As United Nations chief Antonio Guterres convened a climate summit for the first time in four years, he was keen to avoid platforming greenwash.
Instead of a long procession of leaders, the stage would be given only to those with “credible policies and plans” to keep the goals of the Paris Agreement alive.
On Wednesday, the absence of most of the world’s biggest polluters spoke volumes. Three-quarters of the G20 nations were left outside the door, with the United States, China, the United Kingdom and India pushed off the guestlist.
Among those that made the cut, there were a handful of slightly improved goals and climate finance promises – nothing groundbreaking.
“This wasn’t a dramatic pledging or deal-making summit”, says Tom Evans, an analyst at E3G. “But it put forward a group of leaders showing who is ahead and isolated those who are laggards. It was trying to show what is possible instead of diluting the level of ambition.”
Leaders from 34 governments along with seven non-government bodies, including the World Bank, the London mayor and the governor of California, addressed the summit. Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the EU, and South Africa were the most high-profile speakers.
All-out on fossil fuels
Perhaps the most striking feature of the event was increasingly fiery rhetoric on fossil fuels.
California governor Gavin Newsom started by accusing the industry of “playing each and every one of us in this room for fools”. The state has recently filed a lawsuit against major oil companies.
My message to the UN:
This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. It’s not complicated. pic.twitter.com/bHolZrtGyP
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 21, 2023
Those words were echoed by Chile’s Gabriel Boric, who said “the climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis so we need to leave fossil fuels behind”. His regional counterpart, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro came out against fossil fuels despite the country being a major global exporter of coal and oil.
“We depend on those exports, we live on those exports,” Petro said. “However, the real goal for all countries is aiming for zero production and supply of coal, oil and gas in the short term. If we don’t focus on that life will not be saved.”
Catherine Abreu, founder of Destination Zero, hailed the speeches as “game-changing” from the perspective of the global climate regime. “We saw once and for all the connection being made between climate change and fossil fuels”, she told Climate Home News. “As shocking as it is, that is revolutionary for the international space.”
Brazil boosts targets
Brazil brought the biggest news to the table when it announced widely trailed plans to undo former president Jair Bolsonaro’s cuts to its climate ambition and strengthen its targets further.
Lula scraps Bolsonaro’s cuts to Brazilian climate target ambition
“We will enhance Brazil’s emission reduction commitments from 37% to 48% by 2025, and from 50% to 53% by 2030,” said environment minister Marina Silva, who stepped in after President Lula reportedly fell ill. “This is despite the fact that our historical responsibilities are incomparably smaller than those of the rich countries.”
Among the major European countries, which made up the bulk of the attendees, only France came with fresh commitments. It announced it would give €1.61 billion ($1.75bn) to the Green Climate Fund’s four-yearly fundraising round. While this is slightly more in euros than France gave last time in 2019, the changing exchange rate means it is less in US dollar terms.
The EU’s president Ursula von Der Leyen repeated the bloc’s battle lines for Cop28, pushing for global emissions to peak by 2025 and unabated fossil fuels to be phased out “well before” 2050. Germany’s Olaf Scholz restated his country’s commitment to renewable energy, underlining an agreement to triple capacity by 2030 struck at the G20.
Green Climate Fund may have to curb ambition as funding stagnates
Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi campaigner and adviser to the Cop28 presidency, said he was left underwhelmed by the lack of commitments, especially on the loss and damage fund and on adaptation. He told Climate Home News that, while the summit was “an excellent initiative”, it was ultimately “long on talk and short on delivery”.
Oscar Soria from Avaaz, who was at the summit, was disappointed, but not surprised, with the outcome. "The world is on fire, of course, we were expecting more concrete announcements. Nobody said anything meaningful on subsidies to fossil fuels, for example."
The road to Cop28
The climate ambition summit was billed as one of the crucial stepping stones to building a consensus ahead of Cop28. Securing a deal in Dubai will inevitably require a strategy to bring the countries left outside of the room in New York back to the table.
Closing off the summit, Antonio Guterres urged the attendees to "take no prisoners" and "bring together all those that you can bring together with you".
But E3G's Tom Evans says "the absence of key power players highlighted how difficult climate politics has become".
"The UAE will now be thinking of the strategy to bring them back on board. The summit helped in showing where people are sat with ten weeks to go," he added.
The post At UN climate summit big polluters’ absence speaks volumes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Bonn talks close
‘SIDE-STEPPING AND STALLING’: UN climate talks in Bonn have ended in “gridlock”, according to Climate Home News. The outlet reported on the failure to balance developing countries’ need for climate-adaptation finance with “richer nations’ desire to move forward” on emissions cuts. It added that both topics were subject to “rule 16”, meaning no agreement could be reached and work will be pushed to the COP31 summit in Turkey. Inside Climate News quoted UN climate executive secretary Simon Stiell, who said the talks had seen “side-stepping and stalling”.
JUST TRANSITION: One “glimmer of hope” came from negotiations on achieving a “just transition”, reported Euronews. The news outlet said negotiators “made headway on operationalising the Belém-Antalya mechanism”, intended to support people in the shift to a low-carbon economy. However, Politico concluded that much of the focus in Bonn had “shift[ed] to efforts outside diplomatic talks – raising questions about the future of global climate negotiations”.
‘ATTACKING SCIENCE’: Agence France-Presse reported on the EU, Switzerland and “dozens of developing nations” warning of “attacks on science” by a “small group of fossil-fuels interests” in Bonn. Table Briefings explained that “the 1.5C target is increasingly being challenged” and the role of the UN climate-science panel – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – in an upcoming assessment of global climate progress “remains controversial”. See Carbon Brief’s full write-up of the talks for more detail.
US-Iran deal
PRICE DROP: The US and Iran announced that they have reached an interim agreement to halt the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz, reported Bloomberg. Oil prices have fallen, as the “long-awaited deal” began the process of “eas[ing]” the global energy crisis triggered by the conflict, according to the New York Times. The Associated Press noted that high fuel prices will “likely outlast the Iran war”.
‘OIL GLUT’: The Financial Times reported that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast a “glut of oil” emerging next year, if the peace deal holds. The IEA said this would allow countries to build new strategic reserves, as they “review their energy strategies and policies in response to the crisis”, according to Reuters.
‘NEW ERA’: Agence France-Presse reported that oil and gas companies have “few illusions about a return to normal for the Gulf energy industry after more than three months of blockage”. One analyst told the newswire that the war “showed the oil and gas industry that Hormuz risk is no longer just a geopolitical headline”.
Around the world
- OCEAN MONITOR: The Trump administration is “abandoning its plan” to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system key for tracking climate change after a “bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill”, reported the New York Times.
- CORAL HAVEN: The New York Times covered preliminary research, presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya, suggesting there could be three times as many “coral refugia” – where corals are relatively safe from climate change – than previously thought.
- BAD CREDIT: Down to Earth reported that the first carbon credits issued under the Paris Agreement’s new Article 6.4 mechanism are “facing scrutiny over alleged links to institutions controlled by Myanmar’s military junta”.
- OIL BACKTRACK: Reuters reported that oil-and-gas company Equinor has dropped a renewable-energy target and scaled back clean investments, while another Reuters story noted that Shell is selling off its offshore wind assets.
1.1 billion
The number of children facing “at least three overlapping climate hazards”, according to a new Unicef report covered by Agence France-Presse.
Latest climate research
- Including the “permafrost carbon-climate feedback” in climate models increases the chance of exceeding “tipping elements” – such as the Greenland ice sheets, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or Amazon rainforest – by up to 50% | Environmental Research Letters
- The intensity of influenza outbreaks could decline in temperate regions, but increase in tropical areas over the next century, as the climate warms | PNAS Nexus
- European snow cover has declined by 20% for December and January since the start of the industrial era, revealing an “unprecedented ongoing shrinkage of European winters” | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The more than 2m battery electric vehicles (BEVs), 1m “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs) and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are already saving drivers a total of around £3bn a year, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This amounts to savings of more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs for each BEV driver in the UK. The analysis comes amid reports in UK media this week that the government is considering “watering down” its EV sales targets.
Spotlight
Oceans rising at UN climate talks
The state of the world’s oceans is inextricably linked to the changing climate – and many delegates at UN climate talks want to see more focus on this issue, reports Carbon Brief.
Oceans are often described as the world’s “greatest ally” against climate change – absorbing 30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and most of the heat generated by those emissions.
They are also the site of important climate solutions, such as huge offshore windfarms and the shipping industry’s transition to cleaner fuels.
At the same time, the oceans themselves present a growing danger to coastal communities and sea life due to sea level rise, marine heatwaves and ocean acidification.
These diverse issues have led to growing calls within the UN climate process for more focus on oceans. During climate negotiations this week in Bonn – known as SB64 – nations and civil society had a chance to air these views during an “ocean and climate change dialogue”.
‘Elevate action’
Oceans first entered UN climate outcomes in 2019, when the final COP25 negotiated text requested a new “dialogue” on “the ocean and climate change to consider how to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action”.
The following years saw this dialogue established as an annual event. However, the political weight of these discussions has been limited.
COP31 is being co-led by Turkey and Australia, but with Pacific islands playing a supporting role. These small islands sometimes self-identify as “large ocean states”, stressing the ocean’s centrality in their societies.
In Bonn, figures from across the presidency threw their weight behind this issue. Chris Bowen, an Australian minister and incoming COP31 “president of negotiations”, told attendees:
“Australia, Turkey and the Pacific see an important opportunity to elevate ocean-based climate action.”
Strategies and finance
The two-day dialogue in Bonn involved a series of panels, statements and breakout groups.
One of the main topics was how oceans are integrated into national climate plans under the Paris Agreement, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).
Three-quarters of the latest round of NDCs mention oceans, with conservation of “blue carbon” ecosystems the most frequently described action. (Landscapes such as mangroves can both absorb CO2 and protect coastal areas.)
Delegates also discussed alignment with the UN biodiversity process, as well as ocean finance, which currently makes up less than 1% of all climate finance.
(As discussions were taking place in Bonn, country officials also gathered in Mombasa, Kenya for the 11th Our Ocean Conference. Carbon Brief’s associate editor Giuliana Viglione attended the conference and will publish a full summary shortly.)
Developing countries were clear that many of the ocean-related actions in their NDCs would depend on receiving more financial support.
‘Political momentum’
With the backing of the COP31 presidency, delegates were hopeful about where this year’s dialogue could lead.
Charles Hamilton, an advisor for the Bahamas who spoke for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the dialogue, told Carbon Brief that island representatives “are not traveling thousands of miles to just talk and pat ourselves on the back”. He added:
“A dialogue that just remains a dialogue is just more talk – no action.”
Given that, he said “discussions in the dialogue must move into COP decisions and the decisions must be actioned”, noting the importance of finance.
Marina Corrêa, oceans lead at WWF-Brazil, pointed to an upcoming UN climate change Standing Committee on Finance forum as a space to ramp up pressure on ocean finance.
More broadly, she wanted to see the presidencies translate their support into a “leader-level ocean initiative” that could “mainstream” oceans across negotiations.
“We have a really interesting opportunity, in terms of political momentum,” Corrêa told Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listen
‘HOTTER THAN HELL’: An episode of the BBC’s Rare Earth podcast titled “hotter than hell” considered the issue of extreme heat, with input from experts and “people facing up to the hottest temperatures on the planet”.
NOT BROKEN?: John Drake, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, wrote an essay for Aeon – also re-published as a Guardian “long read” – questioning the framing of ecosystems and climate systems “breaking down”.
ON COURSE: On his Volts podcast, US climate journalist David Roberts interviewed UK climate minister Katie White, quizzing her about whether the UK will “stay the course with its climate plans”.
Coming up
- 20-28 June: London climate action week
- 21 June: Colombia presidential runoff
- 24 June: UK Climate Change Committee progress in reducing emissions 2026 report to parliament
Pick of the jobs
- Mongabay, managing editor – Africa | Salary: Unknown. Location: Global
- Contexte, environment reporter – Brussels | Salary: €45,000-€60,000. Location: Brussels
- Climate 200, communications director | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia
- Energy Tracker Asia, energy transition correspondent | Salary: $3,000-$4,000 per month. Location: South-east Asia (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 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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