A month ago, ahead of the mid-year UN climate talks, the Brazilian COP30 Presidency warned governments against “introducing potentially contentious new agenda items that could further burden the process or detract from agreed priorities”.
But two such items – submitted by Bolivia on behalf of the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries (LMDC) which includes China and Saudi Arabia – have proved highly contentious and prevented the negotiations in Bonn from beginning as planned today.
Two weeks ago, Bolivia proposed an agenda item on implementation of the part of the Paris Agreement (Article 9.1) which states that developed countries “shall provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties”.
A senior negotiator from one LMDC country told Climate Home today that the discussion on proper implementation of this article is definitely not on the current agenda in Bonn and should be included.
On the same day, Bolivia proposed another item on “promoting international cooperation and addressing the concerns with climate change-related trade-restrictive unilateral measures”.
This targets the EU’s tax on the carbon emissions of certain imported products and similar proposed measures from the UK and Canada, arguing that they have been introduced “under the guise of climate objectives” and “increase the cost of worldwide climate action”.
Similar attempts were made to get this issue onto the agendas of COP28 and COP29 but both attempts were unsuccessful due to opposition from the developed countries whose policies are criticised by the proposal.
With the two sides at loggerheads, the Bonn opening plenary – which was scheduled to start at 10am local time has yet to begin. “Whole day almost wasted,” said one developing country negotiator, adding “the developed parties don’t want to see our issues”.
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While waiting for the plenary to start, some representatives from civil society recalled that most developing countries left COP29 in Baku really disappointed with the new climate finance goal – the famous NCQG – agreed there. Today in Bonn, finance is – yet again – the reason for tense discussions between countries.
Ironically, the agenda row is actually holding up much-needed discussions on finance. Today, the COP30 Presidency was supposed to be listening to governments’ views on the Baku-Belém roadmap on how to expand developed countries’ COP29 promise of $300 billion a year in climate finance to the $1.3 trillion developing countries want by bringing in other sources. That meeting has been suspended until further notice.
At 6pm in Bonn, a delegate told Climate Home: “There is still no resolution on these two items of the agenda”. Shortly afterwards, in the corridors, we asked UN climate chief Simon Stiell if the official opening was likely to happen in Monday, to which he replied: “So much work still in progress.”
The room where the plenary will be held is available only until 10pm German time. So time is running out in more ways than one!
Climate-unfriendly US absent from Bonn
After starting the process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement in January, Donald Trump’s administration decided for the first time not to send a delegation to the preparatory meetings for COP30, which got off to a slow start today in Bonn.
“It’s no surprise that the US isn’t represented here,” Alden Meyer, senior associate at E3G, told Climate Home. “They have dismantled the office in the State Department that was responsible for coordinating US strategy in the negotiations. So it’s not even clear who they would have sent if they decided to send someone.”
The country will technically be out of the Paris Agreement as of January 27, 2026. “They are also still part of the [UN Climate] Convention. So, they could go to Belém and try to change the negotiations dynamics if they decide it’s in their interest to do so,” Meyer added.
The US-based We Are Still In coalition is, however, participating in the Bonn session, the veteran negotiations expert confirmed. This initiative of subnational states, cities and businesses has been trying to fulfill America’s climate commitments since the gap left by Trump’s first term.
Argentina’s one-woman team
As of last Friday, there was no official information or response to Climate Home’s questions regarding whether Argentina would participate in the meetings in Bonn.
Last November, Javier Milei’s government surprised everyone in Baku by deciding to withdraw the Argentine delegation from COP29.
Although Argentina has repeatedly stated it’s considering pulling out of the Paris Agreement, the South American country hasn’t yet decided to do so, possibly because a potential withdrawal would likely harm ties with its main trading partners – Brazil, China, and the European Union.
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As we were able to verify, Milei’s government has sent just one delegate to Bonn: the current director of environmental affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eliana Saissac.
It’s notoriously difficult for countries with small delegations to engage in a packed talks agenda with several simultaneous meetings – so it’s unclear how Argentina plans to negotiate meaningfully with just one representative or where her efforts will be focused.
The post Bonn Bulletin: Climate talks delayed by agenda fight appeared first on Climate Home News.
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
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.