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”.
The post COP29: What is the ‘new collective quantified goal’ on climate finance? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
COP29: What is the ‘new collective quantified goal’ on climate finance?
The African continent’s hopes for a legally binding agreement to combat drought have been dashed again, as UN land restoration talks in Mongolia passed the issue onto the next set of talks in Egypt in two years’ time.
For over a decade, Africa has pushed for a UN protocol on drought risk management that would acknowledge drought as an issue requiring a regional and global – not just a national – response, potentially paving the way for more finance to help ensure water is available when drought hits.
A formal protocol would enable countries to transition from reacting to drought once it hits to “a proactive enabling mechanism to address drought and its effects such as migration”, said a Tunisian negotiator on behalf of the African Group of countries last week. Once land is regularly too dry and infertile to grow crops or graze animals, people often leave to seek a living elsewhere.
But this effort to adopt a protocol, led by Africa, has been resisted at successive land restoration COPs under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), mainly by developed countries, which argue that a legally weaker alternative – a framework – would be faster and cheaper to set up.
Governments at the previous COP in Saudi Arabia in 2024 failed to reach agreement despite talks running past midnight, while this year’s saw African officials coordinate a walkout from negotiating rooms on Wednesday morning, according to two sources at the talks.
Drought deal delayed until 2028
The IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a non-governmental organisation which unlike the media is allowed to watch and report on closed-door talks, said a call to suspend negotiations on Wednesday showed negotiations had reached “boiling point” and “made some jaws drop”.
Negotiations resumed after a lunchtime meeting with the Mongolian COP presidency although governments were only eventually able to agree that they could not find consensus in Ulaanbaatar and should resume talks on an instrument to deal with drought in 2028.
Christine Colvin, WWF’s head of freshwater policy, told Climate Home News that, with droughts hitting from Honduras to the English region of Hampshire, something concrete – whether a protocol or a framework – is needed urgently “rather than the can being kicked down the road for another two years as will now happen with the protocol procrastination”.
But, in a closing press conference on Friday, the Mongolian minister presiding over talks celebrated that governments had reached consensus on several “contentious” issues and that agenda items blocked at this year’s COP17 would be put on the agenda for COP18 in Egypt.
US blocks agenda items
Other agenda items that divided countries were on measuring land degradation’s effects on women, enhancing the involvement of civil society and women in land COPs, and the UNCCD working more closely and effectively with the UN’s climate and nature conventions.
On the COP’s opening day two weeks ago, the US representative said the Trump government objects to these agenda items “on their premise and no amount of negotiation will allow us to join consensus on these items. As such we request that they be struck from the agenda at which time we will then be able to approve it, saving us valuable negotiating time.”
A US State Department spokesperson later told Climate Home News that the US wants the UN “to get back to basics by refocusing on its core mandate, eliminating overlap, and reducing competition for scarce resources”.
The spokesperson added, “that means prioritising the concrete work member states created [the UN] to do – rather than diverting limited time, attention, and resources toward social and political agendas, including gender-related initiatives.”
On COP’s first day, the European Union and Brazil pushed back against the blocking of these agenda items, with a Brazilian negotiator saying his country attaches “great importance” to them. But the Mongolian presidency directed governments to adopt the rest of the agenda without the controversial items, which were discussed privately with countries throughout the two weeks.
An EU statement, read out later by Irish minister Timmy Dooley, accused “some parties” (meaning national governments) of having adopted a “less constructive approach” and preventing “discussions on important matters from even commencing”.
The agenda items the US refused to engage with were never discussed and were only placed onto the agenda for the next COP on the last day. Those talks will take place in Egypt in two years’ time, with Donald Trump due then to be in his last year as US president.
No restoration without women
The blocking of the gender agenda item has stymied attempts, agreed on by governments at the last COP, to develop gender-specific indicators for the UNCCD’s next overall framework and to facilitate more women delegates at COPs. Women made up only about a quarter of delegates to COP15 in 2022, UNCCD analysis with the latest data shows
Criticising the move to keep gender off the agenda, the EU said in a statement that it welcomes “the attention being given at COP17 to women pastoralists and herders, recognising their contribution to sustainable land management and resilient rural livelihoods”.
The head of the UNCCD, former Egyptian environment minister Yasmine Fouad, said on Friday that “regardless that the agenda item was blocked”, she was proud that she and COP17 President Batmunkh Battsetseg had led the COP as women and attended the gender caucus (a meeting of groups supporting women at the talks).
“Without the women,” she told the closing press conference on Friday, “we will not be able to restore land, restore hope, restore life or restore even our children and grandchildren. And we will keep on pushing that agenda.”
The civil society agenda item aimed to allow NGOs to attend land COP negotiations, as they do at climate COPs, and included terms of reference for an Indigenous Peoples Caucus.
A representative of Indigenous Peoples told the COP’s closing plenary meeting that the group had “deep disappointment that the agenda of this COP has removed the dedicated space for indigenous peoples”. “We cannot restore the land while removing the voices of those who care for it,” she said.
On Tuesday, the UNCCD’s deputy head Andrea Meza was asked about Indigenous Peoples’ participation. She said that the blocking of “one agenda item” is “generating uncertainty in the progress” towards creating caucuses for Indigenous Peoples and for Local Communities within the talks.
Because of the “complex geopolitical situation” making it hard to obtain consensus, coalitions of the willing have become more important, she added.
Mining out, money in
Outside the formal negotiations, the summit was marked by a focus on the strongly Mongolian issues of the role played by pastoralists and rangelands like grasslands, as well as mining, in both degrading and restoring land.
Part of the conference was sponsored by Australian mining company Rio Tinto and its local partner Oyu Tolgoi. Their presence was protested by campaigners wearing T-shirts calling on the companies to “stop wasting drinking water” and to “get out of Mongolia”.
The UNCDD and others praised the success of the summit in raising more finance for land restoration. The COP saw institutions like the Asian Development Bank and Global Environment Facility pledge money to combat land degradation, with the UNCCD estimating that $645 million of new commitments were made.
An estimated $355 billion a year is needed through 2030 to meet global land restoration commitments, compared with around $77 billion currently invested. Private finance accounts for only around 6% of global investment, according to the UNCCD.
UNCCD chief scientist Baron Orr told a press conference that many of the announcements were public-private partnerships that use government money to “even the playing field” for companies that want to protect land, in a bid to ensure they are not disadvantaged compared with those that do not.
Such partnerships are a “huge opportunity”, he said, especially as “we’re not in a moment of public finance – public finance is tight in every country.”
The post Despite African walkout, fractious land COP ends without drought deal appeared first on Climate Home News.
Despite African walkout, fractious land COP ends without drought deal
Burdened by rising fuel import costs and an “ocean crisis” of record-breaking heat, Pacific island nations are seeking to build support for a new regional fund ahead of COP31, intended to channel investment into renewable energy, community resilience and ocean protection, experts said.
Leaders from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), including Australia and New Zealand, are expected to issue a call for global pledges to the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF) at a high-level meeting this coming week in Palau, seeking to build a new model for financing climate action.
The new regional fund was formally launched in May this year and is meant to “serve communities at a community level”, swiftly channelling investments for their projects on the ground, according to Fiji’s assistant minister for foreign affairs, Lenora Qereqeretabua.
“We are expecting pledges for the PRF, and these funds will go to communities that apply,” she told journalists at an online briefing. “We have organised it in such a way that it makes our application processes much, much easier than applying for global funding.”
Qereqeretabua added that she expects that PRF funds will be “utilised by communities to protect themselves from climate change and the effects of climate change.”
The Pacific Islands Forum meeting is expected to shape the region’s priorities ahead of this year’s pre-COP, hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu, and COP31, which will be co-led by Australia and Türkiye.
At COP31, a dedicated session on the climate finance needs of small island states will seek to drive pledges into the PRF. The fund has so far received about $172 million in capital – with about $67 million coming from Australia – and aims to close the year with $500 million.
-
Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks
The US and Saudi Arabia want to scrap shipping’s Net-Zero Framework and have swung behind a far less ambitious alternative -
As marine heat breaks records, countries seek ocean roadmap at COP31
Africa and the EU are leading a push for COP31 to deliver a roadmap that lays out measures to protect fast-warming oceans -
Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry
The government is restricting nickel production to push up prices but producing more sustainable nickel for a premium requires addressing the industry’s coal issue
Ocean heat and fossil fuel shocks
Leaders from the Pacific will meet in Palau from Sunday amid an “ocean crisis” of record-breaking ocean heat caused by this year’s “super El Niño”, according to Kevin Chand, Pacific ocean policy director at National Geographic’s Pristine Seas conservation project.
Leaders at the PIF are expected to put forward commitments towards new marine protected areas, which will be key for shielding ecosystems from future climate extremes, Chand said. The forum is expected to issue a statement on the need for ocean action at COP31, and announce commitments towards reaching the global goal of protecting 30% of the planet’s land and sea ecosystems by 2030.
Rising ocean heat could lead to food insecurity and lost government earnings in the region, as key fish stocks like tuna start migrating away from their coastline in search of colder waters, said Coral Pasisi, director of climate change and sustainability at the Pacific Community (SPC).
Climate shocks are deepening existing economic pressures, as Pacific nations have spent up to a quarter of their GDP on fossil fuel imports due to the war in Iran, according to a recent report by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.
Wesley Morgan, one of the study’s authors, told journalists that partner nations “ought to be putting their money where their mouth is”, and should support the energy transition in the Pacific by covering the upfront costs of switching from polluting diesel to solar power, batteries and electricity grid upgrades.
China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain
Given the increase in climate-related shocks and sea-level rise, the PIF should also mention the need to phase out fossil fuel extraction and consumption, said Sindra Sharma, international policy lead at the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).
Last year’s COP30 failed to deliver a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which led to a group of countries – including several Pacific island nations – pursuing their own fossil fuel phase-out summit in Santa Marta, Colombia. Next year’s conference will be hosted by Tuvalu and co-chaired by Ireland, which should also receive backing from the PIF, Sharma said.
Both the chairs of the Santa Marta coalition and the Australian COP31 co-presidency have vowed to continue a push for this topic to be discussed at COP31.
New fund to test allies
As local communities in the Pacific struggle to access global climate funds, the PRF’s planned model for quick, direct disbursements has “very solid and good” intentions, Sharma said, but it will need political and financial backing from donor countries.
“The proof is going to be when the fund actually starts operating and delivering to communities,” she added. “If there is too much bureaucracy in being able to access the funds, for example. These things will have to be scrutinised.”
The facility aims to deliver funds in two categories: one for climate adaptation and “disaster resilience”, and another for social and community resilience that includes areas like community capacity-building, education, data analytics and financial management, among others. It will launch its first call for proposals at the PIF.
Morgan added that Australia will need to “leverage global interests” so that funding is directed to the Pacific Resilience Facility “or else the Pacific won’t be able to trust Australia as a partner”. The country ratified the PRF treaty in May, triggering its entry into force.
“The perception [of Australia] in the region is genuinely divided, and it’s worth being honest about it,” Sharma said, adding that the pre-COP31 in Fiji, which is usually limited to a technical space for negotiations, will determine how meaningful Australia’s advocacy for the Pacific can be.
This time, Pacific nations want to use the pre-COP in early October as an opportunity to demonstrate the challenges their largely low-lying islands face and to advocate for their political priorities, including a renewed global effort to limit global warming to 1.5C by cutting emissions faster and deeper. World leaders are due to visit Tuvalu to experience the frontline of rising sea levels, although Australia and Fiji have yet to confirm who will attend.
“In Bonn, Australia was largely missing on the negotiated outcomes that we so urgently need to see. It’s not enough to get Pacific priorities on the agenda. Agenda placement is not delivery,” Sharma added.
The post Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31
Climate Change
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
More than 40% of children under the age of 10 globally are already experiencing at least 20 additional “heat-stress days” due to climate change.
This is according to a new attribution study, published in Science Advances, which combines climate models with demographic data to assess the age groups and regions that are exposed to the most hot, humid days.
The study finds that children up to the age of nine already face more additional heat-stress days globally as a result of climate change than any other age group.
It adds that south Asia and west Africa are recording the greatest childhood exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat – largely because these regions have a rapidly growing population with the highest proportion of young children.
As the climate warms, children will continue to be more exposed to heat stress than any other age group, the paper warns.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that the findings should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Humid heat
High temperatures can be deadly. For example, the heatwaves that swept across Europe in the summer of 2026 have been linked to tens of thousands of “excess deaths”.
A prominent 2021 study found that children born in the 21st century will be exposed to more extreme weather events in their lifetimes than their parents and grandparents.
Four years later, a study conducted by scientists from the same team found that more than half of children born in 2020 – around 62 million people – will experience “unprecedented lifetime exposure” to heatwaves, even if warming is limited to 1.5C.
Now, the latest research from the same team finds that children already face greater exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat than adults as a result of human-caused climate change.
Extreme heat is particularly dangerous when combined with high humidity. In hot weather, the human body produces sweat to cool itself down. However, as humidity increases, sweating becomes less effective.
The study uses wet-bulb globe temperature – a measure of temperature that takes humidity and wind into account – to calculate heat stress. It defines a “heat-stress day” as any day with a wet-bulb globe temperature above 28C, as this is considered the threshold for “moderate heat stress”
The authors then use climate models to simulate global temperature patterns in the present-day climate. (The authors use the climate of 2023, in which human activity has caused 1.3C of warming, to represent the “present-day”.)
They then count the number of heat-stress days that each country records on average, per year. The authors then repeat this exercise, simulating a pre-industrial climate without human-caused warming.
By comparing the number of heat-stress days in the present-day climate with the number in a pre-industrial climate, the authors can determine how many extra heat-stress days were driven by climate change. They refer to these as “extra” or “attributable” heat-stress days.
The authors find that “low-latitude” countries, located in the tropics, record the most extra heat-stress days.
For example, the paper finds that people living in Côte d’Ivoire currently face 112 heat-stress days every year. It adds that around half of these are due to human-caused climate change.
In contrast, Germany sees only 0.1 heat-stress days per year in today’s climate on average, which is largely attributable to human-caused climate change.
Rosa Pietroiusti, a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and lead author on the study, explains why this number may seem lower than expected.
She tells Carbon Brief that the paper “really focuses on humid heat, at levels that are relatively rarely felt in Europe”. She adds:
“Our data also doesn’t capture the urban heat island effect, due to the resolution of the data we use, which also would lead to underestimations of heat stress locally, and lead to a mismatch with what people are experiencing at local scales, particularly in cities.”
Inequality
Extreme heat affects some people more severely than others. Children, people over 65 and those with pre-existing medical conditions or certain disabilities are among the most vulnerable. This is because their bodies are less able to regulate their temperature.
The authors use gridded demographic data to determine the age structure of each country. From this, they calculate how many people from each age cohort are exposed to extra heat days as a result of climate change.
The research finds that globally, 583 million children under the age of 10 already live through at least 20 attributable heat days every year. This accounts for 44% of all children in this age bracket.
In comparison, 190 million people aged 60-69 face at least 20 attributable heat days per year, accounting for 30% of this age cohort.
The authors find that children face the greatest exposure to humid heat for two main reasons.
First, there are more young people alive today than older people, with 1.3 billion children aged under 10 in the world, compared to 0.6 billion people aged 60-69.
Second, they find that countries in Africa and Asia typically have rapidly growing populations with more young children. In contrast, many countries in the northern hemisphere – which are typically cooler – have older populations.
The map below shows how many extra stress heat days each country currently faces as a result of human-caused climate change. Darker reds indicate a higher number of attributable heat days. The blue circles show the percentage of the population under the age of 10, with larger circles indicating a higher percentage.
Warming world
The authors also repeat their analysis for a 1.5C and 2C warmer world. They use population estimates from the SSP2 scenario, which projects that the world’s population will peak at more than nine billion in the second half of the 21st century, with most growth occurring in low-latitude regions – especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
The research finds that, in today’s climate, 11% of all under 10s currently experience 100 or more extra heat-stress days per year due to climate change. In worlds warmed by 1.5C and 2C, the percentage rises to 13% and 23%, respectively.
In contrast, only 6% of all people aged 60-69 currently face 100 or more extra heat-stress days each year due to climate change. This number rises to 9% and 17% for 1.5C and 2C worlds, respectively.
These results are shown in the plot below. The three rows represent the climates of 2023 (top), a 1.5C world (middle) and a 2C world (bottom). The columns show different age cohorts, from the oldest on the left to the youngest on the right.
Each circle contains 100 coloured dots, with each dot representing 1% of the age cohort.
The colour of the dot represents exposure to annual heat-stress day, with darker dots indicating more heat-stress days. Grey dots mean that people experience fewer than one extra heat-stress day per year due to human-caused climate change, while black dots mean more than 150 extra heat-stress days due to climate change.
The figure shows that higher warming levels expose more people to heat stress and that younger cohorts tend to be worst affected.
For example, the top-right circle represents heat stress for under 10s in the present-day climate. Three of these dots are coloured black, indicating that 3% faced at least 150 attributable heat-stress days in 2023.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief the study uses wet-bulb temperature because it is a “well-established heat stress metric”. However, she notes that it was not “explicitly defined to focus on children”. She continues:
“A really important step forward in the research community would be to link up climate science and health science experts to do research on what metrics are really most representative of, for example, health impacts and educational impacts that children will be suffering.”
Vulnerability
Dr Qinqin Kong, a postdoctoral researcher at the departments of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study, praises its “robust” methodology.
He tells Carbon Brief that the research provides “a timely quantitative evidence for discussions of climate justice, children’s rights and intergenerational equity”.
However, Kong suggests that the paper “may overstate the contrast between children and the elderly and underestimate the relative burden of older adults”.
He says:
“The elderly may also be more vulnerable due to their social circumstances. Children often benefit from parental supervision and caregiving, whereas many older adults live alone, have limited mobility and face barriers to accessing cooling or emergency assistance during heat events.”
Kong also notes that “people and societies in the mid-latitudes [for example, across much of Europe and North America] are less adapted to heat”, which may make them vulnerable to its impacts.
For example, he says that Europe “shows substantially stronger relative risk of heat mortality likely due to less heat-acclimatised populations, lower air conditioning prevalence and urban designs that don’t favour heat dissipation”.
Similarly, Dr Daniel Vecellio – a researcher at the University of Nebraska, who was not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that children are an “understudied cohort”.
However, he says there is “reason for hope” because “children are typically pretty good behavioural adapters to extreme heat” and because people who are “chronically exposed to extreme heat” will “have a better chance at better acclimatisation”.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief that global reporting on heatwaves is often skewed towards wealthier nations.
For example, she notes that large-scale databases of disasters, such as EM-DAT, often underrepresent heatwaves in Africa, due in part to a lack of news coverage and formal reporting. She adds:
“Studies like this, which start from the climate data, can start to fill some of these gaps.”
She adds that the paper should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries, who are most severely affected by the increase in heat-stress days, “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Pietroiusti, R. et al. (2026) Age-specific exposure to human-induced increases in humid heat, Science Advances, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aeb3232
The post Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy10 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits