This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.”
From her home in Donaldsonville in the southern US state of Louisiana, less than three miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant, Ashley Gaignard says the air itself carries a chemical edge.
The odour, she said, is sharp and lingering. Years ago, when her son attended a school about a mile from the massive CF Industries ammonia production facility, he would begin wheezing during breaks from class, she recalled. His breathing problems eased only after he transferred to a school several miles farther away.
“I’m not against progress,” Gaignard said. “We are against development that poisons and displaces and disregards human life.”
Now, along Louisiana’s Mississippi River corridor, fertiliser giant CF Industries and other companies are placing multibillion-dollar bets on “blue ammonia” — a product made from fossil fuels but with extra technology to capture planet-warming gases and pipe them underground for storage.
To date, no commercial-scale blue ammonia plants are operating — but more than 20 have been proposed nationwide, according to Oil and Gas Watch. Four of the largest such plants are slated for Louisiana, in communities already saturated with petrochemical pollution.
An extensive review by Floodlight found no evidence that existing carbon capture projects anywhere in the world have achieved anything close to the emissions cuts companies like CF Industries are promising. Permit documents, meanwhile, show that the proposed plants combined could be allowed to discharge more than 2,800 tons each year of air pollutants (not greenhouse gases), including more than 400 tons of ammonia.
Classified as a highly hazardous chemical, ammonia can damage the lungs and hurt the skin, eyes and throat. In the air, it can form fine particles that are linked to increased risks of heart disease and stroke, and can be deadly — particularly for children, older adults and people with heart or lung disease.
The Louisiana plants would also be allowed to release carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde.
The companies proposing those plants — CF Industries, Air Products, Clean Hydrogen Works and St. Charles Clean Fuels — have said their operations will provide an abundant source of clean fertiliser and clean energy to global markets, including countries whose climate and trade policies favor low-carbon fuels. They’ve also said they’ll create nearly 840 permanent jobs and millions in new tax revenue for local communities while prioritising public health and safety.
“We are designing the facility with advanced emissions controls, robust monitoring systems, and strong operational practices to minimise impacts,” said Chandra Stacie, the director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our goal is to operate responsibly and be a constructive, long-term partner.”
Environmental advocates, scientists and community members, however, say the new ammonia plants would delay the phase-out of fossil fuels — and bring substantial air pollution and safety risks to places that have long borne the health costs of America’s industrial economy.
Why Louisiana became ground zero
While the historic streets of Donaldsonville recently served as the backdrop to the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, the town’s real-life drama is far less cinematic.
Donaldsonville lies at the center of Cancer Alley, a chemical corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known for its elevated health risks and dense concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries.
Now this stretch of Louisiana is also ground zero for a new buildout: four proposed blue ammonia plants, with several more planned for Texas.
So, why the Gulf Coast?
South Louisiana has abundant natural gas for ammonia production and ports that connect to international shipping routes.
The state offers an existing pipeline network, a seasoned chemical-industry workforce and political leaders who have consistently favored industrial development. The companies proposing ammonia plants can also tap generous state and federal incentives, including more than $2 billion in federal tax credits for carbon capture projects.
The Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, allows companies to collect up to $85 for each ton of carbon captured and permanently stored.
And the state of Louisiana is offering developers millions more in grants and tax breaks designed to spur economic development.
Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who has studied carbon capture systems for years, said there’s little to be gained — and much to lose — from making ammonia this way.
“These plants increase air pollution, they increase global warming … they increase not only energy costs, but total social costs, and so there’s zero benefit — except to the people who are taking the subsidies to implement these projects,” he said.
The scale of subsidies for the proposed Louisiana ammonia plants is “off-the-charts outrageous” — and amounts to a bad deal for taxpayers, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks and analyzes economic development projects. The plants are unlikely to deliver anything close to $2 billion a year in public benefits, he said.
“It can only be accurately called a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers to corporate shareholders,” he said.
Ambitious pitches, tougher reality
Ammonia has long been a workhorse of the global economy, quietly underpinning modern agriculture. It’s the key ingredient in nitrogen fertiliser, and demand is expected to grow as global food production strains to keep pace with population growth.
Now, producers say it could play a far larger role — not just as fertiliser, but as a climate-friendly fuel for ships and power plants.
When it’s burned as a fuel, ammonia doesn’t emit carbon dioxide (though it can produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide).
It can also be burned with other fuels in power plants or potentially used to store hydrogen for shipping and later conversion for use in fuel cells.
But the process commonly used to make ammonia carries a heavy climate cost.
Most production relies on hydrogen derived from natural gas, a process that releases carbon dioxide. Enormous amounts of energy — typically from fossil fuels — are then used to force hydrogen and nitrogen to combine under extreme heat and pressure.
Nitrogen fertilizer plants in the U.S. released more than 46 million tons of heat-trapping gases in 2021 — roughly the emissions of nine million cars running for a year — according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project. Globally, almost 2% of carbon dioxide emissions come from making ammonia — or as much as the energy system emissions of South Africa, according to the International Energy Agency.
That’s where carbon capture comes in. The companies planning blue ammonia plants say they will isolate most of the carbon dioxide released, piping it deep underground for permanent storage.
Texas-based Clean Hydrogen Works says its Ascension Clean Energy project, slated for Donaldsonville, will produce up to 7.2 million tons of ammonia annually and will capture “up to 98 percent” of the carbon dioxide produced.
Nearby, CF Industries and the Pennsylvania-based Air Products plan to build two plants they say will have capture rates of 95% or more.
About an hour to the east, the St. Charles Clean Fuels project would capture more than 99% of carbon dioxide generated, its developer says.
Those claims are unlikely to hold up, said Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, an expert on greenhouse gas emissions and ammonia pollution.
“Is the industry correct in saying that they can produce a really, really low emissions fuel using natural gas as their original feedstock?” he asked. “The answer is no. It’s just never been done, and I don’t think it can be done.”
The majority of existing carbon capture facilities trap less than 60% of carbon dioxide, according to a 2023 review by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “No existing project has consistently captured more than 80% of carbon,” the institute found.
Blue hydrogen — a prerequisite for blue ammonia — “is neither clean nor low-carbon,” and pursuing it would divert time and money from more effective climate solutions, the institute concluded.
In an email to Floodlight, Air Products spokesperson Christina Stephens said the company is “very confident in our proprietary technology that allows us to capture 95 percent of the CO2 emissions.” She did not elaborate.
Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said its facility’s design will be “conducive to high capture rates.”
Experts also note that carbon capture itself is typically powered by natural gas, adding emissions and undercutting its climate benefits.
Compounding the problem are emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane is frequently emitted during drilling, processing and transport of natural gas. More escapes in the process used to extract hydrogen for ammonia production.
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Total methane emissions from the fertilizer industry could be more than 140 times higher than official estimates, one 2019 study found.
Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company believes previous research related to methane leakage has flaws that led to inaccurate conclusions.
Stacie, meanwhile, said St. Charles Clean Fuels will monitor and verify methane emissions through “operations control and third-party verification consistent with emerging best practices.”
The local cost of a global fuel
Even if blue ammonia plants deliver the climate benefits their backers promise — benefits that experts dispute — their local impacts could still be substantial.
In 2024, the CF Industries Donaldsonville plant — near Gaignard’s house — released more toxic air pollutants than all but one other industrial site nationally, according to EPA data. The 7.1 million pounds of ammonia the plant released that year would more than fill the New Orleans Superdome, according to Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist for the Environmental Integrity Project.
Emissions from the planned blue ammonia plants could worsen respiratory health, Terrell said, with impacts extending far beyond the plant sites.
“I would be concerned about increasing asthma rates long term,” she said.
Ascension Parish, where three of the proposed blue ammonia plants would be built, hosts more than two dozen industrial facilities and already has the second highest amount of air emissions in the country, according to EPA data.
So the prospect of new ammonia plants in Ascension Parish worries Twila Collins.
She has lived her entire 55-year life in Modeste, a historic, predominantly Black community along the Mississippi River. If CF Industries gets its way, a massive ammonia plant would rise roughly a mile from her home.
Her message for the company is blunt: “Leave us alone and find somewhere else to go where there’s nobody living, so you won’t disrupt a community.”
Industrial pollution already drifts into her neighborhood, bringing smells “like a landfill,” she said, and a new ammonia plant would add another layer of pollution — and another set of health risks.
In a 2024 report, CF Industries said its employees “regularly maintain, replace, and update equipment” to reduce emissions.
But under its draft permit for the Blue Point plant, the company would be allowed to release more than 1,100 tons of air pollutants each year — equivalent to the weight of more than 27 fully loaded tractor trailers. That includes more than 140 tons of ammonia and more than 580 tons of carbon monoxide.
Collins said she can name more than 30 people in Modeste who suffer from cancer or respiratory problems. The issue is deeply personal. She herself has struggled with cancer. And in 2002, her 9-year-old son died of an asthma attack. He had struggled with asthma all his life, but Collins still wonders whether the industrial pollution surrounding Modeste helped trigger the attack that killed him.
She also worries about what could go wrong if something fails — an accident, a leak or worse — because ammonia production and carbon dioxide transport involve well-documented industrial risks.
CF Industries’ Donaldsonville plant has a history of deadly accidents: a 2000 explosion and fire killed three workers and injured at least eight others, and a 2013 blast killed one worker and injured eight more.
This past November, an explosion at another CF Industries plant in Yazoo City, Miss., led to an ammonia leak and prompted the evacuation of nearby residents.
Residents push back
While supporters emphasise the economic boost and high-paying jobs the projects could bring, many local residents have turned out at public hearings to oppose them.
So many people packed a hearing room on the St. Charles project in 2024 that it had to be canceled and rescheduled in a larger venue.
Some of the public fears have centered on the carbon dioxide pipelines that would be needed to make the projects work.
Air Products, for instance, has proposed piping millions of tons of carbon dioxide 38 miles to be stored a mile underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would be “the world’s largest permanent carbon dioxide sequestration endeavor to date,” according to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development.
At a November public hearing on the project, Air Products vice president Andrew Connolly said the company has an “unsurpassed safety record.”
“All pipelines will be monitored 24-7 and we will meet or exceed all pipeline regulations,” he said.
More than 300 people turned out for that public hearing, according to Dustin Renaud, a spokesperson for the environmental law group Earthjustice. Among the more than 50 people who spoke, all but three opposed the project.
Opponents have warned of what could happen if a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures, as happened in 2020 in Satartia, Mississippi. That disaster sent 45 people to the hospital and left some residents unconscious in their homes and cars. Starved of oxygen, cars stalled or couldn’t start, making evacuation difficult.
The Air Products pipeline would run within half a mile of Sorrento Primary School, an elementary school in Ascension Parish with more than 600 students. An expert hired by Earthjustice concluded that a pipeline rupture could endanger the schoolchildren, along with residents of a nearby subdivision.
Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company will run the pipeline deeper than is required by code in the school’s vicinity. The pipeline will also have more shutoff valves than required, she said.
“We have a long safe history of operating the largest hydrogen pipeline network in the world right here in Louisiana,” she wrote.
Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said the company will incorporate “detection systems, automated shutdowns, mechanical integrity programs and emergency response planning” — consistent with federal rules and “lessons learned from prior incidents.”
Still, some residents worry.
“We don’t have a good evacuation route,” said St. James Parish resident Gail LeBoeuf, who co-founded the environmental justice group Inclusive Louisiana. “If something would happen, we would just be stuck like Chuck.”
The companies behind the blue ammonia projects have said they will bring jobs and millions of dollars into the state economy — a message that has found a receptive audience in the state capital and some city halls.
CF Industries did not respond to Floodlight’s questions about its proposed plant, while Clean Hydrogen Works declined to answer questions.
Amid public opposition, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry in October announced a moratorium on new carbon capture projects. The order halted the state’s review of new permits for projects that would inject carbon dioxide underground, while allowing existing applications to continue — including the blue ammonia projects already underway.
A lower-carbon alternative
There are cleaner ways to make ammonia.
Instead of extracting hydrogen from natural gas and then trying to capture the CO₂, producers can use renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That “green hydrogen” can then be combined with nitrogen to make what’s known as “green ammonia.”
At least one large-scale green ammonia plant is already operating. In Chifeng, China, a facility powered by wind turbines and solar panels began industrial-scale production in 2025. By 2028, the plant is expected to produce 1.5 million tons of green ammonia annually.
In the U.S., developers have proposed green ammonia plants in Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington.
“Instead of making this big labyrinth of pipes and equipment and sending CO2 everywhere and using more energy, you can simply produce that hydrogen with electricity from solar and wind,” said Jacobson, the Stanford professor.
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In the debate over blue ammonia, the stakes are high.
For ammonia producers, the projects promise billions in federal tax credits and a foothold in emerging energy markets. They also offer oil and gas companies a way to delay the phase-out of fossil fuels, critics say.
“It’s a great way to lock in oil and gas infrastructure. … Something that we should be getting away from, as opposed to locking in for years and years to come,” said Alexandra Shaykevich, a research manager at the Environmental Integrity Project who tracks oil and gas projects.
For residents along Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, the stakes are more immediate. They’re being asked to live with new plants, new pipelines and new risks in places that have already absorbed decades of pollution.
But Gaignard plans to keep fighting for her community.
“I don’t look at this as red and blue and the left and the right,” she said. “We need to start looking at humanity.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.
The post As Louisiana bets big on ‘blue ammonia’, communities brace for air pollution appeared first on Climate Home News.
As Louisiana bets big on ‘blue ammonia’, communities brace for air pollution
Climate Change
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
More than 40% of children under the age of 10 globally are already experiencing at least 20 additional “heat-stress days” due to climate change.
This is according to a new attribution study, published in Science Advances, which combines climate models with demographic data to assess the age groups and regions that are exposed to the most hot, humid days.
The study finds that children up to the age of nine already face more additional heat-stress days globally as a result of climate change than any other age group.
It adds that south Asia and west Africa are recording the greatest childhood exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat – largely because these regions have a rapidly growing population with the highest proportion of young children.
As the climate warms, children will continue to be more exposed to heat stress than any other age group, the paper warns.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that the findings should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Humid heat
High temperatures can be deadly. For example, the heatwaves that swept across Europe in the summer of 2026 have been linked to tens of thousands of “excess deaths”.
A prominent 2021 study found that children born in the 21st century will be exposed to more extreme weather events in their lifetimes than their parents and grandparents.
Four years later, a study conducted by scientists from the same team found that more than half of children born in 2020 – around 62 million people – will experience “unprecedented lifetime exposure” to heatwaves, even if warming is limited to 1.5C.
Now, the latest research from the same team finds that children already face greater exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat than adults as a result of human-caused climate change.
Extreme heat is particularly dangerous when combined with high humidity. In hot weather, the human body produces sweat to cool itself down. However, as humidity increases, sweating becomes less effective.
The study uses wet-bulb globe temperature – a measure of temperature that takes humidity and wind into account – to calculate heat stress. It defines a “heat-stress day” as any day with a wet-bulb globe temperature above 28C, as this is considered the threshold for “moderate heat stress”
The authors then use climate models to simulate global temperature patterns in the present-day climate. (The authors use the climate of 2023, in which human activity has caused 1.3C of warming, to represent the “present-day”.)
They then count the number of heat-stress days that each country records on average, per year. The authors then repeat this exercise, simulating a pre-industrial climate without human-caused warming.
By comparing the number of heat-stress days in the present-day climate with the number in a pre-industrial climate, the authors can determine how many extra heat-stress days were driven by climate change. They refer to these as “extra” or “attributable” heat-stress days.
The authors find that “low-latitude” countries, located in the tropics, record the most extra heat-stress days.
For example, the paper finds that people living in Côte d’Ivoire currently face 112 heat-stress days every year. It adds that around half of these are due to human-caused climate change.
In contrast, Germany sees only 0.1 heat-stress days per year in today’s climate on average, which is largely attributable to human-caused climate change.
Rosa Pietroiusti, a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and lead author on the study, explains why this number may seem lower than expected.
She tells Carbon Brief that the paper “really focuses on humid heat, at levels that are relatively rarely felt in Europe”. She adds:
“Our data also doesn’t capture the urban heat island effect, due to the resolution of the data we use, which also would lead to underestimations of heat stress locally, and lead to a mismatch with what people are experiencing at local scales, particularly in cities.”
Inequality
Extreme heat affects some people more severely than others. Children, people over 65 and those with pre-existing medical conditions or certain disabilities are among the most vulnerable. This is because their bodies are less able to regulate their temperature.
The authors use gridded demographic data to determine the age structure of each country. From this, they calculate how many people from each age cohort are exposed to extra heat days as a result of climate change.
The research finds that globally, 583 million children under the age of 10 already live through at least 20 attributable heat days every year. This accounts for 44% of all children in this age bracket.
In comparison, 190 million people aged 60-69 face at least 20 attributable heat days per year, accounting for 30% of this age cohort.
The authors find that children face the greatest exposure to humid heat for two main reasons.
First, there are more young people alive today than older people, with 1.3 billion children aged under 10 in the world, compared to 0.6 billion people aged 60-69.
Second, they find that countries in Africa and Asia typically have rapidly growing populations with more young children. In contrast, many countries in the northern hemisphere – which are typically cooler – have older populations.
The map below shows how many extra stress heat days each country currently faces as a result of human-caused climate change. Darker reds indicate a higher number of attributable heat days. The blue circles show the percentage of the population under the age of 10, with larger circles indicating a higher percentage.
Warming world
The authors also repeat their analysis for a 1.5C and 2C warmer world. They use population estimates from the SSP2 scenario, which projects that the world’s population will peak at more than nine billion in the second half of the 21st century, with most growth occurring in low-latitude regions – especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
The research finds that, in today’s climate, 11% of all under 10s currently experience 100 or more extra heat-stress days per year due to climate change. In worlds warmed by 1.5C and 2C, the percentage rises to 13% and 23%, respectively.
In contrast, only 6% of all people aged 60-69 currently face 100 or more extra heat-stress days each year due to climate change. This number rises to 9% and 17% for 1.5C and 2C worlds, respectively.
These results are shown in the plot below. The three rows represent the climates of 2023 (top), a 1.5C world (middle) and a 2C world (bottom). The columns show different age cohorts, from the oldest on the left to the youngest on the right.
Each circle contains 100 coloured dots, with each dot representing 1% of the age cohort.
The colour of the dot represents exposure to annual heat-stress day, with darker dots indicating more heat-stress days. Grey dots mean that people experience fewer than one extra heat-stress day per year due to human-caused climate change, while black dots mean more than 150 extra heat-stress days due to climate change.
The figure shows that higher warming levels expose more people to heat stress and that younger cohorts tend to be worst affected.
For example, the top-right circle represents heat stress for under 10s in the present-day climate. Three of these dots are coloured black, indicating that 3% faced at least 150 attributable heat-stress days in 2023.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief the study uses wet-bulb temperature because it is a “well-established heat stress metric”. However, she notes that it was not “explicitly defined to focus on children”. She continues:
“A really important step forward in the research community would be to link up climate science and health science experts to do research on what metrics are really most representative of, for example, health impacts and educational impacts that children will be suffering.”
Vulnerability
Dr Qinqin Kong, a postdoctoral researcher at the departments of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study, praises its “robust” methodology.
He tells Carbon Brief that the research provides “a timely quantitative evidence for discussions of climate justice, children’s rights and intergenerational equity”.
However, Kong suggests that the paper “may overstate the contrast between children and the elderly and underestimate the relative burden of older adults”.
He says:
“The elderly may also be more vulnerable due to their social circumstances. Children often benefit from parental supervision and caregiving, whereas many older adults live alone, have limited mobility and face barriers to accessing cooling or emergency assistance during heat events.”
Kong also notes that “people and societies in the mid-latitudes [for example, across much of Europe and North America] are less adapted to heat”, which may make them vulnerable to its impacts.
For example, he says that Europe “shows substantially stronger relative risk of heat mortality likely due to less heat-acclimatised populations, lower air conditioning prevalence and urban designs that don’t favour heat dissipation”.
Similarly, Dr Daniel Vecellio – a researcher at the University of Nebraska, who was not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that children are an “understudied cohort”.
However, he says there is “reason for hope” because “children are typically pretty good behavioural adapters to extreme heat” and because people who are “chronically exposed to extreme heat” will “have a better chance at better acclimatisation”.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief that global reporting on heatwaves is often skewed towards wealthier nations.
For example, she notes that large-scale databases of disasters, such as EM-DAT, often underrepresent heatwaves in Africa, due in part to a lack of news coverage and formal reporting. She adds:
“Studies like this, which start from the climate data, can start to fill some of these gaps.”
She adds that the paper should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries, who are most severely affected by the increase in heat-stress days, “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Pietroiusti, R. et al. (2026) Age-specific exposure to human-induced increases in humid heat, Science Advances, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aeb3232
The post Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
The US is expected to resume its attempt to sink measures for a greener global shipping sector at closed-door talks between governments at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in early September.
The US and oil-producing allies like Saudi Arabia want to weaken a proposed plan for cleaner fuels that aims to reduce planet-heating emissions from the industry, which relies heavily on dirty bunker fuels. Shipping currently represents 3% of global emissions.
Those that want a softer system are likely to back a Liberian proposal which expert analysis suggests would see emissions fall by only half at most by 2050, far short of the sector’s agreed climate goals.
After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on the “Net Zero Framework” (NZF), a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.
But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention from US President Donald Trump and threats of sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.
Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister for the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, called the delay “unacceptable” given the urgency of accelerating climate change.
After a round of low-profile talks in May, the first of three further sets of talks on how to clean up shipping will begin at the IMO’s riverside headquarters in London on Tuesday, culminating in a final public session in November.
Em Fenton, who follows the talks as senior director of climate diplomacy at Opportunity Green, an NGO focused on aviation and shipping, said governments should not be sidetracked by alternative proposals to the NZF, calling them “a distraction from a hard-fought multilateral compromise”.
“If countries want to deliver a just and fair maritime transition, there is really only one choice: back the NZF and stand together in solidarity against those who would tear it apart,” Fenton added.
Five proposals on the table
Governments will discuss five different proposals submitted in advance of next week’s meeting. The most ambitious of these is from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which has proposed a levy on the entirety of a ship’s emissions rather than just those above a certain level, as the NZF envisions.
That had been the original demand of Pacific nations before the NZF was provisionally adopted in April 2025. At the time, Tuvalu’s transport minister Simon Kofe described the NZF as disappointing and not ambitious enough.
For this reason, six Pacific countries abstained in the vote on the NZF. While they supported the original plan for its adoption in October 2025, they have used the delay to push again for more ambition.
John Kautoke, advisor to a group of Pacific nations called 6PAC+, told Climate Home News that the NZF “cannot diminish its already inadequate ambition. If anything, the NZF must increase in ambition if we are going to renegotiate its parameters.”
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Analysis by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) suggests that, of the five proposals, only Tuvalu’s would meet the 2030 and 2040 emissions reduction targets for global shipping that were agreed by governments in 2023. Those were for cuts of 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reaching net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”.
Despite this, the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa have formally proposed that governments adopt the NZF, which won support in a 63-13 vote among governments at the April 2025 talks. Trump’s US walked out halfway through.
According to IMarEst’s analysis, while the NZF proposal will not be enough to meet the industry’s targets, it will reduce emissions more cheaply than the Pacific proposal.
A proposal by Brazil – which fought hard for the NZF last October – suggests tweaking the framework to make meeting targets easier in the short term and harder in the long term.
While this compromise will make it more appealing to the owners of polluting ships and countries that support them, IMarEst estimates it would lead to higher cumulative emissions than either the NZF or Pacific proposals.
The NZF stipulates that fees for high-polluting shipowners should be be put into a Net Zero Fund and used to promote clean shipping fuels and a fairer transition. The Brazilian proposal would delay raising and spending these funds by two years, from 2029 to 2031.
Liberia’s proposal weakens emissions cuts
The US and Saudi Arabia are likely to swing behind a new proposal from Liberia, whose government makes millions of dollars a year selling the right for shipowners to register their vessels in the small West African nation via a US-based company.
This proposal would weaken the emissions reduction targets. IMarEst says it would cut the industry’s emissions at most by a half by 2050, falling far short of the target agreed in 2023 for international shipping to reach net zero “close to 2050”.
It would also replace the NZF’s fees for missing targets with a carbon trading system. As a result, there would be no Net Zero Fund and therefore less money available to incentivise green fuels and make the transition more equitable for poorer nations.
Pacific advisor Kautoke said that, as well as preventing shipping from reaching zero emissions by 2050, Liberia’s proposal would mean the Pacific “will not receive any support to deal with the disproportionately negative impacts created by the cost of the transition”.
“We get a double blow if we adopt the Liberian proposal,” he warned. “We get all the cost of a transition without any support, and we have an industry that continues to burn fossil fuels to an unforeseen point.”
Japanese proposal favours shipowners
Japan has submitted a late proposal to amend the NZF so that shipowners have more control over how the fees they would pay for emitting above a set threshold are spent.
University College London professor Tristan Smith has argued that this change means there will be no central mechanism to incentivise investments in clean fuels. He wrote on LinkedIn that under the system put forward by Japan, shipowners would be able to select which green projects their fees would go to. They could choose their own or those of a sister company or other shipowners, rather than funding broader just transition projects that would benefit marine workers or developing countries hit by rising shipping costs.
Despite its flaws, Smith added that Japan’s proposal “could still get taken seriously by some, given how appealing it may seem to shipowners who have consistently demanded control of revenues, and given how the US and other member states have pushed back against the IMO Net Zero Fund and [greenhouse gas] pricing.”
Tacit or explicit approval?
Next week, governments are expected to make statements saying which proposals – or which aspects of proposals – they prefer. Another set of talks will be held from November 23-27 before a potentially final round from November 30-December 4.
A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted at those talks if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.
The US and its allies are also trying to change the rules to make the next stage more difficult. Decisions that have been adopted at IMO meetings usually take effect automatically unless a certain number of countries object within a certain time period decided by governments, a system known as tacit approval.
But the US wants that to require explicit approval instead, so that any new emissions standard would not come into force unless enough governments – representing a certain percentage of the world’s shipping fleet – actively indicate support for it.
Critics say this change would give a small number of countries with large shipping registries the power to block implementation. Liberia has the world’s biggest shipping registry, run by an American company, followed by Panama and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Liberia and Panama have supported the US at the talks on the Net Zero Framework. The Marshall Islands has long been one of the most vocal supporters of climate action in shipping but, with its officials and shipping registry income vulnerable to US retaliation, did not sign on to the recent Pacific proposal vowing to strengthen the NZF if it is re-opened.
Brazilian negotiator Adriana de Medeiros Gabinio warned in April that the NZF’s opponents are trying to change the rules by which it comes into force as a “safety net to block” it.
The post Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks
SYDNEY, Wednesday 26 August 2026 — New 2026 Sustainability Reports released by supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths this week demonstrate the retailers are failing on their commitments to end deforestation in their supply chains.
Adele Chasson, Nature Policy Lead at Greenpeace Australia Pacific said:
“These so-called sustainability reports are revealing. Despite their public commitments in 2024 and 2025, neither Coles nor Woolworths have taken deforestation-linked beef off their shelves. Meanwhile, bulldozers continue to tear up forests and bushland, pushing wildlife closer to extinction and causing mass toxic runoff to flow into the Great Barrier Reef. Millions of native animals like koalas are losing their homes to beef pastures each year, while the big supermarkets put off action.
“Australians would be shocked to know that beef on the shelves of our biggest supermarkets could be pushing threatened species to the brink of extinction. Collectively Coles and Woolworths have made more than $2 billion in profits in the last year, profiting from the destruction of wildlife and precious Australian nature. Coles and Woolworths owe it to shoppers to deliver on their promises and end deforestation in their supply chains now.
“As big beef buyers, Coles and Woolworths have an essential role to play in keeping Australia’s unique forests standing. They can help stop the Great Barrier Reef from being poisoned by runoff and protect iconic forest wildlife by taking deforestation off their shelves. It’s time these big companies put their money where their mouths are and follow through on their promise of sourcing and supplying deforestation-free beef.”
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