As nations assemble at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, one issue is expected to dominate the summit: climate finance.
In total, countries need to invest trillions of dollars to build clean-energy systems, prepare for an increasingly hotter world and deal with the aftermath of climate change-fuelled disasters.
The UN climate convention also specifically requires developed nations to provide financial resources – usually referred to as “climate finance” – to help developing countries do this.
Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to set a new climate finance target by 2025 that would channel money into these nations and help them tackle climate change.
But negotiations over this “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for climate finance in recent months have exposed deep divides in the UN climate process.
Nations disagree on virtually every element of the NCQG, including the amount of money that needs to be raised, who should contribute, what types of finance should feed into it, what it should fund and what period of time it should cover.
Developing countries are looking to high-income parties, such as the US and the EU, to provide the money. Meanwhile, developed countries want an all-encompassing goal that includes input from private companies and large, emerging economies, such as China.
In this article, Carbon Brief explores the issues countries have been clashing over, which will have to be resolved to secure an outcome in Baku.
- Why are countries discussing a new climate finance goal?
- What number will replace $100bn in the new target?
- Which countries will contribute to the new target?
- What sources of money should be included in the NCQG?
- What kind of activities will the NCQG support?
- How long will countries have to meet the NCQG?
- How will progress towards the target be reported and tracked?
Why are countries discussing a new climate finance goal?
Climate finance is at the heart of international climate politics. It is widely understood that developing countries need to invest large sums of money if they are to cut their emissions and prepare for a hotter world, in line with their climate plans.
The nature of climate finance is disputed, but, currently, it largely comes from developed countries’ aid budgets and contributions from multilateral funds and development banks (MDBs), such as the World Bank. Smaller amounts come from the private sector.
When nations negotiated the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, the treaty said that developed countries “shall provide” financial resources to help developing countries tackle climate change.
In 2009, developed countries agreed to “mobilise” $100bn of climate finance a year by 2020 – an annual target that was meant to run through to 2025. This became a fraught topic, as developed nations missed the 2020 deadline and only reached it two years later in 2022.
In the Paris Agreement of 2015, Article 9 reaffirms that “developed country parties shall provide financial resources to assist developing country parties”. Nations also decided that, before 2025, they:
“Shall set a new collective quantified goal from a floor of $100bn per year, taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries.”
This “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) is the focus of negotiations at COP29. With the 2025 deadline approaching, this will be the final opportunity to settle on the new target.
Negotiators have been gathering for months to discuss the issue, in an effort to find a landing ground. However, the NCQG is both very technical and highly politicised, leaving them deadlocked on most issues.
Following several rounds of negotiations, the co-chairs (from Australia and the United Arab Emirates) overseeing the talks were tasked with producing a “substantive framework for a draft negotiating text”, which would form the basis of COP29 deliberations.
The resulting document offers the outlines of the new climate finance target and crystallises the key areas of remaining disagreement. It is nine pages long and contains 173 elements that are still in square brackets, meaning they are undecided.
What number will replace $100bn in the new target?
Unlike the $100bn, which was an arbitrary number put forward by global-north leaders, the NCQG must take into account the “needs and priorities of developing countries”. Many assessments have shown that these nations’ investment needs will run to trillions of dollars for tackling climate change in the coming years.
However, setting a numerical climate finance target – or “quantum” – is not straightforward. Many of the future demands of dealing with climate change are difficult to quantify and there has been no officially mandated effort to work out what these needs are under the NCQG.
The closest attempt is the “needs determination report” from the UN Standing Committee on Finance, based on combining various reports in which developing countries have self-assessed their own requirements. However, the committee stresses that its estimate of $5-6.9tn over the next five years contains “significant gaps” and, therefore, is not a true reflection of needs.
An analysis by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) points out that this leaves NCQG negotiators relying on various calculations by NGOs, management consultancies and research groups “undertaken under different contexts, for possibly different objectives and with different mandates”.
Despite this lack of clarity, negotiators have converged around the need for trillions of dollars to deal with climate change. But arriving at a more precise figure for the NCQG has proved difficult, in part because countries do not agree on what it is supposed to include.
Developing countries prefer a target made up largely of public funds from developed countries. Meanwhile, developed countries have proposed targets covering a much larger range of sources and including “global investment flows”, rather than public money given by developed countries to developing ones alone. (See: What sources of money should be included in the NCQG?)
As a result, Iskander Erzini Vernoit, director of the Imal Initiative for Climate and Development, tells Carbon Brief that, “while all parties are talking about trillions, they are doing so in entirely different ways”.
Developing country groups, including the Like-Minded Developing Countries, the Arab Group and the African Group, have proposed a few ideas for climate finance targets, all in the region of $1-1.3tn a year, as the chart below shows. Pakistan has proposed the highest figure so far – “a minimum of $2tn” – but it has not specified the timeframe.
Meeting such a target would require an unprecedented tenfold boost in climate finance by 2025. (However, it is difficult to compare like-for-like, as countries have different expectations about the sources that will make up the NCQG target.)
After years of developed countries struggling to hit the relatively modest $100bn goal, these new demands raise the issue of plausibility.
Major contributors including the UK, France and Sweden have all slashed their aid budgets in recent years, reducing the pool of public finance available.
Meanwhile, the US has consistently underperformed in providing climate finance. This is despite most analyses indicating that it should be by far the largest contributor, as it is the world’s richest country and the biggest historic contributor to climate change.
Jonathan Beynon, a senior policy associate at the Center for Global Development, tells Carbon Brief:
“Public budgets are under pressure in most developed countries, prospects for such massive increases in climate finance look limited, however justified they might seem.”
Developed countries stress the need for a “realistic” NCQG target. In one statement, the US mentions the annual needs of developing countries exceeding $1tn a year, but says “it is clear that public international finance alone cannot reach such levels”. It adds:
“There is a fine line between a support goal that stretches contributing parties and one that is so unrealistic that it actually diminishes incentives and potentially undermines the Paris Agreement process.”
Furthermore, the US argues that developed countries do not have to meet the “totality of needs” in developing countries, noting that the NCQG mandate only requires parties to “tak[e] into account” these needs.
Developed countries have largely resisted suggesting a numerical target for the NCQG. They argue that a specific amount cannot be agreed upon until a decision is made on who will contribute towards it. The US has only gone so far as to restate that the goal should be “from a floor of” $100bn per year – as already set out by the Paris text.
(Experts have noted that the $100bn goal should be corrected for inflation, at the very least, which would add many billions of dollars. Beynon says “inflation and economic growth alone” would allow “perhaps a doubling by 2035”.)
Another developed-country proposal from the EU mentions a goal of $2.4tn annually by 2030, a number identified by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance – a group of economists tasked with working out the “investment” needs in developing countries.
In the expert group’s proposal, just $150-200bn per year would come directly from other countries, with $1.4tn from the domestic resources of developing countries themselves.
Alex Scott, a senior associate in climate diplomacy at the thinktank ECCO, noted in a recent briefing that progress outside negotiations, such as mobilising more climate finance from the World Bank, could “build a bit more confidence amongst developed countries that…there are other sources of finance that are going to complement what they can put on the table”.
One recent assessment by a team of NGO climate-finance analysts concluded that a “business-as-usual” scenario could result in $173bn of climate finance being provided and mobilised by 2030 – a 50% increase from 2022 levels. This is based on existing pledges by developed countries and planned reforms to multilateral institutions.
Others in civil society point to the trillions spent on Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, and the trillions that could be raised by taxing fossil fuels and billionaires. Meena Raman, head of programmes at the Third World Network, tells Carbon Brief that the unwillingness of developed countries to commit to more funding is a failure of “political will”:
“It’s very dubious when you say you have not got enough money for climate, but you see that there is a lot of money for bombs and wars.”
Which countries will contribute to the new target?
One of the most contested topics in NCQG negotiations is whether to expand the list of countries that must provide climate finance.
Global-north nations broadly want relatively wealthy, emerging economies, such as China and the Gulf states, to start contributing officially under the UN climate regime. Developing countries argue that, after failing to meet their climate-finance targets, developed countries are trying to shift their responsibilities.
As it stands, only 23 countries are obliged to provide climate finance, including western Europe, the US, Japan, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The EU must also provide climate finance, independently from the funds provided by its member states.
This group, listed in “Annex II” of the UNFCCC, is based on the membership of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1992. (OECD member Turkey secured removal from Annex II in 2001, on the basis that it was an emerging economy.)
The world has changed a lot in the three decades since the contributor list was agreed.
As the chart below shows, emissions from non-Annex II countries, particularly China, have increased significantly since 1992. Many of these nations are also wealthier, and both of these factors are frequently cited as reasons for such countries to start paying climate finance.
There have been consistent efforts by donor countries to broaden the pool of climate finance providers. Indeed, the language in the Paris Agreement reflects this, saying that “other parties” are “encouraged to provide” climate finance “voluntarily”.
However, the division between countries “obliged” versus “encouraged” to contribute has remained. Only Annex II countries were responsible for delivering the $100bn goal.
Developed countries are clear that bringing more donors on board for the NCQG is a priority for them. In a submission ahead of negotiations, the EU refers to “evolving” responsibilities and abilities to pay. It states that:
“The collective goal can only be reached if parties with high greenhouse gas emissions and economic capabilities join the effort.”
The US says that, in its view, agreeing to renegotiate the climate-finance target from 2025 was done on the basis of considering new contributors, making this topic “entirely legitimate, indeed appropriate”.
Developing countries, on the other hand, are firmly opposed to any changes. They argue that it is beyond the legal mandate of the NCQG.
The G77 and China group of 134 developing countries stresses that the NCQG falls under the Paris Agreements and the UNFCCC. Therefore, it includes the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR-RC).
In this case, CBDR-RC refers to developed countries’ obligation and capacity to provide climate finance to developing countries. This principle is “not negotiable” and the NCQG mandate “does not include any discussions on modifications” to climate treaties, the G77 and China group says.
There is no agreed-upon way to determine how responsible countries are for causing climate change, and how much they should be helping to prevent it. This makes determining who could or should contribute to an expanded donor base complicated.
The table below, which draws on a recent paper led by Dr Pieter Pauw of Eindhoven University of Technology, shows various metrics that have been considered to identify new donors for the NCQG.
These include how countries are identified under various international treaties, measures of emissions and wealth, membership of powerful institutions and willingness to contribute to global development funds.
There are 50 non-contributor countries that tick two or more of these boxes, with a handful of relatively wealthy or large nations scoring the highest. (As with any attempt to identify new contributors, this ranking relies on subjective criteria. It scores all of these factors equally without making a judgement of how important they are, and countries are ranked in the order they appear in the study).
Non-contributor countries that meet a selection of potential criteria for contributing to the NCQG. Criteria include how countries are defined under various international treaties, including the UNFCCC, the Montreal Protocol and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Other criteria include different measures of higher CO2 emissions or gross national income (GNI) than the median Annex II country; membership of powerful institutions (EU, OECD, G20); and “significant” (greater than $5m) contributions to global climate, environment and development funds. Source: Adapted from Pauw et al. (2024).
Most proposals for identifying new contributors consider a country’s ability to pay – measured using gross national income (GNI) – and its responsibility for climate change, often based on historical emissions. Nations such as Canada and Switzerland have proposed a new system for determining climate-finance donors, based on this kind of data.
Yet different versions and combinations of these metrics can yield very different results. Focusing on total emissions and economic status generally throws up a selection of large, emerging economies, including China, India, Russia and Brazil.
However, many analyses include some variation of per-capita emissions and income, to ensure a “fairer” representation that does not penalise countries with large populations.
Such calculations suggest that small, wealthy fossil-fuel producers, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, and small, high-income nations, such as Israel, South Korea and Singapore, should contribute to climate finance.
But outcomes can vary significantly, even when accounting for per-capita measures. The best example of this is China, which is the consistent focus of developed-country efforts to expand the contributor list.
Some assessments identify China as an obvious candidate for future contributions – and one that could make a big difference to total spending. Analysis by the Centre for Global Development (CGD) suggests, based on methods that take per-capita metrics into account alongside other factors such as aggregate GNI, that China should contribute up to around 7% of climate finance.
However, if comparability with Annex II countries is considered important when measuring per-capita historical emissions and income, as in analysis by the thinktank ODI, the results are very different. China still ranks far below any of the current developed countries that provide climate finance on these measures.
In fact, the charts below, based on WRI figures, show that major climate finance contributors still largely surpass emerging economies on both per-capita historical emissions from fossil fuels and industry, and per-capita GNI. (These rankings remain roughly the same if land-use emissions are included, although Russia rises higher in the list.)
Given this, the ODI concludes in its analysis that demands for China to become a contributor have “dubious” scientific basis and are “based on geopolitics, particularly China’s status as global power and international financier”.
All of this is further complicated by the fact that many relatively wealthy countries that are not obliged to provide climate finance, including China and South Korea, already contribute climate-related aid and other funding that could be classified as climate finance.
Yet there is resistance from nations such as China to formally classifying their activities as “climate finance” under the UN. Doing so could result in them facing more scrutiny and accountability.
It could also have great political significance given the long-standing division between “developed” and “developing” states in UN talks. This “firewall” was partially broken down with the Paris Agreement, which compelled all countries to set their own “nationally determined contribution” to climate action, but has remained in place for climate finance.
Charlene Watson, a senior research associate at the ODI, says developed country officials argue that having more countries on board makes it easier for them to persuade their treasuries to release more climate finance. However, she questions the value of insisting countries that already provide climate-related funds are included in the UN system:
“My view is that the cake is not going to get any bigger in the short term. It’s just going to be that we can better see the size of the cake.”
Pauw says there is a need for more nuance, including a new category of “net recipients” that both give and receive climate finance. He says coming up with a new list of contributors may be too difficult:
“Whatever you push forward as an idea is arbitrary. There will always be countries who say ‘we cannot agree to this’ – which means that you will not reach agreement.”
One compromise that has been proposed is to introduce different contributor bases for different “layers” of the NCQG, if countries agree on a “multilayered” goal.
That way, China and others might not be responsible for contributing to the “new $100bn” part of the goal, but may be covered by another layer. (See: What sources of money should be included in the NCQG?)
Meanwhile, Vernoit says poorer developing countries are “extremely wary” of the contributor base discussions, as any ambiguity over who is obliged to provide climate finance could hamper its provision. “Accountability is why burden-sharing frameworks and differentiated lists, like the Annex II list, are important to poorer recipient countries,” he explains.
What sources of money should be included in the NCQG?
Another highly contentious issue in the NCQG negotiations is what types of finance should feed into it. This inevitably influences the discussion of how big the goal could be.
The $100bn target is already fairly broad, covering finance “from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance”.
This in itself is controversial, with civil society groups and developing countries often arguing that the goal relies too much on low-quality finance, such as non-concessional loans. Nevertheless, the NCQG has the potential to be even broader.
Developed countries argue that expanding the scope, with a focus on private investment and gearing the entire financial system towards climate action, is the only way to raise the trillions of dollars of money required.
These wealthier nations generally want the goal to be “multilayered”, with a large outer layer consisting of “global investment flows for climate action”. The framing is important, as it could refer to all kinds of money being spent everywhere – not only in developing countries – including investments made by the developing countries themselves.
The developed nations also propose a smaller sub-goal within this investment layer, more aligned with traditional “climate finance”, which consists of finance “provided” and “mobilised” for developing countries.
(Here, “provided” is understood as referring to climate finance given by one country to another, while “mobilised” refers to private investment that comes as a result of public money “de-risking” investments and getting projects off the ground.)
This approach could make a big difference to how much money these countries would be obliged to provide. For example, an EU submission describes an “investment” goal in the trillions, in contrast to a “provided and mobilised” goal in the billions.
In addition, developed-country statements have stressed the “important role of the private sector”, the need for “reforming the multilateral financial architecture to further unlock climate finance” and the role of “innovative financial instruments” to raise more money.
By contrast, many developing countries have argued for a single goal that channels high-quality climate finance from developed countries to them in a reliable way.
In practice, this means developing countries want as much of it as possible to come in the form of grants from developed countries’ public coffers. The Arab Group has suggested that at least $441bn of the $1.1tn in annual climate finance it has proposed should come from developed-country grants.
All of this speaks to a central tension about the significance of two articles in the Paris Agreement. Article 9 states that developed countries are obliged to provide climate finance to developing countries and others are encouraged to do so voluntarily. Article 2.1c, meanwhile, calls for all “financial flows” to be aligned with the agreement’s goals.
As the WRI diagram below shows, developing countries want to keep the NCQG talks focused on Article 9, whereas developed countries say both articles should be covered. Developed countries, such as Japan, have said that they think Article 2.1c also justifies expanding the contributor base. (See: Which countries will contribute to the new target?)
Pauw of Eindhoven University of Technology tells Carbon Brief that this comes down to a fundamental difference of opinion on what climate finance is and should be.
On the one hand, the world needs to channel as much money as possible into tackling climate change and, on the other hand, there is the question of transferring money from developed to developing countries – often framed using the language of climate justice. He says:
“You can’t mobilise a lot of money if you provide everything in grants. So those two motivations seem to clash, and it’s important to understand that both of them are relevant, both of them are important and both of them need to be realised.”
The wording below from the proposed “draft negotiating text” released ahead of the COP29 negotiations shows the main options on the table for the NCQG.
Option 1 broadly captures ideas proposed by developing countries, while option 2 captures the layered “annual investment goal” presented by developed countries.
There are practical reasons for developing countries wanting to avoid certain types of finance in the NCQG.
Some global-north leaders have framed private finance as essential for meeting the needs of developing countries. For example, when asked about climate finance, former US climate envoy John Kerry repeatedly stated that “we don’t have the money”, arguing that the key would be to encourage more private capital into climate-related activities.
Yet the amount of private climate finance “mobilised” by developed countries remained virtually unchanged at around $14bn each year between 2016-2021, only increasing significantly to $22bn in 2022. (This is based on OECD data for private finance with a clear causal link to a donor country sending development finance to a project.)
Private investment is also far less likely to flow into the poorest countries, many of which are the most in need of climate finance. It is often viewed as unsuitable for many climate-adaptation projects, which are less likely to generate profits than mitigation work such as clean-energy projects.
Moreover, while national governments are within the remit of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, private companies and other financial actors, such as banks, are not. This could make it more risky to rely on them to meet the NCQG.
There are also strong calls from many developing countries to exclude “non-concessional” loans – provided at or near market rates – from climate finance altogether.
Since 2016, around 70% of public climate finance has been delivered in the form of loans, with Japan, France and Germany, as well as MDBs, providing most of their contributions in this way.
UN figures suggest that at least one-fifth of reported loans are “non-concessional”, resulting in wealth flowing back to the donor countries as loan repayments and interest, according to a Reuters investigation.
Many of the poorest countries are spending more on servicing debts than they receive in climate finance, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
These debates form part of a wider discussion around the “quality” of finance.
Developing countries want finance to be predictable and accessible, especially given the complications they often face when obtaining it from MDBs and large funds.
For their part, developed countries are more likely to emphasise the need for “effective” climate finance – meaning funds that are used for their intended purposes and have a climate impact.
What kind of activities will the NCQG support?
Finance for climate action is divided into broad categories, depending on its main purpose. The $100bn target supports two types of activities: those that cut emissions – mitigation; or those that help countries adapt to climate change.
Now, there is pressure from most developing countries to include loss and damage as a “third pillar” in the NCQG. This would enshrine support for the victims of climate disasters as an official component of the international climate finance goal, for the first time.
After years of fraught negotiations, developing countries secured a “win” last year with the launch of the loss-and-damage fund at COP28.
However, contributions to the fund have been small compared to the scale of climate-related damages, which are estimated to reach $447bn-894bn per year by 2030.
Some developing countries would like to see NCQG sub-goals in order to ensure there is ring-fenced funding available for adaptation – which remains poorly resourced compared to mitigation – and for loss and damage. This would involve percentages of the overall target being assigned to each of the three pillars.
Sherri Ombuya, a consultant at Perspectives Climate Group, tells Carbon Brief that there has been some convergence between parties on the general idea of increasing adaptation finance. “This builds on some existing positions that have already taken place within the broader negotiation space,” she says.
(Developed country parties have already pledged to double adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025, for example.)
However, developed countries broadly do not want to incorporate loss and damage under the NCQG. They argue that, while a fund for loss and damage finance has now been established, contributions to it are voluntary and not part of the NCQG mandate.
Moreover, Article 9 of the Paris Agreement only refers to climate finance for “mitigation and adaptation” – and the Paris “decision text” that mandates the NCQG does the same.
Developing countries argue that including loss and damage in the NCQG is nevertheless valid, because Article 8 of the Paris Agreement separately “recognises” the importance of “averting, minimising and addressing” loss and damage.
They also see room for the climate-finance goal to expand over time, to reflect the changing needs of developing countries, in line with the Paris Agreement requirement that “efforts of all parties will represent a progression over time”.
How long will countries have to meet the NCQG?
Parties at COP29 must also agree on the timeframe for the provision of climate finance under the NCQG, as this was not specified in Paris.
A key source of conflict concerns whether the target should cover a shorter period of around five years or a longer one of 10 years or more.
Some developing party groupings, including the LMDCs and the Arab Group, have expressed a preference for a five-year goal covering the period from 2025-2030, with the same amount of money – roughly $1tn – provided every year.
An advantage of having a shorter timeframe could be that it gets money moving faster. Supporters also stress the importance of a “revision” or “review” process once the five years are up, in order to adequately reflect “the evolving needs of developing countries”.
Other developing countries, including AOSIS and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), have supported a 10-year timeframe, but with some kind of review after around five years.
Some parties and civil-society groups have pointed out that a five-year timeframe aligns with existing processes for monitoring progress under the Paris Agreement.
Both the global stocktake and national climate plans – known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) – run on five-year cycles and could, therefore, feed into a review of the NCQG goal.
In an assessment of the NCQG, the World Resources Institute (WRI) notes that, while there are advantages to revisiting the target, “reopening negotiations on the NCQG during revision cycles has the potential to cause additional delays and complexity”.
Meanwhile, developed countries including Switzerland and the EU favour a 10-year timeline.
Notably, they have suggested that the NCQG will be achieved “by 2035”. This leaves room to gradually scale funding up over time rather than achieving it up from 2025 onwards, meaning less immediate pressure on contributors.
How will progress towards the target be reported and tracked?
There is general agreement that a workable NCQG requires a system where governments and other institutions report their climate finance transparently. Only then can progress towards the goal be tracked – and contributors held accountable.
As it stands, there are fundamental gaps in the system for tracking climate finance.
Despite being agreed upon in 2009, there was no official UN system in place to track progress towards the $100bn goal until the Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) was tasked with doing so in 2021 – one year after the goal was supposed to have been delivered.
This does not mean that no one has been reporting climate finance. Developed countries have to produce reports for the UNFCCC every two years, which must include the finance they have channelled into developing countries, both directly and through multilateral institutions.
Developed countries also submit information about climate-related spending to the OECD, which publishes its own assessments of climate-finance progress. (In addition, the OECD served as the de facto tracker of progress towards the $100bn goal.)
Meanwhile, NGOs – particularly Oxfam – have produced regular analyses of climate finance.
Crucially, these assessments arrive at very different estimates of how much climate finance has been provided to developing countries. This is partly because there is no widely accepted definition of “climate finance” in the UN climate process.
Nations are allowed to come up with their own definitions of what counts, as well as their own methodologies to track, measure and report it to official bodies. “This results in challenges in aggregating data on climate finance,” according to the SCF.
The lack of clarity around climate-finance figures has contributed to a “continuous erosion of trust between parties in international climate negotiations”, according to one paper.
Real-world implications include governments inflating the amounts they have given and labelling questionable funding for everything from coal to hotels as climate finance.
So far in the NCQG discussions, there has been a broad consensus that the enhanced transparency framework (ETF) is the best way to report on progress. The ETF is a system set up under the Paris Agreement, which requires most parties to submit information about their climate progress in biennial transparency reports (BTR) from the end of this year.
However, the ODI’s Watson tells Carbon Brief that even if this is agreed there will still be plenty to discuss in the NCQG transparency negotiations:
“The ETF just captures reporting from countries…The more we start talking about whether other sources [of finance] count, or how to capture finance from purely private actors, they’re obviously not covered by the BTRs that come out of the ETF. So what else do we need to know?”
These discussions are, therefore, tied to the question of which sources feed into the NCQG and also which countries contribute towards the goal.
Developing countries have fewer reporting obligations under the ETF and there may be pressure on them to report more if the contributor base is expanded, Watson says.
As for tracking the resulting figures, some parties have suggested the SCF should be given this task. Governments may prefer to opt for a UN committee rather than leaving the task to an NGO or external international body, but this may still face opposition.
Finally, despite the apparent convergence between parties on some of the transparency requirements, there is far less agreement on the need to define “climate finance”.
The G77 and China group of developing countries has pushed for such a definition, calling for non-concessional loans and “non-climate specific finance” to be excluded.
Many developing countries stress that climate finance must be defined as “new and additional”, in line with the language used when the $100bn target was set and in the original UNFCCC treaty. This is broadly understood to mean money that comes on top of other obligations.
However, developed countries provide much of their climate finance from their aid budgets and studies suggest that much of this is not “new and additional”.
Given the impact it could have on their finances, developed countries have strongly resisted a strict definition. Perspectives Climate Group’s Ombuya tells Carbon Brief that, while she thinks it is possible that parties could converge on excluding some types of finance from the NCQG, “I feel that to have a successful outcome, it’s likely that parties will have to have a willingness to do without a common definition on climate finance”.
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COP29: What is the ‘new collective quantified goal’ on climate finance?
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Sea levels are already “much higher than assumed” in most assessments of the threat posed by sea-level rise, due to “inadequate” modelling assumptions | Nature
- Accelerating human-caused global warming could see the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit crossed before 2030 | Geophysical Research Letters covered by Carbon Brief
- Future “super El Niño events” could “significantly lower” solar power generation due to a reduction in solar irradiance in key regions, such as California and east China | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 fell to 54% below 1990 levels, the baseline year for its legally binding climate goals, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Over the same period, data from the World Bank shows that the UK’s economy has expanded by 95%, meaning that emissions have been decoupling from growth.
Spotlight
Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ community wind turbine
Following the recent launch of the UK government’s local power plan, Carbon Brief visits one of the country’s community-energy success stories.
The Lawrence Weston housing estate is set apart from the main city of Bristol, wedged between the tree-lined grounds of a stately home and a sprawl of warehouses and waste incinerators. It is one of the most deprived areas in the city.
Yet, just across the M5 motorway stands a structure that has brought the spoils of the energy transition directly to this historically forgotten estate – a 4.2 megawatt (MW) wind turbine.
The turbine is owned by local charity Ambition Lawrence Weston and all the profits from its electricity sales – around £100,000 a year – go to the community. In the UK’s local power plan, it was singled out by energy secretary Ed Miliband as a “pioneering” project.
‘Sustainable income’
On a recent visit to the estate by Carbon Brief, Ambition Lawrence Weston’s development manager, Mark Pepper, rattled off the story behind the wind turbine.
In 2012, Pepper and his team were approached by the Bristol Energy Cooperative with a chance to get a slice of the income from a new solar farm. They jumped at the opportunity.
“Austerity measures were kicking in at the time,” Pepper told Carbon Brief. “We needed to generate an income. Our own, sustainable income.”
With the solar farm proving to be a success, the team started to explore other opportunities. This began a decade-long process that saw them navigate the Conservative government’s “ban” on onshore wind, raise £5.5m in funding and, ultimately, erect the turbine in 2023.
Today, the turbine generates electricity equivalent to Lawrence Weston’s 3,000 households and will save 87,600 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) over its lifetime.
‘Climate by stealth’
Ambition Lawrence Weston’s hub is at the heart of the estate and the list of activities on offer is seemingly endless: birthday parties, kickboxing, a library, woodworking, help with employment and even a pop-up veterinary clinic. All supported, Pepper said, with the help of a steady income from community-owned energy.
The centre itself is kitted out with solar panels, heat pumps and electric-vehicle charging points, making it a living advertisement for the net-zero transition. Pepper noted that the organisation has also helped people with energy costs amid surging global gas prices.
Gesturing to the England flags dangling limply on lamp posts visible from the kitchen window, he said:
“There’s a bit of resentment around immigration and scarcity of materials and provision, so we’re trying to do our bit around community cohesion.”
This includes supper clubs and an interfaith grand iftar during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Anti-immigration sentiment in the UK has often gone hand-in-hand with opposition to climate action. Right-wing politicians and media outlets promote the idea that net-zero policies will cost people a lot of money – and these ideas have cut through with the public.
Pepper told Carbon Brief he is sympathetic to people’s worries about costs and stressed that community energy is the perfect way to win people over:
“I think the only way you can change that is if, instead of being passive consumers…communities are like us and they’re generating an income to offset that.”
From the outset, Pepper stressed that “we weren’t that concerned about climate because we had other, bigger pressures”, adding:
“But, in time, we’ve delivered climate by stealth.”
Watch, read, listen
OIL WATCH: The Guardian has published a “visual guide” with charts and videos showing how the “escalating Iran conflict is driving up oil and gas prices”.
MURDER IN HONDURAS: Ten years on from the murder of Indigenous environmental justice advocate Berta Cáceres, Drilled asked why Honduras is still so dangerous for environmental activists.
TALKING WEATHER: A new film, narrated by actor Michael Sheen and titled You Told Us To Talk About the Weather, aimed to promote conversation about climate change with a blend of “poetry, folk horror and climate storytelling”.
Coming up
- 8 March: Colombia parliamentary election
- 9-19 March: 31st Annual Session of the International Seabed Authority, Kingston, Jamaica
- 11 March: UN Environment Programme state of finance for nature 2026 report launch
Pick of the jobs
- London School of Economics and Political Science, fellow in the social science of sustainability | Salary: £43,277-£51,714. Location: London
- NORCAP, innovative climate finance expert | Salary: Unknown. Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
- WBHM, environmental reporter | Salary: $50,050-$81,330. Location: Birmingham, Alabama, US
- Climate Cabinet, data engineer | Salary: hourly rate of $60-$120 per hour. Location: Remote anywhere in the US
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 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine appeared first on Carbon Brief.
China’s leadership has published a draft of its 15th five-year plan setting the strategic direction for the nation out to 2030, including support for clean energy and energy security.
The plan sets a target to cut China’s “carbon intensity” by 17% over the five years from 2026-30, but also changes the basis for calculating this key climate metric.
The plan continues to signal support for China’s clean-energy buildout and, in general, contains no major departures from the country’s current approach to the energy transition.
The government reaffirms support for several clean-energy industries, ranging from solar and electric vehicles (EVs) through to hydrogen and “new-energy” storage.
The plan also emphasises China’s willingness to steer climate governance and be seen as a provider of “global public goods”, in the form of affordable clean-energy technologies.
However, while the document says it will “promote the peaking” of coal and oil use, it does not set out a timeline and continues to call for the “clean and efficient” use of coal.
This shows that tensions remain between China’s climate goals and its focus on energy security, leading some analysts to raise concerns about its carbon-cutting ambition.
Below, Carbon Brief outlines the key climate change and energy aspects of the plan, including targets for carbon intensity, non-fossil energy and forestry.
Note: this article is based on a draft published on 5 March and will be updated if any significant changes are made in the final version of the plan, due to be released at the close next week of the “two sessions” meeting taking place in Beijing.
- What is China’s 15th five-year plan?
- What does the plan say about China’s climate action?
- What is China’s new CO2 intensity target?
- Does the plan encourage further clean-energy additions?
- What does the plan signal about coal?
- How will China approach global climate governance in the next five years?
- What else does the plan cover?
What is China’s 15th five-year plan?
Five-year plans are one of the most important documents in China’s political system.
Addressing everything from economic strategy to climate policy, they outline the planned direction for China’s socio-economic development in a five-year period. The 15th five-year plan covers 2026-30.
These plans include several “main goals”. These are largely quantitative indicators that are seen as particularly important to achieve and which provide a foundation for subsequent policies during the five-year period.
The table below outlines some of the key “main goals” from the draft 15th five-year plan.
| Category | Indicator | Indicator in 2025 | Target by 2030 | Cumulative target over 2026-2030 | Characteristic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Economic development | Gross domestic product (GDP) growth (%) | 5 | Maintained within a reasonable range and proposed annually as appropriate. | Anticipatory | |
| ‘Green and low-carbon | Reduction in CO2 emissions per unit of GDP (%) | 17.7 | 17 | Binding | |
| Share of non-fossil energy in total energy consumption (%) | 21.7 | 25 | Binding | ||
| Security guarantee | Comprehensive energy production capacity (100m tonnes of standard coal equivalent) |
51.3 | 58 | Binding |
Select list of targets highlighted in the “main goals” section of the draft 15th five-year plan. Source: Draft 15th five-year plan.
Since the 12th five-year plan, covering 2011-2015, these “main goals” have included energy intensity and carbon intensity as two of five key indicators for “green ecology”.
The previous five-year plan, which ran from 2021-2025, introduced the idea of an absolute “cap” on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, although it did not provide an explicit figure in the document. This has been subsequently addressed by a policy on the “dual-control of carbon” issued in 2024.
The latest plan removes the energy-intensity goal and elevates the carbon-intensity goal, but does not set an absolute cap on emissions (see below).
It covers the years until 2030, before which China has pledged to peak its carbon emissions. (Analysis for Carbon Brief found that emissions have been “flat or falling” since March 2024.)
The plans are released at the two sessions, an annual gathering of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). This year, it runs from 4-12 March.
The plans are often relatively high-level, with subsequent topic-specific five-year plans providing more concrete policy guidance.
Policymakers at the National Energy Agency (NEA) have indicated that in the coming years they will release five sector-specific plans for 2026-2030, covering topics such as the “new energy system”, electricity and renewable energy.
There may also be specific five-year plans covering carbon emissions and environmental protection, as well as the coal and nuclear sectors, according to analysts.
Other documents published during the two sessions include an annual government work report, which outlines key targets and policies for the year ahead.
The gathering is attended by thousands of deputies – delegates from across central and local governments, as well as Chinese Communist party members, members of other political parties, academics, industry leaders and other prominent figures.
What does the plan say about China’s climate action?
Achieving China’s climate targets will remain a key driver of the country’s policies in the next five years, according to the draft 15th five-year plan.
It lists the “acceleration” of China’s energy transition as a “major achievement” in the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025), noting especially how clean-power capacity had overtaken fossil fuels.
The draft says China will “actively and steadily advance and achieve carbon peaking”, with policymakers continuing to strike a balance between building a “green economy” and ensuring stability.
Climate and environment continues to receive its own chapter in the plan. However, the framing and content of this chapter has shifted subtly compared with previous editions, as shown in the table below. For example, unlike previous plans, the first section of this chapter focuses on China’s goal to peak emissions.
| 11th five-year plan (2006-2010) | 12th five-year plan (2011-2015) | 13th five-year plan (2016-2020) | 14th five-year plan (2021-2025) | 15th five-year plan (2026-2030) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chapter title | Part 6: Build a resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly society | Part 6: Green development, building a resource-efficient and environmentally friendly society | Part 10: Ecosystems and the environment | Part 11: Promote green development and facilitate the harmonious coexistence of people and nature | Part 13: Accelerating the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development to build a beautiful China |
| Sections | Developing a circular economy | Actively respond to global climate change | Accelerate the development of functional zones | Improve the quality and stability of ecosystems | Actively and steadily advancing and achieving carbon peaking |
| Protecting and restoring natural ecosystems | Strengthen resource conservation and management | Promote economical and intensive resource use | Continue to improve environmental quality | Continuously improving environmental quality | |
| Strengthening environmental protection | Vigorously develop the circular economy | Step up comprehensive environmental governance | Accelerate the green transformation of the development model | Enhancing the diversity, stability, and sustainability of ecosystems | |
| Enhancing resource management | Strengthen environmental protection efforts | Intensify ecological conservation and restoration | Accelerating the formation of green production and lifestyles | ||
| Rational utilisation of marine and climate resources | Promoting ecological conservation and restoration | Respond to global climate change | |||
| Strengthen the development of water conservancy and disaster prevention and mitigation systems | Improve mechanisms for ensuring ecological security | ||||
| Develop green and environmentally-friendly industries |
Title and main sections of the climate and environment-focused chapters in the last five five-year plans. Source: China’s 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th five-year plans.
The climate and environment chapter in the latest plan calls for China to “balance [economic] development and emission reduction” and “ensure the timely achievement of carbon peak targets”.
Under the plan, China will “continue to pursue” its established direction and objectives on climate, Prof Li Zheng, dean of the Tsinghua University Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development (ICCSD), tells Carbon Brief.
What is China’s new CO2 intensity target?
In the lead-up to the release of the plan, analysts were keenly watching for signals around China’s adoption of a system for the “dual-control of carbon”.
This would combine the existing targets for carbon intensity – the CO2 emissions per unit of GDP – with a new cap on China’s total carbon emissions. This would mark a dramatic step for the country, which has never before set itself a binding cap on total emissions.
Policymakers had said last year that this framework would come into effect during the 15th five-year plan period, replacing the previous system for the “dual-control of energy”.
However, the draft 15th five-year plan does not offer further details on when or how both parts of the dual-control of carbon system will be implemented. Instead, it continues to focus on carbon intensity targets alone.
Looking back at the previous five-year plan period, the latest document says China had achieved a carbon-intensity reduction of 17.7%, just shy of its 18% goal.
This is in contrast with calculations by Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), which had suggested that China had only cut its carbon intensity by 12% over the past five years.
At the time it was set in 2021, the 18% target had been seen as achievable, with analysts telling Carbon Brief that they expected China to realise reductions of 20% or more.
However, the government had fallen behind on meeting the target.
Last year, ecology and environment minister Huang Runqiu attributed this to the Covid-19 pandemic, extreme weather and trade tensions. He said that China, nevertheless, remained “broadly” on track to meet its 2030 international climate pledge of reducing carbon intensity by more than 65% from 2005 levels.
Myllyvirta tells Carbon Brief that the newly reported figure showing a carbon-intensity reduction of 17.7% is likely due to an “opportunistic” methodological revision. The new methodology now includes industrial process emissions – such as cement and chemicals – as well as the energy sector.
(This is not the first time China has redefined a target, with regulators changing the methodology for energy intensity in 2023.)
For the next five years, the plan sets a target to reduce carbon intensity by 17%, slightly below the previous goal.
However, the change in methodology means that this leaves space for China’s overall emissions to rise by “3-6% over the next five years”, says Myllyvirta. In contrast, he adds that the original methodology would have required a 2% fall in absolute carbon emissions by 2030.
The dashed lines in the chart below show China’s targets for reducing carbon intensity during the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th five-year periods, while the bars show what was achieved under the old (dark blue) and new (light blue) methodology.
The carbon-intensity target is the “clearest signal of Beijing’s climate ambition”, says Li Shuo, director at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s (ASPI) China climate hub.
It also links directly to China’s international pledge – made in 2021 – to cut its carbon intensity to more than 65% below 2005 levels by 2030.
To meet this pledge under the original carbon-intensity methodology, China would have needed to set a target of a 23% reduction within the 15th five-year plan period. However, the country’s more recent 2035 international climate pledge, released last year, did not include a carbon-intensity target.
As such, ASPI’s Li interprets the carbon-intensity target in the draft 15th five-year plan as a “quiet recalibration” that signals “how difficult the original 2030 goal has become”.
Furthermore, the 15th five-year plan does not set an absolute emissions cap.
This leaves “significant ambiguity” over China’s climate plans, says campaign group 350 in a press statement reacting to the draft plan. It explains:
“The plan was widely expected to mark a clearer transition from carbon-intensity targets toward absolute emissions reductions…[but instead] leaves significant ambiguity about how China will translate record renewable deployment into sustained emissions cuts.”
Myllyvirta tells Carbon Brief that this represents a “continuation” of the government’s focus on scaling up clean-energy supply while avoiding setting “strong measurable emission targets”.
He says that he would still expect to see absolute caps being set for power and industrial sectors covered by China’s emissions trading scheme (ETS). In addition, he thinks that an overall absolute emissions cap may still be published later in the five-year period.
Despite the fact that it has yet to be fully implemented, the switch from dual-control of energy to dual-control of carbon represents a “major policy evolution”, Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), tells Carbon Brief. He says that it will allow China to “provide more flexibility for renewable energy expansion while tightening the net on fossil-fuel reliance”.
Does the plan encourage further clean-energy additions?
“How quickly carbon intensity is reduced largely depends on how much renewable energy can be supplied,” says Yao Zhe, global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, in a statement.
The five-year plan continues to call for China’s development of a “new energy system that is clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient” by 2030, with continued additions of “wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power”.
In line with China’s international pledge, it sets a target for raising the share of non-fossil energy in total energy consumption to 25% by 2030, up from just under 21.7% in 2025.
The development of “green factories” and “zero-carbon [industrial] parks” has been central to many local governments’ strategies for meeting the non-fossil energy target, according to industry news outlet BJX News. A call to build more of these zero-carbon industrial parks is listed in the five-year plan.
Prof Pan Jiahua, dean of Beijing University of Technology’s Institute of Ecological Civilization, tells Carbon Brief that expanding demand for clean energy through mechanisms such as “green factories” represents an increasingly “bottom-up” and “market-oriented” approach to the energy transition, which will leave “no place for fossil fuels”.
He adds that he is “very much sure that China’s zero-carbon process is being accelerated and fossil fuels are being driven out of the market”, pointing to the rapid adoption of EVs.
The plan says that China will aim to double “non-fossil energy” in 10 years – although it does not clarify whether this means their installed capacity or electricity generation, or what the exact starting year would be.
Research has shown that doubling wind and solar capacity in China between 2025-2035 would be “consistent” with aims to limit global warming to 2C.
While the language “certainly” pushes for greater additions of renewable energy, Yao tells Carbon Brief, it is too “opaque” to be a “direct indication” of the government’s plans for renewable additions.
She adds that “grid stability and healthy, orderly competition” is a higher priority for policymakers than guaranteeing a certain level of capacity additions.
China continues to place emphasis on the need for large-scale clean-energy “bases” and cross-regional power transmission.
The plan says China must develop “clean-energy bases…in the three northern regions” and “integrated hydro-wind-solar complexes” in south-west China.
It specifically encourages construction of “large-scale wind and solar” power bases in desert regions “primarily” for cross-regional power transmission, as well as “major hydropower” projects, including the Yarlung Tsangpo dam in Tibet.
As such, the country should construct “power-transmission corridors” with the capacity to send 420 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from clean-energy bases in western provinces to energy-hungry eastern provinces by 2030, the plan says.
State Grid, China’s largest grid operator, plans to install “another 15 ultra-high voltage [UHV] transmission lines” by 2030, reports Reuters, up from the 45 UHV lines built by last year.
Below are two maps illustrating the interlinkages between clean-energy bases in China in the 15th (top) and 14th (bottom) five-year plan periods.
The yellow dotted areas represent clean energy bases, while the arrows represent cross-regional power transmission. The blue wind-turbine icons represent offshore windfarms and the red cooling tower icons represent coastal nuclear plants.
The 15th five-year plan map shows a consistent approach to the 2021-2025 period. As well as power being transmitted from west to east, China plans for more power to be sent to southern provinces from clean-energy bases in the north-west, while clean-energy bases in the north-east supply China’s eastern coast.
It also maps out “mutual assistance” schemes for power grids in neighbouring provinces.
Offshore wind power should reach 100GW by 2030, while nuclear power should rise to 110GW, according to the plan.
What does the plan signal about coal?
The increased emphasis on grid infrastructure in the draft 15th five-year plan reflects growing concerns from energy planning officials around ensuring China’s energy supply.
Ren Yuzhi, director of the NEA’s development and planning department, wrote ahead of the plan’s release that the “continuous expansion” of China’s energy system has “dramatically increased its complexity”.
He said the NEA felt there was an “urgent need” to enhance the “secure and reliable” replacement of fossil-fuel power with new energy sources, as well as to ensure the system’s “ability to absorb them”.
Meanwhile, broader concerns around energy security have heightened calls for coal capacity to remain in the system as a “ballast stone”.
The plan continues to support the “clean and efficient utilisation of fossil fuels” and does not mention either a cap or peaking timeline for coal consumption.
Xi had previously told fellow world leaders that China would “strictly control” coal-fired power and phase down coal consumption in the 15th five-year plan period.
The “geopolitical situation is increasing energy security concerns” at all levels of government, said the Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress in a note responding to the draft plan, adding that this was creating “uncertainty over coal reduction”.
Ahead of its publication, there were questions around whether the plan would set a peaking deadline for oil and coal. An article posted by state news agency Xinhua last month, examining recommendations for the plan from top policymakers, stated that coal consumption would plateau from “around 2027”, while oil would peak “around 2026”.
However, the plan does not lay out exact years by which the two fossil fuels should peak, only saying that China will “promote the peaking of coal and oil consumption”.
There are similarly no mentions of phasing out coal in general, in line with existing policy.
Nevertheless, there is a heavy emphasis on retrofitting coal-fired power plants. The plan calls for the establishment of “demonstration projects” for coal-plant retrofitting, such as through co-firing with biomass or “green ammonia”.
Such retrofitting could incentivise lower utilisation of coal plants – and thus lower emissions – if they are used to flexibly meet peaks in demand and to cover gaps in clean-energy output, instead of providing a steady and significant share of generation.
The plan also calls for officials to “fully implement low-carbon retrofitting projects for coal-chemical industries”, which have been a notable source of emissions growth in the past year.
However, the coal-chemicals sector will likely remain a key source of demand for China’s coal mining industry, with coal-to-oil and coal-to-gas bases listed as a “key area” for enhancing the country’s “security capabilities”.
Meanwhile, coal-fired boilers and industrial kilns in the paper industry, food processing and textiles should be replaced with “clean” alternatives to the equivalent of 30m tonnes of coal consumption per year, it says.
“China continues to scale up clean energy at an extraordinary pace, but the plan still avoids committing to strong measurable constraints on emissions or fossil fuel use”, says Joseph Dellatte, head of energy and climate studies at the Institut Montaigne. He adds:
“The logic remains supply-driven: deploy massive amounts of clean energy and assume emissions will eventually decline.”
How will China approach global climate governance in the next five years?
Meanwhile, clean-energy technologies continue to play a role in upgrading China’s economy, with several “new energy” sectors listed as key to its industrial policy.
Named sectors include smart EVs, “new solar cells”, new-energy storage, hydrogen and nuclear fusion energy.
“China’s clean-technology development – rather than traditional administrative climate controls – is increasingly becoming the primary driver of emissions reduction,” says ASPI’s Li. He adds that strengthening China’s clean-energy sectors means “more closely aligning Beijing’s economic ambitions with its climate objectives”.
Analysis for Carbon Brief shows that clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025, representing around 11% of China’s whole economy.
The continued support for these sectors in the draft five-year plan comes as the EU outlined its own measures intended to limit China’s hold on clean-energy industries, driven by accusations of “unfair competition” from Chinese firms.
China is unlikely to crack down on clean-tech production capacity, Dr Rebecca Nadin, director of the Centre for Geopolitics of Change at ODI Global, tells Carbon Brief. She says:
“Beijing is treating overcapacity in solar and smart EVs as a strategic choice, not a policy error…and is prepared to pour investment into these sectors to cement global market share, jobs and technological leverage.”
Dellatte echoes these comments, noting that it is “striking” that the plan “barely addresses the issue of industrial overcapacity in clean technologies”, with the focus firmly on “scaling production and deployment”.
At the same time, China is actively positioning itself to be a prominent voice in climate diplomacy and a champion of proactive climate action.
This is clear from the first line in a section on providing “global public goods”. It says:
“As a responsible major country, China will play a more active role in addressing global challenges such as climate change.”
The plan notes that China will “actively participate in and steer [引领] global climate governance”, in line with the principle of “common,but differentiated responsibilities”.
This echoes similar language from last year’s government work report, Yao tells Carbon Brief, demonstrating a “clear willingness” to guide global negotiations. But she notes that this “remains an aspiration that’s yet to be made concrete”. She adds:
“China has always favored collective leadership, so its vision of leadership is never a lone one.”
The country will “deepen south-south cooperation on climate change”, the plan says. In an earlier section on “opening up”, it also notes that China will explore “new avenues for collaboration in green development” with global partners as part of its “Belt and Road Initiative”.
China is “doubling down” on a narrative that it is a “responsible major power” and “champion of south-south climate cooperation”, Nadin says, such as by “presenting its clean‑tech exports and finance as global public goods”. She says:
“China will arrive at future COPs casting itself as the indispensable climate leader for the global south…even though its new five‑year plan still puts growth, energy security and coal ahead of faster emissions cuts at home.”
What else does the plan cover?
The impact of extreme weather – particularly floods – remains a key concern in the plan.
China must “refine” its climate adaptation framework and “enhance its resilience to climate change, particularly extreme-weather events”, it says.
China also aims to “strengthen construction of a national water network” over the next five years in order to help prevent floods and droughts.
An article published a few days before the plan in the state-run newspaper China Daily noted that, “as global warming intensifies, extreme weather events – including torrential rains, severe convective storms, and typhoons – have become more frequent, widespread and severe”.
The plan also touches on critical minerals used for low-carbon technologies. These will likely remain a geopolitical flashpoint, with China saying it will focus during the next five years on “intensifying” exploration and “establishing” a reserve for critical minerals. This reserve will focus on “scarce” energy minerals and critical minerals, as well as other “advantageous mineral resources”.
Dellatte says that this could mean the “competition in the energy transition will increasingly be about control over mineral supply chains”.
Other low-carbon policies listed in the five-year plan include expanding coverage of China’s mandatory carbon market and further developing its voluntary carbon market.
China will “strengthen monitoring and control” of non-CO2 greenhouse gases, the plan says, as well as implementing projects “targeting methane, nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons” in sectors such as coal mining, agriculture and chemicals.
This will create “capacity” for reducing emissions by 30m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, it adds.
Meanwhile, China will develop rules for carbon footprint accounting and push for internationally recognised accounting standards.
It will enhance reform of power markets over the next five years and improve the trading mechanism for green electricity certificates.
It will also “promote” adoption of low-carbon lifestyles and decarbonisation of transport, as well as working to advance electrification of freight and shipping.
The post Q&A: What does China’s 15th ‘five-year plan’ mean for climate change? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What does China’s 15th ‘five-year plan’ mean for climate change?
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