 October to agree on a framework to halt the decline and extinction of species by 2030 and allow ecosystems to recover by 2050.

But preparatory talks have been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. Five weeks into a six-week online session, Basile Van Havre, co-chair of the negotiations, told Climate Home News they still had a lot of catching up to do.

“That October date is very soon. And we know that there is a significant amount of negotiation that needs to take place. We need to look seriously at whether it’s possible to meet physically in September or not. If not, we don’t have the time,” said Van Havre.

“So we either get a work programme that enables us to reach the goal that we have, which is an ambitious framework. Or, if we reduce the work plan, then we’re going to have to change the expectations for the [Kunming summit].”

Comment: All hands on deck! We must use online tools to make climate talks more inclusive

Van Havre said negotiators were struggling from fatigue, with many working through the night to accommodate time differences.

While nations have come prepared and willing to exchange views, “we are not getting to the compromise-making, solution-building stage,” Van Havre said. “And that’s a big concern.”

Negotiating online has made it more difficult to create the sense of a collective project, he added. In more normal times, concessions are often made at the end of intense face to face discussions. Online, “the sessions come to an end, you switch off your screen and that’s it”.

And some find it harder to participate than others. Van Havre told Climate Home there had been reduced engagement from Africa, where many delegates are juggling diplomatic responsibilities with full time jobs in government ministries.

#WeStandWithAfrica on calling to halt important decision making processes at @UNBiodiversity until all countries affected by #digitalinequalities can participate fully and equally, face to face. #digitalinequalities #placemaking #digitaldivide #digitalexclusion #face2facemeetings pic.twitter.com/VypjO1Lsky

— Nele Marien (@nelemarien) June 2, 2021

“When they are travelling, it is accepted that they are not going to do their day job. But when they are in the office [negotiating remotely], they’re still expected to do their day job. That’s a big challenge,” Van Havre said.

UK calls on Indonesia to set out roadmap to net zero emissions

Unlike discussions in the climate space, where there remain only a few points of negotiation to finalise the rules of the Paris Agreement, biodiversity negotiators are tasked with thrashing out a full global agreement to protect nature for the next nine years.

For Li Shuo, senior policy officer at Greenpeace East Asia, this is “pushing multilateral online negotiations to its limits”.

Georgina Chandler, senior international policy officer at bird charity RSPB, told Climate Home virtual negotiations had been constructive in many ways but many contentious issues were being deferred. “We are running out of time and space,” she said.

Critical areas of disagreements are emerging. Mobilising finance to help developing nations implement the deal has “really come to a head” and “infiltrated all the discussions” over the last round of talks, said Chandler.

Want more climate news? Sign up to get updates straight to your inbox

Proposals for a robust accountability and reporting mechanism to monitor and compare countries’ efforts to meet global targets against a set of performance indicators are also in the firing line.

“There is a group of countries that are very protective of their national prerogative [and] don’t want to be told by a system. And that’s, Brazil, Argentina, China, Malaysia,” Van Havre told Climate Home.

He added that without common reporting rules, no-one was able to measure progress or ensure countries were on track towards meeting common goals.

Campaigners say this is one reason why the world failed to meet any of the internationally agreed biodiversity goals in 2020.

“There is a significant lack of accountability in the process,” said Chandler.

Van Havre said the talks are “at a critical point” and he remains optimistic an ambitious framework can be achieved. “I think all of us need to remain flexible, adaptable. I see that parties are willing to consider change, in order to get the result we want.” That, he said, “is really good news”.

The post Biodiversity talks are running out of time for robust deal, says top diplomat appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Leaf coalition, which stands for Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance, was launched at the US leaders’ climate summit on Thursday. The public-private initiative aims to catalyse investments for forest protection “at a scale not seen before”.

Nations, states and provinces committed to protecting their tropical forests will receive funding in exchange for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation against performance indicators. The coalition promised to involve indigenous people and local communities living in areas eligible for finance.

US presidential climate envoy John Kerry described the scheme as a “groundbreaking example of the scale and type of collaboration need to fight the climate crisis”.

Multinational companies including Amazon, Airbnb, Bayer, McKinsey, Nestlé and Unilever stand ready to provide finance to the scheme. All have committed to contribute to the initiative in addition to meeting science-based targets to cut emissions in their own operations.

Nathaniel Keohane, of the Environmental Defense Fund, said the coalition set “a high standard” for how companies can supplement their emissions cuts by investing in protecting tropical forests.

Describing this new model of forest financing as “a game-changer,” Keohane said the coalition could eventually “channel tens of billions of dollars per year into ensuring sustainable livelihoods for Indigenous peoples and forest communities… and protecting global forests”.

US pledges to double international climate finance at Earth Day summit

In a statement, the coalition said it aimed to help forest nations move more rapidly towards ending deforestation and achieving their climate plans.

A 2017 study published in Nature Climate Change found that a quarter of countries’ planned emission reductions to 2030 relied on forests’ carbon sequestration potential. Yet forests account for an estimated 3% of funding earmarked to cutting emissions.

Forest nations as well as individual states and provinces interested in participating in the scheme have been asked to apply by 22 July, with the aim of finalising deals by the end of the year. Payments would be based on emissions reductions linked to reducing levels of deforestation or degradation between 2022 and 2026.

A spokesperson for the coalition told Climate Home News discussions are ongoing with about a dozen countries and provinces, with Costa Rica, Guyana and three Brazilian states having taken initial steps to enroll.

Before payments are made, an independent third party will verify results and emissions cuts using the UN-backed Redd+ Environmental Excellence Standard, known as Trees, which includes environmental and social safeguards.

Jurisdictions taking part will have to show deforestation has reduced across the whole of their territory to qualify for financing, the coalition said.

As it happened: US, Japan, Canada pledged deeper emissions cuts at Biden summit

Manish Bapna, interim president of the World Resources Institute, said the initiative offered “an important new approach that can help scale forest protection finance, without diluting emissions reductions elsewhere”.

She said its success will hinge on “the full and effective participation of indigenous and local communities, who have proven to be the most effective guardians of the forest”.

Around the world, tropical forests are under serious threat. Between 2019 and 2020, the loss of primary tropical forest increased by 12%.

Of that, 4.2 million hectares of humid tropical primary forests, which are an important source of carbon storage and biodiversity, were cleared – an area the size of the Netherlands.

Brazil was by far the biggest source of forest clearance, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bolivia and Indonesia, according to data from the University of Maryland.

“Tropical forests are indispensable to fight climate change and biodiversity loss, and have received far less attention and finance than they deserve. The Leaf Coalition takes a first, crucial step to change that”, said Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg.

Stay in the know: Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter

Jo Blackman, head of forests policy and advocacy at Global Witness, said the initiative did not address the drivers of deforestation, including the supply chains of goods consumed in the US, the UK and Norway.

“If the UK, US, EU and other global leaders are serious about keeping the world’s forests standing and protecting the climate, they must commit to robust legislation that holds their own businesses to account, including banks and investors, and ensure that their supply chains and financing are deforestation free,” she said.

Global Witness research found that 300 banks and investors had backed six agribusiness companies driving some of the worst forest clearance in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and New Guinea in the tune of $44bn between 2013 and 2019.

The post US, UK and Norway launch $1bn initiative to protect tropical forests appeared first on Climate Home News.

Like many developing countries, though, its capacity to build back better from Covid-19 is limited by a mounting debt burden.

The government is developing a novel debt-for-nature scheme to ease its debt woes and accelerate the “10 billion tree tsunami”. Designed by the Finance for Biodiversity initiative, the first-of-its-kind nature performance bond would link debt retirement with nature restoration targets.

Prime minister Imran Khan has promised to plant 10 billion trees across the country and restore more than a million hectares of forest. The mammoth project aims to increase resilience to climate impacts like extremes of rainfall, while absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and creating jobs.

“We are investing heavily in nature so when this conversation started about the nature bond we were excited about it,” Malik Amin Aslam, Pakistan prime minister’s official advisor on climate change, told Climate Home News.

“There is a push post-Covid-19 to ask for debt retirement and if we can link [relief] to nature performance, it gives more value to the world,” he said.

Special advisor on climate change Malik Amin Aslam inaugurates a mangrove plantation at Yaqi Bundar, Sindh province, Pakistan (Photo: Ministry of Climate Change/Government of Pakistan)

As of February, the government claimed to have created 85,000 jobs by paying unemployed members of the community to work in tree nurseries and look after saplings, under its “tree tsunami”. It aims to employ another 200,000 people to drive the afforestation effort.

Prime minister Khan announced the creation of 15 national parks to protect over 7,300 square kilometres of land last year. The establishment of a National Park Service aims to create 5,000 jobs in nature protection to respond to a rise in unemployment.

The former cricketer turned prime minister has made the campaign one of his flagship policies since taking office in 2018, staking much of his reputation on the project’s success.

Prime Minister Imran Khan plants Kashmir Freedom Tree in Islamabad, special prayers were held for the development of Pakistan and Independence of Held Kashmir on occasion.#KashmirBlackDay #BlackDay pic.twitter.com/DBErjzO88W

— Government of Pakistan (@GovtofPakistan) October 27, 2019

“This is a highly politicised project,” Mahmood Akhtar Cheema, country representative for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Pakistan, told Climate Home News.

The government is in the first phase of planting 3.3 billion trees by election year in 2023 and is hoping to meet the first billion goal by the end of June – a target it is on track to meet, said Aslam.

Between $800 million and $1 billion have been earmarked for the tree tsunami in the next four years. IUCN Pakistan estimates the campaign could end up costing $2.5bn.

Syed Kamran Hussain, of WWF-Pakistan, told Climate Home News the pilot will help “develop the financial framework for the restoration of degraded ecosystems” at a time when liquidity is in short supply.

“The government is currently using its own resources, but there is a need for the international community to make investments,” Cheema said, describing the prospect of the new bond as “huge opportunity” to raise funds.

Rare IMF relief offers a hope of green recovery to debt-laden nations

The triple crisis of Covid-19, ballooning debt and climate change has propelled debt-for-climate schemes to the top of the international agenda.

Khan has been vocal about the need for rich countries to provide debt relief to developing nations that are struggling to meet their population’s basic needs, let alone invest in sustainable and low-carbon development.

According to its central bank, Pakistan’s external debt and liabilities have grown from $95bn in 2018 to almost $116bn at the end of December 2020. On average over the past five years, debt interest payments accounted for a third of the country’s total revenues.

Pakistan is expected to benefit the most in absolute terms from a debt service suspension initiative agreed by the G20 group of rich countries. But the central bank estimates this relief will not be sufficient “to create the needed fiscal space to mitigate the impact of Covid-19”.

Climate vulnerability should be factored into debt relief, says IMF head

Mark Halle, an environment and sustainable expert who helped set up IUCN’s Pakistan programme in the mid-1980s, is familiar with the country’s efforts to restore its ecosystems and its need for funding.

Now a member of the Finance for Biodiversity initiative, Halle knows Aslam, who serves as the global vice president of IUCN, well. When he asked the climate advisor whether Pakistan would be interested in piloting the new bond, he quickly got his attention.

Under the scheme, a creditor nation would agree to write off a portion of newly issued debt or reduce repayment interest rates if Pakistan met agreed biodiversity and nature restoration targets.

This could include increasing mangrove coverage along the coast, for example. Mangroves are a natural barrier that protect from storms and sea level rise and store up to four times as much carbon as land-based forests.

Mangrove cover in Pakistan’s Indus delta has increased by an estimated 300% between 1990 and 2020, according to a recent study. But researchers found climate change and human activities, such as camel grazing, cutting trees for fuel and overfishing, had driven four out of eight indigenous mangrove species to extinction.

A tree nursery (Photo: WWF-Pakistan)

To ensure the environmental integrity of the pilot, satellite images will be used to monitor performance against agreed nature restoration targets.

“We made it clear that we would be looking for performance measures that genuinely created change on the ground,” Halle said. “Designing a new national park wouldn’t work because that is essentially drawing a line on a map.” But the restoration of a designated area could be rewarded.

“This creates a very strong incentive to perform” and accelerate the implementation of the government’s nature and biodiversity programmes, Halle told Climate Home News from his home in Switzerland.

“If the government subsequently decided to cut down the trees and plough the land, debt payment interest rates would rise again, creating an incentive not only to perform, but to stick with the performance,” he added.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

One potential stumbling block is corruption.

Before Khan became prime minister, his party started its tree-planting initiative on a regional scale in the northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2014.

In terms of its environmental goals, the project was a success, according to an audit by WWF, with 872,000,000 seedlings planted and 89% surviving as of June 2017.

But the National Accountability Bureau found that about $3m had been lost to corruption along the way. The report cited cases of nepotism, misappropriation and embezzlement of daily wages.

There is also the threat of wildfire and drought reversing some of the forest gains.

An acacia plantation in Kohat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (Photo: WWF-Pakistan)

Abid Suleri, executive director of the Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute, stressed the importance of choosing the right species for the arid climate and nurturing them to maturity.

“It’s easy to plant a sapling. But to turn it into a tree requires a lot of dedicated care,” he said. “It’s ambitious, but it’s doable.”

A consortium including WWF, IUCN and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will audit the first stage of the 10 billion tree campaign with financial support from German development bank KfW.

Joe Biden’s $1.2bn budget for Green Climate Fund falls short of campaigner demands

Getting creditors on board could be the most difficult part, Halle said. “Largely because it is new. Somebody has got to move first.”

Finance for Biodiversity is discussing the idea with the UK, Canada, Germany and Italy and has approached China – by far Pakistan’s largest official creditor – despite low expectation Beijing will get involved in the early stages.

Khan has a personal connection with UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith, who is leading on nature ahead of the Cop26 climate summit. Khan was married to Jemima Goldsmith, Zac’s sister, for nearly a decade before they divorced in 2004 and they have two sons.

Zac Goldsmith has previously described Pakistan’s tree planting campaign as “extraordinary” and “a truly global inspiration”. The UK government did not respond to a request for comment.

The UN Development Programme is planning to offer technical assistance to the Pakistani government to facilitate the structuring of the bond, a spokesperson told Climate Home News.

Vikram Widge, senior advisor at the Climate Policy Initiative, told Climate Home News there is appetite among creditors for debt-for-climate and nature schemes.

Widge said innovative and creative mechanisms could have “a huge impact” if deployed to reverse biodiversity loss, and invested in ecosystem restoration, forestry and regenerative agriculture.

“I think we need to do more of this, but I think we need to be smart and sensible about it. The pilots are critical for testing and learning what works, what doesn’t,” he said. It is more appropriate for middle-income countries with the ability to service debts than countries in severe debt distress, he added.

Pakistan is due to host World Environment Day in June, which will launch a 10-year UN campaign to restore ecosystems, and could be a moment to announce a deal with creditors.

The post Pakistan explores debt-for-nature scheme to accelerate its 10 billion tree tsunami appeared first on Climate Home News.

“But it can’t do everything,” Nick Mabey, chief executive of think-tank E3G, tells Climate Home News.

The host nation of the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November has a huge task to lead the world to greater climate action and close the gap between collective national targets and the Paris Agreement goals.

For that, the summit will have to deliver on the urgent needs of the most vulnerable nations while finalising robust rules to build a green and resilient global economy.

The UK will need to share out the heavy lifting and form alliances with people and nations able to shift the dial on specific issues, Mabey says.

From debt relief to designing robust carbon offsets and mobilising the finance needed to help countries cut emissions and cope with climate impacts, the world needs more climate champions. Here’s who is setting the agenda on seven key issues.

Fossil fuel exit

Dan Jørgensen

Denmark is pursuing a managed decline of the oil and gas sector, the largest oil producer in the world to do so. Climate and energy minister Dan Jørgensen says he hopes the decision will inspire others to follow suit.

Jørgensen has been named chair of a global commission, led by the International Energy Agency, to promote a “people-centred” transition to clean energy.

The commission is due to present recommendations ahead of Cop26 in Glasgow, UK, on how to ensure communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry for their livelihoods are not left behind.

“There are a number of ongoing conversations around launching a ‘first movers’ club at Cop26 that would bring together the countries that have committed to ending new exploration and production,” says Romain Ioualalen, senior campaigner at Oil Change International.

The club, he says, would track commitments by countries and regions and establish a diplomatic strategy to encourage others – with progressively bigger oil sectors – to join.

Denmark’s plan to phase out oil and gas production puts pressure on North Sea neighbours the UK and Norway to reconsider their support for continued exploration, for starters.

Debt relief

Mia Mottley

The coronavirus pandemic has caused many developing nations’ debt to balloon. Without fiscal space, vulnerable nations are at risk of diverting money away from climate programmes to guarantee basic social protection.

The G20 has agreed a debt service suspension initiative to June 2021 but debt-ridden nations need longer-term solutions. Creditor countries are due to discuss the issue at the G20 and G7, where proposals for a permanent disaster fund will be considered.

Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley, who chaired an alliance of 20 Caribbean countries in the first half of 2020, has championed an initiative developed by small island developing states for tailored and long-term solutions to address the debt crisis.

In recent months, Mottley, who also serves as the country’s finance minister, has called for “new flexible development finance instruments” at a joint roundtable co-organised by the UK.

She backed the “Debt Relief for Green and Inclusive Recovery” project, a blueprint for low and middle-income countries with unsustainable debt geared to achieve the Paris Agreement and development goals.

Barbados is due to host a meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development in October – another opportunity to promote this agenda.

Public finance

Remý Rioux

Donor countries promised to mobilise $100bn per year to help poorer nations cut emissions and cope with climate impacts by 2020 – a target they are yet to meet. This year, negotiations are due to begin on a new – higher – finance goal from 2025.

In France Remy Rioux, chief executive of the French Development Agency (AFD), has been driving reform among public development banks.

In November, the AFD organised the Finance in Common summit, which culminated in 450 public development banks committing to align their activities with the Paris Agreement goals and to mainstream adaptation.

They promised to “work towards” phasing out coal finance and “consider ways and means” of reducing fossil fuel investments – language that disappointed campaigners but pushed the envelope for some key Asian players.

“There is pressure on [France] to pick up this agenda,” says Alex Scott, E3G’s climate diplomacy programme leader, but Emmanuel Macron’s policy on public finance is “not really delivering”.

In December, Macron announced France would end export finance for oil in 2025 and for gas in 2035 – much later than a planned 2021 ban in the UK. And while the country is leading on finance to restore nature, it has been criticised for delivering nearly all its international climate aid as loans, not grants.

Private finance

John Kerry

As the world’s largest economy and home to the New York stock exchange, the US is well placed to shift the dial in the global financial system.

“The agenda has a much better chance of achieving its urgent objective: for every financial decision to take climate change into account” with the US playing a prominent role, says Giulia Christianson, of the World Resources Institute.

At the treasury, secretary Janet Yellen will play a major financial regulatory policy role, while presidential envoy John Kerry coordinates private sector action abroad.

On his first full day in office, Kerry addressed an international business forum. It’s going to take a “massive” private sector effort to “use the marketplace effectively… to reach our goal,” he said.

Kerry is tipped to appoint “a senior business person” to mobilise ambition from the private sector and hold companies accountable to their climate pledges.

“The key will be to ensure that pragmatism and familiarity with the status quo don’t stand in the way of the kind of ambition and new, bold thinking that’s needed,” warns Christianson.

Adaptation and resilience

Nancy Tembo

Long overshadowed by efforts to cut emissions, the need to help vulnerable communities cope with climate impacts is rising up the political agenda.

Malawi is emerging as a key ally for the UK. It is a member of the Adaptation Action Coalition launched by prime minister Boris Johnson last month to ensure political commitments for adaptation are turned into on-the-ground support.

Nancy Tembo, minister of forestry and natural resources, has called for more integrated approaches to adaptation programmes in developing nations and is working closely with the UK government ahead of Cop26.

Together with Bhutan, Malawi is co-chairing the Local Climate Adaptive Living Facility (LoCAL) which aims to channel grants for locally-led climate change adaptation actions in LDC countries.

The sub-Saharan country is also a member of the African Group of Negotiators, “which is likely to continue pushing very hard [on adaptation finance]” especially as an African country is due to host the next climate talks in 2022, says Yamide Dagnet, director of climate negotiations at the World Resources Institute.

Nature-based solutions 

The restoration and protection of ecosystems is increasingly favoured as a way to meet climate, biodiversity and sustainable development goals. Forests and soils can store carbon, buffer human settlements against storms and floods, and provide habitats for wildlife.

These initiatives need careful stewardship, not least to sure trees planted one year are still standing the next.

The UK has put nature at the heart of its Cop26 strategy with Zac Goldsmith, UK minister for international environment, leading on the issue. Elsewhere, high-level political leadership is lacking, says E3G’s Scott.

China is due to facilitate critical biodiversity talks in Kunming, where countries are expected to agree on a new global framework for protecting nature, but has shown limited appetite for driving ambition.

A coalition co-chaired by Costa Rica and France is championing a set of principles to promote “a good deal for nature”.

And a growing number of countries are working to define best practice, but not necessarily evangelising about it. “The work of Bhutan in this space is very strong,” says Clare Shakya, of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), citing Nepal, South Africa and Ethiopia as countries integrating nature in their climate plans.

Carbon markets and offsets

Andrea-Meza-Murillo

At Cop26, negotiators will try to nail elusive consensus on the rules for a new international emissions trading mechanism under the Paris Agreement. Strict conditions are critical to ensure polluters are not given a free pass.

Costa Rican environment minister Andrea Meza is leading a coalition of nations supportive of minimum standards to ensure the environmental integrity of carbon trading.

It builds on the San José principles, launched by Costa Rica and 31 other countries at the 2019 climate talks in Madrid. And it could expand its work to the voluntary carbon offset market.

Meza, who invited ministers and climate ambassadors to the online launch event in November, said the alliance would “continue to foster thorough political discussions… to help us develop actionable, high-ambition solutions for international carbon markets”.

Costa Rica’s climate change director since 2015, Meza is familiar with the internal workings of the climate negotiations – an asset to drive progress in one of the last unresolved issues of the Paris Agreement rulebook.

The post Cop26 dream team: The people setting the climate agenda on seven key issues appeared first on Climate Home News.

With more than half of its territory covered by tropical forests, Colombia has made halting deforestation and restoring nearly one million hectares of forested ecosystems a pillar of its plan to cut emissions 51% from a business-as-usual baseline by 2030.

The new and tougher target announced at the end of 2020 and in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic is a significant hike from Colombia’s previous 20% target.

It was set following extensive intra-governmental and public consultation and aims to establish carbon budgets from 2023 and put the country on a path to carbon neutrality by 2050 .

“In order to comply with those commitments, we definitely need to protect the Amazon and fight deforestation,” Colombian president Iván Duque Márquez told Reuters Next conference this week, calling for a nature-based approach to addressing climate change.

But the task at hand is enormous. Deforestation accounts for around a quarter of Colombia’s total emissions. The 2016 peace agreement which ended more than 50 years of civil war between the government and the rebel group Farc led to a spike in forest clearance.

Poor and island states highlight toll of climate disasters in submissions to UN

During the conflict, the Farc operated strict deforestation control to conceal guerilla movements in the forest and preserve their revenue streams from illegal mines and coca plantations, used to make cocaine.

After the group disarmed, illegal land grabbing for cattle ranching, timber or coca production surged in areas that are difficult to police.

Cielo Gomez grows coffee on her land in southeast of Nariño territory, Colombia. The land was restituted to her family by the government after being illegally occupied during the civil war (Photo: UN Women/Flickr)

Data from Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (Ideam), which monitors deforestation in the country, shows deforestation soared to its highest level in 2017 with 219,552 hectares of forest cleared – up from just under 124,000 in 2015.

“What is happening on the ground is not compatible with what Colombia has just committed to,” Estefania Ardila, country engagement specialist for Latin America at the NDC Partnership, which supports developing countries willing to raise their climate ambition, told Climate Home News.

“It’s ambitious. And it’s going to be tremendously difficult to achieve,” she said, describing development challenges with high levels of inequality and unemployment.

To design its climate goals, the government calculated the carbon budget it has to 2030 to stay on a pathway to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

“That requires that after 2030, we have no net deforestation,” Ivan Valencia, former coordinator of Colombia’s low-carbon strategy who led the mitigation side of the NDC update, now an independent consultant, told Climate Home.

South Korea 2050 net zero pledge spurs renewables investment

As a signatory to the New York Declaration on Forests, Colombia committed to halving natural forest loss in 2020 and net zero deforestation by 2030, which means any forest clearance needs to be offset by replanting native trees.

By 2019 deforestation levels had dropped to less than 160,000 hectares of land cleared that year. But 2020 goals were missed, as forest clearance nearly doubled in the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 2019.

To save carbon-rich forests and create jobs to reboot the economy from the pandemic, Colombia is working to provide alternative livelihoods for people who live in and around forests.

In its submission of its climate plan to the UN, measures to tackle deforestation account for a third of Colombia’s efforts to meet its 2030 goal. Together with ecosystems restoration, actions related to nature represent more than half of the country’s carbon-cutting effort.

“Unless Colombia complies with its deforestation target and pathway to achieve it, they will not be able to meet their [climate goal] and would have to make a gigantic effort in other sectors to compensate,” said Carolina Jaramillo, Colombia country representative for the Global Green Growth Institute.

Avoiding further deforestation and preserving forest ecosystems provides Colombia with some of the cheapest ways to reduce its emissions, Jaramillo told Climate Home.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

To achieve its goal, Colombia is planning to restore more than 960,000 hectares of land by 2030, plant 180 million trees by 2022 and reduce deforestation by 50,000 hectare per year from a business as usual baseline by 2030.

Additional emissions reductions from reduced deforestation could be sold as credits under the carbon market mechanism established by the Paris Agreement and help to finance other carbon-cutting measures, the plan states.

Financial incentives are being created for farmers to restore ecosystems that store more carbon by raising livestock more efficiently so they need less grazing land, for example.

Agroforestry initiatives for coffee and cocoa production and the development of sustainable forest plantation for timber are among others.

La Chorrera indigenous community and WWF-Colombia, conduct an ecosystem service assessment of the forest surrounding in the Predio Putumayo Indigenous Reserve to help protect it (Photo:
Luis Barreto / WWF-UK)

A recent government strategy for deforestation control supports increasing production of non-timber products, such as natural rubber, fruits and seeds, to protect forests while diversifying the country’s income stream away from a dependence on oil exports and mining revenues.

The development of a bio-economy, which adds value to natural products for medicinal or cosmetic purposes for example, could contribute up to 10% to Colombia’s GDP by 2030 up from less than 1% currently, Jaramillo said.

France and UK lead push for climate finance to restore nature

“How are we going to finance all this in the Covid context? That remains a big challenge,” said Valencia, adding that not all measures had guaranteed funding, leaving a role for the private sector.

And the cost of addressing deforestation will be “difficult to meet” without international cooperation.

In recent years, Norway, Germany and the UK have been supporting Colombia’s efforts to end deforestation through a payment-by-results scheme, under which it received $85 million since 2015. The partnership was renewed in 2019 with a commitment from European countries for an additional $366m to be paid by 2025 for achieving deforestation reduction targets and to implement policies.

“We need to call the whole world to protect that lung of humanity,” Duque said this week about the Amazon, calling for global cooperation in findings ways to finance forest protection through carbon credits and private sector involvement.

While the focus has been put on preserving and restoring Colombia’s forests, campaigners have accused the government of being inconsistent when it comes to its energy policy.

Green growth champion: Focus on jobs helps poorer nations raise climate ambition

President Duque promised a recovery package to Covid-19 that focuses on the energy transition, clean growth and environmental protection – but measures include ‘greening’ the fossil fuel industry with no plans for its managed phase-out.

So far, the country has spent $374million on supporting fossil fuels and just $4.4million on clean energy as part of its recovery, according to the Energy Policy Tracker.

This includes measures to reduce fugitive emissions in the oil sector and improve energy efficiency in refineries. Reeling from a fall in global oil prices, Colombia is turning its attention to fracking to plug a revenue shortfall. The labour ministry has been tasked to present a transition strategy for workers in fossil fuel sectors by 2023.

Santiago Aldana, a climate campaigner based in Bogotá and member of the advocacy group Climalab, welcomed his government’s ambition on cutting emissions, while improving livelihoods and preserving ecosystems.

But he warned the recovery package had exposed “inconsistencies” between the economic strategy and Colombia’s climate ambition, with fracking likely to further increase the country’s emissions.

“Climate action touches upon the most sensitive aspects of the country such as social inequality, poverty and violence,” Aldana told Climate Home. And to achieve its goal, the government will need to continue to engage with civil society to ensure social and climate justice, he said.

The post Colombia banks on forest economy to deliver climate ambition leap appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking at the One Planet Summit for biodiversity held in Paris on Monday, French president Emmanuel Macron, UK prime minister Boris Johnson promised to set aside a significant portion of climate finance for projects that help soils and plants soak up carbon, while creating habitats for wildlife.

The one-day biodiversity summit co-hosted by France, the UN and the World Bank and attended by heads of state, UN chief António Guterres and leaders of international and financial institutions, aimed to converge efforts to reverse biodiversity loss with addressing the climate crisis.

Macron committed to earmark 30% of France’s climate funding by 2030 for “nature-based solutions”. “We need to take actions now that will help us change the world and make it a better place by 2030,” he said.

As an example that links the climate and biodiversity agendas, Macron led a pledging conference for the Great Green Wall. An ambitious vision to create a 15 kilometre wide and 8,000 kilometre long strip of vegetation across 11 countries in the Sahel, the initiative will halt desertification, bolster food security and create millions of jobs, Macron said.

Mobilising new funding to protect nature was one of the summit’s four major themes. UN-endorsed research found an additional $700 billion per year is needed to reverse human destruction of the natural world.

Research by The Nature Conservancy and 15 other institutions claims nature-based solutions can provide up to 37% of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperature rise below 2C. However, only 3% of international climate finance fits that category, with the bulk going to cut emissions from energy use.

China launches world’s largest carbon market for power sector

Joining by video link, prime minister Boris Johnson said £3bn of the UK’s £11.6bn international climate finance commitment to 2025 will be spent on supporting nature and biodiversity.

This will include marine conservation, tackling the illegal timber trade and deforestation and conserving habitats such as mangroves that protect communities from climate impacts.

“Obviously it’s right to focus on climate change and cut CO2 emissions but we won’t achieve balance with our planet unless we protect nature as well. Climate change must now be seen as part of an overall agenda to protect the natural world,” he said.

NGO Oxfam noted the funds came out of an aid budget the UK government had recently cut. “As important as [nature and biodiversity] are, the first priority of overseas aid should be the alleviation of poverty,” said campaigner Tracy Carty.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau said Canada’s future climate contributions will also include funds for biodiversity and committed up to $44m (C$55m) to the UN’s land degradation neutrality fund.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

Vanessa Pérez-Cirera, deputy lead climate and energy practice at WWF, told Climate Home News that while connecting the climate and nature agendas was welcome, governments should “not play musical chairs” with climate finance by pitting different needs against each other.

Instead, funding for nature should be new and additional with donor countries demonstrating coherent policies at home to address the drivers of biodiversity loss and end harmful subsidies for fossil fuels and unstainable agriculture practices, she said.

Kelsey Perlman, forest and climate campaigner at NGO Fern, told Climate Home News that while many will want to “jump for joy at an attempt to address this financing gap for nature,” how the money is disbursed will be key.

“Everybody wants to bridge climate and biodiversity but that means that the way things have been done in the past probably need to be done significantly differently,” she said.

Perlman called for “transformative projects that put biodiversity at the forefront” and focus on the rights of communities living in protected and restored areas. Bilateral agreements between donor countries and vulnerable nations could offer an opportunity to do this while fulfilling climate goals.

“Resilience in any ecosystem is based on its biodiversity and not on the carbon that it stores,” she added.

Portugal makes deal on EU climate law ‘big priority’ of its six-month presidency

The UN biodiversity body has yet to reschedule a critical summit in Kunming, China that was postponed from 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nations are expected to agree on a framework to protect the world’s biodiversity for the next decade.

An alliance of more than 50 countries committed to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030, known as the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, was formally launched at the summit, co-chaired by the Costa Rica, France and the UK.

More than 20 countries including Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico and Angola joined the alliance, which hopes to form the basis for an ambitious global agreement at Kunming.

Governments are also due to raise climate ambition and put the world on track to limiting global heating “well below 2C” when they meet in Glasgow, UK, for the Cop26 summit in November.

“2021 must be the year we reconcile humanity and nature,” Guterres told the summit. “The pandemic recovery is an opportunity to change course… and revive economies, build resilience and rescue biodiversity.”

“Nature-based solutions such as Africa’s Great Green Wall are especially promising,” Guterres said, adding preserving the world’s biodiversity could create 191 million jobs by 2030, citing analysis from the World Economic Forum.

Green growth champion: Focus on jobs helps poorer nations raise climate ambition

Abdoulaye Dia, executive secretary of Pan African Agency for the Great Green Wall, said additional financing for the initiative needed to consider the debt sustainability of Sahel countries, calling for 60% of new finances to come from donors and 40% from concessional finance.

An estimated $4.3 billion annually is needed to restore 8.2 million hectares of land every year in the Sahel region to 2030 to achieve the Great Green Wall’s goals.

More than $14bn of new funding was promised at the summit for Great Green Wall for 2021-2025, including new commitments from the African Development Bank, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the French development agency.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) announced projects worth $925m were being elaborated under a new investment programme to boost climate finance for rural populations in the Sahel, focusing on sustainable agriculture.

The GCF hopes to leverage $1 billion in resources for the Great Green Wall in 2021 and 2022.

The post France and UK lead push for climate finance to restore nature appeared first on Climate Home News.

That was the message of UN agencies during a pledging conference for governments, businesses and philanthropic organisations to bolster financial commitments for the protection and restoration of nature on Monday.

In 2019, these actors spent between $124 and $143 billion per year on activities that benefit nature worldwide, according to recent analysis by the The Nature Conservancy, the Paulson Institute and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

But the research estimated to halt the destruction of plants and animals and restore nature, the world needs to mobilise an additional $600 to $824 billion a year.

Despite calls on governments to significantly step up contributions to halt the decline of plants and wildlife, only a handful of European countries committed to increase their financial flows to protect nature.

“We currently spend less than $100 billion a year on nature – about what we spend on pet food globally,” said Achim Steiner, head of the UN Development Programme, which organised the event.

$700 billion annually is “less than 1% of global GDP and only a fraction of the $5.2 trillion that we spend on fossil fuel subsidies every year, even this year,” he said.

World misses 2020 biodiversity goals: leaked UN draft report

The event follows the publication of a UN report earlier this month finding the world has missed every one of 20 biodiversity targets to 2020 agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. Funding shortfalls and harmful subsidies were identified as significant barriers to progress.

The pledging conference was the first key moment to drum up more funds ahead of major UN biodiversity talks in Kunming, China, provisionally scheduled for May 2021, when governments are due to agree on a new set of biodiversity targets to 2030.

A high-ambition coalition led by Costa Rica and France and endorsed by UN secretary general António Guterres, the EU, the UK and Canada among others, is seeking a headline target to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.

Elizabeth Mrema, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), said financing to meet the biodiversity goals needed to come “from all actors” and hoped the event “will motivate further deliberations and especially commitments to help close the the biodiversity funding gap,” she said.

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires

Development minister Gerd Müller said Germany will increase its €500 million ($584,000) annual investment in protecting biodiversity in developing countries.

He announced the launch of a joint initiative with public and private funders called the Legacy Landscape Fund to leverage long-term financing for protected areas in developing countries. Many lack financial mechanisms to protect nature, he said.

The announcement was welcomed by Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, who said governments, business and global organisations need to align their financing goals.

A study commissioned by the Campaign for Nature found that around $140 billion a year was needed to expand protected areas to 30% of the planet, mostly in low and middle-income countries. Current spending is only around $25 billion.

“If we close that finance gap, the financial return will be five to one,” he told Climate Home News.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

Norway said it would work to create a coalition to end tropical deforestation over the next year.

The UK promised to increase biodiversity finance as part of a commitment to double funding for climate change over the next five years and said it will ask others to do the same.

Environment minister Zac Goldsmith added the government was also working to remove damaging subsidies and replace them “with a system that rewards environmental stewardship”.

Mrema, of the CBD, told political leaders the success of the new biodiversity framework relied on the mobilisation of additional resources and “the reduction or redirection of $500 billion causing harm to biodiversity, including negative incentives or subsidies” — $100bn of which, she said, were in the agricultural sector.

Data from the OECD analysed by The Nature Conservancy showed that in 2019 governments spent up to four times more money on agricultural, forestry and fisheries subsidies that degrade nature than on spending that protects it, an estimated $274–542 billion annually.

These included incentives for production or consumption that exacerbates biodiversity loss through land and ocean degradation, unsustainable exploitation of resources and water use, pollution and deforestation.

Poland agrees coal mining phase out with unions by 2049

To close the biodiversity financing gap to 2030, researchers estimate governments would need to cut harmful subsidies in the agricultural, fisheries and forestry sectors, by $273.9 billion annually.

“Agriculture is the biggest threat, need and opportunity” to halting biodiversity loss and restoring land and habitats, Andrew Deutz, director of conservation finance, at the Nature Conservancy, told CHN.

By transforming harmful subsidies to the agricultural sector into incentives for protection of nature, governments can help inverse the trend, he said.

Deutz added the funding conference had been a “start” but many donor countries may be unwilling to unveil pledges ahead of the biodiversity talks in Kunming.

“I am pretty optimistic that there is more finance that is going to be forthcoming in the run up to the negotiations. What we are seeing now is pre-positioning for Kunming,” he added.

On Monday, 64 political leaders pledged to transition to sustainable patterns of production and consumption and to end subsidies and incentives harmful to nature, biodiversity and climate change and increase those with a neutral or positive impacts.

The post UN summit highlights $700bn funding gap to restore nature appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a pre-recorded speech to the UN General Assembly, Jair Bolsonaro accused “shady interests” jealous of Brazil’s food exports of running a “brutal disinformation” campaign.

Fires in the Pantanal were “the inevitable consequence of hot local temperatures coupled with the accumulation of decaying organic matter,” Bolsonaro claimed.

This year, the Pantanal has been devastated by the highest number of fires since records began in the 1990s. In the state of Mato Grosso, there were 4,200 fires in August 2020 compared to just 184 in August 2019 and 71 in August 2018.

The fires have caused respiratory problems for the region’s human inhabitants, making coronavirus more dangerous, and killed rare animals like jaguars, pumas and giant armadillos.

Encouraged by Bolsonaro, land grabbers advance on Amazon indigenous territory

Observatório do Clima, a network of Brazilian environmentalists, called the president’s denials “delusional”.

“He denounced a non-existent collusion between NGOs and foreign powers against the country, but, by denying reality and not presenting any plan to solve the problems we face, Bolsonaro is the one who threatens our economy,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary at Observatório do Clima.

“Brazil will pay the price for his irresponsibility for a long time. We have a president who sabotages his own country”.

The increase in fires is thought to be driven by a combination of climate change, deforestation and the actions of cattle farmers. According to NASA, the December 2019 to April 2020 wet season was unusually dry.

This left the Pantanal more vulnerable to fires spreading during its July to October 2020 dry season. Many of these fires were started deliberately by cattle farmers on the plateaus surrounding the Pantanal to clear space for their cows to graze.

In his speech Bolsonaro blamed Amazon rainforest fires on indigenous people “burn[ing] their farmland in search of livelihood in already clear areas”. He has previously blamed indigenous people for the Pantanal fires.

According to the Guardian’s analysis of satellite images though, fires which hit the Pantanal’s Baiá do Guató indigenous reserve started outside its borders.

Amazon’s ‘flying rivers’ dry up as drought takes hold

Green groups have blamed Bolsonaro’s policies for the fires, accusing him of stripping power and resources from the agencies that are meant to enforce environmental protection.

In his first weeks as President, Bolsonaro downgraded the role of his Environment Ministry and removed the words “climate change” from its mission.

In 2019, Bolsonaro sacked his space agency chief for providing data which showed that deforestation was increasing. Bolsonaro said the data was “sensationalism” but, at the time, other researchers told Climate Home News that the agency’s data were too conservative if anything.

Opposition congresswoman Fernanda Melchionna said in a statement: “The dismantling of Brazilian environmental policy, underway in the Bolsonaro administration, is extremely serious and is causing incalculable loss for Brazil.”

She accused the government of “militarization of research and environmental inspection bodies, the emptying of the Ministry of the Environment’s actions, the refusal to enforce budgetary rules and the failure to take available action to prevent and fight deforestation and fires.”

Bolsonaro’s plan to unlock the Amazon: split its indigenous people

André Luiz Siqueira, director of Ecology & Action told the BBC that “the Federal Government strengthens the sense of impunity” for farmers who start fires.

Deforestation in the Amazon has been linked to droughts across South America, contributing to fires like those on the Pantanal.

This is because rainforests like the Amazon produce ‘flying rivers’, where moisture rises into the air and is transported across South America before becoming rain. When the rainforest is cut back, these ‘rivers’ become streams.

Deforestation in the neighbouring Cerrado region also damages the Pantanal. Without tree roots holding the soil in place, the rain washes more sediment into the River Paraguay. That sediment ends up in the Pantanal, silts up its waterways and dries out the region.

Bolsonaro is facing pressure from world leaders over the devastation. Last August, as the Amazon burned, the German and French leaders called emergency talks on the fires at the G7 leaders’ summit.

France has since threatened to oppose the trade deal between the EU and South America’s Mercosur unless all nations, including Brazil, commit to honouring the Paris climate agreement.

Bolsonaro has hit back by calling France’s Emmanuel Macron a “colonialist” and “sensationalist”. In Tuesday’s UN speech, he said Brazil was the world’s largest food producer and “for that reason, there’s so much interest in spreading disinformation about our environment”.

Pressure has also come from financial institutions, 29 of which threatened to divest from Brazil unless it does more to combat deforestation. These investors manage nearly $4tn worth of assets.

Amazon land grabbers are destroying Brazil nut groves for cattle pastures

Bolsonaro is also under pressure at home. On the same day as his UN speech, the Brazilian Supreme Court was deciding whether he had acted unconstitutionally in failing to make full use of the National Fund on Climate Change.

The fund was set under President Lula’s government in 2009 to allow public authorities, co-operatives and private companies to reduce their emissions and better prepare for the effects of climate change.

The opposition parties bringing the court case accuse the government of disbanding the climate change secretariat, which was responsible for the climate fund, and abolishing the fund’s steering committee.

Those bringing the case say that much of the fund’s R$508m (US$93m) budget had not been spent. Suely Araújo, from the Observatório do Clima, accused the government of “calculated inaction” and adopting an “environmental anti-policy”.

Bolsonaro faces presidential elections in 2022. His latest approval ratings show an even split. Around 39% of Brazilians approve of him while 34% disapprove.

The post Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires appeared first on Climate Home News.

A draft version of the fifth edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook, seen by Climate Home News, reported that none of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets set in Japan in 2010 have been fully met.

It identified failure to account for the role of women as a significant barrier to progress, along with funding shortfalls and harmful subsidies.

Prepared by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the report provides a summary of the state of nature and biodiversity worldwide.

The final report is due to be released next Tuesday after being reviewed by negotiators, with reflections on the way forward and how Covid-19 recovery packages could help achieve biodiversity goals.

African ministers call for investment in Great Green Wall to aid Covid-19 recovery

It comes as governments are preparing to adopt a new set of biodiversity targets beyond 2020 in Kunming, China. The summit was due to take place in October 2020 but has been provisionally rescheduled to May 2021 because of Covid-19. A proposal to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and seas has formed the basis of the negotiations.

Observers to preparatory talks expressed concerns little progress has been made on mobilising finance to meet the new goals, and fear a repeat of the Aichi failure if more resources are not pledged.

The draft report assessed progress towards meeting each element of the Aichi targets. Among the 44 sub-targets assessed, 20 are ranked as “poor”, 19 as “moderate” and only five as “good”.

It found that biodiversity is not yet being brought into mainstream decision-making, harmful subsidies have not been removed on a meaningful scale and biodiversity continues to decline in places used to produce food and timber.

The loss and degradation of habitats “remains worryingly high,” it said, including in primary forests and wetlands. Last year, a major scientific report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes) warned species extinction was accelerating, with ecosystems deteriorating at rates unprecedented in human history.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

Although most countries have adopted national targets in line with the Aichi goals, “the collective ambition of national targets does not add up to the global ambition” and data gaps remain in biodiversity-rich developing countries, the draft added.

For example, a study of 106 small-scale fisheries worldwide found the harvesting of clams and other invertebrates by women had been largely ignored, leading to underestimation of the total catch and of the species targeted by fishers.

“The essential role of women in underpinning actions for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity have been consistently undervalued,” the report concluded.

Conversely, a programme in Niger to improve agricultural productivity and rehabilitate land that targeted women as well as men was highlighted for showing good results. The region saw the gradual return of wildlife such as rodents, birds, reptiles and mammals.

Unless gender issues better inform future policy decisions, it could undermine long-term efforts to halt the decline and extinction of species and allow ecosystems to recover by 2050, the report said.

Mauritius oil spill compensation could be limited by maritime law technicality

Meanwhile, financial resources for implementing the Aichi goals have increased but remain “inadequate” and funds are “especially lacking in those countries richest in biodiversity and in threatened species”.

The CBD warned that failure to meet the Aichi goals threatened the achievement of the 2030 sustainable development goals and could undermine efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly a third of emissions cuts required to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming “well below 2C”  could come from nature-based solutions, it said.

It is not too late to reverse the trend if conservation efforts are scaled up and protected areas expanded, the draft said. However, it will require “a reinvention of the ways in which we collectively produce, consume and live”.

This, it added, should include maintaining and improving food security without converting large-scale forests and ecosystems into agricultural land, encouraging moderate meat consumption, greening urban areas, better protecting freshwater ecosystems and addressing climate change.

The post World misses 2020 biodiversity goals: leaked UN draft report appeared first on Climate Home News.

Meanwhile a government bill to restart the economy would axe several environmental protections, raising fears of further deforestation.

Forest loss in Indonesia rose 50% in the first 20 weeks of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, according to data from the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland – which operates a global warning system for forest loss – and analysed by Greenpeace.

Analysis of the same data by WWF Germany found that in March alone, forest clearance in Indonesia was up 130% compared to the three-year average for March 2017 to 2019 with an estimated 130,000 hectares razed – the greatest recorded loss of any country that month.

It is the starkest example of a global trend that saw forest loss alerts rise significantly since the start of the pandemic across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Campaigners told Climate Home News the absence of on-the-ground monitoring allowed illegal tree cutting to go unchecked.

“The reduced presence and capacity of law enforcement on the ground means there is more space for illegal activities,” said Oyvind Eggen, executive director at Rainforest Foundation Norway.

“Deforestation increase could be one of the most long-term impacts of the Covid-19 crisis as governments all over the world are thinking about the short term.”

Green shift urged to revive Brazil’s economy and shield Amazon forests

In 2010, Norway pledged up to $1 billion to help Indonesia reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, with payment based on results. As deforestation rates fell in 2017, Indonesia is set to receive its first payment under the deal between the two country this year.

The latest figures released by the Indonesian government show deforestation has been largely stable over the last two years – increasing 5% during that period.

Eggen told CHN he was worried about the picture painted by the latest data. “Are we going back to an environmental catastrophe that was about to be halted? The satellite data doesn’t lie,” he said.

More data and observations from the ground will be needed to determine who is responsible for the destruction, said Eggen. Travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus have created a gap in the records.

In recent months, civil society groups monitoring forest loss have been unable to travel to the Indonesian archipelago’s remote forest areas, Kiki Taufik, Greenpeace’s head Indonesia forest campaign, told CHN.

But “the palm oil and paper sector have been running business as usual,” he said. The Indonesia Palm Oil Association said workers’ movement in and out of the plantations were restricted but there were no plans to reduce activities, Reuters reported in April.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

Indonesia is the world’s top palm oil producer and is heavily dependent on exports. Palm oil plantations have expanded from 3.6 million hectares in 2008 to 16.8 million in 2019, according to the Forest People’s Programme.

Clearing primary forests and peatlands for plantations or logging is banned under Indonesian law and a moratorium on new oil palm plantations has been extended to 2021.

A lack of transparent government data makes it difficult to attribute the deforestation spike to illegal activities or the granting of new permits in spite of the moratorium, Taufik said.

Angus MacInnes, project officer at the UK-based Forest People’s Programme, told CHN law enforcement was “often complicit in the conversion of forests to industrial concessions”, citing cases of alleged intimidation and violence against indigenous activists during the pandemic.

Indonesia’s forestry ministry did not respond to CHN’s request for comment.

On the ground, lowland forests have been particularly vulnerable to illegal encroachment, Rudi Syaf, executive director at Indonesian forest conservation NGO KKI Warsi, told CHN in an email.

Informed by local intelligence, Syaf said there had been a significant increase in illegal logging and forest conversion into palm oil and coffee plantations during the pandemic compared to last year.

Some communities suffering from the economic fallout of Covid-19 were turning to illegal activities including gold mining and logging to survive, he said, as traditional activities such as rubber farming were no longer sufficient to support livelihoods.

Amazon faces ‘perfect storm’ of forest clearance, coronavirus and wildfire

As the fire season gets underway in Indonesia, Taufik, of Greenpeace, questioned whether the government had been able to take fire prevention measures this year. At the end of July, 64,000 hectares had already burnt, he said.

Fires in Indonesia’s forests and carbon-rich peatland cause haze, clouds of smoke including PM 2.5 pollution, which has been linked to a higher death rate from Covid-19. According to the World Health Organisation, Covid-19 cases are on the rise across the country.

While this year’s fire season is forecast to be milder than last year’s blaze, based on weather conditions and potential fuel levels, the stakes are higher. Taufik said the government needed to do more to restore peatland or face a double health crisis of toxic haze and Covid-19.

However the government is concerned with rebooting economic development and creating jobs, by pushing a bill that would revise 79 laws and weaken environmental regulations.

The proposed omnibus bill would scrap the obligation to carry out environmental and social impact assessments for new business licenses, remove a requirement for all regions to maintain a minimum of 30% of their territory as forest area, and eliminate a strict liability rule that compels companies to protect their land from fires.

Indigenous rights and forest campaigners fear it will sacrifice the rainforest and its people to facilitate business.

Analysis by Indonesian forest protection NGO Madani found that, if approved, the bill could see five provinces lose of all of their natural forests to deforestation. That would breach the country’s climate commitment in the forestry sector.

“Environmental damage will cause disasters that will ultimately destroy the Indonesian economy entirely,” Syaf, of Warsi, warned.

The post Forest destruction spiked in Indonesia during coronavirus lockdown appeared first on Climate Home News.

The subsistence farmers and their families collect the urine they pass – most even keep a plastic vessel in their bedroom for use at night – and store it in containers where it matures and turns into a fertiliser worth about $0.47 a litre, cheaper than chemical rivals.

The system is a shift from the use of pit latrines where the urine seeps away into the ground.

“This fertiliser is very effective on crops, it works just like most of the chemical fertilisers and it quickly reacts on the crops as opposed to the chemical fertilisers,” said Mark Folopenzi, a 45-year old farmer at Neno who lives with his wife and three children.

Malawi has a largely agricultural economy, with more than 80% of its population in rural areas and earning a living through subsistence, rain-fed crops including maize, sorghum, pulses and millet. The country is the sixth poorest in the world.

Green bailouts? – Climate Weekly

In a bid to improve agricultural productivity among subsistence farmers, the government of Malawi has since 2005 been implementing the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP), which has been lauded for increasing maize yields and rural incomes.

The programme, which targets around one million of the country’s 11 million smallholder farmers, has cost 288.9 billion kwacha ($393.6 million). However, despite this expenditure, the programme has not necessarily empowered subsistence farmers, as year in and year out they seek relief from government due to hunger as a result of unpredictable weather patterns.

High population growth, deforestation and erosion make the economy especially vulnerable to worsening climate change. The impact of erratic rains, prolonged dry spells and severe floods has been aggravated by a lack of agricultural resources, including fertilisers.

While farmers face many challenges, the biggest cause of crop failure is low rainfall and low nutrients in the soil. Maize, the country’s staple crop, demands lots of nutrients, and growing the plant without fertilisers is difficult.

A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute found that while subsidising fertiliser prices increases use, yields, and household income, it discourages use of organic-based materials and methods to maintain soil fertility.

With the ever-rising cost of chemical fertilisers, subsistence farmers in Malawi have been finding it hard to afford chemical fertilisers, and they have been trying to find affordable and sustainable alternatives – such as urine.

(Photo: Madalitso Kateta)

Folopenzi said the introduction of Bionitrate fertiliser, which is made by maturing human urine in plastic containers, has helped farmers amid the ever-rising costs.

“We can’t grow crops without applying fertilisers as we used to some fifteen years ago. The soil has over the years lost its fertility and growing crops without fertiliser results in bad harvest and hunger,” said Folopenzi.

“This [Bionitrate] fertiliser is very good and we are excited that we can also save a lot of money if we can produce our own fertiliser from the urine we can collect at home,” he said.

Sabawo Chikuni, another farmer from Neno, was previously worried the Bionitrate fertiliser was unhygienic and could be infected with parasites. But having seen its effects, he now plans to use the fertiliser in the winter cropping season.

“I previously had negative feelings on the use of human urine on crops. I felt like this could not be a better alternative to chemical fertilisers. But looking at how the maize in the gardens of farmers that are using this fertiliser has grown, I believe government could be doing us justice if it promoted this fertiliser,” he said.

Bionitrate fertiliser is being championed by Environmental Industries, a private non-profit company that has been working with different local and international organisations in Malawi to promote the use of biotechnology and produce fertilisers which are economically sustainable, environmentally friendly, and safe to use.

Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

Goodfellow Phiri, director at Environmental Industries, said Bionitrate fertilisers are safe to use and do not pose any health hazards, despite health and ethical questions raised by some farmers.

He told Climate Home News that before the urine is turned into fertiliser, it ages and the chemical processes in the urine turn it from an acid to an alkaline, making the product very salty and not habitable for germs.

“In the alkaline state, the PH is beyond seven and the product is salty. In this salty state, all the germs are dead and the fertiliser is odorless and free from germs. However, if mishandled during use, it can be contaminated,” said Phiri.

The fertiliser also helps conserve the soil by raising its PH through its chemical composition, giving it the same effect as agricultural lime on acidic soils.

Phiri’s company collects 40 litres of urine a day and matures 14,600 litres of Bionitrate urine per year. The Bionitrate urine is sold at K350.00 ($0.47) per litre as opposed to the K470.00 ($0.64) per kilo for chemical fertiliser. For an acre of maize, a farmer needs 50 litres of Bionitrate urine.

Urinals at “urine harvesters” are equipped with a urine trap which collects the urine into a 20-litre container, and the urine is later transferred into a 200-litre maturing tank before being packaged into 20-litre and five-litre containers.

(Photo: Madalitso Kateta)

Phiri said the company was currently training farmers on how to process their own urine rather than buy the liquid.

“Our goal is to train farmers on how to construct urine harvesters which can enable them to collect enough urine which they can turn into Bionitrate fertiliser. This is the only way we can make the farmers self-reliant as the cost of fertiliser keeps rising,” he said.

Apart from harvesting urine for fertiliser production, the farmers can create business opportunities by constructing public urine harvesting toilets, which they could charge to use, he said.

Coronavirus: in Hawaii’s air, scientists seek signs of economic shock on CO2 levels

“We are training farmers on how they can get maximum results from this natural fertiliser. However, the challenge that we are currently facing is low adoption because of mindset change towards fertilisers made from human waste,” he said, before adding that demand for Bionitrate fertiliser was steadily rising among subsistence farmers.

Environmental Industries has been working with the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and several non-governmental organisations. It is currently cooperating with the government of Malawi and seed companies to popularise Bionitrate fertiliser across the country.

“This is the right path for Malawi to follow, as the 42 billion Kwacha we spend annually on the Farm Input Subsidy Programme is too much considering that it only benefits one million farmers out of the 11 million active farmers,” said Phiri.

Masauko Dzumani, the Agricultural Extension Development Officer (AEDO) for Neno Extension Planning Area (EPA), said Bionitrate fertilisers were working on crops just as well as chemical fertilisers, and his office has been recommending farmers start using this natural fertiliser.

“We have been doing a trial of the effectiveness of the Bionitrate fertiliser and we have observed that the farmers that have been using it are having the same crops as those that have applied chemical fertilisers like calcium ammonium nitrate and nitrogen phosphorus and potassium,” said Dzumani.

For the farmers using Bionitrate, they have found an effective, cheap, way to sustain their crops.

And it all starts with a plastic pot by the bed.

This article was produced as part of an African reporting programme supported by Future Climate for Africa.

The post Malawi’s farmers grow crops with ‘magic liquid’ fertiliser appeared first on Climate Home News.

Governments are quite rightly focusing on emergency response measures to slow the spread of the virus, save as many lives as possible and take whatever steps they can to relieve the economic hardship people in every country are already facing.

We don’t yet know how much longer it will be until the virus is brought to heel and how much worse things will get until that point. That is the reality we are all trying to come to terms with.

For many of us in the climate and environmental communities, we are simultaneously trying to come to terms with the fact that the landscape for restoring balance to the world’s ecosystems has fundamentally changed.

At the start of the year, much of our planning revolved around major milestones like the biodiversity summit in China and the climate summit in the UK, and how these moments might drive more action from countries, regions, cities, businesses and others to reduce emissions and protect and restore nature.

Now it appears that if we can get beyond the immediate medical emergency, our focus will need to shift from summits to stimulus.

Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

Will governments direct spending in ways that increase emissions and continue to degrade nature? Or will they have the foresight to not only tackle the immediate economic impacts, but also accelerate the transition to resilient, low-carbon and nature-rich societies and economies?

That is likely still some time off, although we are already seeing early examples of the paths governments can choose.

For example, South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party has announced plans for a “Green New Deal” to boost its economy and fulfil its pledge to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Similar questions are springing up around the world, including in the EU, with debate already emerging whether the bloc should double down on the EU Green Deal, or to back away from this ambitious plan.

Much of the discussion so far has focused on the opportunity for economic stimulus packages to hasten the transition away from fossil fuels toward clean energy sources. This is critical, but we must also consider the role that nature-based solutions can play.

To start, protecting natural ecosystems is one of the most immediate steps governments can take to reduce the risk of future pandemics.

Science shows that humanity’s destruction of biodiversity is creating the conditions for new viruses and diseases. Deforestation drives wild animals out of their natural habits and closer to human populations, creating greater opportunities for viruses like Covid-19 to spread.

Coronavirus pandemic shows we need new ways to look after the Earth and each other

But nature-based solutions, as a broad array of actions, deserve much deeper consideration as governments decide how to design their economic responses to the coronavirus.

The bottom line is that, in addition to being an essential component of the response to climate change, nature-based solutions also provide a range of other benefits that will help communities recover from the immediate impacts, as well as support more resilient and sustainable societies and economies in the longer term.

Natural ecosystems provide clean air and clean water, they make communities more resilient to the growing impacts of a warming climate, like protection against floods and hurricanes, and they support and create jobs, particularly in more rural and vulnerable communities.

Analysis last year by the Food and Land Use Coalition found that key transitions in the world’s food and land use systems alone could unlock $4.5 trillion in new business opportunities each year by 2030.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

This is at the same time as saving costs of $5.7 trillion a year in damage to people and the planet. There is also increasing recognition that ‘green infrastructure’ – forests, wetlands, and mangroves for example – can perform better and at lower cost than ‘grey infrastructure’ for services such as flood management, water purification and storage and irrigation.

The potential here is huge: the OECD estimates global financing needs for water supply infrastructure at $6.7 trillion by 2030 and $22.6 trillion by 2050.

Governments must ensure that public spending to address the current economic crisis aims to both reduce emissions and restore balance to all the Earth’s natural systems. Long-term stimulus investment must be used to build a better future; this means spending needs to be aligned with both halving emissions and stopping nature loss by 2030.

Lucy Almond is the director of Nature4Climate, a consortium of some of the world’s leading nature conservation, climate and business organisations that aims to increase investment and action on nature-based solutions in support of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

The post From summits to stimulus: Nature-based solutions can help appeared first on Climate Home News.

Measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, also known as Covid19, are ramping up globally, with tougher travel restrictions forcing meetings to be postponed later into the year and squeezing timetables for decisions.

An intergovernmental conference aiming to establish a global ocean treaty to protect marine biodiversity in the high seas, beyond areas of national jurisdiction, is the latest of a series of global meetings to be affected by the virus.

A draft decision to postpone the meeting is expected to be considered by the UN General Assembly on Wednesday.

The fourth and final round of government negotiations on marine biodiversity had been due to take place at the UN headquarters in New York from 23 March to 3 April.

On Friday, UN Climate Change said it would not hold any physical meetings in its headquarters in Bonn, Germany, or elsewhere in the world from 6 March to the end of April.

Legal gaps and US election could delay climate ambition before Glasgow summit

12 meetings planned between now and the end of April could be affected by the decision, according to UN Climate Change’s calendar. This includes the Adaptation Fund board meeting which has now been postponed.

UN Climate Change secretariat said it was working to find alternative arrangements, including virtual meetings, in coming months.

In a statement, executive secretary of UN Climate Change Patricia Espinosa said the decision to suspend meetings until the end of April acknowledged “the increasing challenges posed by travel restrictions and quarantine measures that some countries have imposed on travellers from Germany”.

Over the past few days, some meetings were unable to make progress because of delegates absence, she said, adding: “Some forthcoming meetings require quorum which can be affected by last-minute cancellations or non-attendance by members or alternates.”

The delays are putting increasing pressure on an already tight timetable ahead of a major biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, in October and UN climate talks in Glasgow, UK, known as Cop26, in November.

In Kunming, countries are due to agree on a new global framework to protect biodiversity over the next decade. In Glasgow, countries are under pressure to enhance their climate plans for the next 10 years and finalise rules for a global carbon market.

Power structures over gender make women more vulnerable to climate change

And the impact is being felt across the UN.

Last month, a preparatory meeting for the biodiversity summit in Kunming, had to be relocated from China to Rome, Italy.

For shipping, the International Maritime Organisation has already postponed two meetings due to take place this month. A key meeting of the IMO’s environmental protection committee held in London from 30 March to 3 April could also be affected.

The committee is expected to review proposals to improve the energy efficiency of ships. A decision on whether to uphold the meeting could be taken later this week, an IMO spokesperson told Climate Home News.

Africa Climate Week, which was due to take place in Kampala on 20-24 April, was also postponed. Uganda is still due to host the meeting but at a later, unconfirmed, date.

Elsewhere, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) board meeting is taking place in Geneva, Switzerland, this week, instead of at its headquarters in Songdo, in South Korea. Attendance to the meeting, where board members are due to approve a new strategic plan for the next four years, has been restricted.

Liane Schalatek, an observer to the GCF meeting from the environmental think-tank Heinrich Böll Foundation who is unable to attend the meeting, told CHN this will be “an interesting test case” for whether transparency and remote participation can work at scale via webcasting.

Climate news in your inbox? Sign up here

The scale of the impacts of Covid-19 on the global timetable for action on biodiversity and climate change is not yet known.

Speaking at the UN on Friday, Cop26 president Alok Sharma said the UK, alongside Italy which is hosting the pre-Cop, will be “creating a drumbeat of action in the calendar of international events leading up to Cop26”. The whole of Italy has since been put on lockdown because of the virus.

In private, climate diplomats told CHN the impact could be much greater if Covid-19 were to affect climate talks in Bonn in June, when countries are due to lay the ground work ahead of Cop26.

A spokesperson for the Cop26 presidency team said the summit was still many months away but it was “monitoring the situation closely”.

“Our officials are attending planned engagements but we are aware that this is an issue which may affect some international travel. We will adapt our plans accordingly to ensure necessary discussions and diplomacy with international partners can continue,” she said.

We need your help… Climate Home News is an independent news outlet dedicated to the most important global stories. If you can spare even a few dollars each month, it would make a huge difference to us. Our Patreon account is a safe and easy way to support our work.

Meanwhile, it is still unclear whether a key EU-China meeting at the end of the month in Shanghai can go ahead as planned.

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council president Charles Michel are due to travel to Beijing to prepare an EU-China summit in Germany in September.

The EU is hoping to engage Beijing in a race to the top to ensure global action to curb emissions remains meaningful ahead of Cop26, even without the US on board.

Last month, EU Commission’s climate chief Frans Timmermans’ planned trip to Beijing was cancelled. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also cancelled his trip to Brussels amid the Covid-19 outbreak.

On Monday, the World Health Organisation reported 1,112 cases in Germany and more than 110,000 confirmed cases across the world. More than 3,800 people have died of the virus so far.

The post Coronavirus delays global efforts for climate and biodiversity action appeared first on Climate Home News.