The year 2023 saw the coronation at Westminster Abbey of a new king, the mugshot of a former US president and the rebranding of a social media platform to a single letter.
But behind the biggest stories of the year, thousands of studies detailing new research also made the headlines. And climate change and energy were among the topics that received the most attention.
Each year, Altmetric tracks how often research papers from academic journals are mentioned in online news articles as well as on blogs and social media platforms. It then gives each paper a score according to the attention it receives.
Using Altmetric data for 2023, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate- or energy-related papers that were published the previous year.
(The list focuses on peer-reviewed research papers only – commentaries or other papers that are not formally peer-reviewed are not included.)
The infographic above shows which papers made it into the top 10, while the article includes analysis of the full list of 25, including the diversity of their authors and which journals feature most frequently.
The list covers research into the climate projections of a major oil company, the human cost of global warming and the catastrophic failure of breeding penguins – as well as the curious case of the high-scoring paper that received almost no news coverage at all.
Antarctic ice shelves
The most talked-about journal papers of 2023 are again dominated by research relating to Covid-19, continuing the pattern seen in recent years.
For example, the highest-scoring paper of any published in 2023 is a review into the effectiveness of measures to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, such as Covid, swine flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars).
The study’s Altmetric score of 25,730 puts it almost 10,000 points ahead of the second-placed paper, which is also about Covid.
But the top-scoring paper relating to climate is not far behind, landing fourth in the overall list with a score of 13,886.
The study, “Change in Antarctic ice shelf area from 2009 to 2019”, gains the highest score for any climate paper in any of Carbon Brief’s annual reviews by some distance – the previous highest was 7,803 in 2022.
(For Carbon Brief’s previous Altmetric articles, see the links for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.)
The study, published in the Cryosphere, uses satellite observations to produce a dataset of changes in the “calving front” – that is, where icebergs break off – and area of the ice shelves that surround Antarctica between 2009 and 2019. It shows that, overall, the area of Antarctic ice shelves has grown by around 5,300 square kilometres (km2) since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area.
Specifically, ice-shelf area has decreased on the Antarctic Peninsula (by 6,693km2) and in west Antarctica (by 5,563km2), and increased in east Antarctica (by 3,532km2) and on the large Ross and Ronne-Filchner ice shelves (by 14,028km2), the paper says.
The map from the study below shows the growth (blue) and retreat (red) of ice shelves around Antarctica, where the size of the circles indicates the scale of the change from 2009 to 2019.
While the high scores of climate-related papers in previous years have primarily been driven by news coverage, this paper appears in just seven news stories.
As study author Prof Anna Hogg from the University of Leeds explains to Carbon Brief:
“Somewhat unusually, we didn’t put out a press release for the paper as we assumed the scientific community that needed the dataset would make use of it naturally.”
Instead, the paper’s high Altmetric score is principally a result of a huge number of mentions on Twitter – more than 63,000 posts from around 48,000 accounts. (Altmetric includes weightings in its scoring system, so news articles (with a weighting of eight) are deemed to have more impact than tweets (0.25).)
A closer look suggests that the paper has been widely quoted by the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent climate sceptics in an attempt to push back on concerns around climate change and the loss of Antarctic ice. These posts have then been widely retweeted by other accounts.
To see the paper “being used as evidence to suggest that climate change isn’t happening” was a “real surprise”, says Hogg, because the paper “doesn’t make any such statement”.
Specifically, the gains the study identifies in ice-shelf area in east Antarctica do not detract from the risks of retreating ice shelves on other parts of the continent, says Hogg:
“The decrease in ice shelf area in west Antarctica is particularly important as this ice shelf area actively ‘buttresses’ the flow of ice from the ice sheet behind it, which through ice dynamic processes is one of the reasons why west Antarctica is contributing significantly to present-day sea level rise.”
Indeed, the seventh most-talked about paper in 2023 (see below) is a Nature Climate Change study warning that accelerated melt of west Antarctica’s ice shelves is now locked in, even for the most ambitious emissions reduction scenarios. The authors provide this stark conclusion:
“These results suggest that mitigation of greenhouse gases now has limited power to prevent ocean warming that could lead to the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet.”
The misleading way the study has been used by some climate-sceptic social media accounts has been “incredibly challenging”, says Hogg, with the authors unable “to reply to every incorrect tweet” about their work. However, they did find “a fair number” of responses from other accounts “saying that they had read the paper and it didn’t provide evidence against climate change”.
This perhaps shows “open access doing its job”, says Hogg, as the paper was published in an open-access journal and so is freely available for anyone to read. In another high-scoring statistic, the full paper has now been viewed more than 150,000 times on the journal’s website.
ExxonMobil
Landing in second place with an Altmetric score of 8,686 is the review paper, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections”. Published in Science, the study analyses the global warming projections documented and modelled by scientists at the oil major ExxonMobil between 1977 and 2003.
(There is a higher-scoring paper, “The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory”, in the journal BioScience, but it is a “special report” and was not formally peer reviewed.)
The results indicate that “in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully”, the paper says, adding:
“ExxonMobil’s average projected warming was 0.20C ±0.04C per decade, which is, within uncertainty, the same as that of independent academic and government projections published between 1970 and 2007.”
The findings reveal that ExxonMobil “knew as much as academic and government scientists knew” about global warming decades ago. But, the paper adds, “whereas those scientists worked to communicate what they knew, ExxonMobil worked to deny it”.
The study was covered by 823 news stories by 555 outlets, including BBC News, the Associated Press, CNN, Vice, CNBC and Inside Climate News. It was also included in 48 blog posts and more than 13,000 tweets. It is the 12th most talked-about paper on any topic in 2023.
Extreme heat
In third place is the Nature Medicine paper, “Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022”, with a score of 7,821. The study finds that more than 60,000 deaths in the summer of 2022 – Europe’s hottest season on record – were linked to the heat.
Across 35 countries, the highest numbers of heat-related deaths occurred in Italy (18,010 deaths), Spain (11,324) and Germany (8,173), the study says. It also finds that the “burden of heat-related mortality was higher among women”, with 56% more heat-related deaths in women than men, relative to population.
The study was picked up in 943 news stories from more than 650 outlets – the largest number of any paper in the top 25. It was picked up by outlets across Europe, including Sky News and ITV News in the UK, Agence France-Presse in France and Der Spiegel in Germany. Carbon Brief also covered the article in detail.
The widespread coverage was likely to be in part because Europe was experiencing a heatwave dubbed “Cerberus” when the paper was published in July.
Lead author Dr Joan Ballester Claramunt from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health tells Carbon Brief that the paper also “received so much attention from the media because society is increasingly aware of the health risks of environmental factors, and particularly in a context of rapidly warming temperatures”.
Rest of the top 10
In fourth place is, “Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”, which was published in Nature Communications.
The study uses statistical techniques to detect early warning signs of a shutdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of the major current systems in the world’s oceans that plays a crucial role in regulating climate.
While assessments using climate model simulations typically suggest that AMOC is “unlikely” to pass a tipping point within the 21st century, the study says a collapse could occur “around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions”.
(Another paper that also uses observation-based early warning signals to assess the stability of AMOC featured in second place in Carbon Brief’s leaderboard for 2021.)
The paper’s Altmetric score of 6,216 reflects its widespread news coverage, covering 672 stories from more than 500 outlets, including the Washington Post, Politico, El País, CNN and Der Spiegel.
The papers in fifth and ninth place both set out frameworks for assessing “safe” boundaries for the Earth to be a habitable place for humans.
In fifth place with a score of 5,411 is the Science Advances paper, “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”. Providing the latest assessment of the boundaries that were first established in 2009, the paper warns that “Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity”.
The ninth-placed paper, “Safe and just Earth system boundaries”, shares a number of the same authors and sets out to quantify limits for “climate, the biosphere, water and nutrient cycles and aerosols at global and subglobal scales”. When the paper was published in May, Carbon Brief reported on the mixed reaction the paper received from other scientists, including concerns that a “self-selected group of scientists” were defining the “safe space” for the planet.
In sixth place is the Science paper, “Global glacier change in the 21st century: Every increase in temperature matters”, which reveals a “strong linear relationship between global mean temperature increase and glacier mass loss”.
The study projects that glaciers outside of Antarctica and Greenland will lose between 26% and 41% of their collective mass by 2100, relative to 2015, under warming of 1.5C to 4C, respectively. Such a loss would cause 49-83% of glaciers to disappear and see 90-154mm added to global sea levels, the study says.
In seventh place is the Nature Climate Change paper, “Unavoidable future increase in West Antarctic ice-shelf melting over the 21st century”, as mentioned above. The findings, the authors say, present a “sobering outlook” for ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea.
The paper made an appearance in the Science round of Carbon Brief’s annual quiz.
The eighth-placed paper is, Quantifying the human cost of global warming, published in Nature Sustainability. It quantifies this cost in terms of the number of people left outside the “climate niche” in which human civilisation has flourished for centuries.
The study shows that climate change has already put around 9% of people outside this niche, and that, by end-of-century, current policies leading to around 2.7C global warming could leave 22-39% of people outside the niche as well.
Finally, rounding out the top 10 is, “Climate extremes likely to drive land mammal extinction during next supercontinent assembly”, in Nature Geoscience.
The study looks at the prospects for humans and other mammals on Earth based on first-ever supercomputer climate modelling of the distant future. The knock-on impacts of all Earth’s continents eventually converging to form the supercontinent “Pangea Ultima” would see huge amounts of CO2 released into the air through volcanic eruptions, it says.
The resulting global temperatures of up to 75C would, as a headline in the i newspaper put it, “one day wipe out humanity – but not for another 250m years”.
Elsewhere in the top 25
The rest of the top 25 includes a mix of research, including a paper on the impacts of El Niño on economic growth, a study on the environmental impacts of different types of diets and analysis of the amount of global warming still “in the pipeline” by former Nasa scientist Dr James Hansen.
In 14th place is the Nature paper, “Assessing the size and uncertainty of remaining carbon budgets”, which presents an updated estimate of the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5C and 2C.
In a 2022 Carbon Brief guest post, some of the study authors present a similar analysis, concluding that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C could be just 260bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) – the equivalent of around six years of emissions. They add:
“Cutting global CO2 emissions to zero by 2050, in line with limiting warming to 1.5C, would require them to fall by about 1.4GtCO2 every year, comparable to the drop in 2020 as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns around the world, but this time driven by a long-term, structural change of the economy.
“This highlights that the scale of the challenge is immense, no matter the precise figure of the rapidly shrinking carbon budget.”
Antarctic sea ice made headlines around the world both in 2022 and 2023, by setting two consecutive years of record low sea ice extent. In August 2023, researchers published a sobering study in Communications Earth and Environment under the title, “Record low 2022 Antarctic sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins”.
The study finds that melting ice led to widespread “breeding failure” across Antarctic emperor penguin colonies and received widespread media attention. It has been mentioned in 537 news articles, generating headlines such as, “Thousands of penguins die in Antarctic ice breakup”, from BBC News and, “Thousands of penguin chicks killed by early sea ice breakup, study says”, in the Washington Post.
The Guardian, New Scientist and Daily Telegraph were among the other publications that reported on the study. This surge of attention pushed the paper to 15th in the Carbon Brief ranking, with an Altmetric score of 3,551.
Meanwhile, the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change slipped down the rankings this year. After three years in the Carbon Brief’s top 10, this year’s report lands in 20th place with an Altmetric score of 3,191.
The report is an epic annual publication, which reviews vast swathes of literature and has more than 100 authors this year. This year’s report introduced some key new indicators of the links between climate change and human health. It was also the first to include projections on how the indicators might worsen in a warmer world.
The report finds that loss of labour due to heat exposure resulted in a $863bn loss of “potential income” in 2022. The agriculture sector was hit the hardest by the loss of labour, accounting for 82% of losses in least developed countries, the authors add.
Carbon Brief’s coverage of the report highlights this loss of income due to heat stress. The graph below shows effective income losses in 2022 due to heat stress in agriculture (blue) and other sectors (red), as a percentage of GDP, by continent.
One spot below the Lancet report is a Geophysical Research Letters study which warns that climate change is making air turbulence stronger and more frequent. The findings, which were picked up in more than 500 news articles, have worrying implications for aircraft passengers.
Back in 2017, study author Dr Paul Williams wrote a Carbon Brief guest post warning that “the most severe [type of turbulence] – the kind that can launch passengers out of their seats and cause serious injuries – is set to become twice or even three times as common by the latter half of the century”. And a recent Carbon Brief guest post on the fastest jet stream winds – known as “jet streaks” – also forecasts an increase in clear-air turbulence for aircraft passengers.
And in 24th place is the Nature paper, “Glacial lake outburst floods threaten millions globally”, with an Altmetric of 2,991. The study warns that 15 million people globally are exposed to impacts of potential “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). (For more on GLOFs, see Carbon Brief’s guest post from 2020, which explains how lakes formed by melting glaciers around the world have increased in size by 50% over the past 30 years.)
Top journals
This year there is a clear winner for the journal with the most papers featuring in Carbon Brief’s top 25: Science takes top spot with five papers.
Following Science are the three journals of Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications and the Lancet, each with two papers in the top 25.
For the rest of the top 25, the remaining 14 journals appear once each.
All the final scores for 2023 can be found in this spreadsheet.
Diversity of the top 25
The top 25 climate papers of 2023 cover a huge range of topics and scope. However, despite the variety in the climate research the papers present, analysis of their authors reveals a distinct lack of diversity.
In total, the top 25 climate papers of 2023 have more than 440 authors. Carbon Brief recorded the gender and country of affiliation for each of these authors. (The methodology used was developed by Carbon Brief for analysis presented in a special 2021 series on climate justice.)
The analysis reveals that the authors of the climate papers most featured in the media in 2023 are predominantly men from the global north.
The chart below shows the institutional affiliations of all authors in this analysis, broken down by continent – Europe, North America, Oceania, Asia, South America and Africa.
The analysis shows that nine out of every 10 authors are affiliated with institutions from the global north – defined as North America, Europe and Oceania. Meanwhile, only six authors are from Africa and South America.
Further data analysis shows that there are also inequalities within continents. The map below shows the percentage of authors from each country in the analysis, where dark blue indicates a higher percentage. Countries that are not represented by any authors in the analysis are shown in white.
The top-ranking countries on this map are the UK and the US, which together account for almost half of all authors in this analysis (25% and 18%, respectively).
More than half of all researchers from the global south are from China – which accounts for around 6% of all researchers in the analysis.
Meanwhile, only one-third of authors from the top 25 climate papers of 2022 are women. Similarly, only seven of the 25 papers have a female lead author.
The plot below shows the number of male (purple) and female (orange) authors in this analysis from each continent.
The full spreadsheet showing the results of this data analysis can be found here. For more on the biases in climate publishing, see Carbon Brief’s article on the lack of diversity in climate-science research.
The post Analysis: The climate papers most featured in the media in 2023 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The climate papers most featured in the media in 2023
With the International Court of Justice’s landmark advisory opinion on climate change hot off the press this July, hopes were high it could be used as a diplomatic lever for stronger climate action at COP30 in Brazil. But it proved a difficult tool to wield in a tense atmosphere.
The advisory opinion (AO) from the world’s top court – which determined that all states have obligations to protect the climate system from significant harm – has already been woven into new climate litigation and existing legal cases, and judges are starting to reference it in their rulings.
The Mexican community of El Bosque in Tabasco even managed to use it as leverage in recent negotiations with the central government over its latest national climate plan (NDC).
Yet, while some countries wanted the ICJ’s non-binding conclusions to feature in the main political decision approved at November’s climate COP in the Amazon city of Belém, the lack of a coordinated strategic push meant that did not happen, legal experts said.
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Monaco, Mexico, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) all called for the ICJ’s decision – and two other climate advisory opinions from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea – to be recognised during various COP30 presidency consultations.
But Jennifer Bansard, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin team leader, told journalists at COP30 that these requests were “at very generic levels” and did not go into the courts’ actionable findings.
“Deep, deep, deep red line”
The closest the ICJ advisory opinion came to being mentioned in a formal text was during a review of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (WIM). This is key as experts believe the decision has particularly significant implications for the new loss and damage fund.
During these discussions, the Independent Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Nations (AILAC) said the AO provides “an informed legal foundation” for advancing work on loss and damage. They pointed to “the need for comprehensive assessment and health protection” for vulnerable groups and “forms of reparation” This was supported by Vanuatu, which led the diplomatic work resulting in the ICJ opinion.
But Saudi Arabia, representing the Arab Group, responded that the ICJ’s final outcome is “non-binding” and “does not represent parties’ views” even though it participated in the process. Negotiations, it added, are a “party-driven process based on consensus, and not litigation”.
According to a source in the room, the Arab Group described the inclusion of the ICJ AO anywhere in the WIM document as a “deep, deep, deep red line”. “If you insist on discussing it, we might as well just suspend this session to not waste each other’s time,” said Saudi Arabia’s negotiator. The AO is not mentioned in the final agreed WIM text.
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Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation and strategic advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said the group was particularly concerned about the ICJ’s reference to the status of a state as developed or developing as “not static”.
“They feared that formally recognising the opinion would open the door to limitless legal liability for fossil fuel production,” he explained.
Left out of the COP30 cover decision
In addition, the AO’s recognition of a “just and fast transition in line with best available science” was mentioned by Fiji, for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), at an inaugural meeting on the Just Transition Work Programme. AILAC, Egypt and the UK also raised it during just transition negotiations, while Malawi used it to try to frame transition finance as a legal necessity.
Some states had expected the cover decision to recognise the AO in some form, but text drawn up by Brazil’s COP presidency did not include relevant wording.
The lack of references came despite the fact that the UN asked the ICJ for the advisory opinion unanimously and 96 countries spoke at the hearings.
Data visualisation developed by law professor Margaret Young and designers Dan Parker and Stanislav Roudavski.
Singh said the COP30 battle lines were drawn so sharply on the ICJ opinion because it validates the claims of vulnerable countries for climate justice, while historical and large polluters wanted “to avoid acknowledging any legal framework that implies liability”.
But, he added, while pushing back strongly against it, developed countries “neither championed nor explicitly opposed it in open plenary to avoid negative optics”.
The ICJ’s recognition that COP decisions may have legal effects could also make negotiators more wary of what they agree to.
In the closing COP30 plenary, Palau for AOSIS noted the ICJ’s clear assertion of 1.5C as the legal temperature limit. Yet the final Mutirao decision explicitly reiterates the Paris Agreement’s language of “pursuing efforts” to reach that level, while retaining the original goal of “well below 2°C”.
No coordinated push to champion the AO
Harj Narulla, a barrister specialising in climate litigation and counsel for the Solomon Islands, argued the COP30 decision “undermined” the ICJ’s conclusions. But barring a few nations like Saudi Arabia, he saw the overall outcome as a “failure of capacity and coordination, rather than a principled opposition to using the AO”.
Insiders said government negotiating teams remain too separate from their legal teams, and the former were not properly briefed on how the AO could be used in practice.
The leadership expected from climate-vulnerable countries, particularly the island nations that had advocated for the AO in the first place, also seems to have been absent. A briefing by Ed King and Lindsey Smith, who work on international climate strategy for the Global Strategic Communications Council, described AOSIS’s showing at COP30 in particular as “insipid”.
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Ralph Regenvanu, minister of climate change of Vanuatu and a key architect of the AO campaign, mentioned it several times in public, including at Cambodia’s announcement that it would formally support a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. But his focus seemed to be on pursuing a new UN resolution recognising the ICJ’s findings.
Neither AOSIS nor Regenvanu responded to requests for comment.
Influencing the wider narrative
Nonetheless, Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa who has followed the climate talks for many years, believes the AO is “starting to influence the wider narrative around responsibility and liability”.
“Though it did not make the ‘waves’ in the formal text that many hoped for, it was clearly the ‘undercurrent’ beneath many streams of negotiation,” agreed Singh.
Nikki Reisch, climate and energy programme director at the Center for International Environmental Law, an organisation that supports the youth activists who sparked the AO process, said the opinion also supports “the need to reform the UNFCCC to make it fit for purpose”. That includes preventing fossil fuel industry influence and allowing majority voting so that a handful of countries cannot block climate action.
Eyes on Colombia fossil fuel transition conference
In 2026, the opinion may start to play a stronger role on the global stage, including at an international conference on a just transition away from fossil fuels co-hosted by Colombia and The Netherlands next April.
The Fossil Fuel Treaty initiative says that gathering will align with the AO, “which confirmed that states have a legal obligation to protect the climate, including by addressing fossil fuel production, licensing and subsidies”.
Colombia seeks to speed up a “just” fossil fuel phase-out with first global conference
Experts, meanwhile, expect more domestic lawsuits underpinned by the advisory opinion aimed at pushing countries to raise their ambition on cutting emissions and say inter-state litigation cannot be ruled out.
“COP30 in Belém is by no means the last word on the ICJ AO or the climate duties it confirms,” Reisch said.
A version of this article was originally published in The Wave.
The post Why the ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate change took a backseat at COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Why the ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate change took a backseat at COP30
After holding stable for two years, China’s carbon emissions may climb back up as the construction of new fossil fuel power plants accelerates and recent policy changes cloud the outlook for clean energy, a new report warned.
The world’s biggest carbon polluter is expected to keep total emissions flat in 2025 despite rising energy demand – a sign that clean power may, for the first time, fully offset the growth in electricity consumption, the analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) showed.
But the Finland-based research group cautioned that a “concerning” policy environment for the next few years increased the risk of an emissions rebound. It added that China was also set to miss its key target for cutting carbon intensity – CO2 emissions per unit of gross domestic product – this year, meaning steeper reductions will be needed to hit its headline 2030 climate goal of slashing carbon intensity by 65%.
Belinda Schäpe, China policy analyst at CREA, said it was unclear how strongly committed China remained to its targets, despite leaders’ assertions that the government always makes good on its climate promises.
“All of this uncertainty raises a lot of questions around where emissions are going,” Schäpe told Climate Home News. “At the moment, it’s very finely balanced. They are just about flat but could well go up or down again based on the decisions that the government will make.”
New pricing model for renewables
Record solar energy installations and strong growth in wind power capacity have increased the share of non-fossil fuel electricity this year, with emissions from the power sector set to decline for the first time since 2016, the report said. But that progress has been partially countered by the rapidly growing use of coal for the production of plastics and other chemical products, meaning overall emissions are expected to remain stable.
At the same time, experts have warned that China’s new pricing system for solar and wind projects risks slowing the clean energy boom. Under the new policy introduced last June, developers of new solar and wind power plants need to secure contracts with provincial authorities through competitive auctions, instead of being guaranteed a fixed price.
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Schäpe said prices had been “very, very low” in some of the auctions so far. “Of course, that’s great for consumers, but it’s really bad for project developers because they don’t want to go ahead and invest in new projects facing the risk of no returns,” she said.
Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) cut its forecast for China’s 2025-2030 renewables growth by 5% due to the changes in the pricing model. The watchdog’s head Fatih Birol said the profitability of renewables projects – especially solar and wind – was expected to decline between 10% and 15% with the new policy.
Coal power boom continues
Coal power plants, on the other hand, are protected from this market-based system, relying instead on long-term power purchase agreements that lock in prices, Schäpe said, describing it as “unfair competition”.
China’s rapidly expanding coal power fleet is adding to the concerns. In 2025, the country has added the largest amount of coal-fired capacity since 2015, while progress on retiring older plants remains very slow, CREA’s report highlighted.
This runs contrary to a pledge made by President Xi Jinping in 2021 to “strictly control” new coal power projects. That commitment was omitted from Beijing’s updated national climate plan (NDC) submitted in late October ahead of COP30.
In its new NDC, China set an absolute emission reduction target for the first time, committing to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by between 7% and 10% by 2035 from unspecified “peak levels”.
Focus on next five-year plan
Schäpe said that the absence of a base year could create an incentive to raise emissions and “storm the peak” – pushing them as high as possible to make future reduction targets easier to meet.
She said this put the focus on China’s 2030 carbon intensity target, adding that if Beijing was still serious about meeting it, emissions would need to peak “around now”.
China targeted an 18% reduction between 2021 and 2025, but it is projected to achieve about 12% by the end of this year, CREA’s report said. If that is confirmed, China will then need to significantly ramp up efforts to cut carbon intensity in the next five years to achieve its headline climate commitment for 2030.
Analysts expect China’s new five-year plan – the blueprint for its economic development – to provide more clarity on the country’s energy policies next year.
“We will see how the government is going to balance these two opposing forces: the outgoing coal industry interests and the new cleantech sectors that are meant to become the driver of future growth,” Schäpe said.
The post China risks emissions rebound amid policy shifts, experts warn appeared first on Climate Home News.
China risks emissions rebound amid policy shifts, experts warn
Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran are among countries opposed to discussing options for agreeing on global norms to protect people and the planet from the impacts of mining, processing and recycling minerals needed for the clean energy transition, documents seen by Climate Home News show.
Environment officials gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, ahead of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) next week are discussing a resolution by Colombia and Oman that aims to make mineral supply chains more transparent and sustainable at a time when growing demand is spurring resource-rich countries to court investment and boost production.
They have proposed the creation of an expert group to identify a range of binding and non-binding international instruments “for coordinated global action on the environmentally sound management of minerals and metals” from mining to recycling. The group would also look at how to handle mining waste and provide guidelines on recovering minerals from tailings responsibly.
Those instruments could range from a global minerals treaty to a non-binding declaration or set of standards on best practice. The resolution is co-sponsored by Armenia, Ecuador and Zambia.
Colombia has previously called for an international minerals treaty to define rules and standards that would make mineral value chains more transparent and accountable.
China, US on the sidelines for now
But Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia, which is emerging as a major player in mineral supply chains, oppose launching a process that could lead to an international agreement on the issue, according to several sources and documents shared with Climate Home News.
Countries will vote on the proposal next week, during the seventh session of UNEA, the world’s top decision-making body for environmental matters.
China, which dominates the processing of 19 of 20 minerals deemed critical for the global economy, has so far stayed quiet about the proposal, but analysts said Beijing was unlikely to support any supranational initiative to govern mineral supply chains.
China’s priority is “to remain sovereign throughout the process of how these minerals are produced and traded” and to promote cooperation “on its own terms”, said Christian-Géraud Neema, an expert on Chinese engagement in Africa’s transition minerals sector and the Africa editor of the China-Global South Project.
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The US, which has been trying to counter China’s critical minerals clout, is not attending UNEA, while the EU – another major global market – is understood to broadly support the proposal.
A spokesperson for the US State Department said: “Our team in Nairobi is focused on the US-Kenya relationship and delivering results for the American people, rather than litigating endless woke climate change theater.” The European Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Several other countries have raised objections. Chile, a top producer of copper and lithium, wants to narrow the focus of the resolution to voluntary cooperation on illegal mining.
In Africa, most countries back the Colombia-Oman proposal, but Uganda and Egypt oppose it, said Nsama Chikwanka, director of Publish What You Pay Zambia, an NGO focused on resource sovereignty.
“Race to the bottom”
Campaigners say countries should unite at UNEA to pave the way for talks on the issue, with some saying binding rules should be the eventual target.
“The investments that are coming to countries like Zambia are from multinational enterprises and national laws are inadequate to ensure that robust standards are applied. So we need something that is internationally binding,” Chikwanka said.
This comes after opposition from China and Russia thwarted a push by mineral-rich developing countries as well as the UK, the European Union and Australia to reflect the environmental and social risks associated with mining-related activities in the outcome of COP30.
“What we are seeing at the moment is a huge race to the bottom of environmental standards at the same time as the impacts of mining are already immense,” said Johanna Sydow, a resource policy expert who heads the international environmental policy division of Germany’s Heinrich-Böll Foundation.
“It is the chance now to create a long-lasting space for governments to work together on this issue,” she told Climate Home News.
The race to extract minerals like lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt and rare earths needed to manufacture batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and other advanced digital and military technologies has led to growing cases of human rights violations, social conflict and environmental harms around the world.
In Indonesia, nickel mining is fuelling deforestation, in Zambia, copper mining has led to catastrophic leaks of mining waste and in Latin America, Indigenous Peoples say the rush to extract lithium for batteries is trampling their rights.
In 2024 alone, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre recorded 156 allegations of human rights abuses linked to the mining of energy transition minerals.
Counter-proposals favour non-binding measures
Opposed to global discussions about possible binding tools to govern mineral supply chains, Saudi Arabia and Iran have instead suggested the creation of a technical platform that could review the impacts of mineral extraction in developing countries, explore options for support to address them, and advance voluntary cooperation on environmentally-sound practices.
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Saudi Arabia is already cooperating with mineral-rich nations on its own terms by investing billions of dollars in transition minerals abroad in a bid to become a global mineral processing hub that could become a counterweight to China’s dominance.
China, meanwhile, threw its weight behind a G20 agreement on a voluntary and non-binding Critical Minerals Framework intended to ensure that mineral resources “become a driver of prosperity and sustainable development”.
At the G20 leaders’ summit in South Africa last month, which was snubbed by the US, China also launched an economic and trade initiative on minerals, aiming to secure access to minerals in exchange for cooperation on technology, capacity-building and financing.
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At least 19 countries, including Cambodia, Nigeria, Myanmar and Zimbabwe, alongside the UN Industrial Development Organisation, have reportedly joined the initiative.
For Neema, of the China-Global South Project, this is an explicit attempt to counter resource diplomacy by the US, which is offering developing countries security and military support in exchange for minerals.
“Producing countries in the Global South are more likely to be attracted by this approach because they know that the likelihood of Chinese companies and banks showing up is quite high,” he said.
The post Proposal for global minerals deal meets opposition as China looks away appeared first on Climate Home News.
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