After governments failed to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels at COP30, Australia will “continue to argue” for a transition away from coal, oil and gas in energy systems at next year’s COP31 climate talks, the incoming “President of Negotiations” has said.
Sitting alongside ministers from the Pacific islands of Vanuatu, Palau and the Solomon Islands on the last evening of COP30 in Brazil, Australian climate minister Chris Bowen was asked about negotiations to transition away from fossil fuels. He told the press conference that he “wasn’t going to start getting into the COP31 negotiations because we haven’t quite finished COP30 yet.”
But he added that Australia and the Pacific helped design a global target to transition away from fossil fuels, which was agreed two years ago at COP28 in Dubai. “We’ll continue to argue for things that are in the best interest of Australia and the Pacific together,” he said.
In a last-minute deal in Belém, Australia and Türkiye agreed to share responsibilities at next year’s UN climate summit, with the conference taking place in the city of Antalya – located in the Turkish Riviera – but with the Australians taking a leading role in the negotiations.
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COP31 will be hosted by Türkiye but run by Australia
Australian minister Chris Bowen said the country will hold the COP presidency with powers to manage talks, prepare drafts and issue a cover decision -
“We are still here” – COP30 tests resolve to keep fighting climate crisis
Climate Home News rounds up a selection of views on the COP30 climate summit outcomes from politicians, top UN officials and analysts
Governments at COP30 failed to collectively agree to launch a roadmap away from fossil fuels, with the Brazilian presidency stating that around 85 countries were in favour and 80 against. The list of countries in favour was published by Carbon Brief, but the countries Brazil says were against have not been named.
Countries did collectively set up a Global Implementation Accelerator, which is linked to the COP28 decision where the fossil fuel transition is mentioned. Voluntary initiatives were also launched at the summit, with Brazil promising to draw up a fossil fuel transition roadmap by COP31 and Colombia hosting an international conference on the transition in April.
Bowen said that COP31 “won’t be an easy negotiation” but “in one way, that’s why I’m looking forward to it so much because hard negotiations can lead to very good outcomes, as recent days have shown”.
Division of COP31 duties
After Australia and Türkiye agreed last week to share COP31 responsibilies, details of their arrangement emerged. Bowen will be COP “President of Negotiations”, which a joint statement describes as “exclusive authority in relation to negotiations”, while the Turkish environment minister Murat Kurum will be “COP President” and will hold the gavel which is banged to formally agree decisions.
Joanna Depledge, a COP historian and research fellow at the University of Cambridge, said on social media that this division of authority “created the potential for damaging confusion”, adding that “COP decision-making is already messy at climate COPs. It needs more certainty, not less”.
“If there is a difference of views between Türkiye and Australia, consultations will take place until the difference is resolved to mutual satisfaction,” the joint statement put out by the UN’s climate change body said.
“We are friends,” Kurum told Saturday’s press conference in Turkish, expressing his hope that the “shared pain” that Turks and Australians suffered in the First World War’s Canakkale or Gallipoli campaign be turned “into a means for friendship, cooperation and service to humanity”. He then left so that Bowen and the Pacific ministers could talk further and take questions.
According to the arrangement between the two nations, the speech-making summit of heads of state, the two week COP trade fair and negotiations will be hosted in the coastal resort of Antalya, while a lower-profile pre-COP meeting will be held in a Pacific nation, presided over by Australia.
At COP31, there will be a dedicated session on the the climate finance needs of small island developing states, at which pledges to the regional fund Pacific Resilience Facility are expected.
Australia and Turkiye will divide up the appointment of ‘champions’, people who represent the COP Presidency and try to inspire global climate action. Australia will appoint youth champions while Turkiye will appoint High-Level Champions and run the Action Agenda – the push for climate action from businesses, civil society and local governments as well as national governments.
Colombia seeks to speed up a “just” fossil fuel phase-out with first global conference
Pacific hosts a Pre-COP
The agreement has dissapointed people in both nations. The leader of the Australia’s opposition Green Party called it an “embarassing result” for Australia while a former Turkish climate negotiator told Climate Home News that, without presiding over negotiations, Turkiye would do all the work while Australia makes the decisions.
But Pacific ministers celebrated the agreement. Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu said that the arrangement is “unprecedented but I believe there will be many more to come because it’s a great model, especially for smaller countries who can’t afford to host a COP”. “I would like to be involved in the agenda setting which is, for us, the most important thing”, he added.
Palau’s climate minister Stephen Victor said he hoped that government leaders would come to the pre-COP in the Pacific, which would be an opportunity to “showcase the impacts of climate change on the Pacific Island region and hear voices and solutions from the region”. Pre-COPs are usually attended mainly by ministers rather than presidents or prime ministers.
Led by Bowen, Australia has long argued for a joint Australian-Pacific COP. Bowen thanked Kurum for “immedately agreeing” to all Australia’s demands on Pacific involvement. Kurum said he wanted to work so that “regions that are most affected by climate change, such as the Mediterranean and the Pacific are given a louder voice on the global agenda”.
The post Australia’s COP31 Co-President vows to fight alongside Pacific for a fossil fuel transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Australia’s COP31 Co-President vows to fight alongside Pacific for a fossil fuel transition
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.