Angola has scaled back its targets for reducing emissions in its new national climate plan, saying it chose “realism and implementability” over the Paris Agreement’s calls for governments to set progressively more ambitious goals.
The African oil-exporting country plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 11% by 2035 from a “business as usual” scenario. That compares to a 24% cut by 2025 in its previous Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), which used an earlier baseline year with far lower emissions.
Under the 2015 climate treaty, countries’ NDCs – which should be updated every five years, with the third round since the Paris pact due this year – are meant to represent a progression from the previous one and reflect the “highest possible ambition”.
Citing the country’s struggles to meet previous targets, Angola’s NDC said the level of ambition “must also take into account national circumstances, capabilities and the need for sustainable development, particularly in developing countries such as Angola”.
It said progress on different climate projects to date has been hampered by limited technical capacity, coordination gaps and a lack of financial and technological support, despite strong political will and policies.
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“The targets for the period … have been set to reflect the most realistic and feasible conditions for Angola,” the NDC added. “While the percentage targets are less ambitious than those in the previous NDC, they correspond to a greater absolute reduction” in greenhouse gas emissions, it noted.
At the same time, the country shifted the baseline used to measure future cuts to a far higher level than in its previous NDC, mainly due to upward revision of emissions from changes to land use. That makes the figures difficult to compare, but allows emissions to nearly double from estimated 2015 levels by 2035.
Climate finance gap
Many developing countries, like Angola, split their NDCs into two parts – one that they can achieve with their own domestic resources and an additional effort that depends on them receiving financial support from the international community.
Some NDCs specify the amount of money required to implement the so-called conditional part of their pledges.
Yet, while climate finance mobilised by rich governments and development banks for cutting emissions and adapting to climate change in developing countries rose to nearly $116 billion in 2022, this is far below estimated needs. Experts have also warned that overseas aid cuts could lead to a fall in funding from some donors.
With a 5% unconditional target for reducing emissions and a 6% conditional contribution, Angola estimates it will need about $412 billion to achieve the emissions-cutting goal. It plans to get $48 billion of that from domestic resources and the rest from international support.
The measures it is proposing to reach its 2035 targets include expanding renewable energy and reducing flaring in oil fields, as well as reforestation programmes and more efficient, less carbon-intensive solutions for industry.
“Reflection of realities”
For Angola, there is a further complication, however. Sub-Saharan Africa’s second-biggest crude oil exporter is in the process of graduating from the UN’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) category, and fears missing out on climate finance targeting the group of the world’s poorest nations as a result.
Despite the Southern African nation’s economic and social development gains, it is saddled with a heavy public debt that was equivalent to almost 70% of its gross domestic product last year.
The new NDC said Angola’s current financial resources were not compatible with the rising ambition set out in the Paris Agreement, adding that the situation could get worse due to the looming loss of certain benefits granted to LDCs such as public development aid.
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Giza Gaspar-Martins, a former Angolan climate negotiator who has served as chair of the Least Developed Countries Group in climate talks, said Angola’s updated NDC was simply a “reflection of realities”.
He said the plan includes what the country intends to achieve with domestic resources (unconditionally) and what it can achieve with additional international support (conditionally) and “whether it is a higher number or a lower number, it doesn’t matter, but it is a reflection of realities”.
But other climate experts said that while Angola’s move was understandable, it runs counter to the UN treaty.
Joanna Depledge, a research fellow at the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance at the University of Cambridge, said Angola’s move was against “the spirit of the Paris Agreement”, but added it should not be judged in the same way as rich countries backing away from their climate targets.
While she noted that – due to the wording used in the treaty – progressively higher targets are not legally binding, “the assumption was that countries must improve their ambition each time”.
In the past decade, countries have not done enough to increase emissions-cutting ambition to the level needed to get the world on a path to limit warming to 1.5C as they agreed to aim for in the Paris Agreement.
To keep the 1.5C goal within reach, countries must reduce emissions by at least 43% from 2019 levels by 2030 – but the last set of NDCs for that target year only represented a 7% reduction, according to a report by the World Resources Institute. It also noted that 23 of those NDCs would not have reduced emissions relative to the initial plan and 42 could not be compared due to insufficient information.
Short on ambition
Angola is not the only country to have submitted an updated NDC in the latest round that fails to raise ambition on climate action, according to researchers.
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Russia’s new NDC outlines plans to reduce emissions to 33%-35% below 1990 levels by 2035, a goal analysts at the Climate Action Tracker nonprofit said not only fails to reflect “highest ambition”, but marks no real increase at all.
And Turkey, which is bidding to host COP31, recently announced an NDC that would only control emissions rather than reduce them, putting its emissions on track to keep increasing by 2035.
China’s new NDC – while the first time it has set a goal for absolute emissions cuts – is also judged to be easily achievable based on its current performance, with analysts saying it could have offered more.
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Angola’s departure from the LDC category puts it in “a difficult context”, conceded Bill Hare, CEO of global climate science and policy institute Climate Analytics, but said weaker efforts by any country are bad news for the goal to limit global warming to 1.5C.
While the biggest emitters need to do more, “it’s also important that smaller emitters put forward the highest possible ambition,” Hare said, adding that development aid cuts and a fracturing of multilateralism since US President Donald Trump took office are affecting poorer countries in need of climate finance.
Without stronger 2030 and 2035 targets to reduce emissions by all countries, he warned that the chances of limiting warming to 1.5C or even 2C “will start to become very small, leading to massive adverse damages and consequences everywhere”.
The post Angola lowers climate ambition in blow to “spirit” of Paris Agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.
Angola lowers climate ambition in blow to “spirit” of Paris Agreement
SYDNEY, Monday 27 July 2026 — In response to an announcement that Woodside’s Browse to North West Shelf (Browse) Project was declared a State Significant Project by the WA Government, the following comments can be attributed to Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Hannah Schuch:
“The WA Government must not ignore the significant risks clearly associated with Woodside’s plans to drill for gas at the pristine Scott Reef — to endangered marine life, our oceans, and our climate — all of which are valued and relied upon by Western Australians.
“The WA Environmental Protection Authority has already found Woodside’s plans to drill at Scott Reef would have unacceptable impacts on the environment without considering the climate impacts of 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon pollution associated with this disastrous proposal.
“Woodside’s gas drilling plans, including seismic blasting and carbon dumping in the heart of a precious ecosystem, pose potentially fatal risks to pygmy blue whales and genetically unique green sea turtles, and could cause a catastrophic oil spill.
“If the WA and federal governments are concerned with the prosperity of WA, they must reject Woodside’s nature and climate-wrecking proposal to drill for gas at Scott Reef.”
—ENDS—
High res images and footage of Scott Reef can be found here.
For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact Emma Sangalli on 0431 513 465 or emma.sangalli@greenpeace.org
Cook Government must recognise risks posed by Woodside’s Scott Reef drilling plans
This summer has seen Europe suffer through a series of record-breaking heatwaves.
Amid widespread media coverage of the number of deaths and the influence of climate change, the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported on new research with the incorrect headline: “Heatwaves caused by fall in pollution.”
The article was shared on social media by Richard Tice – deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party – along with a number of prominent rightwing commentators.
Tice claimed that “net stupid zero is contributing to rising temperatures, not helping”, adding that “we have been gaslit and lied to”.
GB News followed up with its own article, incorrectly headlined: “Britain’s scorching heatwaves caused by falling pollution levels, researchers find.”
Scientists tell Carbon Brief that the framing of heatwaves being “caused” by declining air pollution is “wrong”.
While a drop in pollution has reduced the cooling impact it has had in the past, the scientists say, Europe’s summer heatwaves are primarily becoming more extreme “as a result of greenhouse-gas-induced warming”.
Another scientist adds that “any attempt” to link this research to net-zero policies is “simply wrong”.
Fast warming
The extensive reporting around Europe’s heatwaves in recent months has often mentioned that Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent.
The new study in question aims to unpack why Europe’s summer temperatures are rising more quickly than other regions of the northern hemisphere’s mid and high latitudes.
The research – published in Geophysical Research Letters – explores the role of air pollution and, specifically, how it affects circulation patterns in the atmosphere.
(The study focuses on long-term trends in European summers and does not include the very recent heatwaves.)
Human-caused emissions of aerosols – tiny, light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – have long acted to “mask” global warming. This is largely because they absorb or reflect incoming sunlight and influence the formation and brightness of clouds.
To understand how the climate of Europe – or any region – is changing, scientists need to take into account a whole range of factors, says Prof Bjørn Samset, a research professor at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research (CICERO), who was not involved in the work.
This includes “greenhouse gases, aerosols, land-use change, natural variability and how they all interact”, he says, adding:
“The effects of air pollution on circulation, which is the topic here, has long been difficult to pin down.”
As European countries improved their air quality through the second half of the 20th century, the cooling effect of aerosols has gradually been removed.
This can boost heatwaves in two ways – directly, by letting more sunlight reach the land surface and, indirectly, by influencing the jet stream.
Using hundreds of simulations from nine climate models, the new study finds that a decline in aerosols is resulting in more frequent “quasi-stationary Rossby waves”.
Rossby waves are huge meanders in the jet stream. Occasionally, they become slow-moving – or “quasi-stationary” – which allows weather systems to get stuck over one region, leading to prolonged heatwaves.
These circulation changes have contributed to Europe’s rapidly warming summers.
However, while Europe’s heatwaves are being influenced by declining aerosols, it is “wrong” to say they are being “caused” by them, says Prof Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich.
Fischer, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Heatwaves are caused by high-pressure systems and are now much more frequent and intense because they are happening in a climate that is much warmer than 100 years ago as a result of greenhouse-gas-induced warming.
“The paper shows that the greenhouse-gas-induced summer warming had been temporarily masked by air-polluting aerosols. The full extent for European summers only becomes visible now as the air-polluting aerosols have declined.”
Samset adds:
“Air pollution never causes or removes global warming, it only temporarily moderates it.”
Study lead author Dr Pedro Roldán‐Gómez, an associate researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre, is quoted in the Daily Telegraph saying that “most” of the “excess warming” in Europe, beyond that of comparable regions in the northern hemisphere, can be linked to declining aerosols.
But, earlier in the article, the newspaper interprets this as, simply, “most of the extra heat experienced in Britain and Europe” is down to air pollution.
GB News uses a similar phrasing, reporting that “much of the additional warming across Britain and western Europe since the 1980s is linked to the sharp decline in airborne particles known as aerosols”.
This is “misleading”, says Fischer, while Roldan-Gomez tells Carbon Brief that this is a “tricky point”, which “could lead to wrong interpretations if not properly explained”. He adds:
“The contribution of greenhouse gases is, in any case, the most important factor.”
Cleaner air
The Daily Telegraph’s article was seized upon by Reform’s Richard Tice to claim that “cleaner air” was causing higher temperatures, rather than CO2.
This continued his position – refuted by long-established climate science – that CO2 does not drive global warming.
Tice also claimed in his post that net-zero policies are “contributing to rising temperatures”. Tice appears to be linking declining air pollution to a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Samset points out that net-zero became a goal “decades later” than the cumulative efforts to reduce air pollution since the 1980s and that it is “simply wrong” to link it to the study.
“The scientific community will keep working to understand how greenhouse gas warming and air pollution interact,” he says, but “nothing we do will change the fact that the consequences of global warming are due to human-induced CO2 emissions”.
Fischer adds:
“Let us not forget that cleaning up air-polluting aerosols is highly desirable. According to the World Health Organisation, 7 million people still die prematurely every year due to air pollution.”
Clean air legislation
Finally, the Daily Telegraph article and the study itself both attribute Europe’s declining air pollution from the 1980s onwards to the Montreal Protocol.
This is a “glaring error”, Samset says, and it is “surprising that it wasn’t picked up” in the peer-review process for the study. He explains:
“The Montreal Protocol did not deal with air pollution. It dealt with ozone-depleting gases and has been an extremely successful multi-national effort against environmental damage. “
Clean air legislation was already in place in many European countries by the time the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987, says Samset.
In response, Roldán‐Gómez says that while the protocol did not target aerosols specifically, it “boosted the clean air policies”.
The post Factcheck: No, Europe’s heatwaves are not being ‘caused’ by declining air pollution appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe’s heatwaves are not being ‘caused’ by declining air pollution
Empowering women through greater access to finance could “strengthen” households’ resilience to “climate shocks”, according to a new study.
Published in Climate Risk Management, it analyses the impact of financial access on “women-headed households” in sub-Saharan Africa.
The study finds that where women had formal financial access – such as through owning a bank account – households were more able to withstand short-term shocks.
It adds that “climate shocks”, such as extreme weather events and the impacts of climate change, can cause economic crises, which destabilise communities and households.
However, the authors say that in order to protect households from long-term climate vulnerabilities – including “droughts, floods and sea-level rise” – financial access would need to be paired with wider efforts to tackle gender inequality.
They add that the findings could have important implications for policy in sub-Saharan Africa, where many countries and households are vulnerable to climate disasters.
Financial inclusion
The study highlights that entrenched gender disparities mean many women still have unequal access to financial services in sub-Saharan Africa
For example, women are still less likely to have their own bank accounts and instead are often dependent on male relatives for access to finance.
The number of women with access to an account in the region had risen to 52% as of 2024, according to data from World Bank Group.
However, as shown in the chart below, the gap between men and women has also increased, rising from just under 5 percentage points in 2011 to 12 in 2024.
Using survey data from Afrobarometer, the new study analyses 25,511 women-headed households across 37 sub-Saharan countries.
The authors use the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) framework to measure “financial inclusion”. This looks at factors such as having a bank account, owning a mobile phone and having internet access.
Francis Anaisie, a co-author on the study, tells Carbon Brief the researchers were motivated by the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Anaisie, an economist at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, says the study specifically looked at SDGs five and 13, on gender equality and addressing climate issues. He adds:
“Financial inclusion is one of the key policy tools for empowering women or for empowerment. But as to whether this actually translates into better climate outcomes for women is not known or is limited; this study seeks to address that gap.”
The study finds households with higher levels of financial access for women had higher levels of women’s empowerment, when this is defined as the ability to make choices and have control over economic and social outcomes.
This was checked by cross-comparing financial access against different measures of women’s empowerment, such as financial security, voting rights and connection to communities.
In particular, the study found that “financially included” women had greater political and economic empowerment, such as financial security and voting rights. On some measures of social empowerment, however, the link was weaker – financial access alone was not enough to erase cultural and social barriers to gender equality.
Women and climate change
It has been well documented that women are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than men.
Environmental shocks affect women disproportionately due to a range of factors. These include income disparities, higher rates of displacement and unequal access to land.
Financial inequality and barriers to economic resources, such as needing internet access to make digital payments, play a key role in climate vulnerability, says Tracy Kajumba. She is director for the Least Developed Countries initiative for Effective Adaptation and Resilience (LIFE-AR) interim secretariat at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
Kajumba, who was not involved in the study, explains to Carbon Brief:
“Women are on the front line doing farming, planting, harvesting and these things that are all impacted [by climate change]. If they don’t have the income to invest either in drought-resistant crops or water-saving technologies, it becomes difficult for households to adapt.”
Calculating climate resilience
The new study measures the impact of financial inclusion on women’s empowerment and, in turn, on climate resilience.
It evaluates a household’s ability to withstand and recover from “shocks and stressors” by using a UN Food and Agriculture Organization metric for “resilience index measurement and analysis” (RIMA).
For example, questionnaires are used to gather information about households in certain areas. The data is then used, together with key indicators, to quantify a household’s resilience to food insecurity, climate variability and economic crisis, amongst other risks.
The 25,511 households surveyed across sub-Saharan Africa were found to be relatively resilient overall and had a high capacity to bounce back from climate shocks. However, they had much lower ability to adapt, in order to build protective capacity in advance of extreme events.
In addition, the study finds that women’s financial empowerment had a positive impact on a household’s ability to “absorb” a climate shock, suggesting that financial access is critical for responding to climate change.
Increased empowerment through financial access enables women to make decisions about planting crops, to access credit in emergencies and to buy or sell food at a better price, the study notes.
For example, it says increased financial access and women’s empowerment help households to deal with the immediate consequences of an extreme weather event, such as a drought. This could be through building community mutual-support networks and by enabling access to savings, to keep the household running.
Anaisie says the study shows women’s empowerment has a significant impact on climate resilience. He tells Carbon Brief:
“If we include women in the financial system, in the case of any climate issue they can save, they can be independent, they can rely on investment to absorb these shocks. This empowerment will help them to be more resilient to climate shocks…We can make progress because SDG goals are all about inclusiveness. It’s all about inclusive growth.”
However, the study notes that financial access does not necessarily create long-term change, which would make the household less vulnerable to extreme weather in the first place.
The authors suggest that lasting structural and cultural change is important for bringing about long-term resilience. They say that policies to address gender inequalities would help bring this about.
They say such policies could include gender-sensitive agricultural credit schemes, subsidised climate insurance for women farmers in drought-prone regions, joint land-titling programmes and quotas for women in local climate-adaptation committees.
Such policies would have helped women impacted by recent severe floods in Ghana to protect their savings, Anaisie explains. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Women are engaged in economic activities, especially informal activities. They have resources and money, but when the flood came in, many women lost that. If they had access to insurance, this flood wouldn’t have cost them that much.
“So, if the government comes out with financial initiatives, training, civic education and gender-focused initiatives, leadership training, women will be empowered and this will translate into their resilience with regards to climate change.”
Addressing climate vulnerability in sub-Saharan Africa
The study could have policy implications for sub-Saharan Africa, a region particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The region faces increasingly extreme weather, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods, as well as food scarcity and threats to crops.
The study suggests that policies to address structural and cultural barriers to women’s financial autonomy could be a key way to build climate resilience across the region.
However, it recognises that even where financial access is expanded, gender norms and cultural constraints continue to shape women’s social empowerment. This, in turn, affects their ability to adapt to climate change in the long term.
Ultimately, addressing structural inequalities is needed to minimise climate vulnerability, says Kajumba. She adds that supporting adaptation with financial access can allow households to absorb shocks without falling into poverty – and to rebuild after climate impacts.
Kajumba says that supporting adaptation with women’s financial access can allow households to absorb shocks without falling into poverty – and to rebuild after climate impacts. She adds:
“When they are supported [with] microloans, savings and all that, you will see change in income, change in households, change in health and education for the children as well.”
However, Kajumba notes that structural inequalities still “amplify” women’s vulnerability to climate impacts and make it harder for them to exercise agency and leadership. She adds:
“The tools that are being used are not always favourable for women…When we look at women in leadership and participation, you cannot lead or you cannot participate unless you have some level of income.”
The post Access to finance ‘strengthens climate resilience’ among sub-Saharan women appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Access to finance ‘strengthens climate resilience’ among sub-Saharan women
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