A group of emerging economies chaired by China has proposed that what they regard as protectionism by developed countries should be discussed formally at the COP29 climate summit, setting up an “agenda fight” that could disrupt the talks.
The BASIC group of nations – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – has put forward an agenda item for COP29 in Baku, seen by Climate Home, that addresses “concerns with climate-change related unilateral restrictive trade measures”.
The submission to the UN says these trade measures “under the guise of climate objectives represent a systemic concern with disproportionate effects on developing [countries]”.
“Such measures increase the cost of worldwide climate action, hinder the efforts of developing countries to advance their climate commitments and ambition, undermine the basis of multilateral cooperation and contradict” UN climate agreements, the text adds.
Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events
Aaron Cosbey, a trade expert with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), told a recent webinar that BASIC’s proposal was “explosive”, adding “the potential for these issues to derail progress at that COP is very real.”
EU carbon border levy
The BASIC proposal is likely to be fiercely resisted by the European Union (EU) and the United States. Although the submission does not mention specific policies, BASIC has criticised the EU’s plan for a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) – essentially a carbon tax on imports – as well as certain provisions contained in the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The COP29 president, Azerbaijan’s Mukhtar Babayev, and the head of the UN climate body, Simon Stiell, are tasked with drawing up a draft agenda for the UN summit from a list of submissions, after consulting with governments. At the start of COP29, all governments will review the suggested items and agree what makes it on to the final agenda. Arguments could delay the start of talks.
Legal experts say Trump could quit Paris pact – but leaving UNFCCC much harder
Cosbey said the EU and others are “never going to agree” to the agenda item on trade, because its language is “prejudicial” and the issues it raises are already included under a track of the UN climate talks known as “response measures”.
“They will argue: ‘we don’t want to discuss this as a general agenda item – we want to put it in this box over here where we’ve been discussing it all these years’,” Cosbey added, noting it “may sound like a minor thing” but previous negotiations have been hung up for days over such “agenda fights”.
The BASIC countries have long opposed the CBAM – and they made a similar agenda proposal ahead of COP28. But, led by the group’s then chair Brazil, they backed down and accepted it being left off the agenda.
Cosbey said the question of whether it delays the adoption of the COP agenda this time around depends on whether BASIC countries are “serious” about wanting a formal discussion or are “putting it forward strategically” to draw attention to the issue and extract some concessions in return for dropping it.
The EU’s CBAM is a levy on certain carbon-intensive and heavily traded products imported into the bloc from countries that do not have a price on carbon. It was approved by the EU in 2021 and will come into force in 2026.
Its supporters argue it is necessary to avoid carbon leakage, whereby producers of energy-intensive products like steel, cement and aluminum move their operations out of the EU to countries with weaker environmental regulations.
But in a communique issued after their leaders met in Russia in late October, BASIC described the CBAM as a “unilateral, punitive and discriminatory protectionist” measure.
Aruna Sharma, a former secretary at the Indian steel ministry, told the same webinar the EU wants other countries to follow the pace of its emissions-cutting goals without consulting them properly. Measuring emissions of products in order to comply with the CBAM will be expensive, she added.
India’s then Steel Secretary Aruna Sharma speaks during an interview with Reuters in New Delhi, India, July 30, 2018. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
Costs of compliance
Chantal Line Carpentier, head of the New York office of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said many developing countries spend more on servicing their debt than on social welfare. “So how are these people supposed to be able to invest…in their [carbon] monitoring and verification systems when they can’t even finance their education or their health?” she asked.
IISD’s Cosbey added that even green exporters will have to pay to measure their emissions under CBAM, which adds up to “significant costs especially if you are a small producer”.
Both Cosbey and Sharma said these costs would grow if other nations brought in similar measures using different emissions measurement and reporting requirements. Cosbey said a proliferation of such systems would be “trade restrictive and undermine the ability of trade as an engine of development … to lift countries out of poverty”.
Canada, Australia and the UK are among the countries considering their own carbon trade levies.
How Azerbaijan locked up climate and social justice advocate ahead of COP29
Sharma added that the EU’s CBAM does not take into account a concept that is core to UN climate agreements of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), under which developed countries are supposed to do more to tackle climate change than developing nations.
The EU has previously said the CBAM should be addressed at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rather than in the UN climate talks. But UNCTAD’s Carpentier said WTO talks do not recognise the CBDR principle – and that taking up the CBAM there would “lead to a forever discussion”.
An UNCTAD study suggested the EU could use some of the revenues from its CBAM levy to help developing countries clean up production of goods that are taxable under the scheme. Sharma noted that, while the EU makes a lot of its steel with electric arc furnaces, many of its trade partners still use more polluting blast furnaces fired with coking coal.
The US’s Inflation Reduction Act, introduced by the Biden administration, has also drawn criticism from other governments for including subsidies for electric vehicles that require a large share of their parts to be produced in North America.
This condition has angered other car-making countries which see it as an unfair attempt to get automakers to relocate to the US. The EU, the UK, Japan and South Korea have all complained to the US government over the provision.
(Reporting by Joe Lo, editing by Megan Rowling)
The post Emerging economies set up COP29 agenda fight over trade measures appeared first on Climate Home News.
Emerging economies set up COP29 agenda fight over trade measures
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
-
UK imports of “green” jet fuel linked to Amazon deforestation
A Texas refinery shipping sustainable aviation fuel to Europe has sourced beef tallow with links to a meatpacking firm fined over illegal cattle purchases -
Italy pushes coal exit back after gas prices rise
Analysts say the move sends a negative signal, but its impact will be limited given coal’s marginal role in Italy’s energy mix
Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
Santa Marta conference: fossil fuel transition in an unstable world
New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
-
Climate Change8 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases8 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change Videos2 years ago
The toxic gas flares fuelling Nigeria’s climate change – BBC News
-
Renewable Energy6 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits