You’ve seen the headlines that Cop28 in Dubai has resulted in an unprecedented call to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’. So why were celebrations from developing countries and civil society so muted?
Countries on the front lines of the climate crisis fear that they are still being left to carry the costs, and sink beneath the waves. This global deal has to work for everyone, or it won’t work for any of us.
Here are ten takeaways.
1. No, this outcome is not enough to avert runaway climate change
Rather than a being a detailed plan to save the planet, the deal is a badly-drawn sketch on the back of an envelope.
It only ‘calls for’ a transition away from fossil fuels, rather than deciding on a full phase out. It makes no requirement of the world’s biggest polluters to act any faster than the lower income countries who have done little to cause climate change.
It doesn’t put in place any finance to deliver any of its goals. And it leans on debunked technologies that the fossil fuel industry use to delay their phase out.
This means that the package does not have a whole lot of structural integrity and does not do much to push the biggest, or pull the smallest, in the right direction.
2. But it may accelerate the stranding of fossil fuel assets
You might have seen people celebrating the ‘signal’ that Cop28’s call to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ sends. What does that mean? Does it mean anything at all? Well, yes actually.
The outcome could indeed make waves in the distant boardrooms of banks, investors and asset managers.
For seven years, financial institutions have completely ignored the Paris Agreement’s goal of aligning their financial flows with low greenhouse gas emissions pathways, and have instead continued to provide trillions of dollars to the fossil companies fuelling the climate crisis.
But the call on countries to transition away from fossil fuels is more likely to hit investors’ bottom lines. Bank loans to coal, oil and gas developments in countries that undertake the transition might never be repaid.
Shares and investments in fossil resources that will never be exploited will lose their value. Financial actors are strange, stubborn and unpredictable pack animals. The sensible ones will be planning their fossil exit strategies right now, ahead of the stampede.
3. Appetite for climate action is not matched by willingness to fund it
There’s no such thing as a free climate target. Cop28 really showed that while the world’s appetite for climate action has moved significantly forward, its willingness to cover the costs lags behind.
The wealthiest countries refused to offer any new finance to help lower income counties to leapfrog the fossil fuel era.
Many developing countries – those already being pushed into debt by the spiralling cost of climate disasters – will now be forced to make impossible choices between economic security and climate action.
If rich countries had been willing to put real finance and fair timelines on the table, the outcome could have been much stronger.
Finding ways forward on climate finance, and how we can cover the costs for the world we want to build together, must now be part of every climate conversation.
4. Saudi Arabia was willing to move (a bit). The US was not
With Cop28 being held in the UAE, there has been plenty of discussion about the role of the Gulf States, and the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the talks.
Saudi Arabia emerged as the country holding out most strongly against language to phase out fossil fuels.
But in fact, according to sources in the negotiating rooms, the US was the country that refused point blank to allow any language on finance or fair timelines.
In the final hours of Cop28, the head of the UN Antonio Guterres and of UN climate change Simon Stiell, alluded to ‘arbitrary red lines’, ‘entrenched positions’, ‘blocking tactics’ and ‘landmines’. That gave us insights into how the big beasts were locking horns behind closed doors
Ultimately, the call to transition away from fossil fuels represented Saudi’s willingness to compromise, somewhat. But the lack of finance in the deal showed that the US walked away with most of what it wanted, and gave nothing in return.
5. Developing countries leave Dubai with little
Unfairness is getting more baked into climate talks with each passing year. In thrall to the powerful players, Cop28 barely registered the needs of the countries who have done so little to cause the climate crisis, yet who are suffering the worst impacts and bearing all the costs.
The Alliance of Small Island States criticised the final document as a ‘litany of loopholes’ and ‘an incremental advancement over business-as-usual, when what we really needed was an exponential step change in our actions and support’.
Finance and fairness are key to ensuring the whole world can get on board with the transition to a fossil-free future. But with developing countries feeling demoted to bystanders in their own negotiations, these essential components are nowhere to be found.
6. False solutions get a foot in the door
Most people who have done the maths understand that carbon markets, and technologies like carbon capture and storage, simply can’t solve the climate crisis.
But these dangerous distractions provide a lifeline to the fossil industry, who are desperate to repeat the disproven claim that it’s fine carry on burning their products as long as unicorns, sorry I mean ‘new technologies’, take emissions out the air afterwards.
Cop28’s text leaning on these debunked approaches proved a triumph of lobbying over science. Meanwhile, technical negotiations trying to develop rules to govern carbon markets collapsed, with weak drafts deemed dangerous and unfixable.
Efforts to regulate nonsensical concepts will pick up again next year
7. Adaptation is unfunded
Climate change is bringing erratic rainfall patterns, warming oceans, floods, droughts and stronger cyclones to developing countries.
It is causing crop failures, destroying homes and drying up water sources. Governments are desperate to scale up adaptation to help communities strengthen their resilience to these impacts.
But the money that should be coming from the rich countries that are causing the climate crisis, is not forthcoming. Rich counties deleted any language reassuring countries that they will get the support they need.
8. Loss and damage fund finally agreed
There was some good news on the first day of Cop, two long weeks ago. Technical negotiations that took place throughout 2023 put forward an imperfect but important proposal for a loss and damage fund.
Unusually, this proposal was agreed in the opening plenary, and some minor funding announcements began to trickle in. Nothing like what is needed, but a start.
For the first time ever we have a pot that can help countries to rebuild and recover in the aftermath of climate disasters.
We now need to see much more finance, and for the World Bank that was controversially agreed as host, to fix its ways of working so that it can deliver funds directly to the communities in need.
9. Thank civil society for the focus on fossil fuels
We have civil society to thank for the focus and immense pressure on fossil fuels at Cop28. Thousands of organisations strategically echoed the call together for a fossil fuel phase out through their lobbying, networking, stunts and media work, until this became the one big demand that everyone came to expect from Cop.
Although we didn’t get the language we needed, the call to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ would not have happened without civil society.
10.Finance and fairness will be the goals at Cop29
Ultimately, the Cop28 outcome is deeply unfair, putting an equal burden on rich and lower income countries, requiring no additional action or finance from those that have caused the climate crisis even as the global south bears the spiralling costs of a warming planet.
Cop29 in Azerbaijan is set to agree a new global target on climate finance. Already we know that rich counties want to avoid doing their fair share.
Instead of actually providing grants, they’ll try to claim that loans should count as climate finance, that their own corporations’ activities should count as climate finance, and that their purchasing of carbon offsets should also count.
All of that will not only undercut real finance outcomes, but will deepen rich countries’ neo-colonial grip on the global south, exploiting and exporting yet more profit, under a climate mask.
But if we – all of us – are to have a chance of a safe future, we need the richest countries to move beyond narrowly defined set of self-interests at climate talks, and provide the real finance that can put us on a path for real cooperation and global climate action.
There is much to do to change the terrain of what is possible. But we need to work together to get the public and the politicians on board with the idea that if we want to save our planet from self-destruction, we may actually need to cover the costs.
Teresa Anderson is Action Aid’s global lead on climate justice
The post We have to fix unfairness: Ten takeaways from Cop28 appeared first on Climate Home News.
An Lambrechts is a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International with extensive experience in biodiversity-related multilateral negotiations. She is the head of the Greenpeace delegation at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17 happening in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 2022, COP15 delivered the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. With COP17 starting in Yerevan, we are now halfway to the deadline, and according to the first Global Review of progress, countries are not on track to meet the biodiversity targets, and implementation must accelerate fast.
One of the main findings of the Global Review is that funding falls far short of the scale needed to halt and reverse nature loss. But the crisis facing the world’s biodiversity is not an absolute scarcity of capital – it is a profound public policy distortion.
The global economy currently spends roughly $30 destroying nature for every single dollar invested in its protection. According to a report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a staggering $2.4 trillion is spent in public subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture and water use, while global investment in biodiversity conservation and restoration stands at a mere $220 billion.
Countries urged to ramp up “insufficient” nature policies at COP17
Yet, discussions about how to close the biodiversity finance gap continue to claim that salvation lies in mobilising private capital, scaling offsets and “derisking” investments in nature. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of ecological stewardship and of the global financial architecture.
Biodiversity conservation is not a speculative investment portfolio – it is the foundation of human survival. The health of our planet is a non-monetisable, non-excludable public good. Expecting profit-seeking private capital to protect nature perpetuates the structural drivers of ecosystem destruction in the first place.
But if private market mechanisms cannot save biodiversity, where will the necessary public resources come from?
Money going to the wrong places
The answer lies in recovering the vast public wealth currently drained by cross-border tax abuse, financial secrecy and corporate impunity. Finance and environment ministers meeting in Yerevan must give a strong political signal that, to avert ecological breakdown, countries need to take swift action to reform global tax rules, eliminate harmful public subsidies and cancel unsustainable sovereign debts for the public revenues to end up where they belong.
Extractive sectors such as industrial agriculture, fishing, timber and mining continue business-as-usual, often heavily subsidised by public treasuries, while voluntary carbon and biodiversity offset markets pose a serious risk to nature conservation. Offset schemes have delivered only a negligible fraction of the funding needed to preserve ecosystems, allowing industries to continue with their destructive business-as-usual practices.
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In advanced economies, public funding often actively undermines biodiversity. In Europe, over €5.3 billion in public subsidies is funnelled annually into intensive forest biomass harvesting under renewable energy directives, degrading primary forest ecosystems and undermining long-term climate resilience. Pleading with private investors to fill a “finance gap” while pouring billions into ecological destruction is an exercise in futility.
Developing countries struggle with debt burden
For developing countries, reliance on private finance is further compounded by a crushing sovereign debt crisis. In 2024, public debt in developing economies reached record levels, with net interest payments alone absorbing $921 billion. A record 61 developing countries now spend more than 10% of government revenue on foreign debt service, with many climate-vulnerable nations spending twice as much servicing external debt as they receive in climate and biodiversity finance combined.
This burden acts as a structural driver of ecosystem destruction. Under pressure from external creditors and international financial institutions to avoid default and secure foreign exchange, governments are routinely forced into austerity measures and pushed to expand raw commodity exports into pristine biomes.
Comment: World Bank and IMF should lead the financial system in responding to the climate crisis
The current negotiations for a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNFCITC) also offer a way forward. An estimated $492 billion in tax revenue is lost every year to offshore tax havens. Multinational corporations account for around $348 billion of this total by shifting profits away from the countries where real economic extraction and environmental degradation occur.
In the mining sector alone, developing nations lose tens of billions annually to corporate tax dodging. Furthermore, international financial secrecy shields environmental criminals, with illicit financial flows from illegal logging draining between $51 billion and $152 billion annually.
At COP17, leaders must seize the opportunity to build a bridge between the two conventions and enhance cooperation. Governments must put the world on a firm path to securing predictable, sufficient, sovereign public finance for biodiversity conservation. It’s the only path to a restorative, rights-based future for people and the planet.
The post Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity appeared first on Climate Home News.
Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity
Climate Change
Greenpeace delivers 47 metre-long petition with half a million signatures to Woodside HQ following major gas protest
Greenpeace delivers 47 metre-long petition with half a million signatures to Woodside HQ following major gas protest
PERTH, Monday 19 October 2026 — Dozens of Perth community members delivered a giant petition, signed by almost half a million people, to Woodside’s corporate headquarters this morning, calling on the government to save Scott Reef from Woodside’s reckless Browse gas proposal.
Dressed in sea creature costumes and hats, supporters carried one of Australia’s biggest environmental petitions to Woodside’s headquarters, and a local choir performed a ‘Scott Reef’ rendition of Angie McMahon’s iconic cover of ‘Reckless’ by Australian Crawl.
On the sidelines of the Perth Global Citizen Now event, it comes following a two day-long protest at Woodside’s Scarborough gas platform that saw activists scale and occupy the Floating Production Unit calling to “Stop Woodside’s Dirty Gas” and “Save Scott Reef”. The activists were taken from the platform by police helicopter on Sunday afternoon.
David Ritter, CEO at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Less than a day after two Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists were arrested for their peaceful protest at Woodside’s Scarborough gas platform to save Scott Reef, we are here again with another message to Woodside: half a million of us do not want your dirty gas at Scott Reef.
“Community pressure on Woodside is rising. Today we are here to show Woodside that they can’t ignore half a million people who want Scott Reef protected, not turned into an industrialised gas zone.
“Woodside can’t be trusted with our oceans. Woodside’s plans to drill up to 57 toxic wells at Scott Reef, Australia’s largest oceanic reef, putting endangered pygmy blue whales at risk, and jeopardising a nesting ground for unique green sea turtles.
“We Australians love our oceans and this is an opportunity for our governments to do the right thing, to reject Woodside’s reckless drilling plans, and save Scott Reef.”
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Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or Emma Sangalli on +61 431 513 465
Climate Change
Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists in police custody after two-day protest against Woodside’s Browse gas project at Scott Reef
PERTH, Sunday 18 October 2026 — Two Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists are in police custody after occupying a gas platform at Woodside’s Scarborough gas project, in peaceful protest of the fossil fuel corporation’s plans to drill for oil and gas at Scott Reef.
NEW footage and photos of the peaceful protest available here and on Instagram
The activists used specialised climbing equipment to scale and attach themselves to a Floating Production Unit (FPU), a key piece of gas processing infrastructure at the Scarborough gas field over 200km off the coast of Exmouth, at around 05:45am AWST on Saturday and proceeded to occupy the platform for two days, displaying banners reading “Stop Woodside’s Dirty Gas. Save Scott Reef.”
Special police forces landed a helicopter on the FPU at around 11:30am AWST. The activists safely removed themselves from their equipment before being taken into police custody around 1:00pm AWST. At the time of writing, no charges have been laid.
David Ritter, CEO at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “It takes guts and conviction to do what our activists have done, peacefully protesting Woodside’s reckless gas plans at Scott Reef.
“Woodside’s plans to drill up to 57 toxic wells at Scott Reef are outrageous. If allowed to go ahead Woodside would turn Scott Reef, Australia’s largest oceanic reef, home to nesting green sea turtles and elusive pygmy blue whales, into an industrial gas zone. Around half a million people have called on our governments to stop Woodside and to save Scott Reef.
“Our activists are highly trained and experienced in these activities. West Australia has a proud history of peaceful, democratic protest at sea, to protect our oceans from environmental threats. From whaling in Albany in the seventies, to Woodside’s threat to Scott Reef today, there’s more than fifty years of history, of Greenpeace taking action off WA’s coast to protect the places we love.
“Peaceful protest has long been part of what has given us so many of the things that are great about Australia and is part of the fabric of our democracy and our national identity.”
“The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to a healthy democracy. From Australia to the Arctic and the Amazon, Greenpeace has been peacefully protesting for more than 50 years to expose the biggest environmental threats around the world. We will not be silenced by corporations like Woodside who actively try to stop everyday people from speaking out against their reckless plans.
“Woodside’s reckless proposal to drill at Scott Reef is an unacceptable risk to Scott Reef and to the climate, which our government should emphatically reject.”
Speaking from the Rainbow Warrior, Captain of the Rainbow Warrior Hettie Geenen, said:
“It felt powerful watching from the Rainbow Warrior as these brave activists scaled Woodside’s enormous and imposing gas infrastructure, which has no place at Scott Reef. We are all out here because we feel an urge to act, in the face of Woodside’s grave threat to Scott Reef and to our climate. Now we ask for the Australian government to act too, and reject Woodside’s reckless Browse project.
“Just before this peaceful protest, the Rainbow Warrior sailed to Scott Reef, where our whole crew got to witness the magic of an untouched, healthy reef ecosystem full of marine life. It was my second time visiting Scott Reef with the Rainbow Warrior. When you see Scott Reef up close and witness its magic first hand, it is impossible not to feel driven to try and protect it.”
The activists sailed to Scarborough on the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace’s flagship vessel, which is in the region campaigning to protect Australia’s oceans, including Scott Reef.
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Media contact
Greenpeace Australia Pacific media team in Perth on +61 406 231 892 or +61 407 581 404 or email media.au@greenpeace.org
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