Call to triple adaptation finance
At COP26 four years ago, governments agreed to “urge” developed countries to double finance for adapting to climate change up to around $40 billion a year by 2025.
That goal ends this year, although we will not know until 2027 if it has been met. But at a press conference in Bonn this afternoon, the Least Developed Countries group chair Evan Njewa called for a successor goal – tripling adaptation finance by 2030 on 2022 levels. “Adaptation is a lifeline,” he explained.
Other developing countries are likely to back this. Grupo Sur and the Like-Minded Developing countries have made the same call in different negotiating rooms and Njewa said he was sure that the small islands group AOSIS would back it too.
“We’re never going to say no to adaptation finance,” AOSIS finance negotiator Thibyan Ibrahim told Climate Home in Bonn. But he noted that even tripling “does little to close the adaptation finance gap”. The UN estimates that developing countries need $160-340 billion a year by 2030, whereas tripling on 2022 levels would bring in just under $100 billion.
Last year in Baku, developed governments would not agree to having a sub-goal on adaptation in the wider $300-billion-by-2035 finance goal and it’s not currently clear which negotiating track a new adaptation goal could be included in.
The doubling-by-2025 goal was in the COP26 cover decision – a stand-alone declaration all governments agree to – but the COP30 Presidency has said it does not want a cover decision.
It would fit in the Baku to Belem roadmap to $1.3 trillion or the Global Goal on Adaptation. But the roadmap is not an official negotiated UN agreement – so may not be followed up on – and developed-country governments have been resisting financial indicators in the Global Goal on Adaptation.
Meanwhile outside the world of UN climate talks, a recent CARE report showed that adaptation finance is likely to fall by 10% in 2026. France, Germany, the Netherlands and particularly the UK are set to make big cuts between 2025 and 2026.
The US is giving nothing in either 2025 or 2026. Commenting on US climate finance cuts generally, Njewa said he expects “someone somewhere to rise up and fill in the gap that that party has left”.
From Bonn to Nairobi?
Denouncing the visa problems faced by some developing country delegates heading to Bonn, more than 200 climate campaign groups made a joint call yesterday for governments to consider whether Germany should remain the default host for the mid-year climate talks.
Chanting “no borders, no nations, no visa applications”, a dozen campaigners gathered outside the conference centre on Tuesday morning, holding up a banner calling to move the annual talks to “visa-friendly countries”.
With many of those affected by the perennial issue unable to protest themselves, the demonstrators played a voice note from Roaa Alobeid, a young Sudanese climate activist who spoke movingly at COP28 about the war in her country.
She said she had gone to great lengths to get a visa for the Schengen area, which includes Germany, making an appointment, submitting 15 documents – including five letters of support and a bank statement – but was still rejected.
“I’m not there. I will never be there”, she said. “Why? I’m not worth it?” “We shouldn’t be left behind when we are the ones impacted.”
Cameroonian activist Zoneziwoh Mbondgulo-Wondieh did make it, but told the protest her one-year-old daughter had been refused a visa for being too young. She asked why Germany would implicitly tell a nursing mother they must stay at home and not work abroad.
When Climate Home questioned the German foreign office on this issue last year, a spokesperson said it was important to the government that all delegates could attend but there are legal requirements for getting a visa for the EU’s Schengen zone of free movement.
Rachitaa Gupta, head of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, said it would be better to hold the annual mid-year talks somewhere like Nairobi or Bangkok – where UN facilities already exist and visas are easier to obtain. Holding the meetings in the Global South would also be cheaper, Gupta added.
Climate finance on the rise – mostly for the rich
New figures out today paint a fairly positive picture of global climate finance, showing it climbed to a record $1.9 trillion in 2023, more than tripling over six years.
Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), which compiles the data, said that at the current rate of growth, the world could deliver $6 trillion in annual climate investment – the most conservative estimate of needs – by 2028.
Private-sector funding rose above $1 trillion for the first time in 2023, driven by household spending on electric vehicles, solar and energy-efficient housing – with clean energy in advanced economies and China receiving the bulk of the money.
While this suggests the long-touted need to “shift the trillions” towards green investment is underway, the headline numbers mask the fact that many of the poorest countries are still failing to receive anything like the amounts they need.
The CPI report shows that overall public climate finance fell by about 8% from 2022 to 2023, as government budgets were tight after the COVID-19 pandemic. It also warned that recently announced cuts to official development assistance, in countries such as the US and the UK, raise concern that money from this source could decline further.
International climate finance for emerging markets and developing countries reached $196 billion in 2023, with 78% of that from public sources. Yet while both climate-related development finance and private investment rose, CPI said the least-developed countries still face barriers to accessing affordable capital, and need more financial innovation and support.
In a separate report released on Monday, however, Oil Change International and 17 other NGOs warned that a widely used approach of using government money to lower investment risk and bring in more commercial cash – known as “blended finance” – is falling short of expectations.
The report found that every public dollar of concessional lending is bringing in 4-7 times less private investment than anticipated, leaving the Global South with massive shortfalls of cash for its energy transition. Most money, it said, is going to Global North countries and China, with the remaining 69% of the world’s population receiving just 15% of finance in 2023-2024.
“A just energy transition is dramatically more affordable than continued fossil fuel dependence. But unfortunately affordable doesn’t mean ‘attractive to banks and hedge funds’,” said Bronwen Tucker, global public finance lead at Oil Change. “It is clear from the data that private investors are not fit to lead the way to the fossil free future we need, and that governments must step in.”
Mineral justice for Africa
Efforts to revive the Lobito Corridor trade route in central Africa must prioritise local economic development over raw material exports, researchers at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) said, as campaigners in Bonn call for justice for resource-rich countries and an end to the extractive injustices of the fossil fuel era.
The US and the European Union are providing financial support to Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to upgrade their infrastructure to aid transport of critical energy transition minerals like cobalt and copper through a rail system which terminates at the port of Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic coast.
In a policy brief issued this week, highlighting the Corridor’s opportunities and challenges for a just transition, the researchers questioned how the project’s development will benefit the wider economies of the countries involved, while protecting social benefits and human rights including being fair to the people whose land it might encroach upon and the artisanal miners who dig up many of the raw materials.
They said the involvement of the EU and the US has raised concerns in participating countries such as Zambia, where a parliamentary committee has said the Lobito Corridor project appears to focus on “mopping up critical raw materials” to respond to the energy security concerns of wealthy nations without adding value to the countries.
Lorenzo Cotula, IIED principal researcher, said if the EU and other prospective funders are interested in a genuine, long-term partnership with Angola, Congo and Zambia, they should support their efforts to promote economic development and improve the lives of their citizens.
“This project shouldn’t just be a means to export more raw materials more quickly to wealthier countries, or another chess piece in the great power game,” Cotula said.
“Millions of people in mineral-rich, lower-income countries are being sidelined in a global rush for materials to power electric cars, computers and even military technologies in richer nations,” he added.
Sharing similar concern, campaigners from Power Shift Africa and the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) convened a press conference at the ongoing talks in Bonn calling for the need for just minerals in the just transition, because one cannot exist without the other.
Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition at Climate Action Network International (CAN-I), said the transition that is happening is not one that is needed for a climate-compatible world because the needs of resource-rich countries are being ignored.
Rosemberg said there is need for international cooperation to overturn the current competition over resources, adding that “we know that investment and trade deals are being arranged to secure the supply of these minerals, and in the end, we are reproducing all the mistakes that have been done in the past with the fossil-based economy”.
Samira Ally, project officer at Power Shift Africa, said Africa’s mineral wealth can accelerate a global shift to net zero when governed by justice and stability with necessary guardrails in place.
To do this, she asked governments to integrate language from the G20 and the UN panel on critical minerals into the climate talks and national climate plans so that they “reference sustainable supply chains and the right to development and industrialisation in the Global South”.
The post Bonn bulletin: Developing nations call for adaptation finance to triple by 2030 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Bonn bulletin: Developing nations call for adaptation finance to triple by 2030
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectations
An exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
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Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidies
In the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries who have not submitted a biodiversity plan yet to finalise them “as soon as possible” and taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
“Timid” steps to expand base of donors
Having failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said during one of the sessions that her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, also noted their dissatisfaction but said it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
Cali Fund still not operational
Adopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
The post COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile,