African countries at COP30 say a lack of climate finance to speed the transition to renewable energy means they should be given more leeway to use their fossil fuel resources to benefit their people.
As support grows at the climate talks in Belém for a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, championed by Brazil’s president and environment minister, leaders and officials from Nigeria, Ghana and Mozambique have said African nations should be allowed to keep using their fossil fuel resources to develop their economies.
Africa receives less than 2% of international clean energy investment, and badly needs funding to help increase access to power supplies, which some 600 million people still lack, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Carlos Lopes, COP30’s special envoy for Africa, told Climate Home News that while the priority is still for Africa to transition as quickly as possible to renewables, “if the funding is not coming, Africans have to be pragmatic and will have to use any possibilities to enhance their development”.
“Africans are basically trapped not because of infrastructure but because of the financing schemes that are not allowing them to move as fast as they should wish for the new form of economy,” Lopes said, adding that too much global finance was going into fossil fuels rather than renewables.
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What do African countries want from COP30?
At the UN climate summit, African negotiators are seeking more “debt-free” financing that would allow them to implement climate solutions – from adaptation to just transition -
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The IEA’s “Financing Electricity Access in Africa” 2025 report found that less than $2.5 billion was committed for new electricity access connections in sub-Saharan Africa in 2023. Meanwhile, financing has been concentrated in a small number of countries including Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, and has been skewed towards urban areas.
African leaders call for “room” for fossil fuels
Several African countries have lowered ambition for cutting emissions in their latest national climate plans (known as NDCs), citing a lack of funding that has hampered climate action, a message that was echoed during the leaders’ summit in Belém last week.
Ghanaian minister Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah said “conversations [on phasing out] must be approached with strategic care and profound understanding”.
“To deny Africa the strategic use of these [natural] resources is to deny our right to develop, to light our homes and to power industries,” Buah, Ghana’s lands minister and acting environment minister, told the leaders’ summit.
Mozambique President Daniel Chapo, meanwhile, supported the idea of a just transition, but one that gives Africa the “economic and political room” to use its natural resources to benefit its people.
Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, had already made clear in its NDC that it planned to boost the use of natural gas as a so-called transition fuel.
Vice President Kashim Shettima told the leaders’ meeting that Nigeria would use natural gas “to stabilise power and drive industrial growth” while promoting clean energy by expanding solar and off-grid solutions for rural electrification.
A just transition made for Africa
The world agreed for the first time to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels” two years ago at COP28 in Dubai, but a plan to implement that pledge at the global level has yet to be sketched out.
If countries decide to work on one, it is likely that poor countries will ask for rich nations to set earlier deadlines to reduce their production and use of coal, oil and gas.
Nafi Quarshie, Africa director for the non-profit Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), said any fossil fuel phase-out targets in a roadmap must be “concrete and time-bound”, and reflect different realities.
“Africa cannot be talking about phase-out when it has not phased in,” she told a press conference on Wednesday. “Africa’s pathway cannot mirror Europe’s or America’s. The transition in Africa must prioritise energy access, job creation, diversification and development, not just emissions reduction targets.”
Until the COP process delivers on its financial promises to Africa, the continent cannot be asked to abandon the fossil fuels that currently provide a huge chunk of government revenues in some economies “without credible, accessible, or predictable financial support to replace them,” Quarshie added.
The post Africa wants wiggle room on energy transition as funds fall short appeared first on Climate Home News.
Africa wants wiggle room on energy transition as funds fall short
A report from Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Springmount Advisory reveals the untapped green economic opportunity for Western Australia in a declining Asian gas market, which also offers a genuine solution for decarbonisation in Asia.
Is Western Australia clinging to a fading gas industry while a thriving green future passes it by? As major Asian trading partners rapidly pivot away from volatile gas imports toward cheap solar and battery storage, this report exposes a high-stakes choice: risk becoming stranded in an oversupplied fossil fuel market, or harness WA’s unmatched sun and wind to lead the global clean energy transition.
Summary
From Gas to Green: Building Western Australia’s Future State reveals that Western Australia (WA) faces a critical juncture as falling Asian gas demand, geopolitical gas supply volatility and accelerating renewable energy deployment undermine the long-term economic viability of gas exports. By harnessing its world-class wind and solar resources, the report demonstrates that WA can execute an orderly phase-out of gas and pioneer a green commodity export economy that could generate $987 billion in economic value by 2060, create 24,000 ongoing jobs, and drive a 9.6% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
Key Findings
- Gas demand is falling in Asia – WA can no longer rely on gas exports: Gas demand in core Asian markets fell in 2025 and is projected to continue to decline in 2026. Legislated energy plans in Japan, South Korea, and China now prioritise renewables and nuclear over gas.
- Asia is increasing renewables, importing gas just gets in the way: Evidence from markets like Thailand suggests that gas imports are increasingly crowding out cheaper renewable energy investments and battery storage rather than displacing coal, locking in more emissions over time.
- Green commodities offer a real solution to decarbonise Asia – this is a major win for WA: With world-class renewables, WA can lead Australia’s green commodity exports, which by 2060 could be worth almost a trillion dollars ($987 billion) and support a genuine 9.6% reduction in global emissions.
Recommendations to WA government
Recommendation 1: Plan an orderly gas phase-out aligned with a trading partner pivot plan
Implement a managed, orderly phase-out of gas exports aligned with trading partners’ decarbonisation pathways, rather than waiting for demand to collapse, by:
- Developing and implementing a staged phase-out of gas facilities aligned with feedstock supply expiry or typical end of facility lifespans.
- Committing to no new gas development for gas expansion, including Browse and Kimberley fields.
- Developing new, reciprocal trade relationships with existing gas trade partners, structured to progressively replace gas exports with green commodities – integrated with recommendation 2.
Recommendation 2: Develop an integrated green commodity export strategy, positioning WA as a global green iron manufacturing hub
Establish an integrated green commodity export strategy that immediately prioritises green iron development, positioning WA as a global green iron manufacturing hub, by:
- Committing to green commodity export targets to give industry and investors a clear demand signal.
- Prioritising green iron as the lead sector within the broader green commodity strategy, given WA’s iron ore endowment and first-mover potential.
Recommendation 3: Reject false solutions such as carbon dumping (CCS) and blue hydrogen
Reject carbon dumping (also described as carbon capture and storage, or CCS) and blue hydrogen as viable decarbonisation technologies, and prioritise green hydrogen and proven renewables for clean energy and fuel production by:
- Excluding blue hydrogen projects (and CCS-dependent projects) from all government support programs.
- Requiring existing hydrogen-based production (including ammonia, methanol, synthetic fuels) to have clear, near-term transition timelines to switch to green hydrogen production.
What you can do
Together, we can push for a prosperous green future.
You can help by:
- Sending an email to Environment Minister Murray Watt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling on them to reject Browse.
- Sharing this story to help more Australians understand what’s at stake.
- Encouraging your friends and family to take action.
REPORT: “From Gas to Green” Building Western Australia’s Future State
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 so