Countries gathered at the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) this week failed to back a proposal to establish a panel of experts to look at ways to limit the environmental harm caused by mining, agreeing instead to hold more talks on tackling the issue.

A draft resolution proposed by Colombia and Oman had sought to make mineral supply chains more transparent and sustainable amid booming demand for the minerals and metals needed to manufacture batteries, electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines as well as digital and military technologies.

It had called for the creation of an expert group to identify options for binding and non-binding international instruments to shape global action.

But amid divisions among nations and staunch opposition by some governments to any process that could eventually lead to binding instruments, country delegates meeting in Nairobi only agreed to a watered-down proposal to hold “dialogues” on “enhancing international cooperation on [the] sustainable management of minerals and metals”.

Governments also agreed to discuss how to recover minerals from waste, known as tailings, best practices for the sustainable management of minerals and metals, and strengthening the technological, financial and scientific capabilities of developing countries.

Pedro Cortes, Colombia’s ambassador to Kenya, told an event on Wednesday that the negotiations had been “difficult” but that the agreement will enable governments to continue the discussion.

Mauricio Cabrera Leal, Colombia’s former vice minister of environmental policy who initiated work on the proposal last year, told Climate Home News that the outcome was not what he had envisaged but said it was “good” in light of the “hard” geopolitics at play in Nairobi.

Colombia’s push for a minerals treaty

Colombia has called for an international minerals treaty to define rules and standards to make mineral value chains more traceable and sustainable as the world scrambles to boost supplies of materials needed for the energy transition.

For resource-rich developing countries, demand for these minerals is an opportunity to diversify their economies, spur development and create jobs. But the extraction and processing of minerals also brings the risk of environmental damage and human rights abuses.

Victims of Zambian copper mine disaster demand multibillion dollar payout

Ambassador Cortes told an event on the sidelines of the UNEA that more stringent global oversight was needed.

“While various efforts have sought to promote the environmentally sustainable management of mining through voluntary guidelines, national legislations and industry-led initiatives, it is clear that greater international cooperation is needed at this critical moment to elevate ambition and accelerate action,” he said.

“This action will be essential to balance the growing demand for minerals required for the renewable energy transition with the imperative of ensuring environmental integrity and social sustainability,” he added.

Opposition to binding rules

But numerous governments – including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran as well as resource-rich Chile, Peru, Argentina and some African countries such as Uganda – opposed any discussion of possible binding rules on mineral value chains, several observers with access to the negotiations told Climate Home News.

While UNEA resolutions are not legally binding, they can kick off a process towards binding agreements, such as the launch of negotiations on a treaty to end plastics pollution – a process that has since stalled.

China, which dominates the processing and refining of minerals and metals, stayed largely quiet during the negotiations. But Nana Zhao, an official from the Chinese delegation, told Climate Home News that China was “satisfied” with the wording of the resolution.

The UNEA should stay focused on environmental matters and not bring in issues relating to supply chains, she added.

An opening for more co-operation

Campaigners, who are calling for binding rules to prevent environmental and social harms linked to mineral extraction and processing, expressed disappointment at the agreement but welcomed the prospect of further talks on the issue.

“The initial aim was to start with negotiations for [a] binding treaty and to get countries together to start talking about joint rules,” Johanna Sydow, a resource policy expert who heads the international environmental policy division of Germany’s Heinrich-Böll Foundation, told Climate Home News.

The agreement reached in Nairobi is “very weak” compared to that initial proposal but it creates the “foundation to stay in dialogue and try to find solutions and work on something constructively”, she said. “This is an opening for more co-operation”.

UN taskforce to deliver equitable supply chains

On the sidelines of the assembly, UN agencies launched a taskforce on critical energy transition minerals to coordinate UN activities in building more transparent, sustainable and equitable supply chains.

The taskforce will help deliver on recommendations by a panel of experts convened by UN Secretary-General António Guterres which called for putting equity and human rights at the core of mineral value chains.

It will be chaired by the UN Environment Programme, UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the UN Development Programme, and draw on expertise across the UN system.

Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said the sustainable management of minerals cuts across trade, environment and development.

“Multilateral cooperation and partnerships beyond the UN [are] absolutely essential for us to respond to what we can see is a driving demand and hunger for minerals and metals. But before we have a ‘race’ to this, let’s make sure we look at these aspects that can lead to injustice, environmental harms, biodiversity loss, water pollution and human rights [harms],” she added.

Suneeta Kaimal, president and CEO of the Natural Resource Governance Institute and a member of the UN panel of experts, said the taskforce was “a timely and necessary step toward making the panel’s ambitions real”.

“It must work boldly and inclusively with communities and civil society, and it will need political commitment and financial resources – not only technical efforts – to drive a just and equitable new paradigm that safeguards people, ecosystems and economies in producer countries,” she said.

The post Push for global minerals deal meets opposition, more talks agreed appeared first on Climate Home News.

Push for global minerals deal meets opposition, more talks agreed

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

EU sets 2040 goal

CUT CRUNCHED: The EU agreed on a legally binding target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% from 1990 levels by 2040, reported the EU Observer. The publication said that this agreement is “weaker” than the European Commission’s original proposal as it allows for up to five percentage points of a country’s cuts to be achieved by the use of foreign carbon credits. Even in its weakened form, the goal is “more ambitious than most other major economies’ pledges”, according to Reuters.

PETROL CAR U-TURN: Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has agreed to “roll back an imminent ban on the sale of new internal combustion-engined cars and vans after late-night negotiations with the leader of the conservative European People’s Party,” reported Euractiv. Car makers will be able to continue selling models with internal combustion engines as long as they reduce emissions on average by 90% by 2035, down from a previously mandated 100% cut. Bloomberg reported that the EU is “weighing a five-year reprieve” to “allow an extension of the use of the combustion engine until 2040 in plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles that include a fuel-powered range extender”.

CORPORATE PRESSURE: Reuters reported that EU countries and the European parliament struck a deal to “cut corporate sustainability laws, after months of pressure from companies and governments”. It noted that the changes exempt businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees from reporting their environmental and social impact under the corporate sustainability reporting directive. The Guardian wrote that the commission is also considering a rollback of environment rules that could see datacentres, artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactories and affordable housing become exempt from mandatory environmental impact assessments.

Around the world

• EXXON BACKPEDALS: The Financial Times reported on ExxonMobil’s plans to “slash low-carbon spending by a third”, amounting to a reduction of $10bn over the next 5 years.
• VERY HOT: 2025 is “virtually certain” to be the second or third-hottest year on record, according to data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, covered by the Guardian. It reported that global temperatures from January-November were, on average, 1.48C hotter than preindustrial levels.
• WEBSITE WIPE: Grist reported that the US Environmental Protection Agency has erased references to the human causes of climate change from its website, focusing instead on “natural processes”, such as variations in the Earth’s orbit. On BlueSky, Carbon Brief contributing editor Dr Zack Labe described the removal as “absolutely awful”.
• UN REPORT: The latest global environment outlook, a largest-of-its-kind UN environment report, “calls for a new approach to jointly tackle the most pressing environmental issues including climate change and biodiversity loss”, according to the Associated Press. However, report co-chair Sir Robert Watson told BBC News that a “small number of countries…hijacked the process”, diluting its potential impact.

$80bn

The amount that Chinese firms have committed to clean technology investments overseas in the past year, according to Reuters.

Latest climate research

• Increases in heavy rainfall and flooding driven by fossil-fuelled climate change worsened recent floods in Asia | World Weather Attribution
• Human-caused climate change played a “substantial role” in driving wildfires and subsequent smoke concentrations in the western US between 1992-2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Thousands of land vertebrate species over the coming decades will face extreme heat and “unsuitable habitats” throughout “most, or even all” of their current ranges | Global Change Biology

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

The years 2023 and 2024 were the warmest on record – and 2025 looks set to join them in the top three. The causes of this apparent acceleration in global warming have been subject to a lot of attention in both the media and the scientific community. The charts above, drawn from a new Carbon Brief analysis, show how the natural weather phenomenon El Niño, sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions from shipping, Chinese SO2, an eruption from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and solar cycle changes account for most of the “unusual warmth” of recent years. Dark blue bars represent the contribution of individual factors and their uncertainties (hatched areas), the light blue bar shows the combined effects and combination of uncertainties and the red bar shows the actual warming, compared with expectations.

Spotlight

Climate change boardgames

This week, Carbon Brief reports on the rise of climate boardgames.

Boardgames have always made political arguments. Perhaps the most notorious example is the Landlord’s Game published by US game designer and writer Lizzie Magie in 1906, which was designed to persuade people of the need for a land tax.

This game was later “adapted” by US salesman Charles Darrow into the game Monopoly, which articulates a very different set of values.

In this century, game designers have turned to the challenge of climate change.

Best-selling boardgame franchise Catan has spawned a New Energies edition, where players may choose to “invest in clean energy resources or opt for cheaper fossil fuels, potentially causing disastrous effects for the island”.

But perhaps the most notable recent release is 2024’s Daybreak, which won the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahre award (the boardgaming world’s equivalent of the Oscars).

Rolling the dice

Designed by gamemakers Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock, Daybreak sees four players take on the role of global powers: China, the US, Europe and “the majority world”, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Through playing cards representing policy decisions and technologies, players attempt to reach “drawdown”, a state where they are collectively producing less CO2 than they are removing from the atmosphere.

“Games are good at modelling systems and the climate crisis is a systemic crisis,” Daybreak co-designer Menapace told Carbon Brief.

In his view, boardgames can be a powerful tool for getting people to think about climate change. He said:

“In a video game, the rules are often hidden or opaque and strictly enforced by the machine’s code. In contrast, a boardgame requires players to collectively learn, understand and constantly negotiate the rules. The players are the ‘game engine’. While videogames tend to operate on a subconscious level through immersion, boardgames maintain a conscious distance between players and the material objects they manipulate.

“Whereas videogames often involve atomised or heavily mediated social interactions, boardgames are inherently social experiences. This suggests that playing boardgames may be more conducive to the exploration of conscious, collective, systemic action in response to the climate crisis.”

Daybreak to Dawn

Menapace added that he is currently developing “Dawn”, a successor to Daybreak, building on lessons he learned from developing the first game, telling Carbon Brief:

“I want the next game to be more accessible, especially for schools. We learned that there’s a lot of interest in using Daybreak in an educational context, but it’s often difficult to bring it to a classroom because it takes quite some time to set up and to learn and to play.

“Something that can be set up quickly and that can be played in half the time, 30 to 45 minutes rather than an hour [to] an hour and a half, is what I’m currently aiming for.”

Dawn might also introduce a new twist that explores whether countries are truly willing to cooperate on solving climate change – and whether “rogue” actors are capable of derailing progress, he continued:

“Daybreak makes this big assumption that the world powers are cooperating, or at least they’re not competing, when it comes to climate action. [And] that there are no other forces that get in the way. So, with Dawn, I’m trying to explore that a bit more.

“Once the core game is working, I’d like to build on top of that some tensions, maybe not perfect cooperation, [with] some rogue players.”

Watch, read, listen

WELL WATCHERS: Mother Jones reported on TikTok creators helping to hold oil companies to account for cleaning up abandoned oil wells in Texas.

RUNNING SHORT: Wired chronicled the failure of carbon removal startup Running Tide, which was backed by Microsoft and other tech giants.

PARIS IS 10: To mark the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, climate scientist Prof Piers Forster explained in Climate Home News “why it worked” and “what it needs to do to survive”.

Coming up

• 15-19 December: American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meeting, New Orleans
• 15-19 December: 70th Meeting of the Global Environment Facility (Gef) Council, online
• 16 December: International Energy Agency: Future of electricity in the Middle East and North Africa webinar, online

Pick of the jobs

• Natural Resources Wales, senior strategic environmental policy specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Wales (hybrid)
• The Nature Conservancy, director of conservation – Mata Atlântica | Salary: Unknown. Location: São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and nearby cities, Brazil
• Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, postdoctoral researcher – downscaling for climate services | Salary: Unknown. Location: Barcelona, Spain

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out

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05.12.25

DeBriefed 28 November 2025: COP30’s ‘frustrating’ end; Asia floods; UK ‘emergency’ climate event

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COP30 DeBriefed 21 November 2025: ‘Mutirão’ text latest; ‘Roadmaps’ explained; COP finish times plotted

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COP30 DeBriefed 14 November 2025: Finance and 1.5C loom large at talks; China’s emissions dip; Negotiations explained

COP30 Belém

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14.11.25

The post DeBriefed 12 December: EU under ‘pressure’; ‘Unusual warmth’ explained; Rise of climate boardgames appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 12 December: EU under ‘pressure’; ‘Unusual warmth’ explained; Rise of climate boardgames

Ten years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, as geopolitical tensions slow climate action, leading experts have urged ambitious countries to forge new coalitions that can drive forward efforts to limit global warming without waiting for consensus.

As the implementation of the landmark Paris accord enters a “more difficult phase”, French economist Laurence Tubiana, one of the pact’s key architects, said some countries could go ahead “with more speed and more ambition” than others.

“[The Paris Agreement] is not a Bible – it has to evolve with time,” she said. Tubiana, a former diplomat, added that the framework needs to grapple with a “much more fragmented” landscape as countries are sharply divided over the pace of the transition away from fossil fuels.

Why the Paris Agreement worked – and what it needs to do to survive

At COP30, more than 80 countries wanted a global roadmap for phasing down coal, oil and gas to be formally included in the main political outcome of the Belém summit. But strong opposition from most fossil-fuel producing nations pushed such a plan out of the final Global Mutirao decision which had to be agreed by consensus.

Instead, the Brazilian presidency promised to create voluntary roadmaps on tackling fossil fuels and deforestation outside of the UN climate process over the next year.

Move faster than global consensus

Tubiana suggested that the “next wave” of climate action could be unleashed through enforcing Article 6.1 of the Paris Agreement, which recognises that some countries “choose to pursue voluntary cooperation” in implementing their national climate plans (NDCs) “to allow for higher ambition”.

That, she added, could provide “the hook” to link initiatives led by external alliances to the official framework guided by the Paris Agreement, and make them more effective and accountable.

Echoing Tubiana’s words, Rachel Kyte, the UK’s special representative for climate, argued for building “ever more interesting coalitions within countries and across countries” among those that “continue to be inspired by Paris”.

So-called coalitions of the willing have been useful before “for some countries to move further, faster when the global consensus was not there”, she added.

Bernice Lee, a distinguished fellow at Chatham House, said countries that have already invested political and economic capital in implementing the Paris Agreement – such as China – have “skin in the game” in a way that sets them apart from those that have yet to do so. It’s a “coalition of the doing rather than just the willingness”, she added.

Climate action slows in recent years

As the United States, led by climate change–denying President Donald Trump, prepares to formally exit the Paris Agreement in January, nations in Belém “strongly” reaffirmed their unity and commitment to the accord’s goals. That came as UN Secretary-General António Guterres conceded for the first time that global temperatures will rise, at least temporarily, above the 1.5C threshold set in the Paris deal.

But even if the most ambitious target is missed, the projected global temperature increase by the end of the century has fallen by at least 1C in the decade since the landmark agreement was struck.

“That means Paris has already reduced future risks for people and ecosystems: fewer extreme heat events, lower sea-level rise, and less pressure on vulnerable communities than in a 3–4C world,” Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said in a statement.

But he warned that climate action “has slowed in the last four years”. Now, he emphasised, “our future depends on the political will to move forward fast enough to finish the job”.

Need for “pragmatic” partnerships

Kyte advised developed countries “still in the mix”, like the UK and European Union member states, to find a different way to forge partnerships with more humility. “What we saw in Belém is that a decade of over-promising and under-delivering in many dimensions has grown old,” she said, singling out the provision of money by wealthy governments to help vulnerable countries cope with escalating climate impacts.

At COP30, a demand from the world’s poorest nations to triple adaptation finance given by rich countries was agreed, but only by a deadline of 2035 rather than 2030, and within the strict contours of the $300-billion-a-year UN climate finance goal, which covers all kinds of public funding including loans and private finance mobilised by governments.

Comment: Why the Paris Agreement worked – and what it needs to do to survive

In tackling thorny issues such as transitioning away from fossil fuels, as agreed at COP28 in Dubai, Kyte said that, while some countries are actively trying to “weaponise” this tension, others are “just fearful of a world where there is going to be some kind of diktat on how to manage their transitions”.

Once work gets underway on the roadmaps for phasing down fossil fuels and halting deforestation, “I hope we can recapture the spirit of Paris, which was about pragmatic partnership in pursuit of things which are really difficult,” Kyte added.

The post As Paris Agreement enters tougher era, new alliances urged to step up appeared first on Climate Home News.

As Paris Agreement enters tougher era, new alliances urged to step up