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
Climate Change
DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
UK, Europe and India battle heatwaves
‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy” temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.
‘BRUTAL REMINDER’: In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.
Around the world
- CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
- DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
- SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg.
- NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
- EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.
Four million
The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.
Latest climate research
- Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
- LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
- Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
- Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.
Spotlight
How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economy
This week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.
Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.
In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.
Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.
Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief.
However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.
“We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.
A nascent industry
Solar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.
The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.
Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.
However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.
“Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.
The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.
Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.
Powering rural communities
Many rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.
According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.
A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.
With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.
Watch, read, listen
MOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.
ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.
Coming up
- 31 May: Colombia presidential elections
- 31 May-5 June: Global Environment Facility council meeting, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
- 2-5 June: The Venice Agreement for Peatlands workshop, Kisumu, Kenya
Pick of the jobs
- National Oceanography Centre, engagement assistant (external communications) | Salary: £28,254. Location: Southampton, UK
- Dangote Industries, decarbonisation specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lagos, Nigeria
- City of New York, chief decarbonization officer | Salary: $261,469. Location: New York City
- Climate Central, writer and associate editor | Salary: $72,000-$75,000. Location: US (Remote)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids appeared first on Carbon Brief.
At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.
Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.
Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”
As the Mission 300 initiative advances, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).
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In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, GEAPP’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.
Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?
A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. So we want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country.
Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed.
(Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)
The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.
Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?
A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.
We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.
The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.
Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?
A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that.
So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities.
Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?
A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses.
Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier.
Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?
The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.
Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?
A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.
So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that.
Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?
A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.
Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies
When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable.
To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.
Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.
The post Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?
The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
A rapid expansion of data centres across the nation is at the heart of the US tech sector’s plans to continue “dominat[ing]” the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.
This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.
As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.
Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.
The IEA’s latest world energy investment report shows that spending on renewables and electricity grids continues to dominate at the global scale.
In the US, Trump administration policies such as the phase-out of tax credits for renewables has led to the IEA revising its forecast for new wind and solar power downwards.
At the same time, US electricity demand is expected to rise by an average of 2% per year from 2026 to 2030, with data centres contributing half of the overall increase.
This is leading to what the IEA calls an “AI-driven push” to build new gas-power plants in the US, the world’s largest data-centre market and largest gas producer.
Globally, orders for new gas-power plants increased to 130 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 – a 25-year high – and US demand was a “major factor” in this, according to the IEA.
Much of the demand is coming from tech companies in the US seeking to bypass grid connection queues by building “captive” gas-power plants.
As the chart below shows, since the start of 2025 these US captive data centres alone have signed off on more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world – aside from the US itself.
Overall, investment in grid upgrades, power equipment and electricity generation to support the buildout of data-centre infrastructure around the world hit $105bn in 2025, according to the IEA.
This is more than the total invested in the energy sector across the whole of Africa – a continent where more than 600 million people do not have access to electricity.
The IEA notes that strong demand for gas-power plants for data centres in the US – and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East – is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.
The agency also points out that as the tech sector becomes a “major energy investor”, accounting for around 40% of all corporate power-purchase agreements, it is also “underpinning momentum” for emerging clean technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal.
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AI boom means US is now ‘investing more’ in fossil-fuel power than China
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