The Brazilian diplomats presiding over the COP30 climate summit in November have said they want an “early harvest” at June’s mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn, aiming to secure agreements on two key issues that were left unresolved at COP29 last year.
Brazil’s lead climate diplomat Liliam Chagas told reporters this week she is seeking “real advances in the Bonn sessions” on the fledgling Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) and recommendations from the 2023 Global Stocktake (GST) of government climate action, so that decisions to move them forward can be approved at COP30.
The JTWP is a series of dialogues on how to make the transition to a greener world fair while the GST discussions focus on how the world’s governments should respond to being collectively off track to meet their goal to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times.
Negotiators began talks at Climate Week, a UN event held in Panama this week, using an informal format called “world café” – grouping them in tables to discuss issues such as the role of Indigenous people and communities, economic drivers and social protections.
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Late last year, at COP29 in Baku, governments were split over what aspects of fairness the JTWP should tackle and whether finance should be included, as well as on whether transitioning away from fossil fuels should be mentioned in texts on how to take the GST forward.
Chagas said these issues had not been settled at COP29 because separate talks there on a new finance goal had proven so “lengthy and difficult”, but added that she was now trying to bring a “sense of urgency” to officials.
“These decisions, at this point in the year, they are something that will show that the COP process works [and] is resilient,” she said, adding that she wants to “early harvest some of the decisions in order to not leave everything for [COP30] in November”.
The COP30 Presidency expressed similar sentiments in its third open letter to negotiators released on Friday.
Global stocktake
The GST was a review of progress on climate change carried out in 2023 which found that, while government action had reduced the amount of global warming expected, it was still insufficient to limit average temperature rise to 1.5C.
At the COP28 climate talks in Dubai at the end of that year, governments jointly agreed to respond to this by calling on each other to take measures like tripling renewable energy capacity and transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
But the next year at COP29, they failed to include the same language on renewables and fossil fuels in the outcomes of a planned “UAE dialogue” on how to implement the recommendations of the GST. Saudi Arabia, which COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago visited on Friday, opposed any mention of fossil fuels in formal texts at COP29.
The Baku summit ended without agreement on the GST, with Chile’s lead negotiator Julio Cordano telling the closing plenary he was “concerned to see attempts to backtrack the agreements made last year”.
In its latest letter, the COP30 Presidency said the GST is “our guide to Mission 1.5”, a collective roadmap to keep to the 1.5C warming limit – and responding to it should include accelerating the global energy transition and halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.
“We must support one another to advance collectively on tripling renewable energy capacity globally, doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements, and transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner,” said the letter.
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COP30 CEO Ana Toni told negotiators at Panama’s Climate Week that governments must now figure out the details of how they plan to achieve the GST, discussing options for support in the form of new regulations, finance and capacity-building.
“If in the past people thought that federal governments going from COP to COP and just having the (Paris Agreement) rulebook would be enough, we know that it is not enough. We need to go from commitments from companies, governments and civil society now to action,” Toni emphasised.
Mexican lead negotiator Camila Zepeda welcomed this approach during a panel discussion at Climate Week and said the Dubai agreement would be the “north star” of Mexico’s new nationally determined contribution, an emissions-cutting plan that all countries must deliver before September.
Andreas Sieber, associate director of global policy and campaigns at advocacy group 350.org, praised the Brazilians for “finally pivoting to a language of delivery” and for linking the GST decision to tripling renewables and phasing out fossil fuels.
But “political signals alone won’t deliver outcomes,” he added. He called on them to “exercise clear, strategic diplomacy and throw [their] full political weight behind securing an ambitious formal COP30 outcome that actually accelerates the Global Stocktake and energy transition”.
Just Transition Work Programme
Governments also failed to reach agreement on the JTWP in Baku last year, with divisions on issues of human and labour rights, measures seen as restricting free trade, adaptation and emissions reductions.
A major bone of contention was whether to designate finance to support plans for a just transition, with developing countries wanting funding included and developed countries opposed.
Negotiations on this issue fell down the COP29 presidency’s list of priorities as the talks on the new finance goal became heated. It set up a last-minute contact group and presented a final draft to save the JTWP, but no agreement was reached.
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The COP30 Presidency’s letter this week called the JTWP “a dynamic concept of paramount relevance to people’s real lives”, adding “let’s build on the discussions from COP29 and demonstrate ambition to agree on the scope and focus for this powerful concept”.
Anabella Rosemberg, who follows JTWP discussions for Climate Action Network International, said “the pace [of negotiations] will have to be accelerated to make up for the lost time since COP29”.
But, she added, “a solid agreement” on just transition is “within reach”. “The COP30 Presidency is sending the right signal,” she said. “Time for governments to seize the opportunity.”
Global goal on adaptation
The third negotiating track highlighted by the new COP30 letter is the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), which it said should be “a robust framework to track collective progress”.
Corrêa do Lago told reporters that adaptation – meaning becoming more resilient to the impacts of climate change – “has become absolutely central because climate change change is here”.
The GGA is a set of 11 targets for adaptation which government negotiators are hoping to agree how to measure, using a set of indicators which they must fix at COP30, after slow progress at COP29.
Negotiators have been divided on whether to include adaptation finance to meet these goals, with developed countries against and developing nations in favour.
Governments have also struggled to agree on how to define, measure and track progress on broad issues like how improved water supply or sanitation can help people adjust better to climate change.
Baku-Belém roadmap
One issue that will not be negotiated, Corrêa do Lago clarified to reporters, is the Baku-Belém roadmap on how to mobilise $1.3 trillion a year of climate finance from all sources, in addition to an agreed $300 billion of public finance annually by 2035.
The COP30 top diplomat said he would work with Azerbaijan’s COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev to launch this roadmap at COP30, after extensive consultation with governments – including finance ministers – and other “stakeholders” around the world. A draft roadmap will be published on September 8. “I believe it can be a very interesting document but we’re still in listening mode,” he said.
Azerbaijani lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev told Climate Week’s opening ceremony that success “will now depend less on what governments agree and more on what nations deliver”.
Comment: Let’s use early milestones to stay focused on climate action
“We are calling on donors to set out how they will deliver their fair share of the $300bn that they pledged in Baku. We are making sure that they are focused on early milestones,” said Rafiyev, who added that as part of that, developed countries must double adaptation finance this year compared to 2019 levels and by 2030 reach the $300bn climate finance target.
Juan Carlos Navarro, environment minister of Panama and host of Climate Week, demanded “clear targets” on the financial contributions of developed nations, adding that “only if we have clarity and achieve concrete outcomes will we be able to succeed”.
Call to avoid agenda fight
Previous mid-year climate talks in Bonn have been marked by lengthy debates on what should be on the agenda. For example, in 2023, a debate over how to include finance and emissions-cutting measures in the formal discussions continued for seven days.
At COP28 and COP29, a proposal by the BASIC group of emerging economies – which includes Brazil – to discuss the EU and US’s alleged “unilateral restrictive trade measures” proved controversial and eventually unsuccessful.
The COP30 Presidency’s letter this week said it is “advisable to avoid introducing potentially contentious new agenda items that could further burden the [UN climate negotiation] process or detract from agreed priorities”.
The letter also acknowledged “ongoing calls for COPs reform” and said that, as COPs are moving from “a negotiation-centered to an implementation-centered era”, governments should “consider the future of the process itself” – and come up with solutions to challenges like an excessive number of agenda items and barriers that prevent the participation of smaller country delegations.
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Brazil seeks early deals on two stalled issues at Bonn climate talks
Climate Change
World Bank and IMF should lead the financial system in responding to the climate crisis
Sandra Guzmán is director at the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean (GFLAC), and Raju Pandit Chhetri is lead climate finance negotiator for the least-developed countries at the UNFCCC.
Recent catastrophic floods in Nepal starkly remind us that the climate crisis demands urgent action. The initial estimate that the country will need to spend $5 billion on recovery will likely remain a major concern. However, that is only one part of the story. No financial metric can capture the value of lives lost in crises like this.
And this is not a standalone event; from the mountains of Nepal to the coastlines of Latin America and the Caribbean, developing countries are increasingly facing severe climate impacts. The average annual loss from climate disasters in the Latin American and Caribbean region is estimated at $58 billion. Human suffering remains immeasurable in all these instances.
Climate finance has been a key demand from our regions and from all developing countries to meet the needs of their citizens. At the recently concluded pre-COP31 in the Pacific, several developing-country governments strongly warned leaders about the dangers of failing to act on both climate and climate finance.
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Yet, two years after the Baku climate summit, where all governments agreed on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate finance – with multilateral development banks (MDBs) playing a key role in delivery – that discussion risks being sidelined at this week’s annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Bangkok, Thailand.
World Bank drops climate finance target
The MDBs have a critical role in mobilising a share of the $300-billion-per-year goal for public climate finance adopted at COP29 and are key to scaling broader financing to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035. They entered the NCQG dialogues promising capacity to mobilise these resources and agreeing to be part of the solution.
This June, even as the World Bank announced the renewal of its Climate Change Action Plan, it dropped its 45% climate finance target under pressure from the US administration. That commitment was key to ensuring the bank continues to deliver on its promise to mobilise enough climate finance to meet the NCQG target.
This announcement was a setback at a moment when developing countries are looking to MDBs to step up and fill gaps left by cuts in official development assistance (ODA) by donor governments.
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MDBs have long said they can convert $1 provided by donors into $2-$4 for client countries and have promised to deliver impact. Official data does paint an encouraging picture overall. The MDBs have delivered an increase in climate finance almost every year so far.
While financing needs far exceed what has been provided, MDBs mobilised an average of around $75bn per year in climate finance for low- and middle-income countries over the last five years, showing they are still on track to deliver the $120 billion per year they committed to.
Adding to the debt burden
However, climate finance cannot be measured by quantity alone. As MDBs increase their focus on private-sector mobilisation to diversify their funding, tracking the quality of the financing they mobilise becomes even more critical. Beyond scale, this is where the system currently lags most.
Between 70-90% of the financing provided by MDBs is in the form of loans, exacerbating the debt burdens that the World Bank and IMF have long warned about. This strains countries’ economies at a time when developing countries face severe climate impacts, inflationary pressures, and global economic uncertainty. Adding further debt that climate-vulnerable countries must repay with interest does not necessarily translate into effective climate finance flows.
It is also essential to address barriers to accessing finance in low- and middle-income countries, particularly by prioritising transparency around how much climate finance goes to the most climate-vulnerable countries and communities.
Additionally, there needs to be clarity on how much climate finance is being mobilised to build resilience and address increasingly frequent climate disasters, as well as for renewable energy projects that would help developing countries achieve a just transition.
Climate stresses undermine development
As climate-induced disasters become more frequent, countries are compelled to shift resources away from vital sectors such as health, education, food security and infrastructure that underpins development. For nations already grappling with limited fiscal budgets and mounting debt, climate change is becoming an even heavier burden, pushing them to borrow more.
These are also development issues at their very core – countering debt challenges, investing in resilient infrastructure, protecting schools and hospitals from climate disasters, and increasing crop yields to reduce the cost of food. So, when the World Bank talks about a smart development framework, it warrants a check on how much climate finance is provided and its quality.
Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap
MDBs must now lead the charge by publishing a clear plan to deliver on the scaled-up climate finance goal as a first step, and make financing accessible and affordable, including grant-based instruments. The plan must also define clear accountability metrics to track delivery, access, affordability and reach and commit to at least triple adaptation finance.
MDB shareholder countries also have a role in backing the institutions to deliver on these promises. When World Bank and IMF management meets with finance ministers this week in a region battered by the worst climate impacts, they must not leave climate finance off the agenda.
They must give the World Bank and IMF the mandate, the capital and the political backing to make real scale-up possible. The true test of this financial system will not be found in conference rooms in Bangkok, but in the lives saved in Nepal.
The post World Bank and IMF should lead the financial system in responding to the climate crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.
World Bank and IMF should lead the financial system in responding to the climate crisis
When oil and gas shipments stopped flowing through the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the Iran war, Southeast Asian nations were left reeling as the supply crunch laid bare their acute reliance on fossil fuel imports.
As prices soared, governments in the region scrambled to introduce emergency energy-saving measures – from a four-day working week to curbs on air conditioning. Thailand revived decommissioned coal plants while the Philippines, which imports nearly all of its oil, declared a “national energy emergency”.
But the crisis has also prompted renewed resolve to find a long-term solution to their vulnerability at a time when electricity demand is booming to power the region’s growing industry, cooling needs and the mushrooming of energy-hungry data centres.
At the heart of Southeast Asian nations’ response is a longstanding infrastructure project to connect the region’s power grids by 2045 and enable cross-border trading of clean electricity through a network of underground and subsea interconnectors.
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The plans will allow nations with high renewable energy generation potential to trade surplus power to their neighbours and major demand centres like Singapore, helping to integrate more renewables into the power mix and reduce reliance on fossil fuel imports.
“[It] will give us more energy security,” the Philippines’ energy secretary, Sharon Garin, told a press conference after a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) energy ministers last week, when they discussed accelerating the delivery of the regional grid as part of measures to respond to the energy crisis.
“The Philippines is rich in solar power, Malaysia is rich in hydropower and Indonesia has geothermal: different countries have different resources. [The ASEAN Power Grid] will optimise the utilisation of renewables to the benefits of each member state,” said Garin.
But turning this decade-old political vision into a reality has been slow, held up by painstaking work to harmonise a patchwork of regulatory and legal frameworks and mobilise the private capital needed to build cross-border infrastructure.
More than $300 billion is needed to expand and modernise the region’s fragile grids to support the projected energy demand increase by 2050. This includes $27 billion required to deliver the cross-border interconnections by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Every year of delay could cost the region billions of dollars in additional fuel costs and lock in new gas infrastructure for decades to come, according to analysis by global energy think-tank Ember.
The building block for energy security
With electrification high on the agenda of the COP31 climate talks in Türkiye next month, there is growing attention on the need to modernise and expand grid infrastructure to cope with growing electricity use and more renewables in the power mix.
Clean electrification and energy efficiency could deliver about a third of cumulative carbon emission reductions between 2026 and 2050, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook. But delivering that would require doubling annual global grid investment to $1 trillion between now and 2035.
Last month, the UN launched an initiative to accelerate investment into expanding and modernising grids in Southeast Asia and Africa.
First conceptualised in 1997, the ASEAN Power Grid has gained fresh impetus in recent years as countries turn to renewables to cut their emissions and move away from volatile fossil fuel markets.
Energy supply disruption caused by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East has strengthened the case for regional grid connections. Before this year’s conflict began, the Middle East accounted for 60% of Southeast Asia’s crude oil imports. Competition for fewer, more expensive oil and gas shipments has left Southeast Asia facing a $160 billion energy import bill this year. Based on current policies, this could rise to $400 billion by mid-century.
In the Philippines last week, energy ministers agreed on an enhanced planning framework to deliver the ASEAN Power Grid and made progress on regulatory guidelines.
Garin said ministers were considering accelerating the project’s delivery. “The first study was to connect [by] 2045 – that’s too far,” she said.
A strong business case
The economic benefits of the plan have “captured the political imagination” of leaders in the region, Robert Cooke, grids advocacy lead at the Global Renewables Alliance, told Climate Home News. “The business case is stronger than ever,” he said.
“If countries were to go about building their own separate grids, of course that would be an expensive endeavour. But the discussion around the ASEAN Power Grid includes what costs could we share in building out this grid,” added Tiza Mafira, director of the Indonesia office for the Climate Policy Initiative.
Stronger grids would help the region meet collective targets to increase the share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply from 14% to 30% and in installed power capacity from 34% to 45% by 2030.
Connecting and pooling dispersed renewable resources would also help smooth local power shortages caused by daily and seasonal variations, reducing the need for backup gas plants and battery storage.
The IEA found the ASEAN Power Grid could help unlock some of the 20 terawatts of untapped solar and wind potential across Southeast Asia – an amount around 55 times the region’s current total power capacity.
From lines on a map to shovels in the ground
Rather than building a single unified network, the ASEAN Power Grid is developing cross-border links between neighbouring countries and smaller groups of nations.
As of 2025, nine of 18 priority interconnection projects are operational – accounting for around 10 GW of capacity with an additional 13.7 GW planned by 2040.
Source: Ember
A power line channelling up to 200 MW of clean electricity generated from hydropower in Laos to Singapore via Thailand and Malaysia has emerged as a key building block for grid-to-grid trading.
Progress on technical discussions will also help provide the clarity the private sector needs to invest in bankable projects, said Cooke.
In 2025, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank announced a dedicated funding initiative to support the project.
“The enabling pieces are emerging,” said Monalisa Dimalanta, former chair of the Philippine Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Renewable Energy Board. “But the timelines remain unclear and a 2045 vision cannot answer today’s emergency,” she said.
“A power grid… that exists only on paper will not keep the lights on.”
Singapore: the delivery test
The implications of failing to deliver the ASEAN Power Grid are most acute in Singapore.
Constrained by space, with few renewable energy resources and dependent on gas for more than 90% of its electricity mix, Singapore has emerged as a leading proponent of a regional power grid as it seeks to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
To meet its power needs, the city-state aims to