The chair of this month’s penultimate round of talks to agree a global treaty on tackling plastic pollution is concerned that certain countries “seem to have forgotten” that all nations originally backed an ambitious pact.
Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who will host the talks in Ottawa starting on April 23, said in an interview with Climate Home that all governments had “agreed collectively that we wanted an ambitious treaty to fight plastic pollution and to eliminate it by 2040”.
But, he added, “unfortunately some countries seem to have forgotten that’s what we agreed upon [at the United Nations Environment Assembly] almost two years ago. I’m going to make it my mission in life in the coming weeks to remind everyone that this is our collective agreement.”
He did not specify which countries appear to be backtracking, but noted that some “are in more of a hurry than others” to get a deal – “which is why you have a high-ambition coalition”.
That coalition is pushing for a strong accord to end plastic pollution and includes all large developed countries except the United States, plus some developing nations.
The members of the self-described “high-ambition coalition” are coloured in light blue.
Guilbeault was speaking during the latest UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi last month, where some governments tried to water down anti-plastics language.
David Azoulay, from the Center for International Environmental Law, told Climate Home “a number of countries” had tried at this year’s UNEA to “get around or away” from the mandate to set up a plastics treaty.
They did not propose a rival resolution, he said, “probably because they saw there was very little appetite for it”. But that did not stop them from attempting to use the assembly to influence the plastics treaty negotiations, he added. The talks are organised by the United Nations Environment Programme.
Russia’s ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maksimychev, told the UNEA that Russia is an “active participant” in the talks and “we do not support shifting emphasis to restrictive measures of a productive or commercial nature”.
Plastics support fossil fuel demand
Over the last two years, government negotiators have gathered for three rounds of talks on setting up the treaty to tackle plastic pollution.
The fourth round will be held in Ottawa this month, and the fifth and supposedly final session will be in the South Korean city of Busan in November. The agreement should then be adopted officially at a diplomatic conference in 2025.
BP expects the share of oil demand from non-combusted (grey) sectors like plastic to rise in the next few decades. (Photo: BP/Screenshot)
Plastics are made from oil and gas, and their production causes 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. The fossil fuel industry predicts that as demand for oil and gas for energy falls, they can make up for it by selling their products to plastic manufacturers.
New estimates from the US-based Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show plastic production emits as much carbon pollution each year (2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019) as 600 coal-fired power plants.
A study published by the lab on Thursday, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, warned that carbon pollution from plastic production could triple by 2050.
And even if global power grids shift over to clean energy, the plastic industry’s share of the global carbon budget could rise from just over 5 percent now to more than 20 percent by mid-century, based on conservative projections for industry growth, it added.
Plastic litter also makes flooding – already exacerbated by climate change – worse.
In Zambia, Lwenga Mulela, whose company converts plastic waste into useful products like paving and plant pots, told Climate Home plastic bottles pile up in drainage channels in the nearby capital Lusaka and stop rain escaping down the drain, causing flooding on the streets.
Lwenga Mulela shows plastic wrappers which she turns into products like paving on March 12 24. (Photo: Joe Lo)
During a brief rainstorm in Lusaka’s Central Business District in March, Climate Home saw cars slowing to a crawl to pass through puddles and pedestrians jumping over water to stay dry.
Money talks
The UN treaty negotiations have so far been divided on whether to focus on the production of plastic, potentially through targets to reduce it, as the “high-ambition coalition” and climate campaigners want.
The alternative is to limit its scope to expanding recycling of plastic, as the industry itself and the US, Saudi Arabia and others are calling for.
Asked if plastic production should be in the treaty, Canada’s Guilbeault said: “We have to look at every element of plastic pollution.” But asked about the biggest remaining divides, he pointed to finance.
Many countries, particularly small islands, “receive an incredible amount of plastic pollution that they’re not responsible for, and there should be an international mechanism to help them deal with the problem,” he said.
“Right now with the economic situation internationally – high interest rates, high inflation – it’s a difficult conversation but it’s a necessary conversation nonetheless,” he added.
This was highlighted by Madagascar’s representative at the UNEA who said his country backed a plastics treaty and was “insisting on the need to prepare global countries of the south and support them in this regard”.
In Zambia, entrepreneur Mulela also called for finance for developing countries to develop waste disposal and recycling systems. She said the companies that produce the plastic should provide that funding, as should richer nations.
“I think they have an obligation,” she said. “It’s a global village, so what is affecting one part of the world is also affecting every other part of the world.”
Approval by consensus or vote?
If governments do not unanimously agree on a text in November, a treaty could be endorsed through a two-thirds majority vote – but, for many negotiators, that would be a last resort.
Jyoti Mathur-Filipp, head of the secretariat responsible for the talks, told Climate Home “there is no wish on any member state’s part to actually have a vote on substance… so for us, we hope that we will adopt this treaty with consensus, without a vote.”
But, for campaigners like Greenpeace’s Graham Forbes, the apparent unwillingness to vote could end up weakening or delaying the treaty as he argued that a process based on consensus has enabled low-ambition countries to “undermine substantive progress”.
“Voting would enable member states that are serious about addressing the issue to negotiate a treaty that actually gets at the core of the issue: reducing plastic production and use,” he said.
Guilbeault took the middle-ground, noting that not every country has to agree to something for it to be adopted by consensus.
He wants the new treaty “to have as much buy-in as possible from as many countries as possible but, at the same time, I don’t think the world should be held hostage to the interest of a few countries – that’s not consensus either.”
The talks in Ottawa are tasked with narrowing down the draft text for the treaty. Guilbeault said he hopes to see 75-80% of it agreed this month, but added that the thorniest issues will be left to Busan in November.
In Kenya’s Laikipia County where temperatures can reach as high as 30 degrees Celsius, a local building technology is helping homes stay cooler while supporting education, creating jobs and improving the livelihoods and resilience of community residents, Climate Home News found on a visit to the region.
Situated in a semi-arid region, houses in Laikipia are mostly built with wood or cement blocks with corrugated iron sheets for roofing. This building method usually leaves the insides of homes scorching hot – and as global warming accelerates, the heat is becoming unbearable.
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, lived in these harsh conditions until 2023, when the Laikipia Integrated Housing Project began in his community.
The project uses compressed earth block (CEB) technology, drawing on traditional building methods and local materials – including soil, timber, grass and cow dung – to keep buildings cool in the highland climate. The thick earth walls provide insulation against the heat.
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, stands in front of classroom blocks built with compressed earth blocks (Photo: Vivian Chime)
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, stands in front of classroom blocks built with compressed earth blocks (Photo: Vivian Chime)
“Especially around the months of September all the way to December, it is very, very hot [in Laikipia], but as you might have noticed, my house is very cool even during the heat,” Muthui told Climate Home News.
His school has also deployed the technology for classrooms and boarding hostels to ensure students can carry on studying during the hottest seasons of the year. This way, they are protected from severe conditions and school closures can be avoided. In South Sudan, dozens of students collapsed from heat stroke in the capital Juba earlier this year, causing the country to shutter schools for weeks.
COP30 sees first action call on sustainable, affordable housing
The buildings and construction sector accounts for 37% of global emissions, making it the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). While calls to decarbonise the sector have grown, meaningful action to cut emissions has remained limited.
At COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates and Canada launched the Cement and Concrete Breakthrough Initiative to speed up investment in the technologies, policies and tools needed to put the cement and concrete industry on a net zero-emissions path by 2050.
Canada’s innovation minister, François-Philippe Champagne, said the initiative aimed to build a competitive “green cement and concrete industry” which creates jobs while building a cleaner future.
Coordinated by UNEP’s Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, the council has urged countries to embed climate considerations into affordable housing from the outset, “ensuring the drive to deliver adequate homes for social inclusion goes hand in hand with minimising whole-life emissions and environmental impacts”.
Homes built with compressed earth blocks in Laikipia (Photo: Julián Reingold)
Homes built with compressed earth blocks in Laikipia (Photo: Julián Reingold)
With buildings responsible for 34% of energy-related emissions and 32% of global energy demand, and 2.8 billion people living in inadequate housing, the ICBC stressed that “affordable, adequate, resource-efficient, low-carbon, climate-resilient and durable housing is essential to a just transition, the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the effective implementation of the Paris Agreement”.
Compressed earth offers local, green alternative
By using locally sourced materials, and just a little bit of cement, the compressed earth technology is helping residents in Kenya’s Laikipia region to build affordable, climate-smart homes that reduce emissions and environmental impacts while creating economic opportunities for local residents, said Dacan Aballa, construction manager at Habitat for Humanity International, the project’s developers.
Aballa said carbon emissions in the construction sector occur all through the lifecycle, from material extraction, processing and transportation to usage and end of life. However, by switching to compressed earth blocks, residents can source materials available in their environment, avoiding nearly all of that embedded carbon pollution.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), global cement manufacturing is responsible for about 8% of total CO2 emissions, and the current trajectory would see emissions from the sector soar to 3.8 billion tonnes per year by 2050 – a level that, compared to countries, would place the cement industry as one of the world’s top three or four emitters alongside the US and China.
Comparing compressed earth blocks and conventional materials in terms of carbon emissions, Aballa said that by using soil native to the area, the process avoids the fossil fuels that would normally have been used for to produce and transport building materials, slashing carbon and nitrogen dioxide emissions.
The local building technology also helps save on energy that would have been used for cooling these houses as well as keeping them warm during colder periods, Aballa explained.
Justin Atemi, water and sanitation officer at Habitat for Humanity, said the brick-making technique helps reduce deforestation too. This is because the blocks are left to air dry under the sun for 21 days – as opposed to conventional fired-clay blocks that use wood as fuel for kilns – and are then ready for use.
Women walk passed houses in the village of Kangimi, Kaduna State, Nigeria (Photo: Sadiq Mustapha)
Traditional knowledge becomes adaptation mechanism
Africa’s red clay soil was long used as a building material for homes, before cement blocks and concrete became common. However, the method never fully disappeared. Now, as climate change brings higher temperatures, this traditional building approach is gaining renewed attention, especially in low-income communities in arid and semi-arid regions struggling to cope with extreme heat.
From Kenya’s highlands to Senegal’s Sahelian cities, compressed earth construction is being repurposed as a low-cost, eco-friendly option for homes, schools, hospitals – and even multi-storey buildings.
Senegal’s Goethe-Institut in Dakar was constructed primarily using compressed earth blocks. In Mali, the Bamako medical school, which was built with unfired mud bricks, stays cool even during the hottest weather.
And more recently, in Nigeria’s cultural city of Benin, the just-finished Museum of West African Art (MOWA) was built using “rammed earth” architecture – a similar technology that compresses moist soil into wooden frames to form solid walls – making it one of the largest such structures in Africa.
David Sathuluri is a Research Associate and Dr. Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
As climate scientists warn that we are approaching irreversible tipping points in the Earth’s climate system, paradoxically the very technologies being deployed to detect these tipping points – often based on AI – are exacerbating the problem, via acceleration of the associated energy consumption.
The UK’s much-celebrated £81-million ($109-million) Forecasting Tipping Points programme involving 27 teams, led by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), represents a contemporary faith in technological salvation – yet it embodies a profound contradiction. The ARIA programme explicitly aims to “harness the laws of physics and artificial intelligence to pick up subtle early warning signs of tipping” through advanced modelling.
We are deploying massive computational infrastructure to warn us of climate collapse while these same systems consume the energy and water resources needed to prevent or mitigate it. We are simultaneously investing in computationally intensive AI systems to monitor whether we will cross irreversible climate tipping points, even as these same AI systems could fuel that transition.
The computational cost of monitoring
Training a single large language model like GPT-3 consumed approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity, resulting in 552 metric tons of carbon dioxide – equivalent to driving 123 gasoline-powered cars for a year, according to a recent study.
GPT-4 required roughly 50 times more electricity. As the computational power needed for AI continues to double approximately every 100 days, the energy footprint of these systems is not static but is exponentially accelerating.
And the environmental consequences of AI models extend far beyond electricity usage. Besides massive amounts of electricity (much of which is still fossil-fuel-based), such systems require advanced cooling that consumes enormous quantities of water, and sophisticated infrastructure that must be manufactured, transported, and deployed globally.
The water-energy nexus in climate-vulnerable regions
A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day – sufficient to supply thousands of households or farms. In the Phoenix area of the US alone, more than 58 data centers consume an estimated 170 million gallons of drinking water daily for cooling.
The geographical distribution of this infrastructure matters profoundly as data centers requiring high rates of mechanical cooling are disproportionately located in water-stressed and socioeconomically vulnerable regions, particularly in Asia-Pacific and Africa.
At the same time, we are deploying AI-intensive early warning systems to monitor climate tipping points in regions like Greenland, the Arctic, and the Atlantic circulation system – regions already experiencing catastrophic climate impacts. They represent thresholds that, once crossed, could trigger irreversible changes within decades, scientists have warned.
Yet computational models and AI-driven early warning systems operate according to different temporal logics. They promise to provide warnings that enable future action, but they consume energy – and therefore contribute to emissions – in the present.
This is not merely a technical problem to be solved with renewable energy deployment; it reflects a fundamental misalignment between the urgency of climate tipping points and the gradualist assumptions embedded in technological solutions.
The carbon budget concept reveals that there is a cumulative effect on how emissions impact on temperature rise, with significant lags between atmospheric concentration and temperature impact. Every megawatt-hour consumed by AI systems training on climate models today directly reduces the available carbon budget for tomorrow – including the carbon budget available for the energy transition itself.
The governance void
The deeper issue is that governance frameworks for AI development have completely decoupled from carbon budgets and tipping point timescales. UK AI regulation focuses on how much computing power AI systems use, but it does not require developers to ask: is this AI’s carbon footprint small enough to fit within our carbon budget for preventing climate tipping points?
There is no mechanism requiring that AI infrastructure deployment decisions account for the specific carbon budgets associated with preventing different categories of tipping points.
Meanwhile, the energy transition itself – renewable capacity expansion, grid modernization, electrification of transport – requires computation and data management. If we allow unconstrained AI expansion, we risk the perverse outcome in which computing infrastructure consumes the surplus renewable energy that could otherwise accelerate decarbonization, rather than enabling it.
With global consensus over climate action faltering on the accord’s 10th anniversary, experts say “coalitions of the willing” should move faster and with more ambition
Rising demand in Southeast Asia and India is expected to prevent coal use from falling significantly this decade, the International Energy Agency predicts
What would it mean to resolve the paradox?
Resolving this paradox requires, for example, moving beyond the assumption that technological solutions can be determined in isolation from carbon constraints. It demands several interventions:
First, any AI-driven climate monitoring system must operate within an explicitly defined carbon budget that directly reflects the tipping-point timescale it aims to detect. If we are attempting to provide warnings about tipping points that could be triggered within 10-20 years, the AI system’s carbon footprint must be evaluated against a corresponding carbon budget for that period.
Second, governance frameworks for AI development must explicitly incorporate climate-tipping point science, establishing threshold restrictions on computational intensity in relation to carbon budgets and renewable energy availability. This is not primarily a “sustainability” question; it is a justice and efficacy question.
Third, alternative models must be prioritized over the current trajectory toward ever-larger models. These should include approaches that integrate human expertise with AI in time-sensitive scenarios, carbon-aware model training, and using specialized processors matched to specific computational tasks rather than relying on universal energy-intensive systems.
The deeper critique
The fundamental issue is that the energy-system tipping point paradox reflects a broader crisis in how wealthy nations approach climate governance. We have faith that innovation and science can solve fundamental contradictions, rather than confronting the structural need to constrain certain forms of energy consumption and wealth accumulation. We would rather invest £81 million in computational systems to detect tipping points than make the political decisions required to prevent them.
The positive tipping point for energy transition exists – renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels, and deployment rates are accelerating. What we lack is not technological capacity but political will to rapidly decarbonize, as well as community participation.
Deploying energy-intensive AI systems to monitor tipping points while simultaneously failing to deploy available renewable energy represents a kind of technological distraction from the actual political choices required.
The paradox is thus also a warning: in the time remaining before irreversible tipping points are triggered, we must choose between building ever-more sophisticated systems to monitor climate collapse or deploying available resources – capital, energy, expertise, political attention – toward allaying the threat.
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