Pacific governments say an official UN report shows their push for a levy on all shipping emissions – with the revenues redistributed to poorer nations – is fairer, cheaper and more effective than other green options under consideration.
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”.
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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.
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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.
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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)
The post Key UN report lends weight to Pacific plan for shipping emissions levy appeared first on Climate Home News.
Key UN report lends weight to Pacific plan for shipping emissions levy
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
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None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
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The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines
With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.
At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance.
The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK.
In a recent press conference, China’s environment vice-minister Li Gao noted the need to “uphold multilateralism” and send a “clear political signal” that the global community is united around climate action.