Dubai pledges “at risk”
Although it now feels like a different lifetime, it was only 18 months ago that UN climate boss Simon Stiell hailed “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era.
At COP28 in Dubai, all countries agreed to a suite of collective actions – including transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, tripling renewables, and halting and reversing deforestation – in response to their failure to keep climate goals on track as demonstrated by the Global Stocktake.
But that breakthrough is now “at risk” unless the delivery of those promises is urgently speeded up, Jennifer Morgan, an architect of that landmark COP28 deal and until recently Germany’s climate envoy, told an audience at London Climate Action Week.
Campaigners issue mass call for reforms to rescue UN climate process
How to do that? One obvious place would be the dedicated “dialogue on implementing the Global Stocktake outcomes” at the UN climate talks. But discussions in that negotiating track broke down at COP29 in the face of concerted resistance by oil-exporting countries. Now, in Bonn, they appear to be heading in a similar direction with no shared understanding even on the purpose of this space.
Developed countries, small-island states and the AILAC group of Latin American nations want to put the focus on “collective progress” towards meeting the GST goals, ideally by holding an annual ministerial summit and producing reports. But others including the Like-Minded Developing Countries – which counts China and Saudi Arabia among its members – and India have pushed back, saying this forum should not become an assessment mechanism or set new targets, according to a summary of discussions published by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.
Brazil: Let’s deliver on our old climate promises before making new ones
The elephant in the room is finance. CAN International’s Shreeshan Venkatesh said the “weak decision” on that in Baku – where developed countries agreed to deliver $300 billion per year by 2035 – is “leaving a mark and stopping a constructive, progressive decision from being made here”.
Over in London, Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s climate envoy, warned that without addressing the “centrepiece of climate change” – finance – “it is difficult to get any significant outcome in Belém”.
The pressure is on Brazil, which only a week ago pinned the implementation of the GST goals to the top of its action agenda for this year’s summit. “The time of finger pointing is gone,” said COP30 CEO Ana Toni on Tuesday, calling for a “mature” debate on the energy transition.
Shuttling between stuffy rooms in Bonn and glitzy events in London over the last week, she said it was in the UK capital that she saw “real life moving”. “We haven’t been able as yet to translate that real life to the negotiation rooms,” Toni added. “The transition is inevitable. We need to capture that and bring it into politics”.
How that will be reflected into the final outcome in Belém is still far from clear. One option would be to produce a “cover decision” which often provides a home to stranded and politically -fraught discussions. In a recent letter, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) urged COP30 President André Correa do Lago to seriously consider that possibility.
But speaking to Climate Home last week, Toni made clear that COP30 would rather not go down that route. “We don’t want to use the very precious time of negotiators to get out of the room to negotiate something else rather than deepen the debate about the topics they are already discussing,” she said.
Turkiye makes COP31 case
With one day of the Bonn climate talks left, the fight between Australia and Turkiye over who gets to host COP31 next year has yet to be resolved – despite strong support for Australia from the “Western Europe and Others” group of countries that will make the decision.
Many expected Turkiye to drop its bid, but it doubled down today, with a major charm offensive. Its delegation in Bonn held two receptions – with soft drinks and snacks – and delivered a presentation on why the southern Turkish resort city of Antalya and its huge Expo centre should host COP31.
Part of its pitch is that Antalya has lots of hotels and flight connections – something COP30’s host city Belém is sorely lacking. Its presentation claimed it has 628,000 beds, golf courses, great food and tourist attractions like the Roman ruins of Side.
“Antalya is ready to host a low-carbon global gathering,” the Hollywood-style voiceover said in a promotional video over a graphic of planes converging on Antalya. The argument is that its “central location” will minimise air miles, while Turkiye sees itself as a bridge between East and West, and developed and developing countries.
The presentation promoted Turkiye’s green credentials as an “economy not dependent on fossil fuels”. It wasn’t mentioned explicitly, but rival Australia is a major fossil fuel exporter. Wary of the attraction of Australia’s co-operation with the Pacific islands for COP31, Turkiye’s presentation also mentioned the Pacific several times.
Australia, meanwhile, wants to host the COP in its southern city of Adelaide – a pioneer in renewable energy. The UNFCCC wants a decision on the COP31 host to be made here in Bonn so that whoever is chosen has more than a year to prepare.
Fund the firefighters
“THE WORLD IS ON FIRE. FUND THE FIRE DEPARTMENT” – that was the no-nonsense message, replete with fire emojis, that the UNFCCC’s deputy head Noura Hamladji posted on Linkedin yesterday. The UNFCCC secretariat is the body that organises the UN climate talks and keeps work going throughout the year.
Hamladji was referring to negotiations on how much money governments should give the UNFCCC – the metaphorical fire-fighters – for 2026-2027 so that it can carry out the ever-growing list of activities governments have told it to do.
The two options in the latest draft text are for the budget for 2026-2027 to be around the same as 2024-2025 – $74m over the two years. Or for a 24% increase up to $92m.
A note from UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said that, without an increase, the sustainability of the UNFCCC process and of the secretariat would be jeopardised.
At a meeting today, governments told the UNFCCC to draw up two budgets with around a 10% increase and a 19% increase, according to three sources in the room.
They added that Saudi Arabia said they did not have a mandate to go above 10%. And the UK – which wants 24% – proposed 19% as a compromise.
This will disappoint the UNFCCC and those who rely on its work. Even with the 24% increase, which Stiell calls a “proposed core budget”, the UN climate chief says the UNFCCC would not have enough to cover its “essential” programmes and support activities.
It would also disappoint the small islands of AOSIS. Their finance negotiator Thibyan Ibrahim told Climate Home they want the secretariat’s 24%.
What Stiell calls an “actual needs scenario” of $109m is currently off the table. It is not an option in the draft negotiating text.
Without enough money to fulfill its functions, the UNFCCC would need to raise supplementary funding from voluntary contributions from governments and other sources like philanthropies – such as Michael Bloomberg who has stepped in to fill the hole left by the US government under Trump.
The post Bonn bulletin: Waiting for a plan to rescue COP28 breakthrough appeared first on Climate Home News.
Bonn bulletin: Waiting for a plan to rescue COP28 breakthrough
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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Lula’s election win in Brazil raises hopes for zero deforestation drive
Lula’s re-election makes it more likely Brazil can meet a key goal to end forest loss in the Amazon and builds confidence in a new fund to protect the world’s rainforests, experts say
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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Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak -
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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, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
