The LEAF coalition, an initiative launched in 2021 seeking to mobilise finance for forest protection, announced the agreement this week with the Brazilian state of Pará.

The state, which will host the COP30 climate summit next year in the city of Belém, last year recorded the highest Amazonian deforestation rate in the country. Around 170,000 sq. km, an area the size of Uruguay, was destroyed.

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Announcing the carbon credit initiative in New York, Pará State Governor Helder Barbalho told international press that the deal – which allocates a portion of the funds to indigenous and local communities – is “extraordinary”.

“It will be the largest carbon credit sale in history,” Barbalho said in a statement. “We dream of making living forests valuable, turning what dead forests need into a reality when the forest gains value.”

Funds for rainforests

Around 30 multinational corporations including Amazon, Bayer, BCG and H&M Group will purchase the credits from the project at $15 per tonne. The governments of the UK, US, Norway and South Korea will also back the deal with purchase guarantees, promising to buy a chunk of the credits at $15 per tonne if no private-sector buyer offers more than that.

LEAF expects to generate around 12 million forest credits by reducing deforestation in Pará from 2023 to 2026. The coalition has already established smaller projects in Costa Rica and Ghana, which sold credits at a lower price of $10 per tonne.

“The LEAF approach represents the best, and perhaps last, chance to halt and reverse tropical deforestation by 2030, channelling billions in climate finance to the Global South,” said Eron Bloomgarden, CEO of Emergent, coordinator of the LEAF coalition.

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

Ahead of climate finance talks at COP29 in Baku, developed countries have insisted on highlighting the role of private finance such as the one featured in the LEAF coalition to move funds from Global North to South.

Bilateral purchases of carbon credits have also become more common, but the rules governing these agreements are yet to be finalised at COP29 – leading to controversial deals.

Close monitoring

If successful, the LEAF deal could become a “role model” for forest protection in the Amazon, but this will require evidence of the interventions changing Pará’s emissions trajectory, said Mariana Oliveira, manager of the Forests, Land Use and Agriculture Program at WRI Brasil.

“Given the nature and structure of the transaction, it will be necessary to closely watch the interventions to be sure that there is a link between the revenue from carbon credits and the interventions,” Oliveira told Climate Home News.

Since 2020, Pará state – the second-largest in the Brazilian Amazon – has committed to an emissions reductions strategy aiming to restore around 5 million hectares of forests and achieving net-zero forest emissions by 2036. The state has also put in place a mandatory tracking of all cattle and buffalo supply chains. After a slight rise in 2021, Pará’s deforestation fell in 2022 and 2023.

Senegalese banker Ibrahima Cheikh Diong picked to lead new loss and damage fund

While the state is already making efforts to combat deforestation, Oliveira said the information available on the LEAF deal suggests the efforts will be additional and with a separate source of funding – which are critical elements of high-integrity carbon credits.

“From now on, it is important for civil society to closely monitor how this program will develop, demanding real and effective participation from traditional peoples,” she added.

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Simon Stiell told investors at an event in New York that the efforts of many developing countries to adopt more renewables like solar and wind power “are hamstrung by sky-high costs of capital… or mired in spiralling debt crises”.

Because the “mega-trend” in clean energy is occurring unevenly, most investors are missing out on “gigantic, unrealised opportunities” outside of wealthy countries, he added, warning that this also poses a major threat to global action to curb climate change and avoid its worst impacts.

“I’ll be blunt: if more developing economies don’t see more of this growing deluge of climate investment, we will quickly entrench a dangerous two-speed global transition,” Stiell said.

UN climate chief calls for “exponential changes” to boost investment in Africa

Such an imbalance is both “unacceptable” and “self-defeating” for all economies, he emphasised. It would make halving global emissions by 2030 to keep warming in check “near impossible”, he explained, as well as causing havoc in international supply chains as extreme weather bites.

The disruptions experienced by businesses during the COVID19 pandemic “will seem like a minor hiccup compared to what an unchecked climate crisis will inflict” in an interdependent world economy, Stiell warned. “If a two-speed global transition sets in, ultimately everyone loses, and loses badly,” he added.

IEA weighs in

A report issued on Tuesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA), showing how to meet the energy transition goals agreed at last year’s COP28 climate summit, noted that advanced economies and China account for more than four out of every five dollars invested in clean energy since the Paris Agreement was signed in late 2015.

The IEA called for stronger and more stable policies to attract private investment in clean energy in other regions, together with larger, better-targeted international support spurred partly by a new climate finance goal due to be agreed at COP29 this November.

The agency also pointed out that, although governments are worried about how to make the energy transition socially acceptable, globally they are still spending nine times more making fossil fuels cheaper than on subsidising clean energy for consumers.

COP29 aims to boost battery storage and grids for renewables, as pledges proliferate

The report said that the COP28 goal of tripling global renewable energy capacity by 2030 is within reach – but meeting it will not automatically mean that more renewable electricity will clean up power systems, lower costs for consumers and slash fossil fuel use.

Achieving those aims will require complementary efforts to enable clean electrification – including building and modernising 25 million kilometres of electricity grids by 2030 and adding 1,500 gigawatts (GW) of energy storage capacity by that year, largely with batteries.

Fast-tracking a green future

With businesses and financiers gathered in New York for the annual Climate Week NYC, alongside leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), international agencies and green groups emphasised the need for concerted action by the public and private sectors to put internationally agreed energy targets into practice.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said the goals set at COP28 could put the global energy sector “on a fast track towards a more secure, affordable and sustainable future”. “To ensure the world doesn’t miss this huge opportunity, the focus must shift rapidly to implementation,” he added.

Other organisations also outlined key ways to make this happen. Mission 2025 – a coalition of businesses, sub-national governments and researchers, among others – appealed to governments to set “investment-positive policies” that can provide confidence to mobilise large-scale finance for the energy transition.

Using data from the Energy Transitions Commission, an international think-tank, Mission 2025 identified three such policies that have already worked in industralised countries and some large developing economies to help boost finance for renewables and electric vehicles.

It recommended fixing gigawatt targets for renewable energy deployment at the national level as the UK and India have done for example; derisking investment in renewable energy – by offering support such as competitive long-term contracts or tax credits – as in Europe, the India, China and the United States; and setting a date of 2035 or earlier to end sales of petrol and diesel passenger vehicles, as the European Union has done.

Global push to triple renewables requires responsible mining of minerals

Mission 2025 said these policies should be extended to other places, and could roughly double today’s investment in clean power and electric vehicles to $1 trillion of the $3.5 trillion needed annually for the energy sector to play its part in limiting warming to 1.5C.

Mike Hemsley, deputy director of the Energy Transitions Commission, told Climate Home these policies are as cheap as their fossil fuel equivalents, so there is no net cost to countries from implementing them as part of the updated national climate plans governments are now preparing – including for lower-income and emerging economies.

“We hope that this can give them some confidence to say if we set ambitious policy, we can attract private investment, realise some of our own goals and not necessarily cost ourselves anything – all for the good of the climate,” he said, adding that strong policies can also help lower investment risk in developing countries.

Renewables cheaper than fossil fuels

Research released on Tuesday by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) at the Global Renewables Summit during UNGA showed that with renewable power capacity additions setting a record of 473 gigawatts in 2023, four-fifths of newly commissioned, utility-scale renewable projects had lower costs than their fossil fuel-fired alternatives.

Power from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, it found, has seen its cost plummet to around $0.04 per kilowatt hour in just one year, making it 56% cheaper than fossil fuel and nuclear options in 2023. Overall, the renewable power deployed globally since 2000 has saved up to $409 billion in fuel costs in the power sector, IRENA added.

“Thanks to low-cost renewables in the global market, policy makers have an immediate solution at hand to reduce fossil fuels dependency, limit the economic and social damage of carbon-intensive energy use, drive economic development and harness energy security benefits,” IRENA’s Director-General Francesco La Camera said in a statement.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling, editing by Joe Lo)

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The government officials who make up the fund’s board selected Diong – who has worked in insurance, private and public banks and government – during a meeting in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku last week. His appointment was announced on Saturday.

The board’s co-chair Richard Sherman said the selection “reflects the seriousness of the multilateral resolve to address the urgent impacts of loss and damage in countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change”.

Diong, who also has American nationality, said he was “honoured” to take up the role and looked forward to providing “crucial support to low-income developing countries most affected by climate change”.

Global push to triple renewables requires responsible mining of minerals

Diong’s career spans China, the United States, the UK and much of Africa and the Arab world. He is fluent in English, French, Mandarin and Wolof.

He has long experience in raising money for infrastructure projects – including airports and power plants – in Senegal, and has more recently led efforts to expand insurance for climate disasters in Africa and advised governments on how to deal with and prevent them.

Globe-trotting career

As a young man in the 1980s, Diong studied civil engineering at Hohai University in the Chinese city of Nanjing, writing a thesis on the design of a hydropower dam on the Wuhan river.

In 1989, he returned to Senegal to design projects to improve access to drinking water and irrigation in rural areas. From 1993, he worked as a freelance management consultant before joining consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in Virginia.

In the early 2000s, he worked for the World Bank, the organisation that has been selected to host the loss and damage fund on an interim basis, despite some resistance from civil society and developing countries.

In 2007, Diong became an adviser to the president of Senegal on the country’s relationship with China and raising funds for investment from emerging markets.

COP29 aims to boost battery storage and grids for renewables, as pledges proliferate

According to his LinkedIn profile, he also worked with Senegal’s infrastructure minister on development and fundraising for large projects including a new airport and coordinated the establishment of Senegal Airlines, a publicly-owned airline which quickly folded after accumulating too much debt.

In 2011, he spent six months as permanent secretary at the energy ministry and tried to tackle the country’s energy crisis by boosting supply through building new power plants and rehabilitating old ones.

He then moved to London to become senior Africa banker with French bank BNP Paribas, raising finance for key infrastructure projects, including power plants, roads and convention centres.

After another spell as a consultant, the United Nations appointed Diong to lead the African Risk Capacity (ARC) group in 2020. The ARC arranges insurance against extreme weather for African countries and advises governments on how to prepare for and respond to severe droughts, floods and storms.

Developing countries denounce rich nations’ disregard for just transition talks

Diong left ARC about a month ago to take up a role as an adviser on environmental, social and governance issues to the president of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa. The bank is co-owned by 18 Arab countries, and channels money to African nations for development projects as well as financing Arab exports and investments to the continent.

In a video with farewell messages posted a month ago on Youtube, Diong’s former employees at ARC describe him as humble, inspirational and a good singer of ‘Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong. “We have been doing loss and damage since before loss and damage became mainstream,” says one.

Diong will take up his role with the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) on November 1, with the fund likely to start distributing money for the first projects it approves next year.

A former member of the fund’s transitional board, Avinash Persaud, said he wished Diong well but feared the fund “will remain tiny”. At COP28 last year,  wealthy governments pledged around $660 million to the fund and no further announcements have been made since.

The Azerbaijan government, which hosted last week’s FRLD board meeting, said it would work at November’s COP29 UN climate summit to convert the pledges received so far into tangible funding ready for disbursement “to the communities who particularly need it”, and seek further contributions to the fund.

UK calls for “ambition” on COP29 climate finance goal but won’t talk numbers

Persaud said he feared too many people still think that one of the main solutions to loss and damage is that those at risk should take out more insurance, despite insurers becoming increasingly reluctant to provide cover against climate-related catastrophes.

The finance expert from Barbados added that, rather than relying on wealthy countries to pledge money to the fund, a “systemic global mechanism” is needed to fill it more reliably, such as a tax on oil production.

Correction 23/9/2024: This article originally incorrectly stated that Avinash Persaud was a member of the fund’s board. It has been corrected to say that he is a former member of the fund’s transitional board.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

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Governments are being asked by the COP29 presidency to back a pledge to increase global energy storage capacity six times above 2022 levels, reaching 1,500 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, and to add or refurbish more than 80 million kilometres of electricity grids by 2040. The voluntary initiatives are currently in draft form and will be finalised after consultation with states and other partners.

The targeted increase in the ability to store energy, mainly in batteries, is what the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said is needed to meet the goal set last year at COP28 to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 while maintaining energy security.

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As renewable sources tend to produce more variable power than fossil fuels – generating it only when it is windy or sunny, or water is available – batteries and other forms of energy storage can help even out those peaks and troughs in electricity supply and keep homes and economies running.

How ambitious?

Iola Hughes, research manager at London-based battery consultancy Rho Motion, told Climate Home the COP29 target is not ambitious as it sounds.

Rho Motion predicts that by 2030, there will be 1,400 GW just from battery storage – so 1,500 GW of energy storage, which includes a non-battery method called pumped hydro, would not be a big jump.

The IEA forecasts that, under current policies, energy storage will reach 1,000 GW by 2030. Its “Net Zero Emissions scenario”, which is compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, includes 1,500 GW of energy storage by 2030.

Global installed energy storage capacity in 2023 (left), 2030 under the stated policies scenario (middle) and 2030 under a 1.5C-compatible Net Zero Emissions scenario (right). Light purple is utility-scale batteries, dark purple is behind-the-meter batteries and orange is pumped hydro (Photos: IEA)

Hughes said “the real challenge” will be ensuring that storage is installed on a global basis to support the adoption of renewables. The IEA expects that the vast majority of battery storage is likely to be in China and in advanced economies.

The IEA has said that rolling out battery storage “will require action from policy makers and industry, taking advantage of the fact that battery storage can be built in a matter of months in most locations”.

In a report on batteries released this April, it also said the supply of the minerals needed for them – like cobalt, lithium and nickel – must be scaled up and that policy-makers should remove barriers to this expansion.

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

Richard Black, policy director at think-tank Ember, agreed that the COP29 storage target looks “absolutely achievable” given the current high rate of growth. He told Climate Home the boom in solar energy over the last 20 years shows that exponential growth can continue but “the market can’t do everything”.

Governments must provide confidence and bring costs down by agreeing to the COP29 pledge and setting policies that boost energy storage, he added.

The other part of the pledge, to refurbish or add 80 million km of electric grids, also comes from an IEA report, which said in 2023 that this target is necessary to meet the world’s climate goals.

The proposed 80 million km is the equivalent of the entire existing global grid – or about 2,000 times the Earth’s circumference.

The world’s transition to clean energy will mean running more machinery – like cars and heating and cooling systems – on electricity. Bigger and better electrical grids are needed to provide that power, the IEA says.

Trend for more initiatives

The core job for COP presidency teams is to get all countries to agree by consensus on formal UN agreements and decisions setting out what they will do to tackle climate change.

But in recent years, presidencies have also sought to get as many governments as possible to agree to voluntary initiatives, like the COP26 pledge to end forest loss and land degradation by 2030 and the COP28 declaration to adapt and transform food systems to respond to the  “imperatives of climate change”.

Fernanda Carvalho, climate lead at WWF International, said this trend has picked up since COP26 in Glasgow, adding that the progress of these initiatives should be monitored. “As a trend, it needs to be studied – it needs to be questioned,” she told journalists this week.

UK calls for “ambition” on COP29 climate finance goal but won’t talk numbers

The 14 initiatives announced under the COP29 “Action Agenda” include a platform to support the nexus between climate finance, investment and trade, a declaration to unlock a global market for clean hydrogen, an appeal for a “COP Truce” and a declaration on sustainable tourism including sector targets in national climate plans.

Alden Meyer, a senior associate with think-tank E3G, said he had held several discussions with the COP29 presidency over its raft of initiatives and had “stressed the need to break the cycle of each presidency putting its own bright, shiny objects on the table as a legacy and claiming success”.

Last December, a report from the Climate Action Tracker research group estimated that of the total emissions savings that could be achieved by the pledges announced at COP28, around a quarter was already included in government climate plans, around a quarter was additional and achievable, and around half was unlikely to be achieved without further action to improve the initiatives.

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On Thursday, the Industrial Transition Accelerator launched at COP28 said weak demand for green products is curbing needed investment of up to $700 billion in low-carbon projects in heavy-emitting industries such as aluminium, steel and cement.

Meyer said the COP29 presidency had assured him they were talking to previous COP hosts about how to institutionalise the various voluntary pledges Baku is leading and make them deliver. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; additional reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Megan Rowling)

Correction: This article was corrected on 23/09/24 to clarify that the 80 million km of grids target is for 2040. It originally incorrectly said it was for 2030.

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The OECD report, which analysed the period from 2015 to 2022, shows that funding for efforts to protect and restore nature grew from $11.1 billion in 2021 to $15.4 billion in 2022.

The increase came largely from multilateral institutions – mainly development banks – which increased their funding from $2.7 billion in 2021 to $5.7 billion in 2022, mostly by offering concessional loans, which are cheaper than borrowing on commercial terms.

The issue of whether loan finance should be provided to already debt-strapped developing countries for action on climate and nature is hotly debated, with poorer countries and climate justice activists calling for more money to be disbursed as grants.

Multilateral funding for biodiversity (in green) saw the biggest increase between 2021 and 2022, mostly in the form of loans. (Photo: OECD)

Boosting funds for biodiversity protection will be a key issue at the COP16 UN conference in Colombia late next month, as countries face the challenge of meeting a goal to mobilise $20 billion by 2025 – a sum agreed two years ago at COP15 in Montreal. This, in turn, will influence the creation of new national biodiversity plans, experts say, which could also help curb rising carbon emissions.

To channel some of this money, governments agreed at COP15 to set up a new international biodiversity fund established under the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). It has struggled to get off the ground, receiving a scant $200 million so far.

“It is critical that historic and new donors arrive at COP16 with substantial new funding announcements for developing countries – primarily in public grants, not loans,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the advocacy group Campaign for Nature.

Causes for concern

While it is “certainly good news” that biodiversity funding has increased in the years leading up to 2022, there are some concerning trends, O’Donnell told Climate Home News.

For example, he pointed to a disparity between funding for projects marked as “biodiversity-specific”, which has the principal goal of reversing biodiversity loss, and funding marked as “biodiversity-related”, which is mainly aimed at tackling a different problem but yields some benefits for biodiversity.

The OECD report shows that, while overall biodiversity funding increased, the amount with the principal goal of tackling biodiversity loss decreased, falling from $4.6 billion in 2015 to $3.8 billion in 2022.

“We can’t safeguard nature and the planet just by making it a tangential approach to other funding endeavours,” said O’Donnell. “The majority of the funding has to be with the true desire to safeguard nature.”

Oscar Soria, a veteran biodiversity campaigner and CEO of The Common Initiative, an environmental think-tank, agreed that the lack of funding dedicated directly to biodiversity could limit efforts to protect conservation areas and restore nature.

The prevalence of loans over grants also poses a challenge for developing countries, the two experts said. “With development budgets shrinking in key donor countries, the future of real biodiversity protection hangs in the balance,” Soria added.

The OECD report shows that most direct public funding came in the form of grants, but this type of finance has grown very slowly in the last decade, creeping up from $6.6 billion in 2015 to $7.1 billion in 2022.

Asia and Latin America were the top recipient regions for biodiversity finance from multilateral institutions, but most of it came in the form of loans. (Photo: OECD).

Funding gap

Based on the trends shown in the OECD report, Soria noted that governments “should be able to deliver” the $20-billion goal for international public finance by 2025.

O’Donnell agreed that the goal should be within reach, but said that implementing the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in Montreal – which includes a target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030 – will require major additional financing. 

“Countries should look at this and say ‘we need to aim higher’,” he added.

The gap on a longer-term finance goal that includes all sources – for $200 billion by 2030 – is much wider, as the report shows that currently governments have mobilised only around $25.8 billion in total for biodiversity, including from the private sector.

In the case of multilateral institutions, the funds committed for biodiversity between 2015 and 2022 represent just 3% of all development finance disbursed in those years. Top recipients included China ($750m), Colombia ($338m) and Mexico ($207m).

Donor countries, meanwhile, remain small in number, with only five governments responsible for nearly three-quarters of the biodiversity funding provided between 2015 and 2022.

“This cannot be just an accounting exercise,” O’Donnell told Climate Home. “Ultimately, this needs to be an impact exercise – one that is focused on halting and reversing biodiversity loss.”

(Reporting by Sebastián Rodriguez; editing by Megan Rowling)

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In his first major speech in government, after the Labour Party won power in July, Foreign Secretary David Lammy told journalists, diplomats and green campaigners at London’s Kew botanical gardens that, at COP29, the UK will “push for the ambition needed to keep 1.5 alive”. That refers to a global warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed by governments, which is set to be exceeded unless climate action is ramped up dramatically.

However, when asked by Climate Home, Lammy declined to say how high the UK government thinks the new global finance goal should be – or when it will put forward its proposal. “I can’t make announcements here because if I did, I’d go back to a storm with [UK finance minister] Rachel Reeves,” he said.

The new collective quantified goal (NCQG) will determine how much finance should be mobilised for developing countries each year starting from 2025. It is the main outcome expected from COP29 in Baku in November. The current goal of $100 billion per year is widely viewed as inadequate and was only met two years late in 2022.

Developing-country negotiators have complained that rich nations are refusing to discuss the size (or quantum) of the NCQG. Developed countries have instead pushed to expand the list of contributors to the goal to include wealthier, higher-emitting developing countries like China and Saudi Arabia.

Developing-country “frustration”

“It’s been frustrating for most of the developing-country negotiators,” Kenyan climate finance negotiator Julius Mbatia told journalists on Monday. He accused developed countries of trying to “dodge” their mandates and responsibilities and “avoid committing to a scale that they are actually not committed to deliver politically”. “It’s a tactic,” Mbatia said. “Unfortunately, it’s being played at the worst moment when we are talking about meeting the needs and priorities of vulnerable countries.”

Melanie Robinson, global climate director at the World Resources Institute, said on Tuesday the context has changed since the current finance goal was set 15 years ago, as the impacts of climate change have worsened. All countries now need to get onto a net-zero, climate-resilient economic development pathway that benefits everyone and restores nature, she said.

“We know just how huge that challenge is for all countries,” she added. “But while developed countries and China can probably find the finance to make that transition themselves, we know that developing countries will need international finance.”

Slow progress in Baku risks derailing talks on new climate finance goal at COP29

Asked about developing countries’ frustrations, Lammy said: “I recognise the disjunct between rhetoric sometimes in the Global North and the real pressing needs that exist in the Global South as they look to see is that rhetoric going to be actually matched with funds.”

He said it remains the government’s “ambition” to deliver on the promise made by the former ruling party to provide £11.6bn ($14.7bn) in climate finance between 2021 and 2026, while Labour undertakes a regular review of spending plans. It had inherited from the Conservatives a £22bn ($29bn) “black hole” in Britain’s annual budget and a “tough fiscal environment”, he added.

The previous government cut the UK’s overseas aid target from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income. The new one has repeated the Conservatives’ pledge to reverse this when “fiscal circumstances allow”. Lammy said on Tuesday he wants to restore it “as quickly as possible, and of course that’s a discussion that I’m continuing to have with colleagues in the [finance ministry]”.

He added that the UK government will propose to Parliament a guarantee for the Asian Development Bank which will “unlock $1.2 billion in climate finance for developing countries in the region”. He repeated the previous government’s support for a capital increase for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development “subject to reforms”.

Clean Power Alliance

In addition, Lammy announced that the UK will appoint two new envoys for climate and nature, reporting to climate minister Ed Miliband and environment minister Steve Reed respectively. It will also launch a Clean Power Alliance that aims to help countries leapfrog fossil fuels and transition to energy systems based on clean power.  The UK itself aims to get all its electricity from clean sources by 2030.

“Of course, there are different obstacles from different countries but, despite several other valuable initiatives pushing forward the energy transition, there is no equivalent grouping of countries at the vanguard of the transition,” Lammy said.

He added that the alliance would “focus on diversifying the production and supply of copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel – the lifeblood of the new economy”. These minerals are key to the global energy transition because they are needed for things like electric cables and batteries – and their processing is largely dominated by China, something that is a concern for Western politicians.

Lammy stressed the need to “bring these commodities to market faster while avoiding the mistakes of the past”, and said the UK would help developing countries “secure economic benefits while promoting the highest environmental standards for mineral extraction”.

Human rights must be “at the core” of mining for transition minerals, UN panel says

Climate Home has reported on how mining of these minerals has hurt local communities in Indonesia and Argentina – and may fail to bring fair benefits to local communities in Zimbabwe. A United Nations panel said last week that supply chains for critical minerals should not harm the local environment or human rights.

Lammy said the UK would restore its international credibility on climate action – after perceived indifference from former Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak – by ending new licenses for oil and gas production and overturning an effective ban on onshore wind power.

“We’re bringing an end to our climate diplomacy of being ‘do as I say, not as I do’,” he said.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

This article was amended after publication to clarify Lammy’s comments on the UK’s existing £11.6bn climate finance commitment.

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About 30 developing countries sent civil servants to a five-star hotel in Ghana for official UN discussions on “response measures” that are meant to tackle how to maximise the benefits and minimise the negative impacts of a green transition.

All nations agreed at last year’s COP28 climate conference to hold the latest round of talks in a hybrid format. There were no officials present from wealthy governments – and while the US, the European Union and the UK did log on virtually, they kept their cameras largely off during the two-day meeting. Their rare contributions were received badly by developing countries.

The UN negotiations on response measures to climate change have been going on for more than 20 years. The 2015 Paris Agreement reinforced a commitment by governments to consider the concerns of countries “with economies most affected by the impacts of response measures”, particularly developing ones.

In a video message introducing this month’s talks, UN climate chief Simon Stiell said national climate action plans “will have profound societal implications – both good and bad”, adding “it’s crucial that we ensure more people benefit and that harms are mitigated”.

Participants then swapped their experiences on issues such as electric motorcycles with dead batteries being dumped on the roadside in the Maldives and the effects of EU deforestation regulations on Ghana’s cocoa industry.

Slow progress in Baku risks derailing talks on new climate finance goal at COP29

Towards the end of the first day, Egyptian negotiator Khaled Aly Hashem Hussein observed that “it’s very unfortunate that in this room we don’t have a single representative from the developed countries”. This, he said, made it a monologue rather than a dialogue.

Brazil’s negotiator Vitor Mattos Vaz echoed those concerns, saying that no interventions had been heard from developed countries, including contributions via video.

He said governments “can not cherry-pick only the commitments and the tracks [of the Paris Agreement] that they are interested in”. When they do so, “they are eroding the spirit of mutual trust and reciprocal commitment,” he added, calling for the “absence of their comments”  to be formally noted.

Don’t mention CBAM

The next day, representatives from the US, EU and UK did speak up. Sewek Gasiorek from the British government said he regretted not being there in person as “it is a very busy time”, with G20 meetings and the United Nations General Assembly running concurrently.

He then clashed with negotiators from South Africa and Saudi Arabia over the extent to which the talks should focus on how measures taken by developed countries affect poorer nations. Gasiorek said “there is no agreement, as has been suggested earlier” that the discussions should be limited to that – which led South Africa’s Mahendra Shunmoogam to accuse him of “revisionist agenda-setting”.

Shunmoogam then asked the EU’s representative, Belgian government official Catherine Windey, how the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) – a tax system that is due to be fully in place by 2026 and is regarded by some emerging economies like South Africa as a protectionist measure that will damage their economies – was compatible with the “do no significant harm principle.”

Windey responded that the dialogue “isn’t supposed to address any individual policies of parties, so I’m not going to enter that discussion here”.

One developing-country official at the meeting told Climate Home they had left Ghana feeling they had wasted their time. “It was getting us into the discussion about nothing really of value,” the bureaucrat said.

Talks will continue at COP29 in Baku in November on whether and how to hold a further year’s worth of workshops and dialogue on response measures.

At COP28, governments agreed that “measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade”. Developing countries are likely to push at COP29 for agreement on more explicit criticism of policies like the EU’s carbon border tax.

(Reporting by Joe Loe; editing by Megan Rowling)

This article was updated on Sept. 18 to add that the talks were planned in a hybrid format and to clarify a comment from the UK’s negotiator.

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Negotiators gathered in Azerbaijan this week for the last round of technical talks before COP29, after mid-year discussions in Bonn ended in stalemate on several crunch issues.

Countries have yet to define critical aspects of the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) for climate finance, including who should pay – the so-called “contributor base” – and how much money they will mobilise – known as the “quantum”.

Commenting on this week’s talks, COP29 President-Designate Mukhtar Babayev said negotiations had come “a long way” but still risk “falling short”.

“Determination and leadership is needed from all parties to bridge the gaps that still divide us in this critical final phase,” Babayev said. “Sticking to set positions and failing to move towards each other will leave too much ground to be covered at COP29,” he added.

Bigger share of COP29 badges for Global South NGOs upsets rich-country groups

Civil society groups belonging to Climate Action Network (CAN), an international climate justice coalition, said in a joint statement they were disappointed at what they described as a lack of preparation by delegations from rich governments.

“The failure to achieve any clear outcome also means developing countries face uncertainty as they draw up their national climate plans, known as NDCs, because their ambition is necessarily dependent upon the availability of climate finance,” the statement said.

All countries are scheduled to submit more ambitious NDCs with stronger goals to cut planet-heating emissions and adapt to climate change impacts by February next year.

Contributor controversy

During this week’s Baku talks, sharp divisions remained over who should provide finance for vulnerable countries, as developing nations rejected rich governments’ proposals to elicit contributions from high-emitting emerging economies like China and wealthy developing states in the Gulf.

On behalf of the G77 group of developing countries, India’s negotiator told the final session that developed nations must provide “affordable, accessible and adequate” climate finance to avoid repeating the problems of the $100-billion goal, which was met two years late and mostly delivered in the form of loans.

“Instead we’re being asked to change the policy environment, divert our domestic resources away from the goal and even contribute to the goal,” said the Indian negotiator. “These are huge concerns for developing countries.”

The G77 group advocated for the inclusion of loss and damage finance in the NCQG – as the previous $100-billion goal covered only adaptation and mitigation – as well as pressing for funding to be delivered through “public finance in a grants-based or concessional manner”.

Green Climate Fund restructures, aiming to become donors’ “partner of choice”

Developed countries, meanwhile, held their ground and insisted that some developing nations should also pay up for the new goal, with the UK’s negotiator saying it cannot be argued the world has not changed since climate negotiations started in 1992, when the current country groupings were defined.

Global North governments also defended the role of private finance in the NCQG, with New Zealand claiming that, since trillions of dollars will be required, “we need to be speaking the same language” and “to do that we need structural transformation which can only happen by including [the] private sector”.

“Silence on finance”

Climate finance experts following the talks criticised developed countries for acting in “bad faith”, accusing them in the CAN statement of being “silent on future climate finance”.

“Just weeks before COP29 and after three years of process and engagements, we don’t even have an inkling of what developed countries will bring to the table for the NCQG,” said Liane Schalatek, associate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Washington.

Campaigners noted the time constraints as COP29 approaches fast, and expressed concern that ministers have been left with too many issues to resolve.

“It is shameful how developed countries have been undermining these finance negotiations. With less than two months to go until COP29, they should be scaling up their ambition and delivering their fair share of public finance through grants,” said Mariana Paoli, global advocacy lead at Christian Aid.

“If we get a weak finance outcome at COP29, it will be their fault – and devastating for communities in the Global South,” she added.

(Reporting by Sebastián Rodríguez, editing by Megan Rowling)

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After five months of discussion, the UN Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals launched a report on Wednesday containing a set of seven principles to underpin responsible, fair and sustainable extraction of critical minerals for clean energy supply chains.

“The essence of this report is to inspire care and caution to avoid the mistakes of the past,” said South Africa’s UN ambassador Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, who co-chaired the panel. “We’ve already seen conflict generated by the scramble for these resources, particularly in my continent.”

Critical minerals – among them lithium, nickel and rare earth elements – are essential for manufacturing renewable energy technologies including electric vehicles and batteries. At the COP28 UN climate summit, governments agreed to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 – a goal that is also set to triple demand for minerals by the end of the decade.

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

But expanding mining at the scale required poses environmental and social risks, particularly for indigenous communities. A 2022 study, which reviewed more than 5,000 critical mineral mining projects, found that more than half were located on or near Indigenous lands.

Principles for just mining

The principles proposed by the UN panel say that human rights must be “at the core” of mineral value chains. They also urge safeguards for nature, adopting a justice perspective, sharing financial benefits with local communities, investing responsibly, ensuring accountability, and promoting international cooperation.

To enforce the principles, the panel also recommended five actions, among them setting up a high-level advisory group to facilitate dialogue on the issue and a transparency system to shed light on mineral value chains, which could be piloted in “two or three” mineral-producing developing countries.

UN chief António Guterres convened the panel of experts in April, gathering representatives from 25 governments, as well as from the mining industry, finance, Indigenous peoples and civil society.

He said its report identifies ways “to ground the renewables revolution in justice and equity, so that it spurs sustainable development, respects people, protects the environment, and powers prosperity in resource-rich developing countries”.

Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone

Suneeta Kaimal, CEO of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) who participated in the panel’s deliberations, said that up to now the mining sector and the international system had failed developing nations in delivering justice and equity, but the panel report could serve as a first step for a “new norm”.

“A new paradigm in the mining sector is not going to transform overnight, but this is a very important series of first steps. Developing producer countries have a right to expect that the mining sector can deliver shared benefits, value addition and economic diversification,” Kaimal told Climate Home News.

Broader consultation on the principles will be carried out among governments and other groups in the run-up to November’s COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.

Finding common ground

Both Mxakato-Diseko and Kaimal said the panel had convened a diverse group of experts, who were tasked with finding common ground on important issues such as transparency and benefit-sharing with local communities.

The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), an industry organisation that participated in the panel, issued a statement welcoming parts of the report, but noted it “had hoped and advocated for the Principles to go further in areas where the roles of governments and international bodies are essential to ‘raise the floor’ of mining practices”.

The ICMM has advocated for the adoption of industry standards on responsible mining, overseen by “an independent, multi-stakeholder governance body” outside the UN system. Civil society groups have criticised this initiative, arguing against “self-regulation” by business.

The UN can set a new course on “critical” transition minerals

NRGI’s Kaimal noted that the report had missed opportunities for more ambitious language in some parts, including the acknowledgement of Indigenous rights – where it cited only existing agreements – and more specific definitions of a “fair share” of benefits from mining projects and “no-go zones” where they should be avoided.

While the experts sought and built on common ground, the discussions took place in the context of global geopolitics, Kaimal said – “and you can’t ignore that elephant in the room”.

But, she added, governments now have “a pathway to continue the dialogue”. “Bringing the recommended actions to life will be an important part of the next steps,” she said.

(Reporting by Sebastián Rodríguez, editing by Megan Rowling)

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The company has agreed to pay British project developer UNDO to take around 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere – about 0.02% of the airline’s current annual emissions – through a form of carbon removal known as “enhanced weathering”.

Weathering is the natural process of rocks decomposing and converting carbon dioxide into solids and liquids. Enhanced weathering is when this natural process is artificially sped up by spreading ground-up rock on land, shorelines or in the ocean.

British Airways’ sustainability director Carrie Harris said carbon removals like this “form a key part of our roadmap to reach our climate goals”, adding that though the firm’s initial purchase was “relatively small, the partnership hopes to demonstrate the art of the possible and unlock future investment in carbon removals”.

Standard Chartered bank provided debt financing for UNDO to scale up its activities, and CFC provided insurance for the deal.

Most technology to cut aviation emissions directly is expensive, speculative or problematic, while sustainable aviation fuels are costly and in short supply. As a result – and with the industry and governments generally unwilling to reduce flight numbers – a large chunk of airlines’ green strategies counts on carbon removal technologies.

In 2022, transport ministers around the world agreed an “aspirational goal” for the international aviation industry to reach net zero by 2050.

The British government’s “Jet Zero Strategy” to get UK aviation to net zero by 2050 plans to achieve about a third of the industry’s emissions reductions through carbon removals.

British Airways projects that its own emissions will be higher in 2050 than in 2020, even with more efficient flying and sustainable aviation fuel. But it plans to still reach net zero emissions in 2050 by investing in carbon removal projects and buying carbon offsets.

Experts have questioned the legitimacy of some of the carbon credits previously purchased by the firm. A government official in Peru claimed in an investigation by Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s journalism unit, that a forest protection project funded by British Airways over-estimated how much danger the forest was in – and therefore how much greenhouse gas was prevented from being released into the atmosphere.

More broadly, academics at the University of California Berkeley found last year that clean cooking projects, another type of carbon offset bought by British Airways, deliver only a fraction of the emissions reductions they advertise.

Jim Mann, the founder of UNDO, said in a statement that the aviation industry “will require large amounts of high-quality carbon removal to meet their net zero commitments” and that deals like the one with British Airways are needed to scale up the market.

He added that enhanced rock weathering is “one of the most robust carbon dioxide removal solutions available today because it is permanent, highly scalable and provides a host of co-benefits” – including better soil.

Green Climate Fund restructures, aiming to become donors’ “partner of choice”

Scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, reported in 2022 that enhanced weathering is expensive due to the costs of mining, transport and disposal, and requires a lot of energy to grind up the rocks. Deployment at scale may require decades, they added.

While the technique has the positive side-effect of improving soil quality, the IPCC scientists found it can also have negative impacts caused by mining for the rocks and contamination of air and water.

A briefing by researchers for the UK parliament warned that if the technology were to take off, “there would likely be adverse environmental impacts due to the extent of quarrying required, such as destruction of habitats, noise, water and air pollution.”

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

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The UNFCCC has tweaked the algorithm used to allocate badges to observer groups this year in response to requests from governments to address a long-standing imbalance in the global representation of participants from civil society, academia and indigenous communities.

Attendees from rich industrialised countries have historically formed the biggest contingent of observers at the COP climate summits. Half of all observers at COP28 in Dubai last year hailed from a bloc of Western European nations, the US, Canada and Australia, even though countries in that group represent only 12% of the world’s population.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell wrote this week in a foreword to a handbook for observers that “we need the COP process and participation to reflect the fact that the climate crisis is hitting communities in every part of the world”.

Campaigners in the Global South have welcomed the reforms, while some green groups in the Global North quietly expressed surprise and disappointment over hefty cuts to their allocated quotas and the way the changes have been implemented.

Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said “finally we are getting a fairer distribution of observer badges”.

“It’s only right that people from countries that are most vulnerable to the climate crisis are able to attend the meetings that are supposed to address their needs,” he added. “For too long, the vast majority of COP badges have been held by people from a small part of the world but with disproportionately high emissions.”

Racquel Moses is the CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator, which aims to modernise infrastructure through supporting projects like a solar panel assembly facility in Trinidad and Tobago.

She told Climate Home her organisation usually gets three badges but this year received six. “In past years, we had to rely on the generosity of other organisations for support with passes,” she said, “this year at COP, we finally have the ability to be adequately represented”.

Stela Herschmann said that Climate Observatory, the Brazilian think-tank she works for, has “for the first time received a number of credentials close to what we requested”.

She said that “no matter how many badges we requested” in previous years, they only got one or two. But this year, they asked for eight and received seven.

“I believe that this year we will see more Global South involved in the negotiations,” Herschmann said.

Letter of complaint

Some Global North groups, however, have been stunned by the scale of the changes and the impact on access to the climate summit for their staff. Climate Home is aware of several climate organisations with a historically large presence at COPs that have so far received just a handful of COP29 passes or, in more extreme cases, only one badge each.

Joseph Robertson is the head of the US-based Citizens’ Climate International, which trains volunteers to lobby their political representatives. He leads a joint delegation with partner organisations which usually gets about 12 badges, some of which it passes on to campaigners from the Global South. But this year, it got just two badges and so has had to rethink its plans for the summit.

A spokesperson for the UNFCCC told Climate Home that the “Western European and Others Group” was given 40% of the total number of observer badges in the initial allocation for COP29, made in August.

A US-based academic who is a coordinator for the Research and Independent Non-Governmental Organizations (RINGO) constituency – one of the largest groupings of observers – voiced their concerns in a letter sent to Stiell at the end of August and seen by Climate Home.

UN climate chief calls for “exponential changes” to boost investment in Africa

It said that while RINGO appreciates efforts towards achieving “a more diverse and balanced representation” at COPs, the “drastic reduction” in badge allocations for Global North groups “has significant unintended impacts that undermine” that goal.

The letter argued that many groups use their allocations to bring young people to COPs and that organisations headquartered in the Global North provide badges to colleagues based in developing countries.

The letter went on to say that restricting observer quotas could prompt more NGOs to seek attendance passes from government delegations, known as ‘party overflow’. That would put countries “in position of controlling NGO access” and undermine the openness and transparency of negotiations, the RINGO coordinator warned.

The letter calls on the UNFCCC to revisit the quota allocation for COP29 and provide transparency in the process.

UN appeal for “global solidarity”

The UN climate body did not comment on the specific content of the RINGO letter. But a spokesperson told Climate Home “this will continue to be a gradual, iterative and difficult process”, and the UNFCCC secretariat “values any feedback from all stakeholders and will keep looking for ways to improve this process”.

They added that, as some organisations are now applying for an increase in their initial allocation, “the final breakdown of participants by geographic grouping won’t be known for some months”.

The Baku Olympic Stadium will be the COP29 venue (Photo: Matteo Civillini)

In the handbook for observers, published after the RINGO letter had been sent, Stiell pleaded with organisations affected by the changes to support the re-balancing efforts “in a spirit of global solidarity which is so crucial to success, at all levels”.

He also pointed out that the overall number of observer badges had to be cut this year due to a reduction of space at COP29. The summit hosted by Azerbaijan at Baku’s “Olympic Stadium” is expected to be smaller than last year’s gathering in Dubai, which saw a record-breaking 84,000 people attending. A member of Azerbaijan’s COP29 organising committee told Climate Home in April they were expecting around 40,000 people.

The changes to the quota allocation followed an explicit request from countries to the UNFCCC – formulated at June’s mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn – to “continue taking administrative measures to encourage a more diverse representation of observer organizations”.

Update: This article was updated on 9/9/2024 to include Stela Herschmann’s comments and on 10/9/2024 to include Joseph Robertson’s comments and on 11/9/2024 to include Racquel Moses’s comments

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

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Speaking at a conference of African environment ministers on Thursday in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Stiell said investments in renewable energy and climate resilience “can and should be the single greatest opportunity for Africa, to lift up people, communities, and economies”.

African countries face a disproportionately heavy burden from climate change, with temperatures across the continent rising slightly faster than the global average, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Deadly floods, droughts and extreme heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, with increasing knock-on effects on economies and societies.

African countries are losing between 2 and 5 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) every year as a result of climate-related hazards, according to a new WMO report cited by Stiell in his speech.

The UNFCCC chief cautioned world leaders – especially those from the G20 group of the largest economies – against dismissing climate impacts across Africa as someone else’s problem. “It is African nations and people who pay the heaviest price,” he said. But, he added, “the economic and political reality – in an interdependent world – is we are all in this crisis together”.

Green investment pleas

Stiell went on to call for “exponential changes in business, investments, and growth” that would strengthen Africa’s role in climate solutions, including renewables such as solar and wind power, energy efficiency, clean cooking and adaptation measures.

African countries need an estimated $277 billion a year to bankroll plans outlined in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – governments’ climate action blueprints –  but they can currently count on a fraction of that sum.

Belém’s electric bus controversy: a cautionary tale for COP30

Investments in clean energy and related electricity grid upgrades amounted to $39 billion across the African continent in 2023, just 2% of the global total, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Fossil fuel supply and power generation still attract the bulk of energy investments in Africa.

Efforts to prepare for, and adjust to, the escalating impacts of climate change are similarly underfunded.

Climate adaptation in sub-Saharan Africa is forecast to cost between $30 billion and $50 billion a year over the next decade, according to the WMO report. But the region only received an estimated $10.8 billion in adaptation finance between 2021 and 2022,  according to the latest data published by the non-profit Climate Policy Initiative, which tracks adaptation finance flows.

Youssef Nassef, the UNFCCC’s director for adaptation, told journalists on Wednesday that climate change is exacerbating poverty, undermining food security and harming children’s development on the African continent.

Yet only 21 out of 54 African countries have so far submitted National Adaptation Plans, which are a key tool for mapping out and funding climate resilience measures – mainly due to the limited ability of the poorest nations to prepare them, he said. That, he added, is “a cause for concern”.

Climate finance focus at COP29

At the COP29 UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, this November, countries are set to agree on a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) for finance that should channel more money into both adaptation and clean energy in developing nations. But governments remain deeply divided over many of the fundamental issues, including the size of the goal, what it should fund and, crucially, who should contribute.

Rich countries want high-emitting emerging economies, like China and the Gulf states, to pitch in. While hitting back at attempts to include them in the NCQG donor base, some of those countries are already providing climate finance bilaterally, outside the UN process.

China’s President Xi Jinping and African leaders stand for a group photo during the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) on September 5, 2024. ADEK BERRY/Pool via REUTERS

Beijing pledged on Thursday to step up its financial support to Africa with a fresh $51-billion funding offer to develop infrastructure, agriculture and trade across the continent. That should include 30 clean energy and green development projects, according to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which did not provide further details.

Stiell said on Thursday that COP29 “must signal that the climate crisis is core business for every government, with finance solutions to match”.

He called for progress on a range of finance sources besides the NCQG, from getting a global carbon market up and running to making the new loss and damage fund operational – all of which would help drive climate progress in Africa and beyond.

“An Africa ascending, an Africa empowered to take bolder climate actions is in every nation’s interests,” the UN climate boss emphasised.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

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The U-turn comes after nearly 80 Nobel prizewinners and world leaders hit out at the deletion of any references to fossil fuels in a previous version of the negotiating text for the Summit of the Future taking place in New York during this year’s UN General Assembly.

The UN has billed the high-level event as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate global action” on issues including climate change, sustainable development and peace. Member states are expected to agree on an “ambitious, concise and action-oriented” pact seen as a blueprint for boosting multilateral cooperation.

In the latest draft, published on Thursday, world leaders “decide to […] transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science”.

The language closely mirrors the landmark agreement struck at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai last year with the exception of a call to “accelerating action in this critical decade” which is absent from the draft.

The new Pact for the Future draft “cements the [COP28] commitment”, according to Alex Rafalowicz, executive director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “If the language stays, it’s clear there’s no going back. This is a first step, but declarations alone will not suffice. We need to build on this outcome with immediate, decisive action and concrete plans.”

Controversy over fossil fuels

UN Secretary-General António Guterres first proposed the Summit of the Future back in 2021 when he laid out his vision for global cooperation in the coming decades. The gathering will bring together governments, UN agencies, civil society organisations, academic institutions and the private sector on September 22 and 23.

Governments have been negotiating the text of the pact for nearly a year, with Germany and Namibia coordinating efforts as co-facilitators of the summit.

Last January they released a “zero draft” based on member states’ initial inputs and submissions from civil society, academia and the private sector. It included a reference to countries “accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems”.

But any mention of fossil fuels disappeared from a second draft published in mid-July following another round of consultations.

Leaders are cutting fossil fuel finance – next comes unlocking clean energy for all

That prompted strong condemnation from climate action leaders. In a letter to governments, Nobel Prize laureates – including Bangladesh’s new interim leader Muhammad Yunus and former Irish President Mary Robinson – said they were “gravely concerned” about the absence of any mention of fossil fuels, which they called “one of the greatest threats facing the world today”.

The burning of coal, oil and gas is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. Any pathway to limit warming to the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5C requires a significant decline in the use of fossil fuels by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Backslide fears

In addition to a shift away from fossil fuels, the latest Pact for the Future draft also follows in the footsteps of the COP28 agreement in calling for an acceleration in the “development and deployment” of renewable energy and “other zero and low-emission technologies”.

While the Summit of the Future text does not qualify these technologies, the Dubai deal explicitly referred to nuclear energy, as well as emissions abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage (CCUS).

Sultan Al Jaber and Simon Stiell celebrate as the Cop28 agreement is passed (Photos: Cop28/Mahmoud Khaled)

The COP28 agreement adopted by nearly 200 countries was widely hailed as a historic achievement signposting an end to the fossil fuel era. But climate campaigners have since grown worried that countries are backsliding on their promises and attempting to weaken their commitment to wean the world off dirty energy.

Saudi Arabia’s energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al-Saud, for example, claimed last January that the transition away from fossil fuels was just one of several “choices” on an “à la carte menu” offered by the COP28 pact.

Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at Oil Change International, told Climate Home that any attempt to weaken or reverse the COP28 decision “is like playing a losing hand with billions of lives that would put any chance of avoiding a 1.5C breach out of reach”.

“Civil society should not have to be the fighting voice of reason to keep fossil fuel phase-out on the table and align international declarations with science,” he added.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

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The European Commission should review “flawed” sustainable finance criteria for the aviation and shipping sectors in the EU Taxonomy, a guide designed to funnel private investment towards net zero-aligned activities, according to a coalition of NGOs behind a legal challenge lodged at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg on Tuesday.

The green groups claim the EU acted unlawfully in late 2023 when it introduced “loose” rules allowing a green label to be put on fossil fuel-powered planes and ships if they meet “weak” efficiency standards.

“The aviation and shipping criteria send completely the wrong signal to investors – directing investments to planes and ships that will pollute the climate for decades to come,” said David Kay, legal director at Opportunity Green, which filed the complaint alongside CLAW-Initiative for Climate Justice, Dryade and Dutch NGO Fossielvrij.

String of lawsuits

The EU introduced its “taxonomy for environmentally sustainable economic activities” in 2020 with the goals of preventing greenwashing and driving private capital into green technologies most needed for the transition to net zero emissions. Investments in “taxonomy-aligned activities” amounted to 440 billion euros between January 2023 – when the initial rules came into force – and May 2024, according to EU data.

How can governments tackle loss and damage at the national level?

But in a string of legal challenges, the rulebook has been accused of greenwashing highly polluting industries. Environmental campaigners at Greenpeace and a coalition including Client Earth and WWF filed two separate complaints at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) last year over the inclusion of fossil gas – under specific conditions and for a limited period of time – and nuclear energy in the list of green investments. The cases still need to be heard and a judgement is not expected before 2025.

The latest legal challenge filed on Tuesday takes issue with the criteria adopted in November 2023 for labelling certain aviation and shipping activities as sustainable.

“Marginal” emissions savings

In its rulebook, the EU Commission classed aviation and shipping as “transitional” activities because, it said, aircraft and ships with zero CO2 emissions are not yet technologically and economically feasible. The Commission introduced screening criteria to allow the inclusion of existing technologies when they comply with a series of efficiency standards which, the legislative body said, would help the world reach the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

But the NGOs argue that those thresholds are too broad and fail that scientific test. For example, giant cruise liners running on liquefied natural gas (LNG) and more than 7,000 new Airbus aircraft powered almost exclusively by fossil fuels – equivalent to 90% of the firm’s future orders – qualify as sustainable under the EU classification, analysis by the NGO Transport and Environment shows.

London airport expansion spotlights danger of “false hope” Jet Zero strategy

That is because, according to the regulations, their greenhouse gas emissions are lower than the older and more polluting ships and planes they would be replacing. But the NGOs argue those emissions savings are “marginal” and warn that promoting investments in those technologies will lock in carbon-intensive assets for decades.

Opportunity Green’s Kay said the Commission has “not put forward any evidence that these standards support a 1.5C pathway”.

“Given the long lifespan of these ships and planes, they will still be in the skies and the seas in 20-25 years’ time. That’s a dangerous thing for the taxonomy to be driving investment towards,” he added.

Aviation and shipping account for 8% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions, but their share has risen rapidly over the last decade in line with continuing growth in air passengers and maritime trade.

The EU Commission did not respond to a request for comment.

The post EU hit with lawsuit over green labelling of aviation and shipping investments appeared first on Climate Home News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melting ice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Move the village?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry anger

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

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

FAO draft report backs growth of livestock industry despite emissions

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

Years in the making

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

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

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

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

Production or just pollution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The report, overseen by a steering committee of 32 governments and published by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), found that a levy would do less damage to the global economy than a standard for cleaner fuels and, if designed right, could help reduce global economic inequality.

Marshall Islands shipping negotiator Albon Ishoda said the analysis showed that a direct levy on emissions “is the fastest, cheapest and most equitable way” to decarbonise shipping, a sector that accounts for 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas pollution.

A levy would force ship owners to pay for every tonne of greenhouse gases their vessels emit, making the use of more-polluting fuels – like today’s oil-based bunker fuel – more expensive. It would incentive the use of lower-emitting fuels like ammonia, biofuels, methanol and hydrogen.

Ishoda said he now expects to see countries coalesce around an emissions levy, adding that “alternatives such as relying solely on a fuel standard could be up to twice as damaging for global GDP by 2050, with the poorest countries hit hardest”.

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

But written comments on the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report show that Brazil, Argentina and China disputed its findings. Latin American nations have long led opposition to an emissions levy, fearing it will harm their trade-dependent economies.

Argentinian officials noted that they were “surprised” at the conclusion that levies would lead to less economic damage in the long term while Brazil wrote that this was “nonsensical”.

Argentina said it was “policy-prescriptive and therefore unacceptable” for the report to suggest that disbursing the revenues would help developing countries more than developed ones, while China argued this aspect should not have been factored in as “the impact assessment should focus on the impact of the measure, rather than the impact after revenue distribution”.

Levy or fuel standard?

Governments have already agreed to put a price on shipping emissions as a way to reach net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”. But they have not settled on exactly how to do that, instead tasking experts to study the impacts of various proposals.

One proposal – which most countries support – is a fuel standard that would see ship owners pay for emissions only above a certain level. Owners of ships emitting below this level could potentially sell licenses to those emitting above it, enabling them to continue polluting. This would incentivise shipowners to use cleaner fuels or to save fuel by sailing slower.

Some countries – like the Pacific island states and many European nations – want to combine this fuel standard with a levy, where ship owners would have to pay varying amounts based on their vessels’ total annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Renewable-energy carbon credits rejected by high-integrity scheme

Under the direction of governments, experts from UNCTAD, the World Maritime University, DNV and Starcrest Consulting Group produced four separate reports, modelling dozens of different scenarios.

UNCTAD found that any emissions-cutting scenario would push up the cost of shipping, damaging the global economy by around 0.1-0.2% by 2050. It did not model the economic benefits of how the measures would help curb climate change.

Comparing a levy to a fuel standard, the UNCTAD report concluded that “in the long run (2050), scenarios that envisage a levy have a smaller impact” on economic growth.

University College of London academic Tristan Smith, who worked on the paper, explained that the levies modelled lead to greater subsidies for zero-emission fuels and higher incentives for fuel efficiency than the proposed fuel standard. He told Climate Home that this lowers the cost of the transition and therefore the damage to economic growth.

Fairer and faster?

The report found that a fuel standard without a levy would damage the economies of developing countries – particularly small islands (SIDs) and least developed countries (LDCs) – more than developed countries because any increase in shipping costs hits the poorest hardest.

A high emissions levy of $150-300 per tonne of CO2 equivalent would be fairer, it found, broadly damaging developing countries’ economies less than developed ones, assuming that the revenues were distributed to poorer nations. Such a levy would actually boost the economies of most LDCs, it found, and damage SIDs less than the alternatives.

Consultants from Starcrest interviewed representatives of governments and business in various countries and heard concerns that economies exporting cheap, bulky goods over long distances would be badly hit by an increase in the cost of shipping. It cited Tonga’s exports of the medicinal kava plant and the US’s exports of wood chips as examples.

If green measures drive ships to slow down to save fuel, then countries that rely on exporting perishable goods to faraway destinations would suffer, Starcrest was told. Argentina’s beef and Chile’s cherry industries could be vulnerable.

As first airline drops goal, are aviation’s 2030 targets achievable without carbon offsets?

University of Sao Paulo economist Paula Pereda told Climate Home that a levy would “quickly reduce emissions”, but warned against its “potential regressive impacts, which more negatively affect poorer countries and poorer families in all countries”.

While revenue redistribution could help tackle this unfairness, it could also increase emissions from the compensated households and increase the complexity of the mechanism, she added.

“Balancing environmental benefits with social equity remains a key challenge in the implementation of carbon tax policies,” she said.

Governments will debate whether to pursue a levy or fuel standard at the next set of IMO talks in London, starting on September 30. They are aiming to have a measure in place by 2027, which means they will need to agree it at talks in April 2025.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

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The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) announced on Tuesday that eight renewable energy methodologies, which cover about a third of the carbon credits available on the voluntary market, cannot use its “Core Carbon Principles” (CCP) seal of approval.

The ICVCM, an independent watchdog, aims to address widespread concerns over the quality of carbon credits after many projects have been accused of overstating their climate and societal benefits. It is assessing groups of offsetting projects to determine whether they comply with the CCP criteria, which are designed to identify and encourage high-integrity carbon credits that meet requirements on governance, emissions reduction and sustainable development.

The body said existing standards are not strict enough on judging whether renewable energy projects need the funding generated by selling carbon offsets in order to go ahead – a concept known as “additionality”. But it emphasised that renewables like solar, wind and hydropower are key to tackling climate change and carbon credits “still have a role to play” in financing them.

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Since the eight methodologies were designed as long as 20 years ago, the cost of renewables has collapsed, and their profitability in many parts of the world has rocketed, meaning they are more likely to make money without needing extra revenue from selling carbon offsets.

The ICVCM said that “for several years, carbon market experts have noted concerns about the additionality of many renewable energy activities and the difficulties in transparently demonstrating the additionality of these activities approved under existing methodologies”.

Major carbon-credit registries like Verra and Gold Standard stopped accepting new grid-connected projects in 2019, with the exception of those located in least-developed countries (LDCs).

But pre-existing renewable energy activities continue to generate a sizeable chunk of all the offsets available on the registries.

According to a recent analysis by Carbon Market Watch, over 280 million renewable energy credits are available in the voluntary carbon market. If companies and individuals used all those credits, that would compensate on paper for emissions equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide Thailand released into the atmosphere last year.

Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert at Carbon Market Watch, called the ICVCM’s decision “a positive step”. “It sends a clear message to tackle the issue of the many low-quality credits still in circulation and undermining the market,” he told Climate Home.

Despite long being written off as largely worthless by climate experts, renewable energy credits are still popular among corporate buyers.

Fossil fuel majors like Shell and Total, automakers and cruise operators were among the biggest purchasers of renewable energy credits over the last 12 months, an analysis of Verra’s database shows.

In one transaction last year, German carmaker Audi used nearly 100,000 carbon credits generated in 2021 from an Indian solar project to claim that its handover of electric vehicles in Europe and the United States was “CO2 neutral” despite the emissions involved in producing them.

Japanese parcel delivery service Yamato Transport Company and public entities like Australia’s Brisbane City Council and Western Sydney University also relied on renewable offsets to claim carbon neutrality in 2023.

A spokesperson for Audi told Climate Home: “We ourselves are not only dependent on the standards established in the market but depend on them being viewed critically too”, adding that the company is “convinced that constructive criticism leads to higher-quality projects and general transparency”.

The spokesperson said the automaker also increasingly relies on “on-site inspections, thorough due diligence and audit processes” and wants “to act independently of external providers in the medium term”. It founded a joint venture with ClimatePartner in 2022 to develop its own carbon offset projects.

Because of earlier concerns about whether carbon offsets generated by renewable energy deliver the emissions reductions they claim, their price has been falling over the last two years.

According to data provider MSCI, the average price is just $2 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced – less than half the price of offsets derived from projects aiming to protect forests, tackle methane emissions or promote energy efficiency. Renewable energy credits are likely to see further falls in price after the ICVCM’s rejection.

As first airline drops goal, are aviation’s 2030 targets achievable without carbon offsets?

But Amy Merrill, CEO of the ICVCM, left the door open to better renewables methodologies obtaining CCP approval. She called on carbon crediting programmes to develop methodologies “that better reflect the rapidly changing and variable circumstances around renewable energy deployment”.

“While renewable energy costs have fallen dramatically around the globe over the past decade,” she said, “they have not fallen evenly across all countries and high up-front expenses and other barriers mean that there are still many places where it is difficult to deploy renewable capacity.”

The cost of renewables is particularly high in remote rural parts of developing countries without access to the electricity grid, on islands with small populations and in areas where the authorities are hostile to renewable energy for ideological reasons, particularly in parts of the US. Methodologies enabling projects in these places would have the best case to get CCP approval, market experts told Climate Home.

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

Verra has announced that it will revise some of its additionality requirements “to address the deficiencies noted by the ICVCM”.

The registry plans to submit its new rulebook to the watchdog and give existing projects the possibility of updating their quantification of credits accordingly. “This is part of our commitment to providing a path for all VCS [voluntary carbon standard] projects that wish pursue a path to CCP labelling,” Verra said in a statement.

A Gold Standard spokesperson said ICVCM’s rejection of the methodologies was “ambiguous and potentially harmful to high-quality renewable energy carbon credits on the market today” as different regions across the world still face various financial and technical barriers making carbon finance necessary.

They added that Gold Standard would consider the ICVCM assessment framework among other inputs in its next review of relevant methodologies.

The ICVCM’s negative assessment of existing renewable energy credits could also have repercussions for the new United Nations carbon mechanism currently under development.

Canada’s Olympics kit provider hit with greenwashing complaint in France

Renewable energy projects make up four-fifths of all projects seeking a transfer from the old Kyoto-era Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) into the new market system being set up under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, Climate Home revealed last January.

The projects need formal authorisation to proceed from the countries where their activities are located.

Carbon Market Watch’s Wyburd said ICVCM’s rejection of the renewable energy methodologies “will hopefully send a few shock waves” to the countries having to make those decisions. “Given their profound shortcomings, these credits should not be given a new lease of life under the future UN mechanism,” he added.

At the same time, the ICVCM approved other methodologies to capture methane from landfills and to detect and repair methane leaks in the gas industry. That means 3.6% of unretired carbon credits have now been approved to use the CCP label.

Shell, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Western Sydney University and Aviva did not respond to a request for comment on the impact of the ICVCM’s renewables decision. Total declined to comment.

The article was updated on 9/8 to add a comment received from Audi after publication.

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

The post Renewable-energy carbon credits rejected by high-integrity scheme appeared first on Climate Home News.

At the talks in Sofia, Bulgaria, most countries supported a faster process that would see three flagship reports assessing the state of climate science delivered by mid-2028, in time for the next global stocktake – the UN’s scorecard of collective climate action.

But a group of high-emitting developing countries made up of China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Africa – backed by Kenya – opposed an accelerated timeline, citing concerns that it would be harder to include scientists from the Global South, three sources present at the talks told Climate Home.

Governments were unable to reach a decision for the second time this year after “fraught talks” in January ended with the same outcome. The issue will be debated again at the next gathering in February 2025, while a separate expert meeting is tasked with drafting the outline of those reports by the end of 2024.

Fight over climate science

Adão Soares Barbosa, IPCC representative for Timor-Leste within the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group, expressed his disappointment over the lack of agreement in Sofia resulting from “strong polarisation in the room”.

“If the assessment reports are not able to feed information into the global stocktake process, what are they good for?” he said, speaking to Climate Home.

Joyce Kimutai, who represented Kenya at the Sofia talks, said her country’s opposition to the proposed shortened timeline was “absolutely not intended to frustrate the process” but to highlight the challenges countries with more limited resources would be facing.

“With such a tight timeline, it is likely that we will produce a report that is not comprehensive, not robust. We found that very problematic,” she told Climate Home on Monday.

IPCC delegates exchange views in an informal huddle in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo: IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

The primary purpose of the IPCC is to provide credible scientific assessments to the UN’s climate body (UNFCCC) and national decision-makers. The findings of its reports – which are usually compiled over several years by scientists working on a voluntary basis around the world – have been highly influential. They synthesise the latest research on climate change, as well as efforts to curb planet-heating emissions and adapt to the impacts of global warming.

The sixth series, whose final report was issued in March 2023, played a prominent role in informing the first UNFCCC global stocktake which resulted in governments agreeing for the first time to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels” at COP28 in Dubai last December.

But some fossil fuel-rich countries like Saudi Arabia – which have pushed back against clear language on the need to cut production – have previously opposed strong recognition of IPCC reports in UNFCCC negotiations.

The UN climate body has officially requested that its scientific counterpart align its activities with the timeline of the next global stocktake. The IPCC’s input will be “invaluable” for the international review of climate action, Simon Stiell, chief of the UN climate body, told the IPCC meeting in January.

Reputation ‘at risk’

As he opened the session in Sofia, the IPCC chair Jim Skea warned of a “complex and testing” agenda.

The discussion over the report production schedule would have “far-reaching implications in terms of the timeliness of our products, and the inclusivity of both our own processes and the science that is being assessed”, he added. 

Scientists and government officials were presented with a proposal drafted by the IPCC secretariat – its administrative arm – which would see the assessment reports completed between May and August 2028. That would be a few months before the global stocktake process is scheduled to end in November 2028.

The IPCC must produce its flagship report in time for the next UN global stocktake

A majority of countries, including EU member states, the UK, the US and most vulnerable developing nations, supported the proposal, stressing the importance of the scientific reports feeding into the global stocktake, according to sources and a summary of discussions by the IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Many supporters added that the IPCC’s reputation would otherwise be at risk.

Small island states and least-developed countries argued that IPCC input is crucial for those that lack capacity to produce their own research and are most vulnerable to the immediate impacts of climate change, according to the IISD summary.

But a dozen developing countries – with India, Saudi Arabia and China being the most vocal – opposed speeding up the process, arguing that more time is needed to ensure greater inclusion of experts and research from the Global South, which would result in “robust and rigorous” scientific output.

South Africa, Russia, Kenya, Algeria, Burundi, Congo, Jordan, Libya and Venezuela expressed similar views, according to IISD.

More time for more voices

India said that “producing the best science needs time, haste leads to shoddy work”, while Saudi Arabia claimed that the shortened timeline would “lead to incomplete science and would be a disservice to the world”, according to the IISD summary of the discussions.

Kenya’s Kimutai told Climate Home that producing scientific literature and reviewing submissions takes a lot of time and, unlike their counterparts in richer countries, scientists in the Global South can rarely count on the help of junior researchers at well-funded institutions.

“We love this process – we find it important,” she added, “but we’re trying to say that, while it may be an easy process in other regions, it is not for us”.

As first airline drops goal, are aviation’s 2030 targets achievable without carbon offsets?

The IPCC has long struggled with ensuring adequate representation of expert voices from the Global South. Only 35% of the authors working on its sixth and latest assessment report hailed from developing countries, according to a study published in the journal Climate, up from 31% in the previous cycle.

In Sofia, several delegates pointed out that the IPCC is working to improve inclusivity and that a slight extension of the schedule would not be the solution. Similar views were aired by forty IPCC authors from developing countries in a letter circulated ahead of last week’s talks, urging countries to ensure that the reports are ready in time for the global stocktake.

While recognising concerns over the inclusion of under-represented communities, they argued that it would not be achieved by allowing more time but through “deliberate efforts to counterbalance long-standing inequalities” in the research world.

Writing for Climate Home, Malian scientist Youba Sokona, one of the letter’s authors, warned that the IPCC risks losing its relevance and influence over global climate policy-making if its output cannot be used in the global stocktake.

IPCC Chair Jim Skea gavels the session to a close. Photo: Photo by IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou

Despite lengthy exchanges, scientists in Sofia could not find a solution and decided to postpone a decision on the timeline until the next IPCC session in February 2025, when countries will also need to agree on the outline of the reports’ content.

Kenya’s Kimutai has proposed a compromise that would see reports on adaptation and mitigation completed in time for the global stocktake, with a third on the physical science of climate change coming in later.

Richard Klein, a senior researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and a lead author of previous IPCC reports, told Climate Home the ongoing row was “problematic”. “With these delays, a shorter [report] cycle in time for the global stocktake may not be feasible anymore, which in turn makes it less likely we will see ambitious nationally-determined contributions (NDCs) after that process,” he warned.

Expert scientists from the IPCC will meet again this December at a “scoping” session to sketch out a framework for what the assessment reports should include.

Barbosa of Timor-Leste is worried that those discussions will also become “heavily politicised”.

“We are concerned that high-emitting developing countries will try water down the work on emission-cutting measures and keep out strong messages on things like the need to phase out fossil fuels,” he told Climate Home.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

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Delivering the solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other clean technologies the world needs to meet its climate goals requires a massive expansion of the supply chains responsible for producing them.  

From mining and processing critical minerals, to assembling, transporting and installing these technologies across the world, the transition away from a fossil fuel-powered society requires a huge shift, which could help support the creation of thriving economies and millions of jobs.  

At the same time, the transition away from coal, oil and gas requires a multitude of new resources, the extraction and processing of which can cause social and environmental harms if improperly managed.  

Delivering a fast and fair energy transition means avoiding the pitfalls of the extractive fossil-fuel economy and building new industries which can benefit workers and communities everywhere. 

What we are looking for 

Our “Clean Energy Frontier” series aims to produce hard-hitting accountability journalism on these issues. 

In our first series, we reported on lithium mining booms in Zimbabwe and Argentina; explored India’s dream of building its own solar supply chain; uncovered accusations of rights abuses linked to an Indonesian nickel park; delved into efforts to recycle rare earths in Canada; and examined Swedish company Northvolt’s sodium-ion battery plans.  

In our second series, we are looking for longform stories (1,500-1,700 words) that explore how the energy transition can help support sustainable development, address inequalities and create jobs.  

We are interested in stories that illustrate the opportunities and challenges of the transition and how it can be funded (especially in developing countries), spotlight geopolitical and trade tensions and efforts to address them, expose harms, and examine how technologies are transferred from wealthy to poorer countries. 

Each story should blend on-the-ground reporting with investigative or explanatory journalism.   

We particularly welcome strong character-driven stories and the use of data or satellite images to unveil new trends. The ideal story will have an original angle that captures the attention of our international audience.  

We plan to publish six deeply reported articles between November 2024 and June 2025. We are seeking stories from around the world and we encourage journalists from developing countries to send us their ideas. We are accepting pitches on a rolling basis until the start of 2025. 

Stories should be accompanied by visual elements, including high-quality photos and video, and we encourage partnerships between journalists and photographers.  

How to pitch 

Join us for an hour webinar at 12pm GMT on August 20 2024 to find out what we expect from your pitches. Sign up here.  

We welcome pitches from journalists with at least three years’ experience. You must have fluent spoken and written English. Journalists from all countries are welcome to apply. It helps if you have worked with international media before and have awareness of climate change issues. 

Your pitch should include: 

• The top line of the story and essential context in no more than 250 words. If we like the idea, we will ask for more detail 

• The sources you would interview 

• Any travel requirements 

• A short summary of your journalism experience, including links to three recent stories you are proud of 

• A link to the portfolio of the photographer you are planning to work with.  

We can offer a competitive reporting fee, as well as an additional budget to commission photographers and cover travel and accommodation expenses. Travel costs will be negotiated in advance and reimbursed subject to valid receipts. 

Please send your pitches with the word ‘Pitch’ in the subject line to project editor Chloé Farand by emailing chloe.farand [at] outlook.com.  

The post Call for pitches: Climate Home News seeks story ideas on clean energy supply chains appeared first on Climate Home News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Higher costs

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

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

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

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

Pollution clampdown on Delhi kilns threatens brick workers’ future

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

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

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

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

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

Calling for global action to limit the devastating consequences, the head of the United Nations said “billions of people are facing an extreme heat epidemic – wilting under increasingly deadly heatwaves”.

Extreme-heat events have been getting more frequent, intense and longer-lasting in recent decades as a result of human-made climate change.

Guterres’ appeal comes as the record for the world’s hottest day was broken twice on consecutive days this week, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Monday beat Sunday, with the global average surface air temperature reaching 17.16 Celsius, as parts of the world sweltered through fierce heatwaves from the Mediterranean to Russia and Canada.

Guterres said the UN had just received preliminary data indicating that Tuesday “was in the same range”, which would make a third hottest straight day on record, if confirmed.

In a speech, he noted that heat – driven by “fossil fuel-charged, human-induced climate change” – is estimated to kill almost half a million people a year, about 30 times more than tropical cyclones.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, December 1, 2023. COP28/Christophe Viseux/Handout via REUTERS

This year alone, extreme heat struck highly vulnerable communities across the Sahel region, killed at least 1,300 pilgrims in Mecca during Hajj and shut down schools across Asia and Africa affecting more than 80 million children.

“And we know it’s going to get worse. Extreme heat is the new abnormal,” Guterres added in his speech to journalists at UN headquarters in New York.

The Secretary-General’s “call for action” brings together ten specialised UN agencies for the first time in an urgent and concerted push to strengthen international cooperation in addressing extreme heat.

Focus on most vulnerable

Guterres listed four areas where greater efforts could be made to keep people, societies and economies safer from the negative consequences of rising global temperatures.

He emphasised the importance of “caring for the most vulnerable” – with those at greatest risk including poor people in urban areas, pregnant women, people with disabilities, the elderly, children, those who are sick and people who are displaced from their homes.

Households living in poverty often live in substandard homes without access to cooling, he added, appealing for a boost in access to low-carbon cooling and expanded use of natural measures – which include planting trees for shade – and better urban design, alongside a ramp-up of heat warning systems.

Graphic from Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change

Workers also need more protection, he said, as a new report from the International Labour Organization warned that over 70 percent of the global workforce – 2.4 billion people – are now at high risk of extreme heat, especially in Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Arab States.

The UN is calling on governments to urgently review laws and regulations on occupational safety and health to integrate provisions for extreme heat, including the right to refuse working in extreme hot weather.

Energy transition and adaptation

A third area targeted by the UN for action is making economies and societies better able to withstand heat, through stronger infrastructure, more resilient crops, and efforts to ease the pressure on health systems and water supplies.

“Countries, cities, and sectors need comprehensive, tailored Heat Action Plans, based on the best science and data,” Guterres said.

Lastly, the UN chief urged stepped-up action to “fight the disease”, by phasing out fossil fuels “fast and fairly” including no new coal projects, with the aim of limiting global warming to 1.5C – a goal nearly 200 governments signed up to in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries,” he emphasised. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future.”

The United States, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK have issued two-thirds of the global number of oil and gas licences since 2020, according to research published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development this week.

‘Still time to act’

Commenting on the UN’s call to action, Alan Dangour, director of climate and health at Wellcome, a UK-based science foundation, noted that people working outside in physical jobs and those who cannot afford to adapt to rising heat are particularly exposed – but the effects are far broader.

“The levels of heat we now routinely see around the world put every part of society under extreme pressure, directly harming our health while also affecting food and water security and much of our vital infrastructures,” he said in a statement.

Speaking to journalists on Thursday, scientists convened by Wellcome said there are positive measures that can be taken to combat the problem of extreme heat, which can also bring wider social benefits.

UAE’s ALTÉRRA invests in fund backing fossil gas despite “climate solutions” pledge

For example, they explained that using community facilities as cooling centres can offer older people a place to chat or play cards, tackling social isolation and heat stress at the same time. Or adding shades with solar panels to market stalls can help women traders keep working on hot days while also providing free electricity for their businesses.

“There is still time for concerted action to save lives from the impacts of climate change, but we can no longer afford to delay,” Dangour said.

A construction worker drinks water while working on a building during hot weather in Pristina, Kosovo, June 19, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Valdrin Xhemaj)

The UN’s call for action points out that existing tools to reduce the devastating consequences of extreme heat could be deployed with large and far-reaching effects. Guterres said the good news is that “there are solutions… that we can save lives and limit its impact”.

For example, a global scale-up of heat health warning systems could save more than 98,000 lives every year, according to the World Health Organization. And the rollout of occupational safety and health measures could avoid $361 billion a year in medical and other costs, the ILO has estimated.

The UN chief urged a “huge acceleration of all the dimensions of climate action” as global warming is currently outpacing efforts to fight it. That could start to change, he added, as heatwaves, impacts on public health and disasters such as Canada’s wildfires are now hitting the richest countries as well as poorer ones.

“The heat is being felt by those that have decision-making capacity – and that is my hope,” he said.

(Reporting and editing by Matteo Civillini and Megan Rowling)

The post UN chief appeals for global action to tackle deadly extreme heat appeared first on Climate Home News.

Environmental advocacy group Stand.earth accused the Vancouver-based apparel company of greenwashing in a “first-of-its-kind complaint” submitted to the French Directorate General for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) days before the Olympics Games opening ceremony in Paris.

Stand.earth has called on the French regulator to investigate Lululemon’s “vague, disproportionate and ambiguous” environmental claims which, the green group said, constitute misleading commercial practices. In response, the company told Climate Home its publicity does not misrepresent its operations.

Through its “Be Planet” campaign unveiled in 2020, Lululemon tells customers that its “products and actions avoid environmental harm and contribute to restoring a healthy planet”.

A screengrab from Lululemon’s sustainability webpage

But the company’s latest impact report shows that emissions from Lululemon’s full supply chain – known as Scope 3 – nearly doubled to 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide between the campaign’s launch and 2022. That’s equivalent to powering 300,000 gasoline cars for a year.

Stand.earth’s complaint said Lululemon’s emissions are set to grow even further as it tries to hit a goal of doubling sales by 2026.

“Lululemon customers worldwide deserve to know the true impacts of the company’s climate pollution, not the greenwashed version it uses to sell products,” said Stand.earth Executive Director Todd Paglia.

UAE’s ALTÉRRA invests in fund backing fossil gas despite “climate solutions” pledge

Earlier this year, Stand.earth filed a similar complaint against Lululemon in Canada that resulted in the country’s Competition Bureau opening a formal investigation into the retailer’s use of environmental claims. A separate complaint accusing Lululemon of greenwashing was brought in early July this year by a private citizen in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

A spokesperson for Lululemon said that Be Planet “is not a marketing campaign” but “a pillar” of the company’s impact strategy, and that the firm is confident the statements it makes to the public accurately reflect its impact goals and commitments.

“We are taking direct action and are committed to collaborating with industry partners to help address supply chain impacts on climate change,” the spokesperson added. “We welcome dialogue and remain focused on driving progress.”

Rising revenues, rising emissions

Lululemon is one of the world’s fastest-growing retailers of athletic apparel, with net revenues rising 19% to $9.6 billion in 2023. The company, which has more than 700 stores in 20 countries, is the official clothing provider for Team Canada at the Olympic Games whose opening ceremony takes place in Paris this Friday.

According to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Paris 2024 Games are targeting a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions compared to the average of the London Olympics in 2012 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016, including Scope 3 emissions such as from spectator travel. This means Paris 2024 will offer the first Olympic Games aligned with the Paris Agreement on climate change, the IOC says.

View of Lululemon name above its retail store in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, New York, NY, August 2, 2023. (Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA)

Lululemon, meanwhile, has committed to reaching net zero emissions across its supply chain by 2050 through a target validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), widely seen as the gold standard in corporate accountability.

But the company has come under intense criticism from green advocates over its climate and environmental impacts caused by energy-intensive production, high consumption of natural resources like water and long-distance shipping of items around the globe.

Four-fifths of Lululemon’s manufacturers in 2022 were located in countries that are highly-dependent on fossil fuels like Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The materials most commonly used by Lululemon in its clothes – polyester and nylon – are themselves produced from fossil fuels, according to the Stand.earth complaint.

EU greenwashing crackdown

The environmental group said the case will mark the first test of the French regulator’s readiness for a wave of new European greenwashing legislation.

The European Parliament approved a new directive in January requiring member states to introduce stricter rules surrounding the use of sustainability claims by companies and banning certain practices.

European lawmakers are currently working on a further piece of legislation that aims to define what kind of information companies must provide to justify their green marketing in the future. In its current form, the proposed regulation would require sustainability claims to be based on scientific evidence and checked by an independent and accredited verifier.

A global wealth tax is needed to help fund a just green transition

The so-called “Green Claims” directive is currently going through a negotiation process between the European Parliament and the European Council – which brings together EU leaders – before a final text is agreed.

“For decades, companies have faced no consequences for deceptive practices aimed at misleading the public about their environmental and climate justice impacts,” said Stand.earth’s Paglia. “However, we’re now seeing a rising interest in holding these companies accountable for their claims, and a crackdown is beginning to happen from Europe to North America.”

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Canada’s Olympics kit provider hit with greenwashing complaint in France appeared first on Climate Home News.

ALTÉRRA was billed as the world’s largest private investment vehicle to “focus entirely on climate solutions”. COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber hailed its launch as “a defining moment” for creating a new era of international climate finance.

Yet four months later, one of the initial funds ALTÉRRA backed with a $300-million commitment agreed to buy a major fossil gas pipeline in North America, Climate Home has discovered.

In March, BlackRock’s “Global Infrastructure Fund IV” acquired half of the 475 km-long Portland Natural Gas Transmission System, with Morgan Stanley taking the rest in a deal worth $1.14 billion overall.

That acquisition would not have come as a surprise to the fund’s investors.

When US-based BlackRock pitched it to the State of Connecticut’s Investment Advisory Council back in 2022, the world’s biggest asset manager gave a flavour of where their money would likely end up. Its presentation – seen by Climate Home – featured a list of “indicative investments” including highly-polluting sectors such as gas power plants and transportation networks, liquefied natural gas (LNG), airports, terminals and shipping.

Climate Home does not know whether ALTÉRRA saw the same presentation, nor did the UAE firm respond directly to a question asking if it was aware before the COP28 announcement that the BlackRock fund might invest in those sectors.

An ALTÉRRA spokesperson told Climate Home its “investments seek to build the energy systems of tomorrow, while supporting the transition of existing energy infrastructure towards a just and managed clean energy ecosystem”.

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In addition to the gas pipeline, BlackRock’s infrastructure fund has so far invested in carbon capture, waste management, utilities maintenance services, telecom infrastructure, data centres and the production of industrial gases, according to regulatory filings, a BlackRock job advertisement and press reports accessed by Climate Home.

A BlackRock spokesperson said its global infrastructure fund franchise “targets investments in solutions across the energy transition value chain, driven by the long-term trends of decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization to support the stability and affordability of energy supply around the world”.

Andreas Sieber, associate director of global policy and campaigns at climate advocacy group 350.org, said Climate Home’s findings “confirm our worst fears”. “The ALTÉRRA fund uses a masquerade of green progress while funnelling investment into fossil fuel pipelines and gas projects, which are the biggest causes of the climate crisis,” he told Climate Home.

Climate finance is a hot topic at UN negotiations, with countries expected to set a new global goal at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, this November, amid persistent calls for higher amounts to help poorer nations boost clean energy production.

The COP28 presidency said last year that ALTÉRRA would “drive forward international efforts to create a fairer climate finance system, with an emphasis on improving access to funding for the Global South”. Al-Jaber added that “its launch reflects… the UAE’s efforts to make climate finance available, accessible and affordable”.

But the sparse details provided at the time prompted climate justice activists to question the real impact it would have in countries that most need financial support to adopt clean energy and adapt to a warming world. Only about a sixth of the fund – $5 billion – was earmarked as “capital to incentivize investment into the Global South”.

Follow the money

ALTÉRRA is a so-called ‘fund of funds’. Instead of directly investing money in individual companies or assets, it puts its cash into a series of funds run by other investment firms. At COP28, it committed a total of $6.5 billion to funds managed by BlackRock, Brookfield and TPG, without setting out how the remaining $23.5 billion would be spent.

Since then, ALTÉRRA has not announced any further investments. Its chief executive, Majid Al Suwaidi, told Bloomberg this month that the fund is “actively planning the next phase of allocations”, without giving further details.

The launch of #ALTÉRRA marks the start of three unique alliances with global asset managers, @Brookfield, @BlackRock, and @tpg.

Together, we share the same vision, to bridge the climate investment gap and finance a new climate economy. pic.twitter.com/7yEXOyZqpK

— ALTÉRRA (@Alterrafund) December 1, 2023

Most of the funds picked by ALTÉRRA remain at an early stage and have yet to announce completed transactions or are still trying to raise more capital from investors. The most notable exception is BlackRock’s fourth Global Infrastructure Fund. By the time it won the $300-million commitment from ALTÉRRA in Dubai, the vehicle was ready to deploy its money.

ALTÉRRA told Climate Home its investment in the BlackRock vehicle is in line with its goals of getting climate finance “flowing quickly and at scale” and of partnering “with funds that invest in the energy transition and accelerate pathways to net-zero”.

Announcing its first $4.5-billion closing in October 2022, BlackRock said the fund would “continue to target investments in climate solutions, while also supporting the infrastructure needed to ensure a stable, affordable energy supply during the transition”.

In private conversations with potential investors, the asset manager spelled out more clearly what that meant.

Its presentation to the State of Connecticut in December 2022 showed that the fund would not only invest in things like renewable energy, electrification and battery storage, but also in fossil gas power plants and pipelines, LNG and transportation infrastructure like airports, shipping and terminals.

A slide from BlackRock’s presentation of the Global Infrastructure Fund IV to investors

In line with this strategy, BlackRock agreed a deal this March for its Global Infrastructure Fund IV to acquire half of the Portland Natural Gas Transmission System (PNGT), a fossil gas pipeline stretching from the Canadian border across New England in the United States to Maine and Massachusetts.

When it began operations in 1999, the pipeline helped shift New England’s power generation away from coal and oil, but it has also created a stronger dependency on fossil gas, leaving citizens vulnerable to price spikes. The region is now planning to accelerate the rollout of renewable energy sources.

Comment: To keep its profits, Big Oil stole our future

The PNGT was not the first fossil fuel infrastructure the BlackRock team behind the Global Infrastructure Fund had snapped up. In a written testimony submitted this March to the State of New Hampshire, a senior executive listed a dozen oil and gas pipelines backed by earlier rounds of the fund. They included one operated by ADNOC, the UAE state-owned oil company whose CEO is Sultan Al-Jaber, COP28 president and chair of ALTÉRRA’s board.

Responding to Climate Home’s findings on where ALTÉRRA’s money is going, Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said it is “extremely concerning to see a fund hailed by a COP president as a solution to the climate crisis investing in fossil fuels”.

“This needs to be a wake-up call to the world that these funds created by COP hosts are little more than PR stunts designed to greenwash the activities of fossil fuel-producing nations,” he added.

Oil-backed carbon capture

BlackRock does not disclose the infrastructure fund’s complete portfolio, but it has invested another $550 million in Stratos, the world’s biggest direct air capture (DAC) project being developed in a joint venture with oil giant Occidental. The plant under construction in Texas promises to suck as much as 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually and bury it underground.

Its proponents see DAC as a key technology to balance out emissions in the race to achieve net zero by 2050, although so far it remains expensive and largely unproven at scale. Stratos won a grant from the US government to fast-track the construction of the facility, and it has struck deals to sell carbon offsets generated in future from the plant with corporate giants like Amazon.

Scottish oil-town plan for green jobs sparks climate campers’ anger over local park

When the DAC partnership was announced last November, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said Stratos “represents an incredible investment opportunity for BlackRock’s clients… and underscores the critical role of American energy companies in climate technology innovation”.

But Stratos’ critics have questioned Occidental’s motivations and dismissed its DAC investments as a greenwashing ploy to keep pumping oil and slow down the transition away from fossil fuels.

“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s chief executive, told the CERAWeek energy industry conference last year. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

Call for safeguards

While BlackRock’s infrastructure fund deploys its cash largely in the Global North, ALTÉRRA’s promised investments in developing countries are still taking shape.

Brookfield in June launched a new “Catalytic Transition Fund” backed by ALTÉRRA with a $1-billion commitment. The fund’s stated focus is “directing capital into clean energy and transition assets in emerging economies”.

Climate Home asked ALTÉRRA if it had adopted any exclusion policies that would, for example, rule out investment in certain types of fossil fuels.

The UAE fund did not respond to the question, but a spokesperson said its investment approach is aligned with the goal “of accelerating the climate transition, with a focus on clean energy, industry decarbonization, sustainable living, and climate technologies”.

Climate activists protest against fossil fuels during COP28 in Dubai in December 2023. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

350.org’s Sieber called on Al-Jaber – who was widely criticised by green groups for his dual role as president of COP28 and head of a fossil fuel corporation – to “act swiftly to enforce stringent safeguards” for ALTÉRRA’s investments.

“The UAE is on the brink of losing the little credibility it still has left in addressing the urgency of the climate emergency,” Sieber added. “The world, especially communities who are being hit the hardest by climate impacts every day, cannot afford to have one more cent invested in fossil fuels.”

The key question now is whether Azerbaijan – the host of COP29 and itself a substantial producer and exporter of oil and gas – will do things differently. Last week, it announced a new voluntary fund that it said will invest at least $1 billion for emissions reduction projects in developing countries. Baku is hoping to secure contributions for it from fossil-fuel producing nations and companies.

Power Shift Africa’s Adow said developing countries need state-backed climate finance from rich nations, negotiated through the UN climate process, and “not just cooked up in voluntary schemes”. That funding “can be used where the need is greatest, not just where it might make most money for some private profit-seeking businesses,” he added.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; fact-checking by Sebastián Rodríguez; editing by Megan Rowling and Sebastián Rodríguez)

The post UAE’s ALTÉRRA invests in fund backing fossil gas despite “climate solutions” pledge appeared first on Climate Home News.

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

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

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

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

Just transition?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backers respond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can’t just switch it off”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate pedigree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

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On June 20, the Supreme Court in London ruled that, in deciding whether to approve a new oil well in Horse Hill in southern England, the authorities must consider the greenhouse gas emissions from burning the oil, not just the much smaller volume of emissions from getting the oil out of the ground.

Announcing what has been called the “Finch ruling”, Judge George Leggatt said: “The emissions that will occur on combustion of the oil produced are ‘effects of the project’ because it is known with certainty that, if the project goes ahead, all the oil extracted from the ground will inevitably be burnt, thereby releasing greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere in a quantity which can readily be estimated.”

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

The ruling has already helped campaigners challenge a planned coal mine in Cumbria in the north of England, set to provide fuel for steel-making. The UK’s new Labour government said last week that the previous Conservative government had made an “error in law” when approving the mine and withdrew support for the mine’s developer in a separate court case being heard this week.

Campaigners against the Cumbria coal mine oppose bringing “zombie” coal back from the dead on July 16, 2024 (Photo: Friends of the Earth)

Speaking during a break in that case, Friends of the Earth lawyer Katie de Kauwe said the Finch ruling had strengthened the green group’s legal argument against the coal mine. The mine’s developer – which is still defending the case – did not assess the emissions from burning the coal and, in the wake of the Finch ruling, “we believe it’s very clear that was unlawful”, she told Climate Home.

The ruling is likely to resonate beyond the UK, she added, because it concerns regulations that are derived from European Union (EU) law. Although the UK has left the EU, many of its laws remain similar.

Greenpeace Norway campaigner Halvard Raavand said his colleagues had “a small celebration” in their Oslo offices when the Finch ruling was handed down, popping bottles of alcohol-free champagne. “It’s highly positive,” he said. “We’re very, very relieved – it shows it’s possible to take on fossil fuels and win.”

New South African government fuels optimism for faster energy transition

Like the UK, Norway is not an EU member but bases much of its law on that of the bloc. Greenpeace Norway is challenging in court its government’s approval of three new oil and gas fields, arguing that they failed to properly consider the climate impact from burning the fuels – known as scope 3 emissions.

Raavand said that, while Norway and the UK’s national courts are not related, Norwegian judges are likely to consider the UK’s judgement as a precedent. “Other courts across Europe might look to each other too,” he said.

Gina Gylver, head of Natur og Ungdom (Young Friends of the Earth Norway), and Frode Pleym, head of Greenpeace in Norway in Oslo District Court on November 28, 2023 (Photo: Rasmus Berg/Greenpeace)

Over in Amsterdam, Dutch Friends of the Earth campaigner Sjoukje van Oosterhout also celebrated the Finch ruling. “This verdict sets an important precedent,” she told Climate Home. “Judges worldwide will be looking at this.” She said it could boost campaigners’ legal challenge to Dutch company One Dyas’ plans to drill oil in the Wadden Sea, part of the North Sea.

Climate law professor Harro van Asselt said the UK ruling was “important” and “may well have implications for EU member states considering licensing fossil fuel projects”. He added that judges had made similar rulings in Australia and Norway in the last few years – although the Norwegian case, which influenced the Finch ruling, is under appeal.

While its ripple effects will be strongest in the EU and countries with similar laws, van Asselt said he would not exclude the possibility of the Finch ruling influencing court judgements elsewhere, in particular in common-law countries like Australia. Common law is a legal system that evolves based on judges’ rulings, generally found in former British colonies like the US, Canada and New Zealand.

De Kauwe of Friends of the Earth added that the Finch ruling could influence environmental impact assessments across the world.

Most of the oil and gas being extracted in Europe (red) or discovered, or under development (blue), is in the North Sea (Picture: Global Energy Monitor/Screenshot)

The recent change in government in the UK is also likely to hamper new fossil fuel production projects in the country. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was elected on a manifesto promising to ban the method of gas extraction known as fracking and not to issue new licenses to explore new oil and gas fields or grant new coal mining licenses.

Gareth Redmond-King is the international lead at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit advocacy group. He told Climate Home that, at last year’s COP28 climate summit, British politicians heard from Global South government negotiators that politicians in their countries had cited the UK’s decision to issue new North Sea oil and gas licences as justification for pursuing their own fossil fuel exploration. That excuse has now been taken away, he said.

“Leadership works both ways,” he added. “The precedent set by this [Labour] decision makes it harder for fossil fuel companies to justify drilling in other countries. The UK is now the first G7 country to have pledged to put a moratorium on new exploration. That’s a big step.”

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post UK court ruling provides ammo for anti-fossil fuel lawyers worldwide appeared first on Climate Home News.

“The level of damage is apocalyptic,” said Henrietta Elizabeth Thompson from Barbados, among the countries worst hit by the natural disaster, at the start of the four-day session in Incheon, South Korea.

The board needs to create a fund that “reflects the scale of the magnitude, of the risk, the damage and devastation faced by people across the world and the urgency required to respond to it,” she added.

But before the fund starts handing out any money in future, board members have to agree on procedural matters.

A name and a place

On the opening day, the Philippines was picked as the host of the fund’s board in a secret vote by members. The Southeast Asian nation defeated bids from seven other candidates: Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Bahamas, Barbados, Eswatini, Kenya and Togo. 

Selecting a host country was one of the most pressing priorities for this week’s meeting. It represented a first necessary step for the board to take up a legal personality and enter into formal agreements with the World Bank, set to host the loss and damage fund on an interim basis. 

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While the administrative staff of the fund will be based at the World Bank, the board will carry out some of its meetings in the Philippines in the future, likely in the capital Manila. The country’s proposal scored particularly high thanks to its abundant transport options and accommodation facilities and its visa free entry for short stays for most visitors, according to a background paper. 

A man stands in a home where the roof was ripped apart, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, July 5, 2024. REUTERS/Maria Alejandra Cardona

The somewhat thorny issue of what to officially call the fund also landed on the table in South Korea. 

For nearly all climate talks participants, it’s simply been the “loss and damage fund” since it was adopted at COP27, but the United States have made various attempts at a rebrand. At COP28 in Dubai, for example, then U.S. climate envoy John Kerry kept referring to the “fund for climate impact response” – a more neutral label that softened the suggestion of developed countries’ historical responsibility. 

In consultations ahead of the meeting, the co-chairs of the board collected various options, from the minimalistic “the Fund” to the highly technocratic “Fund referred to in decisions 1/CP.28 and 5/CMA.5”.

Ultimately, members decided to go with “Fund for responding to Loss and Damage”, abbreviated as FLD, without spending much time debating the matter. 

Beware the ‘billions’

Divisions cropped up when the discussion turned to the process of selecting the executive director (ED). Hoping to announce the name of the executive director at COP29 this November, the board had to agree at this session on the criteria for picking the fund’s boss, including the roles and responsibilities.

Several board members from developing countries wanted the ED’s job description to mention efforts to find additional money for the fund at the scale of billions. “If you have someone running a fund of 100 million, this is totally different from 10 billion, 55 billion, or 100 billion,” said Egypt’s Mohamed Nasr, “the scale of this fund is not confined to where it is”.

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

Countries have pledged around $700 million to the fund so far, with Italy, Germany, France and the United Arab Emirates among the biggest contributors. The United States has pledged only $17.5 million. South Korea pledged $7 million at this week’s meeting. The residual costs from loss and damage is projected to reach a total of $290 billion to $580 billion by 2030, according to a 2018 study.

But some developed country board members, including the US, rejected the proposal of including a reference to “billions”, according to observers.

“It is clear that developed nations…remain non-committal about scaling financial mobilisation,” said Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, who attended the meeting. “The initial commitments of a few hundred million dollars are merely a drop in the ocean compared to the real and escalating costs of climate change that developing countries endure,” he added.

Eventually, board members found a compromise wording. The ED will be asked to lead efforts to grow the fund’s resources “towards contributing to a response at scale to respond to climate-induced loss and damage”.

Global goal of tripling renewables by 2030 still out of reach, says IRENA

The recruitment process will now go underway with the goal of putting a shortlist of candidates in front of the board by the next meeting scheduled for September 18-20 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Legal agreements

Between now and then, there will be little time for a summer break.

After approving last June the conditions of hosting the fund, the World Bank now has until August 12 to share with board members the draft text of the agreements detailing how that will work in practice. It will include things like provisions to handle the money and give access to recipients and the rules governing the relationship between the board and the World Bank.

Developing countries and civil society groups are eager to see guarantees that communities in hard-hit countries will be able to access funds directly without going through various intermediary agencies.

“Agreeing and certifying these agreements will be the most important decision at the next board meeting”, said Liane Schalatek, associate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington who attended the board meeting. “The World Bank has shared an outline of what they will include, but we are talking about legal agreements so the devil is in the detail”.

The post In Hurricane Beryl’s shadow, loss and damage fund makes progress on set-up appeared first on Climate Home News.

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

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

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

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

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

Living “like town dwellers”

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

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

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

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

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

House prices soar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Countrywide compensation battles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloody conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deadly violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposition is “political”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy nationalisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JETP talks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tensions over private sector role

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two-tier system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Safer Hajj

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Opinion polls predict that voters are set to back the left-wing Labour Party over the incumbent Conservative government by a significant margin, a BBC tracker shows.

Lammy told an event during London Climate Action Week that he supports the green reforms of the global financial system that have been proposed by the leaders of Kenya, Barbados and the World Bank.

Clare Shakya, climate lead at The Nature Conservancy, a green group, told Climate Home that Lammy’s comments were “massively ambitious” and “exactly what the world needs to hear right now”.

But promises on climate finance to developing countries in the Labour Party manifesto are the same as the ruling Conservative Party. Lammy argued that “all across the world, a cost-of-living crisis is making it hard to make the case solely for taxpayers’ funds” to support climate action in developing nations.

The Conservatives and Labour have both pledged to restore the overseas aid target from 0.5% to 0.7% of gross national income when “fiscal circumstances allow”. Both have committed to providing £11.6 billion ($14.7bn) in international climate finance between 2021 and 2026.

Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator for Brazil’s Climate Observatory, commended Lammy “for being so vocal about the need for the UK to step up” on climate multilateralism.

But, he added, the Labour politician “doesn’t seem to offer anything new on climate finance and now, with four months left until COP29, we desperately need a breakthrough”.

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

At the COP29 climate summit in November, governments are due to agree on a new post-2025 goal for international climate finance. Developed and developing countries have been divided so far, with developing nations proposing targets of $1.1-$1.3 trillion a year but wealthy governments refusing to openly discuss figures until the issue of where the money will come from is addressed.

Outside the UN climate talks, a coalition led by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley – partly backed by the US, Germany and others – has been pushing for multilateral development banks to lend more money to green projects. Kenyan Prime Minister William Ruto has called for taxes on polluters to raise money for climate finance.

Lammy told a forum on climate politics, organised by think-tank E3G on Tuesday, that the global financial system’s rules “were set up in a different age, a different century – they don’t work today”. “We want to work with [World Bank president] Ajay Banga and others to bring about the changes that are required,” he added.

Angelo said he supports the need to shake up the system, but described Lammy’s references to reforming multilateral development banks while limiting public finance as “standard developed-country talking points”.

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Asked about the Labour manifesto promise to “audit” its relationship with China, Lammy said Labour would “engage appropriately” with the world’s biggest emitter on key policy areas, adding “there is no more important issue in so many ways than the climate issue.”

He praised the EU, US and Australia for their efforts to talk with China, and said a Labour government would “cooperate with China when we can”. The previous day, he told the India Global Forum that he would also work with India on climate change.

Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC, told Climate Home that “the UK has been quite self-absorbed and quickly disappeared from the list of interlocutors with Beijing since COP26 in Glasgow”.

“The desire to restart engagement is a welcome development,” he added. “This is particularly true if the US election goes south. Much of the rest of the world will need to hold the fort.”

On domestic energy policy, Lammy reiterated Labour’s pledge not to issue any new licences for oil and gas production in the North Sea.

The party’s manifesto outlines further national climate policies, including decarbonising electricity by 2030 – five years earlier than the current government’s plans – by doubling onshore wind, tripling solar and quadrupling offshore wind.

(Reporting by Daisy Clague and Joe Lo; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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

In 2021, the Glasgow Climate Pact, agreed at the COP26 UN climate summit, called on countries for the first time to accelerate efforts “towards the phase-down of unabated coal power”. “Unabated” means power produced using coal without any technology to capture, store or use the planet-heating carbon dioxide emitted during the process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

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

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According to satellite data released by the World Bank on Thursday, gas flaring increased by 7% in 2023, reversing a decline in 2022. The rise resulted in extra planet-warming emissions equivalent to 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) – similar to adding about 5 million cars to the roads, it said.

Gas flaring emits greenhouse gases including black carbon and methane, which has a warming effect about 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period.

The top flaring countries in 2023 were Russia, Iran, Iraq and the United States, with just nine countries responsible for 75% of gas flaring globally.

Last year also saw an uptick in the intensity of flaring, meaning the amount of gas flared per barrel of oil produced, as oil prices spiked above $90 a barrel in the autumn.

In some countries, such as Iran and Libya, increased flaring intensity was attributed to increased oil production, coupled with a lack of investment in and prioritisation of gas recovery and utilisation.

Intensity was also high in countries affected by conflict, such as Syria, where operators struggle to address flaring.

“We’re hopeful that this is somewhat of an anomaly and the longer-term trend will be dramatic reductions,” said Zubin Bamji, manager of the World Bank’s Global Flaring and Methane Reduction (GFMR) Partnership, which monitors flaring and supports governments and oilfield operators to reduce related emissions.

Decoupling trend

That hope is underpinned by the “decoupling of a long-standing correlation between oil production and gas flaring” since the late 1990s, Bamji explained in emailed comments.

Operators can minimise flaring through measures such as re-injecting gas back into the earth or capturing it for utilisation.

Demetrios Papathanasiou, director of the World Bank’s energy and extractives global practice, said in a statement on the data that if the wasted gas were captured and used, it could displace dirtier energy and generate enough power to double electricity supplies in sub-Saharan Africa.

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But others argue that using flared gas more efficiently – or regulating flaring and its related methane emissions – will not be eliminate the practice as long as fossil fuels are still being produced.

“The number one thing we need to do is put the oil and gas industry into decline,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director at Oil Change International (OCI), a nonprofit group that campaigns against fossil fuels.

Pledges versus regulation

The increase in flaring suggests that growing global attention and initiatives to eliminate flaring have not been “sufficient or sustainable enough”, according to the World Bank’s report.

Operators and countries representing about 60% of flaring worldwide have endorsed the World Bank’s Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 (ZRF) initiative, while 155 countries have signed a Global Methane Pledge, launched at the COP26 climate summit in 2021, to collectively cut methane emissions.

Jonathan Banks, global director of methane pollution prevention at Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group focused on decarbonising energy, said those initiatives are “helpful”.

But, he added, governments and companies are still “not doing nearly enough” to stop flaring, whether in the form of policies to force businesses to take action or energy firms’ own plans and investments.

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

That is changing, Banks said, referring to recently introduced regulations in the United States, Canada and the European Union which aim to reduce methane emissions. “But those new policies take time to be implemented and enforced,” he noted.

The EU’s Methane Strategy, adopted in May, will include a methane transparency requirement on gas imports that looks to penalise gas flaring and venting – an even more polluting practice of releasing unignited gas.

“The potential to use access to the European market as a way to drive action is huge,” Banks said, adding that only a global standard, applied to all internationally traded oil and gas, could bring an end to flaring and venting.

US gas “certification”

Without such a standard, oil and gas companies are in practice policing themselves when it comes to curbing flaring and methane emissions more broadly.

In the US, for example, third-party gas “certification” companies track methane emissions coming from oil and gas infrastructure and tell consumers their gas is “responsibly sourced”.

According to OCI, there is no set standard for what level of methane leak reductions qualify natural gas for this label.

“Methane became a reputational issue for the US oil and gas industry a few years ago,” said OCI’s Stockman. “Suddenly we saw this proliferation of companies offering to monitor methane, and provide a certification to gas producers as an incentive to sign up.”

Gas certification is currently part of oil and gas companies’ voluntary efforts to act on their methane pollution – in the US, Colorado is the only state that directly measures methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure. But, according to OCI, the industry is pressing regulators to use certification “as a proxy for regulatory oversight.”

Fossil fuel industry under pressure to cut record-high methane emissions

Research by Earthworks and OCI found that these certifying companies use unreliable technology, which missed all but one of the emissions “events” captured by researchers’ own monitoring equipment.

They also found conflicts of interest on the part of leaders and board members of certification companies, including holding investments in the same oil and gas clients they were working with and promoting fossil gas as a clean energy source.

While regulation is needed, Stockman said, it must be monitored by governments and is near impossible to enforce at scale, due to practical and technological limitations.

Even satellite technology is limited in its capacity to observe small-scale emissions events at “hundreds of thousands of individual sites”, he said.

“We can’t trust the industry,” he added. “The way to keep methane out of the atmosphere is to keep it in the ground.”

(Reporting by Daisy Clague; editing by Megan Rowling)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate breakthrough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watered down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plastic production divisive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big splits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Reporting by Joe Loe; editing by Megan Rowling)

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In a letter to German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, seen by Climate Home but not made public, several coalitions of climate activists say that visa barriers exclude many participants from the Global South from the “climate negotiations that will determine the future of their countries and communities”.

Ugandan campaigner Hamira Kobusingye from Fridays for Future Africa, one of those behind the letter, told Climate Home: “This is an example of systemic and climate racism, as most of the affected delegations were primarily from Africa and Asia. This issue is rooted in the lingering effects of colonialism.”

Government negotiators also sounded the alarm, collectively agreeing in formal conclusions at the talks that they “noted with concern the difficulties experienced by some delegates in obtaining visas to enable them to attend sessions” in Bonn and urging “timely issuance of visas”.

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

Delegates from Europe and most of the Americas do not need visas for short stays in Germany while those from Africa and most of Asia do.

The German Federal Foreign Office told Climate Home it was “important” to them that all accredited UN conference participants were able to attend.

A spokesperson said they were “in close contact with the UNFCCC Secretariat months before the conference, including on the visa issue, and sensitised the missions abroad at an early stage to the upcoming conference and the potential increase in demand for visas”.

They added that UN accreditation for the Bonn talks “cannot replace the actual examination of the visa application” and there are legal requirements for getting a visa for the EU’s Schengen zone of free movement.

Climate Home has seen seven letters issued by the German government denying visas to African campaigners and negotiators. One other rejection letter was issued on Germany’s behalf by another European Union government, as some EU countries share responsibility for issuing visas in certain nations.

The letters say that the visas were not issued because the delegates had not proved they had the funds to cover their stay or that they planned to leave before their visa expired or that the information or documents provided were not reliable.

Not welcome?

The organisers of the letter to the German government said they have found seven other cases where delegates only had their visas approved after the start of the two weeks of talks, meaning many had to rebook flights.

Bonn makes only lukewarm progress to tackle a red-hot climate crisis

Others reported being unable to get an appointment with visa officials of the German embassy in their country.

One delegate from an African country, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home that they went to the German consulate three times before they received information on how to get a visa.

They were told they weren’t going to get a visa appointment in time and only received one after getting contacts in their own government to help. “Not everyone has those advantages though, so I was pretty lucky”, the delegate said.

Proscovier Nnanyonjo Vikman from Climate Action Network Uganda said she only received her visa five days after the start of the talks and had to change her flight. She said many delegates feel “they are being harassed to enter a country that obviously doesn’t like them”.

No shortage of public money to pay for a just energy transition

As well as limiting access, the visa issues delayed the talks. In the opening session, the Russian government blocked the adoption of the agenda because, they said, several of their negotiators had not received visas. They relented after receiving assurances the visas would be granted quickly.

The German government spokesperson told Climate Home that the foreign office liaises closely with the UNFCCC to find solutions for “queries or discrepancies” including “for visa applications submitted too late during the conference”.

Call to move mid-year talks

Similar issues have plagued previous European climate summits. In 2022, two campaigners from Sierra Leone were left stranded in Nigeria after the Swedish government sent their passports to be processed in Kenya as they applied, unsuccessfully, for visas to attend the Stockholm+50 environment summit.

The UN talks are held in Bonn every June as it is the home of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), whose secretariat organises the meeting and is permanently based in a riverside tower a short walk from the conference centre.

The mid-year conference is supposed to help negotiators discuss issues in advance of the COP climate summit, a more high-profile event held every November, and to share experiences on how to tackle climate change.

Vikman, who went to Bonn to promote methods of adapting farming to the effects of climate change, said that the talks should be moved from Germany to a place everyone can access.

“We don’t need to die coming to Bonn – let’s move, she said.

Developing countries suggest rich nations tax arms, fashion and tech firms for climate

Kobusingye echoed her call. “It is crucial to remember that the role of the UN is to unite nations. If Global North countries cannot facilitate this process, Germany and the UN should consider moving the conference to a more receptive country that is visa-free for delegates from the Global South,” she said.

She contrasted the German government’s hosting with the UAE’s arrangements for COP28 last November and December when, she said, “every accredited delegate received their visa promptly, demonstrating that it is possible to accommodate all participants efficiently”.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

This story was updated on June 14 to add comment from the German government received after publication.

The post Visa chaos for developing-country delegates mars Bonn climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the closing session of the two-week talks on Thursday evening, many countries expressed their disappointment and frustration at the lack of any outcome on the Mitigation Ambition and Implementation Work Programme (MWP), noting the urgency of stepping up efforts to curb greenhouse gas pollution this decade.

The co-chairs of the talks said those discussions had not reached any conclusion and would need to resume at the annual climate summit in Azerbaijan in November, unleashing a stream of disgruntled interventions from both developed and developing countries.

Samoa’s lead negotiator Anne Rasmussen, speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), emphasised that “we really can’t afford these failures”. “We have failed to show the world that we are responding with the purpose and urgency required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees,” she said.

Anne Rasmussen of Samoa, speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

Governments, from Latin America to Africa and Europe, lamented the lack of progress on the MWP because of its central role in keeping warming to the 1.5C temperature ceiling enshrined in the Paris Agreement.

Current policies to cut emissions are forecast to lead to warming of 2.7C, even as the world is already struggling with worsening floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels at global average temperatures around 1.3C higher than pre-industrial times.

Mitigation a taboo topic?

Despite the clear need to act fast, a deep sense of mistrust seeped into talks on the MWP in Bonn, with negotiators disagreeing fundamentally over its direction, according to sources in the room.

Developed countries and some developing ones said that the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries (LMDCs), led primarily by Saudi Arabia and China, as well as some members of the African Group, had refused to engage constructively in the discussions.

“The reason is that they fear this would put pressure on them to keep moving away from fossil fuels,” an EU delegate told Climate Home.

Bonn bulletin: Fossil fuel transition left homeless

Bolivia’s Diego Pacheco, speaking on behalf of the LMDCs, rejected that view in the final plenary session, while describing the atmosphere in the MWP talks as “strange and shocking”. He also accused developed countries of trying to bury data showing their emissions will rise rather than fall over the course of this decade.

The EU and Switzerland said it was incomprehensible that a body charged with cutting greenhouse gas emissions had not even been allowed to discuss them.

“Mitigation must not be taboo as a topic,” said Switzerland’s negotiator, adding that otherwise the outcome and credibility of the COP29 summit would be at risk.

Rows over process

Before MWP negotiations broke down in Bonn, its co-facilitators – Kay Harrison of New Zealand and Carlos Fuller of Belize – had made a last-ditch attempt to rescue some semblance of progress.

They produced draft conclusions calling for new inputs ahead of COP29 and an informal note summarising the diverging views aired during the fraught exchanges. For many delegates, the adoption of those documents would have provided a springboard for more meaningful discussions in Baku.

But the LMDC and Arab groups refused to consider this, arguing that the co-facilitators had no mandate to produce them and calling their legitimacy into question – a claim rebutted by the UN climate secretariat, according to observers. Frantic efforts to find common ground ultimately came to nothing.

A session of the Mitigation Work Programme in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

Fernanda de Carvalho, climate and energy policy head for green group WWF, said the MWP discussions must advance if the world is to collectively reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 and 60% by 2035 from 2019 levels, as scientists say is needed.

The MWP should be focused on supporting countries to deliver stronger national climate action plans (NDCs) – due by early next year – that set targets through to 2035, she said.

“Instead, we saw [government] Parties diverging way more than converging on hard discussions that never made it beyond process,” she added.

‘Collective amnesia’

Some developing countries, including the Africa Group, pushed back against what they saw as efforts by rich nations to force them to make bigger cuts in emissions while ducking their own responsibilities to move first and provide more finance to help poorer countries adopt clean energy.

Brazil – which will host the COP30 summit in 2025 – said the MWP was the main channel for the talks to be able to find solutions to put into practice the agreement struck at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a fair way.

But to enable that, “we have to create a safe environment of trust that will leverage it as a cooperative laboratory”, he said, instead of the “courthouse” it has become “where we accuse and judge each other”.

Observers in Bonn pointed to the absence of discussions on implementing the COP28 deal on fossil fuels, which was hailed last December as “historic”.

“It seems like we have collective amnesia,” veteran watcher Alden Meyer, a senior associate at think-tank E3G, told journalists. “We’ve forgotten that we made that agreement. It’s taboo to talk about it in these halls.”

‘Detour on the road to Baku’

After the exchange of views, UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell noted that the Bonn talks had taken “modest steps forward” on issues like the global goal on adaptation, increased transparency of climate action and fixing the rules for a new global carbon market.

“But we took a detour on the road to Baku. Too many issues were left unresolved. Too many items are still on the table,” he added.

The closing plenary of the Bonn Climate Change Conference. Photo: Lucia Vasquez / UNFCCC

Another key area where the talks failed to make much progress was on producing clear options for ministers to negotiate a new post-2025 climate finance goal, as developed countries refused to discuss dollar amounts as demanded by the Africa and Arab groups, among others.

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

Developing nations also complained about this in the final session, while others expressed their concern that a separate track of the negotiations on scientific research had failed to address the topic in a rigorous enough manner.

In his closing speech, Stiell reminded countries that “we must uphold the science”, and urged them to accelerate their efforts to find common ground on key issues well ahead of COP29.

The next opportunities to move forward on the new finance goal – expected as the main outcome from the Baku summit – will be a “retreat” of heads of delegations in July followed by a technical meeting in October, including a high-level ministerial dialogue on the issue.

But several observers told Climate Home that highly contentious issues – such as the size of the funding pot and the list of donors – are beyond the remit of negotiators and are unlikely to be resolved until the political heavyweights, including ministers, take them up in Azerbaijan in November.

Rising costs of climate crisis

“Business-as-usual is a recipe for failure, on climate finance, and on many other fronts, in humanity’s climate fight,” Stiell said. “We can’t keep pushing this year’s issues off into the next year. The costs of the climate crisis – for every nation’s people and economy – are only getting worse.”

Mohamed Adow, director of Kenya-based energy and climate think-tank Power Shift Africa, warned that “multiple factors are setting us up for a terrible shock at COP29″, saying this “ticking disaster threatens to undermine” the NDCs and in turn the 1.5C warming limit.

North Africa’s disappearing nomads: Why my community needs climate finance

In comments posted on X, formerly Twitter, Adow called for justice for those dying from the impacts of climate change such as extreme heat in India and Sudan in recent days, arguing that climate finance remains “a vital part in securing a safe and secure future for us all”.

But, he said, Bonn did not deliver a beacon of hope for vulnerable people. “Developing countries are expected to slay the climate dragon with invisible swords, having gotten zero assurances on the long-term finance they need,” he added.

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

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