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Is the end near for COPs in petrostates?
Fossil fuels have been given warm hospitality at COPs in recent years, with the last two climate summits being held in fossil fuel-expanding petrostates with presidencies even getting caught promoting oil and gas deals on the job.
That’s why a group of top climate experts, scientists and former UN chiefs called for reform in an open letter published this Friday, where they argue that countries expanding oil and gas should not be able to hold the COP presidencies.
Signed by former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, the letter calls on countries to establish a “strict eligibility criteria to exclude countries who do not support the phase out/transition away from fossil energy”.
The letter does not provide details of who would judge this criteria. Climate Home requested additional information, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
While the experts recognise the importance of UN climate talks, they also call for reform of the COP process, writing that the “current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale” needed to address the climate crisis.
The COP29 presidency has been vocal about its disinterest in a quick fossil-fuel phase out, with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev even telling the opening plenary that fossil fuels are a “gift from god” and that “we must be realistic” about energy transition.
An analysis of Aliyev’s speeches published today by campaign group 350.org found that the Azeri president defended or promoted fossil fuels in more than three quarters of his energy and climate-related speeches. In over a year of such speeches, Aliyev never even mentioned the Paris Agreement, the campaign group found.
Some campaigners backed the reform proposal. Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub, said it is “demoralising” to hear the messages sent by Azerbaijan’s COP presidency.
She told media in Baku that the UN climate body, UNFCCC, should come up with a “conflict of interest policy” for delegates and the COP presidency that “puts a firewall between fossil fuel interests and the COP process.
She also called on countries to limit the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP. According to another report published today by Global Witness, almost 1,800 lobbyists have shown up at COP29 – around 700 hundred less than last year but more than the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries combined.
Currently, countries can select who participates in their delegations, either with a “party” or “party overflow” badge. They do not choose people with an “observer” badge. Most lobbyists are observers, but some countries such as Japan, the UK, Canada and Italy brought fossil fuel lobbyists as part of their national delegations, the Global Witness report found.
According to the report, the biggest group of fossil fuel lobbyists is from an observer group called the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) which sent 43 people.
But IETA denies this characterisation. While it does have a representative from French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies, an IETA spokesperson told Climate Home their delegates were “a broad mix” which “includes emitters who are committed to a just transition and solution providers who will help them on that journey”. Drawing up an exclusion list will be contentious.
Peace, Baku style
It is the “Energy, Peace Relief and Recovery” Day here in Baku. But if you’re running through the halls you won’t note much change – as there hasn’t been in conflict-afflicted nations across the world, despite Azerbaijan’s COP Truce proposal.
The COP29 host wanted to pause all the conflicts in the world – which number more than 50 – for the duration of the climate talks, inspired, they said, by the Olympic Truce.
On Friday, the COP Truce appeal did not feature prominently on the agenda. Nonetheless, the presidency said that the initiative received the support of 132 countries. That includes nations currently involved in civil wars and international conflicts, like Sudan, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Azerbaijan itself has yet to reach a fully-fledged peace deal with neighbouring Armenia. According to Azeri media, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry said that there cannot be any “physical meetings” with their Armenian counterparts until December as the climate summit is the government’s main focus.
When the COP Truce was first announced, climate campaigners called it a “performative… PR exercise” and “a distraction” from a separate UN-supported push to strengthen climate action in conflict-affected regions.
On that front, the COP29 presidency and six countries launched today the ‘Baku Call on Climate Action for Peace, Relief, and Recovery’, aiming to develop a strategy for preventing climate-induced wars and scaling up support for conflict-struck vulnerable nations.
The initiative will see the creation of a hub through which countries can “collaborate on peace and climate initiatives”.
During an event on this initiative, Climate Home asked Elshad Iskandarov, special envoy of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, about the ceasefire appeal. He said that the truce was proposed to “foster peace in the world and highlight the importance of climate” without giving any further details.
But not everyone feels attuned to the “COP of peace” vision pushed by the COP presidency. Mohammed Usrof, founder of the Palestinian Youth Climate Negotiators Team, voiced concerns about COP29 being hosted in Azerbaijan because the country is Israel’s biggest crude oil supplier, as shown in a recent report by Oil Change International.
Mila Sirychenko, a Ukrainian activist, had reservations about expressing her views at COP due to the large size of the Russian delegation. Russia’s party at this COP counts 900 people, only topped by the Azeri (995) and Brazil delegations (984).
Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Eni – all companies that supply crude oil to Israel – brought a combined total of 39 lobbyists to the climate summit.
“So many others continue to be complicit with maintaining business as usual,” Usrof told Climate Home, referring to the almost 1,800 fossil fuel lobbyists at COP, many of whom are part of countries’ official delegations. “And, as we see, the business as usual involves the genocide of Gazans”.
“Puzzling” lack of pledges for adaptation
There’s a “great paradox” in evidence at COP29 between leaders’ speeches urgently calling to keep people safe from worsening climate change impacts – and the apparent lack of money available to do that, according to the head of the Adaptation Fund.
The UN fund – which has been at the cutting edge of efforts to build resilience to extreme weather and rising seas for the last two decades – only managed to secure contributions of around $61 million from donor countries at a fundraising event on Thursday, against its annual goal of $300 million.
This despite exhortations from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the UN climate chief at the start of COP29 for rich countries to fill the huge gap in adaptation funding, which could reach $187 billion-$359 billion a year by 2030.
“These missing dollars are not abstractions on a balance sheet: they are lives taken, harvests lost, and development denied,” said Guterres.
While there’s still time for more governments to come forward with new pledges before the end of COP29, Adaptation Fund head Mikko Ollikainen told Climate Home that “this year the situation looks quite difficult”.
“Contributor governments [are] almost all talking about the importance of adaptation – and quite a few of them are recognising the need for grant-based financing for adaptation especially – so it’s puzzling how that relates to the reality of there not being new pledges to the Adaptation Fund or adaptation funds in general,” he said on the sidelines of the COP.
At last year’s climate conference in Dubai, the fund also fell short of the same target – bringing in around $188 million. But there, wealthy governments had an excuse: they were also asked to dig deep to get the fledgling loss and damage fund up and running, which they did to the tune of nearly $700 million.
This year, however, they can’t hide behind the loss and damage fund as new money for that at COP29 has so far amounted to little more than Sweden’s $18.4 million pledge. Sweden has also stumped up around $763 million for the Green Climate Fund and $12 million for the Adaptation Fund.
This week the Adaptation Fund has received pledges from 10 European countries and regions, with flood-hit Spain offering the most ($19 million). The UK and the European Union are so far no-shows, though Germany has said it plans to contribute.
To make matters worse, the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Fund – also set up under the UN climate talks to help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change – has had to suspend a planned pledging event at CO29 after it “didn’t get very good signals” money would be forthcoming, the chair of the LDC Group told Climate Home on Friday.
Ollikainen said “the direction is quite wrong”, with needs going up and less money coming into the coffers of his fund. The Adaptation Fund has a long pipeline of projects but if donors don’t cough up more it will run out of money, he added. It is set to receive income from a 5% levy on sales of offsets in the new UN carbon market, but that may not start until 2026, he noted.
Samoan minister Cedric Schuster, who chairs the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), told Climate Home he remains hopeful more money will come through for vulnerable countries at COP29 – and that the new climate finance goal due to be agreed in Baku will ensure contributions in the future.
“We can’t do anything if there are no pledges,” he said.
In brief…
Green light for new forest carbon credits: A key watchdog for the carbon market has given its high-integrity seal of approval to three methodologies for producing offsets that aim to reduce deforestation under so-called REDD+ projects. No credits have been issued so far under the rulebooks for forest projects approved by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), but the body said “there is a large volume of credits in pipeline”. Hundreds of millions of existing REDD+ offsets have been issued under older methodologies but have faced widespread criticism over their alleged lack of real emissions reductions and failure to protect environmental and human rights. ICVCM did not assess the criteria for these earlier projects and producers of those credits will not be able to claim the high-integrity label unless they switch to the new methodologies.
The post COP29 Bulletin Day 5: Pressure to clean up COPs and shortfall in adaptation pledges appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP29 Bulletin Day 5: Pressure to clean up COPs and shortfall in adaptation pledges
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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