For the first time in the history of COP climate summits, the US – the world’s largest historical emitter – has not sent a delegation to the talks.
Back in January, newly inaugurated US president Donald Trump signed a letter to the UN to trigger the start of a US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement for a second time.
Although this process is not yet complete, the White House confirmed earlier this month that no “high-level officials” would be attending COP30 in Belém, Brazil.
The US joins Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino as the only countries not registering a delegation for the summit, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis of the provisional lists of delegates published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Despite these absences, more than 56,000 delegates have signed up to COP30, provisionally placing the summit as one of the largest in COP history.
This is despite the run-up to the negotiations being dogged by reports of a shortage of beds and “sky-high” accommodation costs.
Brazil even offered free cabins on cruise ships moored in Belém to delegations from low-income nations who were otherwise unable to attend.
According to the provisional figures, 193 countries, plus the European Union, have registered a delegation for the summit.
Unsurprisingly, the largest delegation comes from COP30 hosts Brazil, with 3,805 people registered.
This is followed, in order, by China, Nigeria, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This year also sees the largest number of “virtual” delegates, with more than 5,000 people signed up to attend the talks online.
Party delegations
With 56,118 delegates registered, COP30 is provisionally the second-largest COP in history, behind only COP28 in Dubai, which was attended by more than 80,000 people.
This is the provisional total, based on the delegates that have registered to be at the summit in person. At recent COPs, the final total is at least 10,000 lower, which would drop COP30 down to the fourth largest.
(The UNFCCC releases the final figures – based on participants collecting a physical badge at the venue – after the summit has closed.)
The chart below shows how the provisional figures for COP30 compare to the final totals in past COPs – going back to COP1 in Berlin in 1995.
The participant lists provided by the UNFCCC are divided between the different types of groups and organisations attending the summit. The largest group at COP30 is for delegates representing parties. These are nation states, plus the European Union, that have ratified the convention and play a full part in negotiations.
This group adds up to 11,519 delegates – the fourth largest behind the past three COPs.
(In keeping with recent COPs, the UNFCCC has published spreadsheets that name every single person that has registered for the summit – excluding support staff. Previously, COPs have typically included thousands of “overflow” participants in which countries and UN agencies could nominate delegates without their names appearing on their official lists.)
For consistency with Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous COPs, the above chart includes overflow delegates as a single group. However, the participant lists do divide the overflow delegates between parties and observer groups. Including the overflow numbers approximately doubles the total for party representatives to 23,509.
US no-show
Overall, of the 198 parties to the UNFCCC, 194 have registered delegations for COP30.
The most notable absentee is the US, which has been present at every other COP in history – even throughout Donald Trump’s first presidency.
On average, the US sends a delegation of around 100 people, typically making it one of the larger groups at the talks.
The absent parties – Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino – have been more sporadic attendees at past COPs.
Despite reports of a “logistical nightmare” hosting a COP summit in the Amazon, there has been no drop-off in the number of countries registering delegations for COP30.
In addition to hotel rooms and rental properties in Belém, beds have been made available on cruise ships, in converted shipping containers and in motels that Reuters primly described as being typically “aimed at amorous couples”.
Reports suggested that many developing nations considered scaling back their presence at COP30, with smaller delegations or attendees only coming for a few days.
While the average party delegation size of 59 (excluding overflows) is lower than the previous two COPs, it is similar to the average in COP26 in Glasgow and COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The map and table below present the delegation size – split between party and overflow badges – for all the countries registered for COP30. The darker the shading, the more delegates that country has signed up. Use the search box to find the data for a specific party.
The largest delegation comes from host country Brazil, with 3,805 people registered. China (789) and Nigeria (749) follow with the second- and third-largest, respectively.
Making up the rest of the top 10 are Indonesia (566), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (556), France (530), Chad (528), Australia (494), Tanzania (465) and Japan (461).
The UK comes someway down the list with a delegation of 210.
(It is worth noting that some countries – such as Brazil – allocate some of their party badges to NGOs, which can artificially inflate the size of their official delegation.)
The smallest delegation is the one person registered to represent Nicaragua. There are five delegations of two people (North Korea, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Slovakia).
Ahead of COP30, Latvia's climate minister, told Reuters that the country had asked if its negotiators could dial into the summit by video call. However, Latvia does not appear to have registered any delegates to attend virtually.
In total, 40 parties registered virtual delegates. Party totals are all in single figures apart from the Philippines (31), Costa Rica (21) and Turkey (16).
Changing gender balance
The UNFCCC’s participant lists typically provide a title – such as Mr, Ms, Sr or Sra – for each registered delegate. In the past, this has allowed Carbon Brief to work out the balance of men to women in the delegations that each country has sent to a COP.
(This analysis always carries the caveat that the titles are designated by UNFCCC and not by Carbon Brief. In addition, Carbon Brief recognises that gender is not best categorised using a binary “man” or “woman” label and appreciates that the UNFCCC’s lists may not be wholly accurate.)
Overall, the COP30 provisional list suggests an average gender balance of party delegations of 57% men to 43% women.
As the chart below shows, this makes COP29 the most balanced COP in history. For consistency, the COP28, COP29 and COP30 figures only include those on party badges, not overflow ones.
(Note: Since COP28 last year, the UNFCCC has also used titles that do not indicate gender – such as Dr, Prof, Ambassador and Honourable. Therefore, for this analysis, these non-gendered titles – which make up 1% of all the people at COP30, for example – have not been included.)
There are four party delegations this year that are all men – Tuvalu (three delegates), Niger (three), North Korea (two) and Nicaragua (one) – and one that is all women (Nauru, with five delegates).
The full list of COP30 party delegation sizes can be found here.
(For previous COPs, see Carbon Brief’s delegate analysis for COP21, COP23, COP24, COP25, COP26, COP27, COP28, COP29)
The post Analysis: Which countries have sent the most delegates to COP30? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Which countries have sent the most delegates to COP30?
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.