Two weeks of tense UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, have produced few tangible outcomes as diplomats faced “gridlock”.
Negotiators failed to find agreement in numerous areas, such as scaling up global emissions cuts and funding for climate adaptation.
In the closing plenary, many diplomats lamented weakened trust in the UN climate process, as it struggled to find its footing in a new geopolitical landscape.
As ever, climate finance was one of the greatest sources of tension between developed and developing countries, influencing the debate around adaptation and trade in the Bonn talks.
Many countries criticised “coordinated attacks” on science by those with “fossil-fuel interests”.
Some delegates saw progress on a “just transition mechanism” to support communities through decarbonisation as a positive outcome, with a package of texts agreed for the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey.
Reporting from the talks in Bonn, Carbon Brief covers the key outcomes and disputes at the 64th biannual sessions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) subsidiary bodies (SB64).
- Adaptation
- Just transition
- Climate finance
- Global stocktake
- Mitigation work programme
- Action agenda and new initiatives
- Climate science
- Fossil fuels
- Trade dialogues
- COP reform
- Ocean dialogue
- Road to COP31
Adaptation
Climate adaptation proved one of the most contentious areas of negotiation in Bonn. In particular, parties were unable to agree on text relating to the “global goal on adaptation” (GGA).
Across the two weeks, progress was “stuck, stalled or deferred”, even in the rooms of technical adaptation items, Jeffrey Qi, policy advisor with International Institute for Sustainable Development’s (IISD) resilience program, told Carbon Brief.
In many of the rooms, this was due to a “fault line” over finance, Ana Mulio Alvarez, policy advisor at thinktank E3G told Carbon Brief, as developing countries sought support to help protect themselves from escalating climate hazards.
Last year at COP30, parties had agreed on a new adaptation finance target within the “global mutirão”.
The text “calls for efforts to at least triple adaptation finance” for developing countries by 2035. This is largely expected to come from developed countries, which are obliged to provide climate finance under the Paris Agreement.
While this tripling target agreed in Brazil was broadly welcomed by developing countries, it lacked key details. For example, it did not specify the baseline for tripling, the parties which have to contribute or the types of finance that will be counted under the goal.
(Earlier drafts of the text in Belém had included reference to 2025 as the baseline, the deadline for a $40bn adaptation finance goal set at COP26. This led some parties and civil society organisations to state that the 2035 level ought to be $120bn.)
In Bonn, various parties said that the tripling target should also be included within the text on the GGA. This included the African group, small-island states (AOSIS), least developed countries (LDCs), some Latin American countries (AILAC), as well as the G77 and China.
They said that they would need finance to implement the GGA, especially as adaptation projects often rely on public, grant-based funding rather than private investment.
Canada, Norway and Japan were among those opposing a reference to the tripling target.
A first draft text on the GGA did not include a reference to the finance goal. Many parties again expressed their concern over this omission.
A second draft only included a reference to the tripling of adaptation finance within a bracketed opening paragraph. (Passages of text that are not yet agreed are shown in square brackets.)
A reference to tripling finance remained in the final draft, shown below. The entire text is surrounded by square brackets and is subject to negotiation and agreement at COP31.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for ActionAid International, said:
“It’s been a huge fight to even get a soft acknowledgement of the Belém promise to triple adaptation finance, let alone a proper plan to meet that promise. It seems rich countries want to be able to quietly forget they ever said anything at all.”
Beyond the question of finance, a number of other GGA elements were discussed in Bonn. This included work on the “indicators”, a set of 59 ways to measure progress towards the GGA, which were agreed by parties at COP30.
The adoption of these indicators in Belém had proven difficult, despite experts having worked on them for two years. They were pushed through at the close of COP30 to mixed reactions.
Parties entered negotiations in Bonn amid the uncertainty this created. Alongside the indicators, the final text last year contained plans for a two-year “Belém-Addis vision” to further refine the indicator process.
As part of this, at SB64 parties worked towards creating a taskforce that would establish underlying data and methodologies for the indicators. However, the make-up of this taskforce became fraught, as parties disagreed on whether it should be technical or political.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Bethan Laughlin, senior policy specialist at the Zoological Society of London, said the negotiators were in “a very Groundhog Day’ situation”, where they were once again looking to experts to refine the indicator package, while struggling with the idea of ceding control of the process.
During negotiations in the second week, Brazil and the EU called for the taskforce to be expert-driven, while Grupo Sur, the like-minded developing countries (LMDCs) and the Arab group supported a party-driven taskforce.
As the talks moved into the final days of negotiations in Bonn, this remained a sticking point.
A final element of the GGA is the Baku adaptation roadmap (BAR), which was launched at COP29 in Azerbaijan. It is designed to help bring coherence across the multiple different adaptation efforts and advance progress towards the GGA.
At workshops during the first week in Bonn, parties focused on how the current adaptation framework supports the GGA and climate finance for adaptation.
In negotiations, the G77 and China called for the BAR to ensure access to finance in accordance with Article 9.1. This is the part of the Paris Agreement that refers to developed countries “providing” climate finance. (See: Climate finance.)
Canada, Japan, the UK and the EU all disagreed with this inclusion, arguing that finance should be addressed under other agenda items.
Ultimately, no agreement could be reached on the GGA. The issue was therefore subject to “rule 16” and passed to COP31 without any agreed text.
In the closing plenary, parties expressed their disappointment with the situation, with AOSIS noting the outcome was “completely unacceptable”.
In a statement, E3G’s Mulio Alvarez said that amid worsening climate impacts, the “rule 16 is more than a procedural outcome: it is a warning sign”.
Beyond the GGA, the adaptation space also includes numerous other negotiations.
Those around the adaptation fund drew particular focus this year, as it is in the process of transitioning to exclusively serve the Paris Agreement. This will allow it to access 5% of the revenues generated by the agreement’s new carbon market under Article 6.4.
A key challenge was the makeup of the fund’s board, which currently includes members from “Annex I” and “non-Annex I” countries. This refers to the division of countries based on their development status in 1992, when the UNFCCC was established.
The Paris Agreement refers instead simply to “developed” and “developing” countries. The concern, observers told Carbon Brief, is that this could open the door for wealthier developing countries to be defined as “developed” – something that some parties oppose.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Qi said that the issue would require a head of delegation or higher to push through an agreement. He added:
“This is such a politically charged issue that concerns the fundamental question of the relationship between the convention and the Paris Agreement.”
Parties failed to come to an agreement on this point, instead deciding to continue discussions at COP31.
Just transition
The agreement to create a “just transition mechanism” was one of the most substantial outcomes of COP30. In Bonn, it took a further step forward.
Dubbed the “Belém-Antalya mechanism for global just transitions” (BAM) by civil society, it is intended to provide a centralised hub to support “just transitions” for workers and communities around the world.
Speaking during a press conference in the second week of SB64, COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago pointed to the mechanism as a key “legacy” of the conference.
However, as work got underway on the just transition work programme (JTWP), where the BAM sits, the focus of negotiations was instead on the “terms of reference” for an upcoming review.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition at NGO umbrella group Climate Action Network (CAN) International, said that while negotiations got off to a good start, negotiators got “distracted very fast”. She added:
“Basically, over the 10 days of negotiations, a week was just [spent] on an extremely procedural and technical discussion, instead of a conversation on the mechanism.”
Over the first week, parties diverged on the review’s mandate, objective and scope. This latter point includes how the JTWP relates to processes under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Paris Agreement and UN entities.
Observers told Carbon Brief that they did not think the delay in the discussion of the mechanism had been orchestrated by parties to hamper progress, although they did suggest the BAM was not a priority for certain groups.
Going into the second week, with so much time focused on the terms of reference, Chadli Sadorra, senior program staff at the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, told Carbon Brief that whether or not there was enough time to come up with meaningful outcomes on the mechanism was a concern.
However, on 16 June, the co-chairs introduced a draft text with a “non-exhaustive” list on how to take the mechanism forward.
This was divided into sections on context, purpose, functions integration, coordination and coherence, barriers and opportunities, international cooperation, modalities and governance, timelines and links to the JTWP.
Parties, including Latin American countries under AILAC, Brazil, Norway, AOSIS, the African group and others, welcomed the note as the basis of further negotiations. The Arab group pushed back, saying the text did not reflect its priorities.
There were further discussions on key elements, such as AILAC suggesting a review of the timelines. Brazil and others said that the way the BAM operates and is governed should be considered separately, while the African group urged a strengthened focus on international cooperation.
Ultimately, talks were able to move forward substantially.
Civil society representatives also broadly welcomed the draft text. Rosemberg told Carbon Brief that “there’s a whole chunk that is really good”, adding:
“It points to functions that make sense; it’s not rehashing stuff that we have seen forever in the UNFCCC. It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s crisp, it has potential.”
On the penultimate day of the SB64 negotiations, the co-facilitators asked parties to agree on a package of outcomes, including a summary of the fifth JTWP “dialogue”, a placeholder for its next meeting and the terms of reference for the review of the process. It also included a list of items that would need to be agreed as part of developing the BAM.
Several parties said they could agree to the package in the spirit of compromise. This included an invitation to the chairs of the process to continue working on the matter before COP31, in order to try to find agreement on the BAM.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Dr Leon Sealey-Huggins, a senior campaigner at the charity War on Want, said that lots of important elements remained in the text, albeit in “skeleton form”, including links to financial architecture.
But key questions remain around the details of the BAM, including on the role of non-party stakeholder participants, Huggins added. As such, civil society groups see further meetings on the mechanism, ahead of COP31, as key to allowing it to be adopted in November.
Ultimately, this package of texts was agreed without intervention in the closing plenary of SB64 on 18 June.
Speaking during a press conference that day, attended by Carbon Brief, Rosemberg concluded:
“Watch out, the BAM is coming”.
Climate finance
Delegates spent much of the first week in Bonn debating climate finance outside of formal negotiations, in a series of “workshops” and “dialogues”. Much of their focus was on how to fulfil financial commitments made during previous climate negotiations.
Finance is a core issue at UN climate talks and one that has frequently led to “agenda fights” and delays in recent years.
The major divide is between developing countries that receive climate finance and developed countries that are obliged, under the Paris Agreement, to provide or “mobilise” it.
There was no agenda fight as SB64 kicked off in Bonn. However, finance remained a source of friction across many workstreams, against a difficult global backdrop.
Recent official figures show that climate finance from developed countries reached a record $136.7bn in 2024. Developed countries, therefore, argue that they are raising climate finance in line with their obligations, despite other fiscal strains.
Since 2024, however, aid cuts by major donors – particularly the US – mean public climate spending by developed countries is likely to have fallen substantially. There have also been drops in support for UN climate funds, such as the Green Climate Fund.
Moreover, hardly any developed countries have pledged new finance for 2026 and beyond.
This is in spite of parties agreeing in 2024 on a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) of $300bn a year for developing countries by 2035 – largely from developed countries.
Given this, developing countries argue that developed countries are, in fact, shirking their responsibility to scale up their public-finance provision. They say this is vital, especially considering the $300bn goal is already far below the scale needed to tackle climate change.
Isatou Camara, lead climate finance coordinator for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), told Carbon Brief that their adaptation needs depended on securing such funding:
“[Public finance is] oxygen for us, because when we talk about what we need as vulnerable countries, it’s basically enhancing resilience and adaptation.”
At COP30, parties agreed to launch a new two-year “work programme” for countries to discuss these concerns, among others.
This came after a concerted effort, led by the LMDCs and the Arab group, to start a work programme focused exclusively on Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement. This is the part that says developed countries “shall provide” finance – generally taken to mean public spending.
However, developed countries note that the NCQG goal covers a “wide variety of sources”, including the private sector and wealthier developing countries, such as China.
In the end, parties at COP30 compromised on a programme to address Article 9.1 “in the context of Article 9…as a whole” – meaning it could cover all types of finance.
Nevertheless, in submissions ahead of SB64, many developing countries were clear that they wanted the programme to be a “dedicated space” to discuss Article 9.1.
The LMDCs and Arab group even erroneously referred to it simply as the “work programme on Article 9.1” and made it clear that they “do not see [it] as a way of consolidating other agenda items on finance”.
(Some developing-country groups, such as AOSIS, place a lot of emphasis on other aspects of finance, such as quality and accessibility, as well as the need for provision by developed countries.)
In contrast, developed countries, such as the EU, Norway and Canada, said they wanted a broad approach that focuses on “streamlining” the existing climate-finance agenda and “mobilising” finance from various sources.
There were three “engagement workshops” to discuss this new climate-finance work programme at SB64.
Parties remained entrenched in long-held positions, with developed countries happy to keep the focus on climate finance of all kinds, as opposed to public funding.
The G77 and China rejected the “work plan” prepared by the co-chairs and said its focus should be squarely on Article 9.1. Some developing countries argued for “burden sharing agreements” and an “action plan” to compel developed countries to provide more finance.
In order to elevate these issues into formal negotiations, developing countries and civil-society organisations stressed throughout SB64 that the Article 9 work programme should be placed on the agenda at COP31. (A draft version of the agenda for November’s summit did not include it.)
This argument was given more weight when COP30 president Corrêa do Lago used his “authority” to request such an item, in a letter published towards the end of SB64 week one.
When asked why he made this unconventional intervention, Corrêa do Lago told Carbon Brief that it reflected his understanding of what was agreed last year:
“If I believe that we agreed in Belém that this would happen, I think it is normal that, as president of the COP, I request that to the secretariat.”
Nevertheless, his action is not binding and will not, in itself, avert conflict over whether to include the issue on the COP31 agenda. Despite this, the move was celebrated by civil society, with Sehr Raheja, a climate change programme office at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) telling Carbon Brief:
“Developed countries have been resistant to it from the beginning…Drama is going to be there [at COP31], whether we like it or not.”
The SB64 talks also saw the first two-day meeting of the “Veredas dialogue”, another new finance-related process agreed at COP30.
This is a space for parties to discuss Article 2.1c of the Paris Agreement, which concerns making all global financial flows “consistent” with climate goals. Some developing countries, such as the Arab group, have resisted this aspect of negotiations, preferring to keep the focus exclusively on finance from developed countries.
The Veredas dialogue is essentially a continuation of the “Sharm el-Sheikh dialogue” – which ended last year – except with greater focus on real-world implementation.
These discussions saw presentations on various topics, including how Rwanda is aligning its public finance with climate resilience and Norway’s experience with carbon pricing. As part of the dialogue, high-level “Xingu finance talks” will take place later this year.
Finally, the COP30 presidency hosted sessions to discuss the implementation of the “Baku to Belém roadmap”.
As well as the $300bn goal, the NCQG contains a more aspirational target of reaching $1.3tn in annual climate finance by 2035, which parties at COP30 agreed to “urgently advance”. The roadmap is a presidency-led attempt to add substance to the $1.3tn pledge.
In Bonn, parties and experts discussed activities to “focus collective energies” and “gain quick wins”, as well as how to follow up on the roadmap in “mandated workstreams and through the action agenda”.
A summary of the discussion will be produced and used to inform the continued follow-up on the roadmap, over the coming year.
Global stocktake
Years of discussions culminated in the first “global stocktake” (GST) of the Paris Agreement in 2023, which assessed progress towards climate goals and what more needed to be done.
Since then, countries have been engaging in a process known as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) dialogue, which focuses on implementing the GST outcomes.
There were two sessions at SB64 for parties to share experiences and information about how to implement the GST – and barriers they faced – as agreed at COP30.
Interventions from parties such as the EU, Switzerland and Colombia focused on the GST’s “energy package”, contained in paragraph 28 of the text, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels” and “phasing out inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies”.
AOSIS highlighted the recent conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, as a good example of cooperation to deliver on these outcomes.
Many developing-country parties stressed that they needed more climate finance and other forms of support to carry out GST outcomes. The Philippines, speaking on behalf of the G77 and China, highlighted:
“The persistent gap between the scale of action required to implement GST outcomes…and the scale, quality, accessibility and predictability of support provided.”
Among the groups preferring to keep the focus on finance were those representing major fossil-fuel producers. Saudi Arabia, speaking for the LMDCs, described the dialogue as a “non-prescriptive space with a focus on finance”.
The co-facilitators are now expected to prepare a report that summarises the discussions, without providing guidance.
As the talks came to a close and an overview was presented to attendees by the diplomats leading the discussions, Colombia noted that “transitioning away from fossil fuels” was missing:
“This topic featured prominently in several interventions and was identified by many parties as a key element of the GST outcomes that requires [finance].”
Following this, Saudi Arabia said “cherry-picking” of paragraphs from the GST should be avoided, given it was a “carefully negotiated” package:
“While some parties may choose specific pathways, roadmaps, initiatives, approaches, others are contributing through other alternative approaches – all of which are valid and contribute to the goal of the Paris Agreement.”
(The stocktake calls on all parties to contribute to the entire energy package, including the fossil-fuel transition. Yet Saudi Arabia has consistently argued the package is a menu of options, from which parties can pick and choose.)
Across various rooms in Bonn, talk also turned to the next GST, a two-year process that will begin at COP31 later this year and end in 2028.
The most contentious issue regarding the second GST was whether or not the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will feed directly into it. See: Climate science.
Mitigation work programme
Bonn closed with the mitigation work programme (MWP) – the only formal agenda item specifically about cutting greenhouse gas emissions – failing to reach an agreement. As a result, it was subject to “rule 16”, meaning it was simply pushed to COP31.
The main challenge within negotiations was a divergence between parties wanting the MWP to actively drive more urgent emissions cuts and those who want it to be merely a space for communication.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), explained:
“Tensions in the MWP go back to when it was adopted at COP27, where some parties wanted it to be a non-negotiated space to exchange ideas and views on how to accelerate mitigation action, while others hope the space could be used for more normative signals on what needs to be done going forward.
“At the heart of this is the fact that NDCs are nationally determined, while the goals of the Paris Agreement are collective in nature.”
One of the main areas of focus in Bonn was the future of the MWP, including its duration, its relationship with other UNFCCC processes and how it should be carried out.
For example, during discussions in the first week, parties disagreed on whether the mandate for the MWP’s work – which refers to “this critical decade” – meant it should continue operation until 2030, or whether this simply related to the urgency of action.
Speaking during a press conference in the second week attended by Carbon Brief, Anne Rasmussen, lead climate negotiator for AOSIS, said that on mitigation:
“We need to move beyond simply exchanging views and focus on how the work programme can support the implementation of GST outcomes, particularly those related to mitigation. These [include] accelerating renewable energy deployment and strengthening dedicated mitigation space beyond 2027.”
Questions of finance also became contentious, as they had across a range of negotiating rooms in Bonn.
During negotiations, some parties highlighted the need to engage with financiers, investors or other avenues, in order to turn MWP discussions into action.
In the second week, the diplomats leading negotiations put together three separate documents to represent the divided discussions: a draft legal text; a note capturing the key parts of the debate; and a “non-exhaustive reflection of the exchange of views”.
Further documents released the day after, with few substantial changes, faced a similar response.
In the afternoon of the final day in Bonn, brief draft conclusions were published. This contained just five points, predominantly focused on the need for continued work on the MWP.
Ultimately, however, parties could not even agree on this minimal document and the MWP was pushed to COP31.
In the closing plenary, a range of parties expressed their “profound disappointment” and reaffirmed their commitment to the MWP process.
Action agenda and new initiatives
COP30 saw an effort by the Brazilian presidency to raise the profile of the “action agenda” – a long-running initiative to mobilise climate action outside the formal UN process.
Hundreds of voluntary climate initiatives have been launched by businesses, local governments and many other actors over the years at COP summits and other international events.
In a bid to turn this into real-world action, the COP30 presidency marshalled these initiatives into six broad themes and compiled them into a five-year plan for “accelerating implementation”.
These plans were intentionally aligned with the goals of the global stocktake, negotiated in 2023, which includes everything from “transitioning away from fossil fuels” to “halting and reversing deforestation”. (See: Global stocktake.)
This work continued at SB64, with UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell telling participants in his opening speech:
“We hear calls from many to elevate the global climate action agenda – complementing negotiations, bringing together governments, companies, innovators, investors, cities and regions and civil society.”
The Turkish COP31 presidency launched its own “priorities” for the action agenda during the first week of SB64. The most high-profile of these was a goal – yet to be endorsed by national governments – to increase the global share of final energy demand met by electricity from just over 20% today to 35% by 2035.
(Amid soaring fuel prices linked to the Iran war, some governments have already identified electrification as a way to curb their reliance on expensive fossil-fuel imports.)
The Turkish presidency also announced targets to halve the growth in global waste, reduce “energy consumption intensity in the building sector” by 25%, increase the global use of “circular materials” by 15% and “build awareness of the climate crisis” among young people and farmers, all by 2035.
Alongside these goals, the presidency has also announced a “climate implementation bridge”. This was described as an initiative to help developing countries access support and capacity building – but it is not a new climate fund.
(The COP31 action agenda is set to be formally launched at London Climate Action Week, the week after SB64.)
In a press conference announcing these new goals, the Australian “president of negotiations” for COP31, Chris Bowen, made it clear that the negotiations and the action agenda are “separate things” and that the latter could proceed without universal buy-in from every country. He said:
“The action agenda is set by the presidency, the negotiations are steered but are a party-driven process and require consensus.”
COP30 also had also seen the launch of more new presidency-led initiatives that were intended to drive climate action beyond the UN negotiating halls. SB64 provided an opportunity to flesh these out and for parties to provide their views.
One of these initiatives was the “global implementation accelerator”, which was the focus of an event in the first week of the conference.
COP30 and COP31 presidency representatives explained that this would involve providing additional support to three or four “high-impact” climate “solutions” from the action agenda. The goal would be to help parties – on a voluntary basis – as they implement nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).
Another new presidency initiative was the “Belém mission to 1.5C”, which held a consultation event in Bonn. This has similar objectives to the global implementation accelerator – namely, driving ambition, implementation and investment in nations’ NDCs and NAPs.
The “mission” is gathering inputs from various actors and will use these, alongside various meetings and consultations, to produce a report ahead of COP31.
Some parties used these sessions to make their priorities clear. For example, Saudi Arabia, on behalf of the Arab Group, made statements during both consultations about the importance of carbon-capture technologies. They told the “mission to 1.5C” session:
“International cooperation currently disproportionately emphasises particular solutions, while technologies such as CCUS [carbon capture, utilisation and storage] and CDR [carbon dioxide removal], despite their critical role in IPCC-assessed pathways, remain disproportionately underrepresented.”
This is notable, given the predominance of major oil-and-gas producers in this negotiating bloc and the group’s resistance to efforts to move away from fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia also stressed that these initiatives are voluntary and not connected to UNFCCC processes.
Climate science
Throughout the Bonn talks, there were major disagreements about how climate science should feed into the UN climate process.
Parties traded accusations of “misinformation” and oversimplifying science. There were also disputes about the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C temperature goal and the role of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This came to a head when a press briefing was assembled with representatives from the EU, Switzerland and various developing countries to denounce “coordinated attacks” on science by “fossil-fuel interests”.
When asked which parties were behind these “attacks”, Sivendra Michael, chief negotiator for Fiji, told Carbon Brief:
“It is the usual suspects that seek to block progress…We are seeing efforts to remove references to the IPCC and the 1.5C temperature limit.”
A negotiator from one of the countries in the press conference later elaborated, telling Carbon Brief that Saudi Arabia and India were among those “undermining” climate science.
They also told Carbon Brief that Saudi Arabia had started referencing a Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 2C – failing to mention the 1.5C component altogether. Saudi Arabia, a major oil-and-gas producer, has long opposed the 1.5C goal.
(The Paris Agreement technically has a single temperature target of “well-below 2C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C”.)
All economies face very steep emissions cuts if the world is to meet the 1.5C target and this could have major societal impacts, especially for emerging economies with fossil-fuel industries.
However, small islands and climate-vulnerable states frame warming beyond 1.5C as an existential threat.
Anne Rasmussen, lead negotiator of AOSIS, told Carbon Brief that they were concerned about the “attempt to delink any relevance of the 1.5C” across several tracks, including the JTWP and the MWP.
As at COP30, differences of opinion were most evident in negotiations on “research and systematic observation”, where parties discussed scientific inputs into UN climate talks.
The EU was among parties voicing concerns about “misinformation” and the importance of 1.5C. Saudi Arabia and India were among those arguing against references to “misinformation and disinformation”, as well as 1.5C.
(There was also some debate about the inclusion of references to El Niño and climate “tipping points”. Both were opposed by some large, developing countries, with India and Saudi Arabia arguing there were “varying perspectives” on tipping points science.)
Dr Kate Dooley, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne who followed the Bonn negotiations, told Carbon Brief that the accusations levelled by some parties in the press conference were oversimplified. She said:
“We’ve got both sides finger-pointing at each other – the EU and Switzerland pointing the finger at large, developing countries and saying: ‘What you’re doing is climate denial.’ And it’s not.”
There is growing acceptance that the world is likely to breach 1.5C. If that happens, the “overshoot” could be temporary if there is mass deployment of carbon removal technologies and tree-planting to suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
As ever, this raises questions as to who will be responsible for cutting emissions and for the mass deployment of CO2 removal – and when and where these actions should take place.
Dooley said that “1.5C is the temperature goal and we need all hands on deck to achieve that”, but there was nothing wrong with “interrogating the risks of mitigation pathways and trying to make sure those risks are minimised”.
Large, developing nations argue on the basis of “equity” that they should have more leeway, whereas developed countries bear significant historical responsibility for climate change and that, as a result, they should cut emissions further and faster in line with the 1.5C goal.
Moreover, they argue that developed countries have failed to provide sufficient climate finance and technological support to help developing countries cut emissions.
Responding to this idea, Fiji negotiator Michael told the press briefing there would be “no equity for the most vulnerable” if 1.5C is breached:
“There is this growing narrative that science and equity are in competition…We reject this notion.”
Saudi Arabia and India were also prominent in questioning the role of the IPCC – considered the world’s most authoritative voice on climate science – in the UN process.
Some Indian researchers have been vocal in arguing that the scenarios assessed by the IPCC place an unfair burden on developing countries.
There was also a wider conversation about IPCC timelines in Bonn. Many parties, including the EU, AOSIS and South Africa, argued that the panel’s “seventh assessment report” (AR7) should be brought forward so the “best available science” can feed into the second “global stocktake” in UN climate talks, which is set to conclude in 2028. (See: Global stocktake.)
A group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Kenya and Russia, have pushed back against any effort to accelerate the report timing. As a result, for five consecutive IPCC meetings, countries have failed to agree on the AR7 timeline.
These debates spilled over into SB64 talks, with the same parties arguing against alignment with the second GST. Again, these countries often make arguments on the basis of equity, stating that accelerating the process would disadvantage developing-country scientists.
Fossil fuels
Fossil fuels were not an official part of the negotiating agenda in Bonn, but countries nevertheless discussed them throughout the talks.
At COP30, dozens of nations had backed a “roadmap” to “transition away” from fossil fuels, but ultimately strong opposition meant it did not end up in the formal text.
Instead, countries accepted COP30 president Corrêa do Lago’s compromise offer to develop “roadmaps” outside the formal UN regime, including one for fossil-fuel transition and another on ending deforestation.
So far, 21 countries and negotiating groups have submitted their views to help shape the informal fossil-fuel roadmap. With the exception of Russia, none of the countries that reportedly opposed a formal roadmap at COP30 have had their say.
(There has been a similar call for input from parties for the deforestation roadmap, with 22 submissions so far.)
In the first week of Bonn, the COP30 president hosted a 90-minute session to discuss the fossil-fuel issue in person.
Corrêa do Lago presented progress on developing the roadmap, placing it in the context of implementing the energy-related outcomes from the first global stocktake. (See: Global stocktake.)
Some parties, including small-island nations and Switzerland on behalf of the Environmental Integrity Group (EIG) , expressed interest in carrying the roadmap discussion into the formal process – so it ended up as more than just “a document”.
Meanwhile, groups representing big fossil-fuel producers, such as the Arab group and the LMDCs, did not speak up at all.
Fossil fuels were also discussed in other parts of SB64, notably in the GST dialogue. Numerous nations pointed to the success of the recent “transitioning away from fossil fuels” conference in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Cosima Cassel, climate diplomacy lead at E3G, told a press conference on this topic that Santa Marta was an example of the climate regime “evolv[ing]”, with “coalitions of the willing” coming forward with solutions to move away from fossil fuels.
Trade dialogues
The first-ever dialogue on climate change and trade was held during the first week of negotiations. Parties approached it with a “pragmatic” tone, despite clear tensions, according to thinktank E3G.
Created as part of the “global mutirão” at COP30 in Brazil last year, this was the first of three dialogues that will be held at Bonn intersessional meetings between 2026 and 2028.
Opening the session, COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago highlighted the need to make trade work “as an engine of sustainable development”.
The session began with presentations from the World Trade Organization, the International Trade Centre and UN Trade and Development, which highlighted the potential for trade to contribute to countries’ climate objectives.
However, as parties moved into the discussion portion of the day, many developing nations drew attention to growing concerns that trade measures are creating burdens and barriers for them.
The discussion was organised around three questions: how trade can support climate action; how climate action can avoid adverse impacts on sustainable development; and how international cooperation can address the “trade-climate interface”.
Broadly, developing-country groups argued that the use of trade-related climate measures raises compliance costs, restricts market access and does not align with principles of “equity” and “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”.
For example, the Arab group pointed to research by the International Monetary Fund, which it said found that the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) could generate “welfare gains” for developed countries, while imposing “losses” on developing countries.
Meanwhile, the LMDCs described unilateral trade-related climate measures as:
“Effectively extraterritorial regulatory projection by those with dominant market power and greater historical responsibility [for global warming] onto those with fewer resources and less historical responsibility.”
Developed-country groups pushed back against these criticisms, arguing that they were legitimate approaches to climate “externalities”. The EU said:
“If we disregard sustainability considerations, negative environmental externalities can emerge and lead to dependencies that undermine efforts to protect the environment and the climate.”
Others, such as AILAC and South Korea, focused on improving fairness and transparency in climate-related trade measures.
In a statement, Jordan Dilworth, policy advisor for climate diplomacy and geopolitics at E3G, said that despite the tensions, parties did come prepared to engage:
“Many expected the first trade and climate dialogue to be a showdown, but parties resisted trading blows and instead engaged constructively despite entrenched differences. The test now is for the chairs to ensure that parties feel their positions are being adequately addressed in the next round of dialogues.”
The diplomats running the talks will now consider the interventions and submissions made by parties in the dialogue, before determining the next steps.
They said they would prepare an “informal note under their own authority and with no legal status”, as a record of the first dialogue.
Trade also raised its head in the just transition work programme, with groups such as G77 and China opposing “restrictive” trade measures, while others, such as the UK, argued that the topic of trade does not fall within the mandate of the workstream.
This mirrored divisions seen at COP30, SB62 and other UNFCCC meetings. (See: Just transition work programme.)
COP reform
Following on from COP30, there were continued discussions on the future of the UNFCCC process and potential for reform, although it was less of a hot-button topic.
Much of this fell within negotiations on “arrangements for intergovernmental meetings”, focused on the organisation of COP31, improving efficiency and observer engagement.
Negotiations over the course of the two weeks in Bonn saw parties disagree over issues such as imposing conditions on proposals for new agenda items, the opportunities for parties to engage in consultations, budgetary implications and more.
Ultimately, a final text was agreed on the penultimate day of Bonn.
Parties also negotiated on “cooperation between other international organisations”, which relates to coordinating the work of UN treaties on climate change, nature and desertification.
While this agenda item has existed for over 20 years, it has previously been limited to the publication of an annual report in Bonn.
At COP30, however, it was reinvigorated following a push at the Bonn sessions in June 2025, ultimately being included on the agenda at a COP for the first time in 19 years.
The workstream drew focus at COP30 amid the wider calls for reform of the COP process.
Its inclusion in the agenda at SB64 followed a report from UN scientific panel on nature research, IPBES, on the nexus between biodiversity and other workstreams, which found that countries are wasting $10-25tn annually by dealing with interconnected crises within silos, instead of taking advantage of synergies.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Bethan Laughlin, senior policy specialist at the Zoological Society of London, highlighted that countries now have to produce dozens of reports across the three UN conventions. She added:
“The evidence is clear that siloed decision-making is costing countries trillions per year. To tackle the scale of the climate and ecological crisis, we can no longer act as if these issues are separate from one another.
“Already existing mechanisms, such as the Joint Liaison Group, need to be strengthened, but we also need innovative approaches that will aid countries in scaling up synergistic approaches.”
Ocean dialogue
During the first week at Bonn, stakeholders and delegates took part in the “ocean and climate change dialogue”.
This focused on ocean-based priorities in countries’ “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs), access to finance and aligning international climate and biodiversity efforts relating to oceans.
The dialogue built on the “blue NDC challenge” launched by Brazil and France in 2025, with the goal of as many countries as possible incorporating the ocean into their pledges.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Micheline Khan, senior associate for ocean climate at thinktank the World Resources Institute (WRI), explained that since it was launched at COP25, the dialogue has “achieved important milestones” in the integration of the ocean across the work of the UNFCCC. This included helping to move from ad-hoc inclusion of the topic to a “growing political recognition of ocean language”.
Representatives for both sides of the joint COP31 presidency – Turkey and Australia – spoke during the first day of the ocean dialogue at SB64.
Khan added that the Turkish presidency has “defined the ocean as a key priority within their agenda”, providing political signalling that could help elevate the topic.
But more still needs to be done, Khan said:
“The central challenge is no longer whether ocean action belongs in climate plans – it does. But whether countries have the governance, data, technical capacity and investment pipelines to implement what they have already committed to.”
For more on the ocean dialogue, see the 19 June 2016 edition of Debriefed.
Road to COP31
Attention now turns to COP31, which will be held in the resort city of Antalya, Turkey.
Unusually, the COP presidency is being shared, with Turkey hosting the summit, but Australia serving as “president of negotiations”.
This was a compromise landed on at COP30, after parties failed to agree on a single presidency following more than three years of dispute.
(COP32 will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2027. It will be the first-ever COP hosted by one of the least-developed countries.)
COP31 is being promoted as an “implementation COP”, helping to “close the gap between multilateral commitments and real-world delivery”, according to its website.
However, the fraught negotiations in Bonn, including the lack of progress on key elements, mean the future effectiveness of climate summits is increasingly under question.
In his closing statement at Bonn, UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell urged countries to bring ministers together as soon as possible, “particularly on the thorniest issues,” to allow compromise to be found ahead of Antalya. He added:
“In some negotiating rooms, we’ve heard a familiar tendency towards you-first-ism: Groups refusing to deliver commitments or allow the process to move forward unless others go first. This is a recipe for gridlock when we need all negotiating tracks to be moving in the fast lane.”
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 20-28 June 2026 | London climate action week, London, UK |
| September 2026 | Climate week, New York City, US |
| 8-22 September | UN general assembly (UNGA81), New York City, US |
| 19-30 October 2026 | UN biodiversity summit COP17,, Yerevan, Armenia |
| 9-20 November 2026 | Global implementation accelerator – second information session |
| During Katowice Committee meeting, 2026 | Dialogue on the impact of response measures |
| 9-20 November 2026 | COP31, Antalya, Turkey |
The post Bonn climate talks: Key outcomes from the June 2026 UN climate conference appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Bonn climate talks: Key outcomes from the June 2026 UN climate conference
Climate Change
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
On the morning of 26 August, flash floods surged through a Himalayan border region of Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, killing more than 1,300 people, with thousands still missing.
In the days since the floods, scientists have examined satellite imagery, drone footage and seismic data in order to understand and explain the forces behind the event.
While initial theories pinned the flood on a glacial collapse, scientists now understand the event as a “multi-hazard cascade”, which began with a bedrock collapse.
Some climate sceptics have tried to use this to falsely claim that human-caused climate change had no impact on the event.
Yet, scientists have noted that, while no formal attribution study has been carried out thus far, warming is making such ice-rock avalanches in the region more likely.
Researchers have highlighted how rapid warming is dramatically reshaping Asia’s high-mountain region – and identified rising temperatures, glacier retreat and permafrost thaw as factors that may have all contributed to the disaster.
Balendra Shah, Nepal’s prime minister, has called the floods a “serious signal that…the risks we must bear in the Himalayan region are increasing” due to climate change.
Here, Carbon Brief unpacks what scientists currently know about the causes of the catastrophic event and what they can – and cannot – say about the role of climate change.
What happened?
A report published on 28 August by the HiRisk scientific consortium of high mountain experts detailed the events that led to the flash floods.
It said that events were set in motion on 26 August when a mass of bedrock, as well as the glacier ice on top of it, broke off a slope of Langtang-Lirung mountain in the Nepalese Himalaya, plunging from approximately 5,200 metres above sea level to the valley floor at 3,000 metres.
The landslide shook the ground hard enough that, at 8:37am Nepal local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Later that day, it clarified the shaking was caused by glacier collapse and debris flow, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
On the valley floor, the melting ice, water and debris slammed into the Lhende Khola river, a high-altitude river that runs along Nepal’s border with China.
Known downstream as the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal and the Poiqu or Poqu in China, the Lhende Khole feeds a network of rivers across Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, including the Trishuli river. (In China, the Lhende Khola is known as the Donglin Tsangpo.)
A large “debris” lake was briefly formed on the valley floor. When this lake burst, a wall of water and rock travelled downstream, killing more than a thousand people and destroying settlements, roads, bridges, hydropower plants and border posts across Nepal and Tibet.
HiRisk said that the floodwave travelled down rivers as fast as 30km an hour (around 19 miles per hour) and reached Mugling – a Nepalese town more than 130km downstream – at around 1pm local time.
A separate report from the Center for Land Surface Hazards in the US noted that the flood moved “exceptionally fast, was sediment-laden and extreme in scale”. For example, in the Nepalese municipality of Galchhi, the Trishuli river rose by nine metres in 30 minutes, it said.
Writing in the Conversation, Dr Umesh Haritashya, a glaciologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, explained that the disaster “wasn’t finished when the first wall of water passed [on 26 August]”.
He continued that a new “barrier lake” – estimated to hold a few million cubic metres of water – had developed in a location where two rivers meet in Tibet before crossing into Nepal. This lake burst on 28 August and the river rose again, he said.
On 4 September, the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters that property and infrastructure worth “at least” $2.5bn (£1.9bn) had been lost. Dharma Raj Upreti estimated the cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and restore power would be around $53m (£39m).
How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, initial reports suggested that the trigger was a collapsing glacier or earthquake in the high mountains of Nepal.
After confirming that a seismic tremor was as a result of falling rock and ice, the USGS said the trigger was likely a “glacial collapse and debris flow”. This was widely picked up by the media.
Subsequently, satellite imagery revealed that an “enormous chunk of the mountainous bedrock” beneath the glacier had also given way, reported the New York Times.
Dr Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told the newspaper:
“The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed…It was a much larger collapse than we were initially able to see in the satellite imagery.”
The result was a “deluge of rock and ice, which pulverized into mud and water as it surged down the mountainside”, the newspaper said.
Dr Jakob Steiner a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria, tells Carbon Brief:
“It was not a glacier that collapsed. It was the mountain below the glacier that collapsed and the glacier had no other chance but to go with it because it was sitting on top of it.
“The trigger for that is something that we are not 100% certain about, but, in the end, it very much looks like simply a mechanical failure of the rock material because of stressors that have built up over a long period of time.”
Failures of “bedrock” – the hard, solid rock that sits below looser rocks and soil – are an “increasingly common occurrence”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These massive landslides occur in mountain regions, commonly following rapid deglacierisation [the melting away of a glacier]. Similar events happened in the Chamoli event in 2021 [in the Indian Himalaya] and in the Blatten landslide last year in Switzerland. They’ve also occurred recently in Alaska.”
With a shift in focus from the failure of a glacier to the bedrock underneath, some climate sceptics seized on the development to falsely claim that climate change had not played any role in the disaster.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program, on Twitter, as well as former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley in the Spectator.
However, scientists have highlighted the likely contribution of rapid warming in the region. These factors include the thawing of permafrost and glacier retreat. (For more, see sections below).
Fundamentally, “this would have been a much less significant tragedy if it had been just a rock-slope failure”, notes Davies.
The initial landslide took a mixture of rock and ice into a valley that “contains buried ice” as well, she says, providing the water that “resulted in the hyperconcentrated flow, which took so many lives”.
How have temperatures risen in the affected region?
Global temperatures have risen by roughly 1.4C since the pre-industrial period. However, this increase is not uniform across the planet, with some regions warming faster than others.
A study published in Global and Planetary Change in June 2026 investigated changes in the Langtang catchment – a river basin in central Nepal, in which the Langtang-Lirung mountain is located, which eventually drains into the Ganges. Around one-quarter of the area is made up of glaciers.
The paper found that glacial areas of the catchment – found at 4,000 metres above sea level – warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023. This was “more than three times” the rate observed at a lower elevation weather station, the authors said.
Looking in more detail at the site of the glacial collapse, Dr Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, used ERA5 reanalysis data to show how temperature has changed at the 5,200-metre elevation site where the mass of ice and rock broke loose.
Rohde’s analysis found that June-to-August temperatures have been rising at the site of the glacier collapse since the year 1940, with 2026’s summer the fourth warmest on record, behind 2024, 2025 and 2022. This is shown in the graph below.
Rohde also found that the days leading up to the disaster recorded the hottest August temperatures ever experienced at the site. This is shown in the graph below.
On social media, Rohde stated:
“Given the warming trend, this Nepali glacier had probably been thinning and weakening for years, or even decades. But it ultimately failed during the warmest week in one of its warmest years on record. It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame.”
How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
Many experts have linked warming temperatures in the region to thawing permafrost – ground that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years, whose thickness ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre.
Steiner is part of a research team that has been using sensors to monitor permafrost in the region since 2014. He tells Carbon Brief that it is “pretty clear” the permafrost has been thawing “very actively” at elevations as high as 5,200 metres above sea level “for many years”. He adds:
“This means that the ground has, over the last decades, moved from being in a solid state into – at least, periodically during the warm season – patchy ground where some is frozen and some isn’t…
“If you have frozen ground next to non-frozen ground, you have dynamics happening between that because there are different densities and there’s movement happening, which is conducive to interventional failure – and that we know from many other cases.”
Davies also points to the “degradation” of perennially frozen ground as a factor in the disaster:
“This permafrost acts as a glue to hold together the rocks and, as it melts, the rock can become weakened.”
Permafrost thaw can also result in saturated ground, says Davies, which adds “pressure in the joints” of rock and can “facilitate” failure. She continues:
“Sources of the water include melting permafrost and meltwater from the overlying glacier. We know that this event happened during a period of warmth, but in the absence of heavy precipitation, pointing to ice melt as the source of water.”
A 2025 study of rock and ice avalanches in High Mountain Asia found that more than two-thirds started in areas “where permafrost is probable”.
How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
Glaciers – frozen rivers of ice holding three-quarters of the global freshwater supply – are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
In the Himalaya, the rate of glacier retreat has doubled since the late 20th century, according to a 2019 study in Science Advances.
The Global and Planetary Change study found that glacier area loss rates in the Langtang catchment increased more than fourfold from 1964 to 2023 – with melting accelerating after 2000.
It added that glaciers in the region also experienced “fragmentation” and “widespread thinning” over this period.
The study noted that this loss “coincided with elevation dependent warming”.
The figure below provides an overview of glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023, with orange, red and dark red indicating areas of retreat.
In addition, green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection.
In comments released by the University of Reading, Prof Maria Shahgedanova, a climate scientist researching climate impacts on mountain glaciers, said that the glacier involved in the floods had “retreated by approximately 450 metres between 1990 and 2020”.
She adds that this “potentially reduce[d] the mechanical support provided by the glacier to the underlying rock slope”.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Davies reiterates that the retreat of the glacier is “potentially a contributing factor” to the bedrock collapse and subsequent disaster.
This is because the removal of the glacier from the lower slopes leaves the “upper rock slopes less stable”, she says.
The most recent assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are “rapidly shrinking” as a result of climate change. (This region extends 3,500km over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.)
It said this loss is threatening the safety of the nearly two billion people, including by increasing the risk of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). A GLOF is a sudden and catastrophic release of meltwater from a glacial lake.
Although this disaster was not caused by a GLOF, it is known that climate change is making such events more likely.
Can the event be attributed to climate change?
In the wake of the flash floods, climate campaigners, media outlets and Nepalese politicians have linked them to human-caused climate change.
However, many climate scientists have cautioned that it is too early to say precisely how climate change impacted the disaster.
Davies tells Carbon Brief:
“These events happen so quickly that the exact causes and drivers can take a little time to uncover, especially if the event was a surprise and there had been no monitoring system in place.”
When trying to determine the role human-caused climate change played in the intensity or likelihood of extreme weather, scientists turn to the field of “attribution science”.
To date, no formal rapid attribution study has been produced that attempts to quantify whether – and how – climate change contributed to the event.
Scientists have noted that climate attribution of ice-rock avalanches – which are typically driven by a variety of factors – remains limited, in part because of the lack of a long-term observational record of previous collapses in high mountain areas.
Meanwhile, the studies that do exist stop short of directly linking such disasters to climate change. For example, the authors of a 2021 study into the Chamoli ice-rock avalanche concluded that “we cannot attribute this individual disaster specifically to climate change”.
However, they added, the “possibly increasing frequency of high-mountain slope instabilities can likely be related to observed atmospheric warming and corresponding long-term changes in cryospheric conditions (glaciers and permafrost)”.
In the aftermath of the disaster, many researchers have similarly highlighted that climate change could not be singled out as the cause of the disaster, even if warming likely increased the probability of its occurrence.
On the Climate Brink substack, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted that a “definitive single-event attribution” of the more recent disaster “may never be possible” due to the “messy causality of rock-ice avalanches”.
However, he added that both the existing scientific literature and “essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction” – namely, that warming is making such events more likely in the Himalaya.
Steiner tells Carbon Brief it might be possible to attribute different factors that played a role in the disasters to climate change – for instance, the recession of the glacier – but it would be more difficult to do so for the event as a whole.
Part of the reason for this, he says, is that rock failures in this region of the Himalaya have occurred for millennia, well before humans started altering the climate.
However, he continues:
“The physics of it is not something that has been made possible by climate change. This could have happened without it. But the chance of it happening – and the likelihood of it happening five years after a previous, similar event [in Chamoli] – we, as the scientific community, can be pretty confident about that [being increased because of a changing climate].
“This is because so many of the changes that we know are related to climate change can potentially drive the build-up to eventual failure.”
Ultimately, says Davies, a “careful attribution study is needed, but it is hard to argue that the rapidly warming climate is not having an effect in these regions”. She adds:
“A single event may have multiple drivers, but we are seeing an increase in these events and are likely to see more as the permafrost and glacier melt continues.”
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The post Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.
Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.
Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.
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The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.
“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.
“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.
Electrifying industry
Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.
A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.
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The economic powerhouse burned more coal and gas in the first quarter of 2026, despite record wind and solar build-out
Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.
Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.
In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.
Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.
“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.
“Growing by greening”
China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.
Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.
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For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.
The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.
An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.
This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.
Stalling fossil fuel use
At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.
China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.
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A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.
“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.
A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.
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In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.
A lesson in sequencing
China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.
“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.
For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.
“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.
The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?
More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
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The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis
In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations, which participants were invited to consider and adapt in their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process.
Getting the rules ‘right’
In a statement to Climate Home News, Ghana, Paraguay and the UK – which are FCLP co-leads for its work on forest carbon credits – said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’
The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?
An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
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