With national climate plans through to 2035 due in the coming weeks, some governments are planning to use carbon offsets purchased from other countries to meet their new emissions-cutting goals. But early efforts by Japan to develop such credits highlight potential problems for the new Paris Agreement offsetting mechanism, which experts fear could unleash a fresh wave of greenwashing.
Bilateral agreements to transfer emission reductions from one country to another are taking off after rules were finalised at COP29 last November, with countries looking for new ways to fund climate action and achieve targets set out in their updated national plans.
But long before the climate summit in Baku, Japan had already spent over a decade setting up its international carbon offsetting mechanism modelled on Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement. Tokyo says the scheme will “contribute to the decarbonization of the world”, while providing a reservoir of credits that, in future, both Japan’s government and its companies can draw on to meet their climate goals.
But a Climate Home News analysis of Japan’s current projects – from forest protection to energy-efficient lighting in Southeast Asia – raises questions over the climate benefits and environmental integrity of some of the offsets.
In one of Cambodia’s most endangered ecosystems – the Prey Lang forest – Climate Home found that tree-cutting has soared since the start of Japan’s largest such project, whose offsets rely on deforestation falling. Meanwhile, across the developing world, Tokyo earns carbon credits by using public subsidies to fund emissions reductions by its corporate giants, including fast-fashion firm Uniqlo.
Booming trade
Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement allows countries to trade “mitigation outcomes”, such as carbon credits, directly through bilateral deals. Typically, a wealthy nation funds programmes in a developing country to cut pollution in exchange for units known as ITMOs. These can help governments meet their national climate targets or be used by companies to comply with carbon-offsetting schemes, such as CORSIA for airlines.
Activity under the mechanism has accelerated this year after governments ironed out some of its final details at COP29 in Baku. There are now over a hundred bilateral agreements between more than 60 countries, with many more signalling in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) their intention to draw on Article 6.2 to meet part of their emissions-reduction goals.
Yet, as the profile of bilateral offsets grows, observers are concerned that Article 6.2’s light-touch regulations and limited oversight will usher in a new wave of poor-quality offsets that will reduce emissions only on paper – as has been the case in the voluntary market before recent top-level efforts to improve integrity.
Agreed on the back of tumultuous negotiations, the framework for Article 6.2 gives countries near-total freedom. They can decide amongst themselves how emission reductions are calculated and which environmental or social safeguards to put in place.
‘Free-for-all’
“We have this nice bit of text saying that ITMOs should be real, verified and additional – but that doesn’t really mean anything as there is no system in place that guarantees that,” said Federica Dossi, an Article 6 expert at Brussels-based group Carbon Market Watch. “It’s a free-for-all”.
After approving the terms of trading between themselves, countries are required to submit to the UN climate change body only limited information, which is reviewed by a technical team in what observers have described as a “box-ticking exercise”.
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The UN’s expert panel can admonish countries if their disclosure around bilateral offsetting is incomplete, but it is forbidden from casting judgement on the quality of the cooperative activities.
Unlike in the nascent UN carbon crediting mechanism under Article 6.4 or the voluntary carbon market, there is no way to prevent countries from generating, or using, offsets that have little or no integrity.
“There are essentially no enforcement measures,” said Injy Johnstone, a research fellow in Net-Zero Aligned Offsetting at the University of Oxford. “This is one of the biggest gaps.”
Japan leads development
Few other countries have been at the forefront of the development of Article 6.2 like Japan. Long before the gavel came down approving the framework, Tokyo had already spent years working on its mechanism for bilateral offsetting: the Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM).
“Countries that had already agreed partnerships would have never agreed to more stringent rules that could have invalidated their work up until then,” said Johnstone, who has closely followed the development of Article 6.2 governance and co-authored guidance on how countries can engage responsibly with the mechanism.
According to analysis by the UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre, more than three-quarters of the 162 existing Article 6.2 projects fall under Japan’s Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM), a scheme through which the Japanese government earns carbon credits by partnering with developing nations on emissions-reduction initiatives.
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The JCM is effectively a forerunner to the bilateral offsetting mechanism introduced by Article 6.2. Tokyo set it up in 2013 – before the Paris Agreement came into being – after refusing to renew its support for the Kyoto Protocol amid growing frustration with its carbon-offsetting tool, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
“Japan thought [the CDM] was too heavily regulated,” Yuri Onodera of Friends of the Earth Japan explained to Climate Home.
Thirty-one countries have signed up to Japan’s scheme, with India being the latest – and largest – to join in August.
Additionality concerns
The JCM serves multiple purposes. When fully implemented, it will grant Japan a steady supply of credits that can either be counted by the government towards its international climate targets or used by companies to comply with carbon-pricing mechanisms.
But the JCM also directly supports Japan’s corporate giants both by providing ready-made markets for their low-carbon technologies or by subsiding their efforts to cut emissions overseas.
Fast Retailing, which runs an $80-billion clothing empire, has tapped the scheme to switch to more energy-efficient LED lights in its Uniqlo stores across Indonesia and Thailand with financial backing from the Japanese government.
Nearly a third of all JCM projects involve Japanese tech giants like Sharp or Panasonic installing solar panels in factories or shopping malls, which are often themselves run by subsidiaries of Japanese firms abroad.
Carbon market experts told Climate Home such projects would be regarded as low-integrity and possibly excluded from other carbon crediting mechanisms.
Renewable energy offsets last year failed to obtain a quality label from the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a leading oversight body. That’s because existing rules do not go far enough to prove that the projects need the funding generated by selling carbon credits – a concept known as “additionality”.
Under Article 6.2, countries are free to come up with their own definition of additionality – and, Onodera said, Japan applies a “very lax and vague” one.
The Japanese government is planning to use the offsets generated by some of these projects to achieve its international emission-cutting targets under the Paris Agreement.
In its latest nationally determined contribution (NDC), published in early 2025, Japan said it aimed to accumulate ITMOs equivalent to 100 million tonnes of CO2 by 2030. If those are all counted towards the country’s NDC, it means about 15% of Japan’s planned emission reductions by 2030 will be achieved by funding measures to cut pollution overseas rather than taking action at home. The share of carbon offsets is set to rise to 20% in 2040.
Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi warned that the NDC process risks turning into “an accounting trick” if those ITMOs fail to meet high-integrity standards. “You would see countries claim that they are achieving climate targets when, in the real world, their emissions continue rising or stay at the same level,” she said.
Protecting Prey Lang?
The Japanese government, however, will not be the only beneficiary of the JCM. Japanese companies will also be able to use credits generated under the mechanism, for example, to comply with the country’s carbon pricing system.
The biggest existing JCM project is funded by Mitsui, a Japanese conglomerate with significant fossil fuel interests, in Cambodia. It aims to protect the Prey Lang, a vital biodiversity hotspot and one of the largest remaining lowland evergreen forests in Southeast Asia.
Prey Lang plays a key role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and combating climate change. But the forest has been plagued by widespread logging to harvest luxury timber, expand rubber plantations and set up mining operations – something experts say often happens with the complicity of the Cambodian government.
In 2018, the Cambodian environment ministry and Mitsui partnered up on a REDD+ project in a portion of the forest with the support of American environmental NGO Conservation International. Their stated goal was to reduce deforestation by bolstering law enforcement and improving the living conditions of local communities.
But trees have disappeared at a rapid rate since the project began. Forest loss nearly tripled between 2017 and 2024, according to Climate Home analysis based on data from monitoring service Global Forest Watch. In that period, around 4,000 hectares of forest vanished – an area equal to 12 times the size of New York’s Central Park.
“Deforestation has dramatically reduced the forest cover in the REDD+ project and it is extremely serious,” a spokesperson for the Prey Lang Community Network, a group of mainly Indigenous communities living in and around the area, told Climate Home by email.
Pressure from Cambodian authorities
The community network has been carrying out its own patrols and monitoring illegal activity in the forest since 2004 – long before the REDD+ project started. “The only reason Prey Lang is still there is because of the Indigenous people,” said Ida Theilade, a professor at the University of Copenhagen who has researched Prey Lang extensively. “Their lifestyle is tied to the forest.”
Sony Oum, Cambodia country director at Conservation International, said the NGO works “directly with the target villages to ensure broad participation […] and to support local communities’ role in conservation”.
But, despite its extensive local knowledge, the community network said it had been excluded from participating in the REDD+ project. The developers “have instead collaborated with sub-national and national authorities, which still oppose the activities of grassroots groups”, its spokesperson told Climate Home.
Observers have accused the Cambodian government of accelerating a crackdown against environmentalists and reporters who have documented illegal activities in the Prey Lang.
Journalist Uk Mao, who had reported on logging in the wildlife sanctuary, was arrested and charged with incitement and defamation in a case condemned by civil society groups and the UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders. Mao denied all the charges and told Mongabay he is being targeted because of his work.
Cambodian authorities have faced accusations of fuelling the drivers of deforestation in Prey Lang by handing out mining concessions, turning a blind eye to illegal wood harvesting and sanctioning the construction of power transmission lines across the reserve, as reported by Mongabay.
Questions over carbon accounting
Richard Jeo, senior vice president and chief Asia-Pacific field officer at Conservation International, told Climate Home that Prey Lang is “a complex environment”, but “we are seeing progress”. He added that the REDD+ project “is helping to slow deforestation rates compared to nationally reported baselines”.
Carbon credits from so-called ‘avoided deforestation’ activities, like Prey Lang’s, are underpinned by predictions of how many trees would have been cut down without the project, as well as how much carbon dioxide would have been released into the atmosphere as a result.
That is known as the baseline against which the project’s performance is assessed. This system has come under intense scrutiny over the last few years, with critics arguing that flawed methodologies for setting baselines compromise the integrity of carbon offsets.
In Prey Lang, project developers followed a rulebook drawn up by Conservation International and Mitsui themselves and approved by Japan’s JCM. It allowed them to derive the baseline from countrywide deforestation figures produced by the Cambodian government.
They also predicted which portions of the forest would be cut down. This matters because specific types of vegetation – like evergreen or semi-evergreen forest – can store significantly more carbon than others, such as deciduous trees that shed their leaves seasonally. Depending on where forest loss happens, the carbon savings – and the number of offsets issued – can vary significantly.
The project’s baseline anticipated that, in Prey Lang, the overwhelming majority of deforestation would happen in the carbon-rich evergreen and semi-evergreen portions of the forest. That scenario seemed to be confirmed in 2020 when, as part of an internal exercise, the team behind the project looked at satellite images to detect deforestation hotspots in the area and guide its patrols. That analysis found that, in the first two years of the project, close to 90% of forest loss had occurred in the evergreen and semi-evergreen areas.
But the first monitoring report required under the JCM before issuing carbon credits painted a completely different picture. Drawing on data from the Cambodian government, it recorded soaring forest loss overall. But it also reported that the evergreen portion was left untouched and the vast majority of the clearing happened in areas made up of deciduous vegetation and bamboo trees, which have lower or no capacity to absorb carbon and store it, respectively.
Despite rising deforestation in the Prey Lang, this meant project developers could still show that CO2 emissions caused by tree-cutting were not as high as the baseline scenario had anticipated. In December 2023, the JCM’s committee, made up of representatives from the Japanese and Cambodian governments, approved the findings and authorised the release of a first batch of over 600,000 credits.
University of Copenhagen researcher Theilade told Climate Home there appears to be “a lot of creative accounting” going on. “Can you actually say any carbon credits should be generated? I am not sure when you look at the deforestation happening,” she added.
Greenwashing risk
A spokesperson for Mitsui told Climate Home the firm has “helped provide resources that have led to a reduction in deforestation rates” against the project’s official baseline scenario, as well as giving funding for the development of a system that will enable community-led conservation in the future. “Meaningful forest protection takes time, and we will provide support to Prey Lang for as long as possible,” the statement added.
Conservation International’s Jeo said “protecting Prey Lang requires long-term, reliable funding” and carbon financing represents “a needed, viable mechanism” for achieving that.
“Lasting progress comes from doing the work, learning and adapting as data and methods evolve — that’s what this project is doing,” he added.
However, the lack of clarity over the methods used to measure avoided emissions reductions in this flagship programme, as revealed by Climate Home, suggests that governments will need to pay close attention to how they justify offsets under Article 6.2.
Given the power it affords to individual countries, Oxford University’s Johnstone said its integrity rests on them acting responsibly and building on the limited safeguards available.
Otherwise, she warned, the risk is that this mechanism “could enable greenwashing on a scale that we have never seen before”.
The post As governments bet on carbon trading, Japan’s early scheme spotlights pitfalls appeared first on Climate Home News.
As governments bet on carbon trading, Japan’s early scheme spotlights pitfalls
Antarctic sea ice has recorded its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 48 years ago, new data reveals.
Provisional data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that Antarctic sea ice hit its annual winter peak on 14 September, with an extent of 17.59m square kilometres (km2).
The organisation notes that the data is still preliminary, adding that “large fluctuations in extent are typical of Antarctic sea ice near the seasonal maximum”.
One expert tells Carbon Brief that it is “concerning to see these low values persisting”, but says that scientists need more time to determine whether this represents a “structural shift” in Antarctic sea ice extent.
Meanwhile, at the Earth’s other pole, Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum on 12 September, ranking as the joint-10th lowest in the satellite record.
The NSIDC notes that the last 20 years have seen the lowest 20 Arctic sea ice extents in the satellite record.
Antarctic peak
Dr Lettie Roach, a polar climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, tells Carbon Brief that this year’s Antarctic sea ice maximum was “well below average for the season”. She warns that, “after several decades of stable or increasing winter Antarctic sea ice conditions, it is concerning to see these low values persisting”.
She adds:
“Compared with the Arctic, it’s less clear how recent changes in Antarctic sea ice are attributable to human-caused warming vs natural variability. We need more years of observations to better understand whether this is truly a structural shift.”
Dr Clare Eayrs, a postdoctoral researcher at the Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI), tells Carbon Brief that, since recording a “near-average February minimum” extent, Antarctic sea ice has “returned to unusually low winter coverage”.
She notes that Antarctic sea ice extent in July and August this year were the fifth and fourth lowest on record, respectively, adding that “all five of the lowest July extents have occurred since 2022 and all four of the lowest August extents since 2023”.
The chart below shows Antarctic sea ice extent in 2025 (dark blue) and 2026 (red) so far. For comparison, the chart shows decadal averages (dotted lines) as well as 2023 (mid blue), the year of the smallest winter sea-ice maximum on record.
Eayrs tells Carbon Brief that the regional pattern of Antarctic sea ice cover “changed substantially during the growth season”.
For example, she says that “in April, the Bellingshausen Sea remained almost entirely ice-free, while the neighbouring Amundsen Sea had more ice than usual”.
However, by late August, changes in atmospheric pressure and wind meant that “the Bellingshausen deficit had largely recovered, while ice was unusually scarce in the Amundsen Sea and across much of East Antarctica”.
Arctic minimum
Meanwhile, the Arctic recorded its minimum summer sea ice extent on 12 September. At 4.60m km2, this year ties with 2025, 2010 and 2008 as the 10th-lowest sea ice extent on record.
The chart below shows Arctic sea ice extent in 2025 (dark blue) and 2026 (red) so far. For comparison, the chart shows decadal averages (dotted lines) as well as 2012 (mid blue), the year of the smallest summer sea-ice minimum on record.
Roach tells Carbon Brief that although this minimum is not “record setting”, it is still “lower than any sea ice minimum before 2007”. She adds:
“Human-caused climate change has reduced Arctic sea ice cover and thickness, so the region is fundamentally different compared to a few decades ago.”
Scientists have been tracking Arctic sea ice thickness using a reanalysis produced called the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) since 1979.
In March 2026, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) terminated a global dataset of air pressure that scientists relied upon to produce PIOMAS, forcing both datasets to stop publishing updates.
The PIOMAS website says it will take “considerable effort and time” to find alternative data to use in their reanalysis. It adds that “we don’t yet have a good sense if that’s possible with available funds and if so, when we will be able to resume production of a new PIOMAS timeseries”.
Roach also notes that August saw record-breaking heat sweep across much of the world, explaining that high temperatures “extended into Arctic coastal regions, close to regions with substantial sea ice loss – particularly the Barents-Kara and East Siberian seas”.
Dr Zack Labe, a scientist at Climate Central, tells Carbon Brief that the absence of a new record does not mean that ice cover is becoming more “resilient”. He says:
“Local weather patterns across the Arctic play a really important role in year-to-year sea-ice extent, even as the long-term trend is clearly downward.”
Labe tells Carbon Brief that weather in the Arctic this summer was “influenced mainly by lower pressure toward the central Arctic, which brought cloudier and cooler conditions that limited surface melt and delayed the start of the melt season”.
He explains that this “was most obvious across parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, where the melt season didn’t really kick off until after early July, which was more than two weeks later than normal”.
In contrast, he says, the Atlantic side of the Arctic “had a much more extreme summer”, with sea ice in the Barents Sea recording its “earliest melt-out on record”.
This was partly due to “unusually warm air and ocean temperatures”, Labe says. He notes, for example, that parts of western Siberia saw unusually persistent temperatures more than 5C above the 1981-2010 average for much of the summer, which extended out over the Kara Sea and contributed to substantial ice melt in this area”.
Labe tells Carbon Brief that, going forward, scientists need “more data and observations of other sea-ice metrics, like ice thickness, which may give us better insight into the overall condition of the ice pack, especially during years like 2026 when it is very fragmented”.
(In March 2026, Arctic sea ice reached its peak extent for this winter, clocking in as the joint-smallest in a satellite record going back almost half a century.)
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The post ‘Concerning’ low sea ice persists as Antarctic hits third-lowest winter peak appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Concerning’ low sea ice persists as Antarctic hits third-lowest winter peak
Participants at COP31 in Antalya will have a “duty” not to interfere in Türkiye’s internal affairs under the country’s hosting deal with the UN, reviving a clause dropped for last year’s climate summit in Brazil that human rights groups warn could put activists at risk.
Türkiye has faced growing criticism from human rights groups over the jailing of opposition figures, journalists and activists and imposed a blanket protest ban around July’s summit of the NATO military alliance in Ankara.
The contested provision is included in the binding agreement between the UN climate secretariat and the Turkish government that sets out responsibilities over logistical arrangements and details participants’ rights and obligations.
The document, signed in June but only made public on Wednesday, gives accredited COP31 attendees immunity from legal action over what they say, write or do in connection with the conference. Climate Home News understands that this safeguard can be applied to what takes place both inside and, in certain circumstances, outside of the UN-controlled COP “Blue Zone”. For the first time, this protection explicitly continues after the summit ends.
But participants enjoying these “privileges and immunities” also have a duty to respect Türkiye’s laws and regulations and not to interfere in its internal affairs, the agreement states. Rights groups fear its wide-ranging formulation could be used to discourage criticism of the host government.
Climate Home News understands that whether an action is covered by the immunity or infringes on the host’s internal affairs would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with close coordination between the country’s authorities and the UN climate change body.
A separate provision states that immunity shall be waived where the UN believes it would “impede the course of justice”.
‘Chilling effect’
Those same provisions featured in the host country agreements for COP28 in the United Arab Emirates and COP29 in Azerbaijan, both regarded as authoritarian regimes, before being dropped for COP30 in Brazil.
Ann Harrison, climate justice policy advisor at Amnesty International, said it is “extremely disappointing” that the COP31 agreement re-introduced clauses that could “hinder the ability of human rights defenders and civil society organisations to conduct their work safely”.
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She added the provisions could have a “wider chilling effect” on rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, given concerns over the human rights situation in Türkiye, including laws that “have shrunk civic space” and their “abusive” implementation by authorities.
The UN climate change body declined to comment.
Rights groups have documented blanket protest bans, unlawful use of force by the police and prosecutions of journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers across Türkiye in the last year.
Arrests and protest bans
Last July, environmental activist Esra Işık was sentenced to more than two years for “resisting” a public official over what Amnesty International described as a peaceful protest against an urgent expropriation order linked to the expansion of coal mining in south-western Türkiye. She is appealing the conviction.
Ahead of a summit of the NATO alliance in the capital Ankara in July, authorities put in place a 13-day blanket ban on demonstrations, citing “national security”, and arrested over 200 people. Human Rights Watch said the crackdown showed Türkiye’s “ruthless intolerance of freedom of speech and assembly”.
Earlier this month, Turkish police detained dozens of people as part of what rights groups described as the government’s widening crackdown on LGBTQ+ activists and venues.
Questioned by media as to how he would guarantee the right to protest at COP31, Kurum said earlier in September that his team would “try to meet” any request they receive from civil society and give them “a free space to express themselves”.
“Don’t worry, thinking you will not be able to voice your opinions or really share your thoughts,” he said in an attempt to reassure campaigners, adding that he had put former deputy environment minister Mehmet Birpinar in charge of liaising with civil society.
Civic space needed
Camilla Pollera, human rights and climate change campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said meaningful participation at COP31 is fundamental to the legitimacy of climate action.
“At a climate summit, civil society participation necessarily includes being present, speaking out, scrutinising governments’ decisions and climate policies, and advocating for communities most vulnerable to climate change,” she added.
At last year’s COP30 summit, thousands of Indigenous people and climate activists peacefully marched through the Amazonian city of Belém in the first major demonstration outside the UN venue in four years. Smaller-scale demonstrations were largely confined to the “Blue Zone” at COP27 in Egypt, COP28 in the UAE and COP29 in Azerbaijan.
In two other separate incidents in Belém, members of the Munduruku tribe blocked access to the conference centre for hours, demanding an end to development projects in their ancestral land, and protesters stormed through the venue clashing with UN security officials.
The COP31 hosting agreement keeps some of the safeguards previously hailed by civil society groups. The government and the UN secretariat commit to upholding “the fundamental human rights” of all participants in the agreement’s preamble.
Under the deal, Türkiye also needs to ensure that security personnel follow “the highest ethical and professional standards and are expected to behave with integrity and respect”.
The post COP31 attendees told not to interfere in Türkiye’s “internal affairs” appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 attendees told not to interfere in Türkiye’s “internal affairs”
As rising seas submerge growing swathes of land, countries that lose territory should still keep their national boundaries, sovereign rights and UN membership, according to a political declaration adopted at the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday.
The declaration, which was championed by climate-vulnerable small island states, affirms “the presumption in favour of continued statehood” in the face of sea level rise fuelled by climate change, and urges countries to work together to assist communities affected by encroaching oceans.
Speaking at a high-level UN meeting to address the existential threats posed by sea level rise, Cabo Verde’s Prime Minister Francisco Carvalho, one of the initiative’s co-facilitators along with Australia, said the adoption of the text by consensus sends “a message of hope”.
“This declaration has a very special meaning. For us, sea level rise is neither a distant threat nor a theoretical concern,” he said, adding that rising seas put at risk key infrastructure, water resources and economic growth in small island states.
In the Pacific, sea levels have risen at twice the global rate, dramatically increasing coastal flooding events from two to 20 a year in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and from zero to 102 events per year in American Samoa, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Surangel Whipps Jr., president of the Pacific island of Palau, said the summit in New York represents a “moment of international solidarity”, and highlighted that small island states will remain permanent members of the UN.
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Declaration recognises statehood
An advisory opinion by the world’s top maritime court, the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), first upheld in 2024 that countries do not have to shrink their maritime borders even if they lose land territory due to sea level rise. This was reiterated by the International Court of Justice in last year’s landmark ruling on the climate obligations of states.
The new declaration endorsed by all governments at the UN General Assembly stresses that sea level rise “is not a distant scenario but a real and lived experience for many”, and notes that international law must be implemented in global responses to rising seas.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the “milestone must now be translated into action”, adding that the declaration should encourage an “ongoing dialogue” at the “highest possible level” leading to practical outcomes. Pacific islands have proposed an international treaty on sea level rise that would provide more legal certainty.
“Those on the frontlines must be front and centre on every decision. We cannot allow countries and cultures to vanish beneath the waves,” he said. “The SOS has gone out. The world must answer.”
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
Goodwin Friday, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, said measures to protect vulnerable states will require adequate finance. “Investing in resilience now is more cost-effective than paying the far greater price for loss and damage later,” he added.
Championed by Australia’s COP31 co-presidency, Pacific islands have sought to put adaptation to sea level rise and ocean conservation at the top of the political agenda by inviting world leaders to attend the pre-COP31 summit co-hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu in October.
Tuvalu will also host the second global fossil fuel phase-out summit in April 2027, after around 60 governments met this year in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss ending their dependence on coal, oil and gas.
“Our coastlines, our reefs and our communities are living with the consequences of fossil fuel dependence every day, and our people have earned the right to help shape the way forward,” Lynda Tabuya, Fiji’s climate minister, said in a statement announcing details of the conference.
Ocean monitoring gets a boost in New York
Amid record-breaking marine heat and seas rising at unprecedented speed, governments in New York announced new commitments to protect the world’s ocean, as efforts to bolster marine ecosystems and coastal communities rise up the political agenda.
On Wednesday, the EU and Canada announced more funding for a new Europe-led ocean monitoring system called OceanEye, launched in the aftermath of a failed attempt by the Trump administration to dismantle the largest existing network of deep-sea observatories.
During an event at UN headquarters in New York, EU President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced around $163 million in new funding for the initiative, with the EU pledging €92 million ($105m) on top of existing seed funding and Canada pledging C$82 million (US$58m) over five years.
According to an EU statement, while OceanEye will collaborate with the Global Ocean Observing System, that network “remains vulnerable to financial shortfalls and geopolitical disruptions”. A group of 30 countries from Europe, Africa and the Americas joined an international initiative in support of OceanEye, including large coastal nations like Brazil, Namibia and Mexico.
Von der Leyen said OceanEye “can make us the leading ocean data provider in a matter of years”, including by launching new satellites and installing new observatories in the deep ocean. “From outer space to the deepest ocean, our funding helps us keep watch beneath the waves,” she added.
Carney said the initiative would help protect Canada’s Arctic region with real-time monitoring operating year-round. “We can’t protect what we can’t see,” he said, also highlighting that Canada had expanded conservation of its ocean territory from 1% a decade ago to 15% now.
In New York, a group of 19 countries said they are either developing or implementing plans to sustainably manage all of their ocean territory, with 12 new nations joining the initiative. In a joint communiqué, they called on more countries to sign up ahead of COP31.
Warnings of El Niño-fuelled extreme heat
Scientists and world leaders have raised the alarm over this year’s record-breaking marine temperatures, which have persisted above historical peaks for more than 100 days as the naturally occurring El Niño phenomenon intensifies in the Pacific.
Extreme ocean heat could become a threat to coastal ecosystems and communities, experts fear. Water temperatures 1.5C above normal levels have also rapidly fuelled a strong hurricane in the Pacific in recent days.
Despite scientific calls for additional ocean conservation efforts, a report launched this week in New York warned that efforts to protect ocean ecosystems are lagging behind, with only 10% of the global ocean covered by conservation areas and just 3.5% designated as “effectively protected”.
The post Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood appeared first on Climate Home News.
Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood
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嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
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Climate Change2 years agoAnalysis: China’s CO2 falls 1% in Q2 2024 in first quarterly drop since Covid-19