In the aftermath of Cyclone Chido, which battered the French overseas department of Mayotte on Saturday, locals and experts told Climate Home News that the government had not done enough to prepare the island territory off the east coast of Africa for the growing threat from powerful storms.
High winds, heavy rain and huge waves contributed to a death toll which authorities fear could rise from the current count of 31 to more than 1,000 on Mayotte’s two islands where many people – particularly tens of thousands of undocumented migrants – live in “banga” slums with tin roofs.
France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, said Mayotte was “totally devastated” and about 70% of the population had been severely affected. The French Red Cross said the damage was “unimaginable”.
The cyclone was the strongest to hit Mayotte in at least 90 years, according to the Météo-France weather service, whose Francois Gourand said the storm was super-charged by particularly warm Indian Ocean waters.
On top of this, experts told Climate Home News that failures to adapt to climate change had worsened the impact of the storm. “The island was so fragile,” said one local official, who did not want to be named, explaining that the buildings were too weak to withstand the winds.
Researcher Emily Wilkinson, director of ODI Global’s resilient and sustainable islands initiative, said Mayotte’s plans to get residents to safety were not good enough.
During a visit to Mayotte starting on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron defended the government’s response to a crowd of angry locals, saying that the territory had been prepared for the cyclone. “There were warnings. The services were there,” he insisted, adding that a lot more aid in the form of food and water was on its way.
According to Reuters, he also told reporters on Friday that France had invested heavily in Mayotte but its institutions could not keep up with the arrival of migrants.
‘Second-class citizens’
Mayotte is geographically part of the Comoros archipelago off the east African coast near Madagascar, which was under French control from the 19th century.
In 1974, the four Comoros island groupings held popular votes on whether to become independent of France. Three overwhelmingly voted yes and formed a nation called the Union of the Comoros.
But Mayotte’s people said no, becoming an overseas community and then one of France’s five overseas departments a few decades later in 2011, with its people becoming French citizens and voting in French elections.
Despite its affiliation, Mayotte has remained much poorer than the rest of France and suffers from high rates of unemployment and crime. Nonetheless, its status as part of France has attracted migrants from places like Comoros and about a third of its population is said to be from outside Mayotte, many of whom live in dilapidated buildings in slums.
Recognising that its overseas departments are at risk from cyclones made worse by climate change, the French government has a special green fund which channels money to projects like reinforcing buildings in these vulnerable regions.
As of the end of 2023, the fund had contributed €1.35m ($1.4m) towards six projects in Martinique, Guadeloupe and La Reunion but none in the other overseas departments of French Guiana or Mayotte.
The official in Mayotte, who has experience of accessing climate funds, said there is a “lack of expertise at a local level” that prevents the territory tapping such support, adding that Mayotte had not been hit by a big cyclone for 50 years “so they don’t have any premonition about this situation”.
But Samira Ben Ali, a young climate campaigner from Mayotte who lives in Paris, accused the French government of ignoring warnings from local activists and politicians and not fulfilling promises to finance adaptation on the islands.
“What is happening in Mayotte now is definitely a failure of governance from France,” she told Climate Home. “It really feels like we’re second-class citizens.”
Wilkinson said advanced economies like France are “not taking adaptation seriously” in comparison with efforts to cut planet-heating emissions because “they’re not thinking about parts of their territory which are located in more climate-sensitive regions”.
The adaptation projects that do exist are focused mainly on protecting mainland France rather than overseas territories, she said – “and that’s a real gap”.
Shut out of climate funds
As part of a developed country like France, Mayotte is not eligible to submit projects to UN climate funds like the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund or the new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.
“From the perspective of other vulnerable countries, they would argue that these territories should be receiving support directly from central governments of the UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark – the EU countries with overseas territories,” Wilkinson explained.
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But at a conference ODI organised in Brussels in October, she said, larger overseas territories showed interest in ratifying the Paris climate agreement “as a way of… broaching the topic and perhaps further down the line being able to become eligible for some of the climate funds”. Denmark’s overseas territory of Greenland ratified it in July.
The level of death and destruction on Mayotte also shows the need for early warning systems that go beyond just alerting residents to oncoming storms, Wilkinson said.
Ineffective warnings
Météo-France said in a statement that “the heavy loss of life occurred despite accurate and timely warnings” it provided more than 50 hours in advance, and Climate Home was told that warnings were communicated by email and on the news.
Wilkinson acknowledged this, but said not enough information had been given about what residents should do to protect themselves from a storm like that. In other parts of the world, advice is usually offered by a disaster manager employed by local authorities, who tells residents where to go to be safe and what to take with them. She pointed to Bangladesh as a country that does this well.
But Mayotte lacked evacuation centres that had been set up and checked ahead of time with clear instructions for using them, she said. “If you don’t have that system in place, then people don’t leave their homes,” she added.
Mayotte resident Fahar Abdoulhamidi told the Associated Press the island’s many undocumented migrants were particularly hesitant to go to shelters as they were scared they would be arrested and deported. Ben Ali said she was “just really saddened that they thought that”.
Asked whether local people’s feeling of abandonment by the French government would spur calls for independence, Ben Ali said those conversations would come after basic needs for food, water and shelter are met.
But Wilkinson warned “there’s a real danger that if the French government doesn’t respond with the adequate resources and attention to reconstruction” then it could spur independence protests similar to those seen in France’s Pacific overseas territory of New Caledonia triggered by proposed reforms to voting rights.
Macron has pledged to rebuild the islands’ devastated infrastructure and homes.
(Reporting by Joe Lo and Vivian Chime; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post After Cyclone Chido, France accused of neglecting climate threat to “fragile” Mayotte appeared first on Climate Home News.
After Cyclone Chido, France accused of neglecting climate threat to “fragile” Mayotte
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectations
An exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
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Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidies
In the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries who have not submitted a biodiversity plan yet to finalise them “as soon as possible” and taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
“Timid” steps to expand base of donors
Having failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said during one of the sessions that her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, also noted their dissatisfaction but said it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
Cali Fund still not operational
Adopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
The post COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
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.
