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Ben Marshall is a teaching fellow at Harvard University and Aditya Bhayana is a climate fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The dust is settling after COP30, and two things have become clear. First, the outcomes of the world’s most important climate conference were disappointing. Secondly, those outcomes had less to do with the limits of climate science and more to do with geopolitics.

If they want to meaningfully push for better climate agreements, future COP presidencies will need to take a more proactive role in orchestrating climate negotiations and do so in a way that accounts for the new geopolitical reality. If they don’t, climate action will remain mostly talk.

The shortcomings in Belém

Brazil’s COP30 presidency placed three big bets on the 2025 climate summit: it would be “the COP of implementation;” the rainforest setting would unify actors; and wider participation would unlock new avenues for progress.

Instead, the summit – held in Belém (the “gateway to the Amazon”), in the most deforested country on earth – ended with no roadmap for fossil fuel phaseout, an agreement that only briefly mentions deforestation, and an institutional apparatus less trusted than it was at the start.

What’s on the climate calendar for 2026?

In part, these outcomes reflect rare missteps by COP President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, who pushed contentious issues like unilateral trade measures (including the EU’s carbon border tax) into a separate negotiation track and dedicated only a small part of the agenda to political conversation.

But COP30 also suffered from broader issues that are straining multilateralism. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have made it harder to form cross-regional coalitions, record debt distress in developing countries has weakened trust in global institutions, and collaborative efforts to regulate global shipping emissions and reform international taxation have stalled.

How geopolitics show up at COP

Climate diplomacy is becoming less insulated from these geopolitical pressures. Observers noted this during COP28 (Dubai), and since then, it has become more pronounced, while COP hosts have done little in response.

Great-power rivalry is now shaping even technical negotiations, trust in the idea of COP is waning, and the lines between climate and trade are increasingly blurred. At COP30, we saw this firsthand in the form of three key shifts compared to past summits:

Feasibility is no longer the binding constraint. The scientific, technical, and policy cases for rapid decarbonisation have never been stronger – pathways to limit warming to 1.5°C have been well mapped by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; onshore wind and solar power are respectively 60% and ~80% cheaper than in 2015; and each year of inaction measurably raises the costs of mitigation.

But inside the negotiation rooms in Belém, we saw countries not only weighing climate commitments against fiscal, trade, and energy priorities, but also calibrating their positions to avoid antagonising key international partners (chiefly the United States) or empowering domestic political rivals in upcoming elections.

Narrative power has reached its limits. Narratives once turbocharged climate deals, from stories of shared purpose building momentum at COP21 (Paris) to discussions of climate justice pushing “loss and damage” to the fore at COP27 (Sharm-el-Sheikh). But while Brazil saw some of the most compelling storytelling of any COP – with President Lula framing the Amazon as a global commons to be protected, indigenous flotillas on the river, and even the Pope pushing for concrete action – it was not enough to overcome structural blockages to progress on fossil fuels, climate finance or forests.

Emerging powers have gone from adapting to institutions to reshaping them. China, India, Brazil, and the Gulf states are no longer negotiating at the edges of a Western-designed system, but actively redesigning climate governance to reflect their strategic interests. This showed up in a desire to compartmentalise discussions on trade and emissions, and in resistance to overly prescriptive language on mitigation. Red lines will likely continue to harden as developing countries flex – especially if the US stays away from the table.

    Action options for future COP presidencies

    COP presidencies historically acted as conveners, focusing on the agreement text – largely with the interests of major developed countries in mind. Convening power and elegant drafting are necessary but no longer sufficient. To be successful in the new reality, COP presidencies must act as orchestrators – managing political interdependencies, sequencing issues strategically, and brokering alignment across rival blocs.

    Below are four options available to Türkiye and Australia for 2026, and Ethiopia for 2027, to help set up climate negotiations for greater success:

    1. Invest in the pre-work to build momentum and trust. The landmark Paris Agreement was achieved in part because ministers were engaged early and often, and expectations were disciplined. COP presidencies should engage political stakeholders throughout the 12 (or ideally, 18) months leading up to the summit and keep a tighter lid on public ambitions. They should also push countries to make good on their commitments if they are to overcome a growing sense of mistrust. This year, more than 70 new national climate plans for 2035 were still missing by the end of COP, including top-10 emitters India, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

    2. Explicitly engage with influential blocs. The COP presidency can play a much more proactive role in brokering agreements. With China, that will mean focusing on implementation (e.g., clean manufacturing, grid-scale deployment and technology diffusion) rather than rehashing mitigation targets.

    With other ‘Like-Minded Developing Countries’, including India, it will mean moving from abstract calls for “ambition” toward specific packages that link mitigation to predictable finance, technology access, and transition timelines – especially in hard-to-abate sectors. And with progressives like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance and AOSIS, it will mean translating “climate leadership” into real economic signals, with the COP presidency pushing existing multilateral institutions to provide access to transition finance in response to ambitious climate commitments.

    3. Use creative approaches, but carefully. Brazil offered a response to brittle relationships in the form of mutirão (Portuguese for “collective effort”) sessions. These included closed-door meetings, informal consultations and sidebars, typically without technical staff present, where ministers and high-level delegates could have off-the-record conversations and negotiate political trade-offs that would not survive plenary scrutiny.

    Mutirão showed some promise, but its overuse at COP30 degraded transparency and highlighted a paradox in climate diplomacy that the means of identifying compromise and building consensus among some parties also damages trust with others. Future COP presidencies should be careful not to over-use mutirão itself, but instead to design other approaches that structure informal bargaining and connect it to the formal process.

    This could include: making political huddles mandatory; baking in more inclusiveness by inviting fixed or rotating representatives from large coalitions (as happens in the G77 and WTO “Green Room” meetings); withholding details on the deliberations themselves but publicly communicating what issues are in scope and any red lines (akin to the forward guidance issued by central banks); and requiring closed-door sessions to feed outcomes back into open negotiating tracks (which helped rapidly translate ministerial consultations into draft text at COP21 in Paris). The combined candour and accountability of these and other approaches could help COP presidencies broker alignment among blocs with fundamentally different political economies.

    4. Acknowledge climate governance is entering a post-consensus era. The assumption that all 198 parties to the UNFCCC can converge on a single, high-ambition pathway is no longer credible. Progress will increasingly depend on coalitions of the willing and plurilateral arrangements that complement the multilateral system. COP presidencies should feel comfortable speaking hard truths to power and pushing for stronger, narrower agreements than broader, weaker ones.

    The challenge of climate negotiations is no longer knowing what needs to be done or how to do it, but aligning the interests, power and institutions needed to make it possible.

    Responding to these dynamics requires a different kind of COP presidency – one focused less on targets and text, and more on managing real-world political priorities. Until geopolitics becomes the starting point of climate action, rather than an inconvenient backdrop, real world implementation will remain a promise deferred.

    The opinions expressed in this article the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of Harvard or any other institution.

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    DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids

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    Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
    An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

    This week

    UK, Europe and India battle heatwaves

    ‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy”  temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.

    ‘BRUTAL REMINDER’:  In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
    INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand ​to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.

    Around the world

    • CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
    • DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
    • SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg.
    • NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
    • EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.

    Four million

    The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.


    Latest climate research

    • Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
    • LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
    • Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
    • Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances

    (For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

    Captured

    Map of the UK showing that at least 67 NHS sites have been forced to close due to weather-related flooding since 2021

    A Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.

    Spotlight

    How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economy

    This week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.

    Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.

    In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.

    Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.

    Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief.

    However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.

    “We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.

    A nascent industry

    Solar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.

    The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.

    Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.

    However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.

    “Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.

    The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.

    Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.

    Powering rural communities

    Many rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.

    According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.

    A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.

    With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.

    Watch, read, listen

    MOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.

    ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
    VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.

    Coming up

    Pick of the jobs

    DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

    This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

    The post DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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    Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?

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    At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.

    Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.

    Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”

    As the Mission 300 initiative advances, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).

      In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, GEAPP’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.

      Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?

      A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. So we want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country.

      Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed.

      Campaigners in Africa are demanding their governments stop the development of fossil fuels on the continent and embrace the opportunities of renewable energy
      (Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)

      The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.

      Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?

      A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.

      We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.

      The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.

      Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?

      A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that.

      So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities.

      Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?

      A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses.

      Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier.

      Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?

      The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.

      Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?

      A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.

      So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that.

      Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?

      A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.

      Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies

      When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable.

      To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.

      Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.

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      AI boom means US is now ‘investing more’ in fossil-fuel power than China

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      The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

      A rapid expansion of data centres across the nation is at the heart of the US tech sector’s plans to continue “dominat[ing]” the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

      High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

      This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

      As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

      Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

      Annual investment in fossil-fuel power in China and the US
      Annual investment in fossil-fuel power in China and the US, $bn. The figure for 2026 is an IEA estimate, based on current trends. Source: IEA.

      The IEA’s latest world energy investment report shows that spending on renewables and electricity grids continues to dominate at the global scale.

      In the US, Trump administration policies such as the phase-out of tax credits for renewables has led to the IEA revising its forecast for new wind and solar power downwards.

      At the same time, US electricity demand is expected to rise by an average of 2% per year from 2026 to 2030, with data centres contributing half of the overall increase.

      This is leading to what the IEA calls an “AI-driven push” to build new gas-power plants in the US, the world’s largest data-centre market and largest gas producer.

      Globally, orders for new gas-power plants increased to 130 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 – a 25-year high – and US demand was a “major factor” in this, according to the IEA.

      Much of the demand is coming from tech companies in the US seeking to bypass grid connection queues by building “captive” gas-power plants.

      As the chart below shows, since the start of 2025 these US captive data centres alone have signed off on more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world – aside from the US itself.

      Total value of new gas generation final investment decisions
      Total value of new gas generation final investment decisions by country, region or use-case, between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, $bn. Source: IEA.

      Overall, investment in grid upgrades, power equipment and electricity generation to support the buildout of data-centre infrastructure around the world hit $105bn in 2025, according to the IEA.

      This is more than the total invested in the energy sector across the whole of Africa – a continent where more than 600 million people do not have access to electricity.

      The IEA notes that strong demand for gas-power plants for data centres in the US – and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East – is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.

      The agency also points out that as the tech sector becomes a “major energy investor”, accounting for around 40% of all corporate power-purchase agreements, it is also “underpinning momentum” for emerging clean technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal.

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