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?
The past three years have been exceptionally warm globally.
In 2023, global temperatures reached a new high, after they significantly exceeded expectations.
This record was surpassed in 2024 – the first year where average global temperatures were 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Now, 2025 is on track to be the second- or third-warmest year on record.
What has caused this apparent acceleration in warming has been subject to a lot of attention in both the media and the scientific community.
Dozens of papers have been published investigating the different factors that could have contributed to these record temperatures.
In 2024, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) discussed potential drivers for the warmth in a special section of its “state of the global climate” report, while the American Geophysical Union ran a session on the topic at its annual meeting.
In this article, Carbon Brief explores four different factors that have been proposed for the exceptional warmth seen in recent years. These are:
- A strong El Niño event that developed in the latter part of 2023.
- Rapid declines in sulphur dioxide emissions – particularly from international shipping and China.
- An unusual volcanic eruption in Tonga in 2022.
- A stronger-than-expected solar cycle.
Carbon Brief’s analysis finds that a combination of these factors explains most of the unusual warmth observed in 2024 and half of the difference between observed and expected warming in 2023.
However, natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate may have also played a role in the exceptional temperatures, alongside signs of declining cloud cover that may have implications for the sensitivity of the climate to human-caused emissions.
An unusually warm three years
Between 1970 and 2014, average surface temperatures rose at a fairly steady rate of around 0.18C per decade.
Set against this long-term trend, temperature increases during the period from 2015 to 2022 were on the upper end of what would be expected.
The increases seen in 2023, 2024 and 2025 were well outside of that range.
The high temperatures of the past three years reflect a broader acceleration in the rate of warming over the past decade.
However, the past three years were unusually warm, even when compared to other years in the 2010s and 2020s.
Record-breaking warmth in 2023 meant that it beat the prior warmest year of 2016 by 0.17C – the largest magnitude of a new record in the past 140 years.
The year 2024 then swiftly broke 2023’s record, becoming the first year where average global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The 10 months of data available for 2025 indicates that the year is likely to be slightly cooler than 2023 – though it is possible it may tie or be slightly warmer.
The figure below shows global surface temperatures between 1970 and 2025. (The figures for 2025 include uncertainty based on the remaining three months of the year.)
It includes a smoothed average based on temperature data for 1970-2022 that takes into account some acceleration of warming – and then extrapolates that smoothed average forward to 2023-25 to determine what the expected temperature for those years would have been. (This follows the approach used in the WMO’s “state of the global climate 2024” report.)
This approach calculates how much warmer the past three years were than would be expected given the long-term trend in temperatures.
It shows that 2023 was around 0.18C warmer than expected, 2024 was a massive 0.25C warmer and 2025 is likely to be 0.11C warmer.
Researchers have identified a number of potential drivers of unexpected warmth over 2023-25. Here, Carbon Brief looks at the evidence for each one.
A weirdly behaving El Niño event
El Niño is a climate pattern of unusually warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the tropical Pacific that naturally occurs every two to seven years. Strong El Niño years generally have warmer global temperatures, with the largest effect generally occurring in the months after El Niño conditions peak (when SSTs reach their highest levels in the tropical Pacific).
A relatively strong El Niño event developed in the latter half of 2023, peaking around November before fading in the spring of 2024.
This event was the fourth-strongest El Niño ever recorded, as measured according to SSTs in the Niño 3.4 region in the central tropical Pacific. However, it was notably weaker than the El Niño events in both 1998 and 2016.
This can be seen in the chart below, which shows the strength of El Niño events (red shading) since the 1980s. (The blue shading indicates La Niña events – the opposite part of the cycle to El Niño, which results in cooler SSTs in the tropical Pacific.)
(It is worth noting that measuring the strength of El Niño events is not entirely straightforward. Other tools used by scientists to monitor changes to El Niño – such as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) multivariate ENSO index – show the 2023-24 event was much weaker than indicated in the Niño 3.4 dataset.)
Global surface air temperatures tend to be elevated by around 0.1-0.2C in the six months after the peak of a strong El Niño event – defined here as when SSTs in the Niño 3.4 region reach 1.5C above normal.
The figure below shows the range of global temperature change for the 12 months before and 22 months after the peak of all 10 strong El Niño events since 1950. The light line represents the average of past strong El Niño events, the dark blue line the temperature change observed during the 2023-24 event and the shaded blue area the 5-95th percentile range.
The figure shows the 2023-24 El Niño was quite unusual compared to other strong El Niño events since 1970. Global temperatures rose to around 0.4C above expected levels – which is on the high side of previous El Niños.
The heat also came early, with high temperatures showing up around four months before the El Niño event peaked. This early heat is unlike any other El Niño event in modern history and is one of the reasons why 2023’s global temperatures were so unexpectedly warm.
Global temperatures remained elevated for a full 18 months after the El Niño peaked, well after conditions in the tropical Pacific shifted into neutral conditions – and even after mild La Niña conditions developed at the end of 2024 and into early 2025.
This figure does not explain how much of this unusual heat was actually caused by El Niño, compared to other factors, but it does suggest that El Niño behaviour alone does not fully explain unusually high temperatures in recent years.
Based on the historical relationship between El Niño and global temperatures, Carbon Brief estimates that El Niño contributed a modest 0.013C to 2023 temperatures and a more substantial 0.128C to 2024 temperatures, albeit with large uncertainties. (See “methodology” section at the end for details.)
However, it is possible that this 2023 estimate is too low. There are some suggestions in the literature that 2023-24 El Niño’s early warmth may have been caused by the rapid transition out of a particularly extended La Niña event. There are indications that temperatures have spiked in similar situations further back in the historical temperature record.
Falling sulphur dioxide emissions
Sulphur dioxide (SO2) is an aerosol that is emitted into the lower atmosphere by the burning of coal and oil. It has a powerful climate cooling effect – Carbon Brief analysis shows that global emissions of SO2 have masked about one-third of historical warming.
Global SO2 emissions have declined around 40% over the past 18 years, as countries have increasingly prioritised reducing air pollution, including through the installation of scrubbers at coal plants.
These declines have been particularly concentrated in China, which has seen a 70% decline in SO2 emissions since 2007. In addition, a rule introduced for international shipping in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has resulted in an 80% decline in the sulphur content of shipping fuel used around the world.
The decline of SO2 emissions is shown in the figure below.
Shipping in particular has been suggested as a potential culprit for recent temperatures, given that ships emit SO2 over oceans where the air tends to be cleaner and so emissions have a bigger effect.
Seven of the eight studies that have explored the temperature impact of the IMO regulations have suggested a relatively modest effect, in the range of 0.03-0.08C. However, one study – led by former NASA scientist Dr James Hansen – calculated a much stronger effect of 0.2C that would explain virtually all the unusual warmth of recent years.
The figure below shows Carbon Brief’s estimate of the global average surface temperature changes caused by the low-sulphur shipping fuel rules, using the estimates produced by all eight studies. The central estimate (dark blue line) is relatively low, at around 0.05C, but the uncertainty range (light blue shading) across the studies remains large.
Overall, Carbon Brief’s analysis finds that around 0.04C of warming over 2020-23 and 0.05C of warming over 2020-24 can be attributed to SO2 declines from shipping and other sources.
However, this approach might slightly overstate the effects of SO2 on the exceptional temperatures of the past three years, as shipping and other SO2 declines would have had some effect on 2021 and 2022 as well.
It is also worth noting that the total effects of SO2 declines on global temperatures have been considerably larger and are estimated to be responsible for around one-quarter of all warming since 2007.
However, these SO2 decreases occurred over a long period of time and do not clearly explain the recent spike in temperatures.
An unusual volcanic eruption in Tonga
In early 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano erupted spectacularly, sending a plume 55km into the atmosphere. This was by far the most explosive volcanic eruption since Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991.
This was a highly unusual volcanic eruption, which vaporised vast amounts of sea water and lofted it high into the atmosphere. Overall, around 146m metric tonnes of water vapour ended up in the stratosphere, which is the layer of the atmosphere above the troposphere.
Water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. While it is short-lived in the lower atmosphere, it can stick around for years in the stratosphere, where it has a significant warming effect on the climate.
The figure below shows the concentration of water vapour in the stratosphere between 2005 and mid-2025. It shows how the 2022 eruption increased atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas by around 15%. More than half the added water vapour has subsequently fallen out of the upper atmosphere.
Most early studies of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano focused specifically on the effects of stratospheric water vapour. These tended to show strong warming in the lower stratosphere and cooling in the middle-to-upper stratosphere, but only a slight warming effect on global surface temperatures of around 0.05C.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai had much lower sulphur emissions than prior explosive eruptions, such as Pinatubo and El Chichon. However it put 0.5–1.5m tonnes of sulphur into the stratosphere – the most from an eruption since Pinatubo.
Studies that included both sulphur and water vapour effects tend to find that the net effect of the eruption on surface temperatures was slight global cooling, concentrated in the southern hemisphere.
By using the estimates published in a 2024 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, which used the FaIR climate emulator model, Carbon Brief estimates that the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption cooled global surface temperatures by -0.01C in 2023 and -0.02C in 2024.
This suggests that the eruption was likely only a minor contributor to recent global surface temperatures.
A stronger-than-expected solar cycle
The source of almost all energy on Earth is the sun. Over hundreds of millions of years, variations in solar output have a big impact on the global climate.
Thankfully, over shorter periods of time the sun is remarkably stable, helping keep the Earth’s climate habitable for life. (Big changes – such as ice ages – have more to do with variations in the Earth’s orbit than changes in solar output.)
However, slight changes in solar output do occur – and when they do, they can influence climate change over shorter periods of time. The most important of these is the roughly 11-year solar cycle, which is linked with the sun’s magnetic field and results in changes in the number of sunspots and amount of solar energy reaching Earth.
The figure below shows a best-estimate of changes in total solar irradiance since 1980, based on satellite observations. Total solar irradiance is a measure of the overall amount of solar energy that reaches the top of the Earth’s atmosphere and is measured in watts per metre squared.
The 11-year solar cycle is relatively modest compared to the sun’s total output, varying only a few watts per metre squared between peak and trough – amounting to around 0.01% of solar output. However, these changes can result in variations of up to 0.1C in global temperatures within a decade.
The most recent solar cycle – solar cycle 25 – began around 2020 and has been the strongest solar cycle measured since 1980. It was stronger than most models had anticipated and likely contributed to around 0.04C global warming in 2023 and 0.07C in 2024.
Putting together the drivers
By combining earlier estimates of different factors contributing to 2023 and 2024 global surface temperatures, about half of 2023’s unusual warmth and almost all of 2024’s unusual warmth can be effectively explained.
This is illustrated in the figure below, which shows the five different factors discussed earlier – El Niño, shipping SO2, Chinese SO2, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and solar cycle changes – along with their respective uncertainties.
The sum of all the factors is shown in the “combined” bar, while the actual warming compared to expectations is shown in red.
The upper chart shows 2023, while the lower one shows 2024.
It is important to note that the first bar includes both El Niño and natural year-to-year variability; the height of the bar reflects the best estimate of El Niño’s effects, while the uncertainty range encompasses year-to-year variability in global temperatures that may be – at least in part – unrelated to El Niño.
The role of natural climate variability
Large natural variability to the Earth’s climate is one of the main reasons why the combined value of the different drivers of expected warmth in 2023 has an uncertainty range that exceeds the observed warming – even though the best-estimate of combined factors only explains half of temperatures.
Or, to put it another way, there is up 0.15C difference in global temperatures year-on-year that cannot be explained solely by El Niño, human-driven global warming, or natural “forcings” – such as volcanoes or variations in solar output.
The figure below shows the difference between actual and expected warming in the global temperature record for every year in the form of a histogram. The vertical zero line represents the expectation given long-term global warming and the other vertical lines indicate the warming seen in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The height of each blue bar represents the number of years over 1850-2024 when the average global temperature was that far (above or below) the expected level of warming.
Based on the range of year-to-year variability, temperatures would be expected to spike as far above the long-term trend as they did in 2023 once every 25 years, on average. The year 2024 would be a one-in-88 year event, whereas 2025 would be a less-unusual, one-in-seven year event.
These likelihoods for the past three years are sensitive to the approach used to determine what the longer-term warming level should be.
In this analysis, Carbon Brief used a local smoothing approach (known as locally estimated scatterplot smoothing) to determine the expected temperatures, following the approach used in the WMO “state of the climate 2024” report.
This approach results in a warming of 1.28C in 2023 and 1.30C in 2024, against which observed temperatures are compared.
Other published estimates put the longer-term warming in 2024 notably higher.
Earlier this year, the scientists behind the “Indicators of Global Climate Change” (IGCC) report estimated that human activity caused 1.36C of recent warming in 2024. They also found a slightly lower overall warming level for 2024 – 1.52C, as opposed to the WMO’s 1.55C – because they looked exclusively at datasets used by IPCC AR6. (This meant estimates from the Copernicus/ECMWF’s ERA5 dataset were not included.)
Based on climate simulations, the IGCC report finds the likelihood of 2024’s warmth to be a one-in-six year event and 2023’s a one-in-four event.
Using the same assumptions as the IGCC, Carbon Brief’s approach calculates that 2024 would be a less-common, one-in-18 year event.
However, the IGCC estimate of current human-induced warming is based on the latest estimates of human and natural factors warming the climate. That means that it already accounts for additional warming from low-sulphur shipping fuel, East Asian aerosols and other factors discussed above.
Therefore, the results from these two analyses are not necessarily inconsistent: natural climate variability (including El Niño) played a key role – but this came in addition to other factors. Natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate alone would have been unlikely to result in the extreme global temperatures seen in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
A cloudy picture
Even if unusual recent global warmth can be mostly attributed to a combination of El Niño, falling SO2 emissions, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, solar cycle changes and natural climate variability, there are a number of questions that remain unanswered.
Most important is what the record warmth means for the climate going forward. Is it likely to revert to the long-term average warming level, or does it reflect an acceleration in the underlying rate of warming – and, if so, what might its causes be?
As explained by Carbon Brief in a 2023 article, climate models have suggested that warming will speed up. Some of this acceleration is built into the analysis presented here, which includes a slightly faster rate of warming in recent years than has characterised the period since 1970.
But there are broader questions about what – beyond declining SO2 and other aerosols – is driving this acceleration.
Research recently published in the journal Science offered some potential clues. It found a significant decline in planetary reflectivity – known as albedo – over the past decade, associated with a reduced low-level cloud cover that is unprecedented in the satellite record.
The authors suggest it could be due to a combination of three different factors: natural climate variability, changing SO2 and other aerosol emissions and the effects of global warming on cloud reflectivity.
Natural climate variability seems unlikely to have played a major role in reduced cloud cover, given that it was relatively stable until 2015. However, it is hard to fully rule it out given the relatively short satellite record.
Reductions in SO2 emissions are expected to reduce cloud reflectivity, but the magnitude of the observed cloud reflectivity changes are much larger than models simulate.
Models might be underestimating the impact of aerosols on the climate. But, if this were the case, it would indicate that climate sensitivity might be on the higher end of the range of model estimates, because models that simulate stronger aerosol cooling effects tend to have higher climate sensitivity.
Finally, cloud cover might be changing and becoming less reflective as a result of warming. Cloud responses to climate change are one of the largest drivers of uncertainty in future warming. One of the main reasons that some climate models find a higher climate sensitivity is due to their simulation of less-reflective clouds in a warming world.
The Science study concludes that the 2023 heat “may be here to stay” if the cloud-related albedo decline was not “solely” caused by natural variability. This would also suggest the Earth’s climate sensitivity may be closer to the upper range of current estimates, it notes.
Methodology
Carbon Brief built on work previously published in the IGCC 2024 and WMO state of the global climate 2024 reports that explores the role of different factors in the extreme temperatures in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The impact of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the temperatures was estimated using a linear regression of the annual mean global temperature anomaly on the Feb/Mar Niño 3.4 index. This resulted in an impact of −0.07C, 0.01C and 0.13C for 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively (with a 95% confidence interval of ±0.13 ºC).
It is important to note that the uncertainties in the ENSO response estimated here also incorporate other sources of unforced internal (modes of variability in other basins such as AMV), and potentially some forced variability. The bar in the combined figure is labelled “El Niño and variability” to reflect this.
For details on calculations of the temperature impact of shipping and Chinese SO2 declines, see Carbon Brief’s explainer on the climate impact of changing aerosol emissions.
Solar cycle 25 was both slightly earlier and slightly stronger than prior expectations with a total solar irradiance anomaly of 0.97 watts per metre squared in 2023 relative to the mean of the prior 20 years. This resulted in an estimated radiative forcing of approximately 0.17 watts per metre squared and an estimated global surface temperature increase of 0.07C (0.05C to 0.10C) with a one- to two-year lag based on a 2015 study. Thus, the impact on 2023 and 2024 is around 0.04C and 0.07C, respectively (+/- 0.025C). This is a bit higher warming than is given by the FaIR model, as the 2015 study is based on global models that have ozone responses to the UV changes, which amplifies the temperature effects a bit.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption added both SO2 and water vapour to the stratosphere (up to 55km in altitude). The rapid oxidation of SO2 to sulphate aerosol dominated the radiative forcing for the first two years after the eruption. As a result, the net radiative forcing at the tropopause was likely negative; −0.04 watts per metre squared and −0.15 watts per metre squared in 2022 and 2023, respectively, implying a temperature impact of -0.02C (-0.01C to -0.03C) calculated using the FaIR model.
The post Analysis: What are the causes of recent record-high global temperatures? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: What are the causes of recent record-high global temperatures?
Local officials are often viewed as relatively weak actors in China’s governance structure, largely implementing policies issued from the central level.
However, a new book – “Implementing a low-carbon future: climate leadership in Chinese cities” – argues that these officials play an important role in designing innovative and enduring climate policy.
The book follows how four cities – Shenzhen, Zhenjiang, Xiamen and Nanchang – approached developing low-carbon policies over the course of almost a decade.
It identifies “bridge leaders” – mid-level local bureaucrats who have a strong interest in a specific policy area and who are unlikely to move often between different posts – as key to effective local climate policymaking.
Carbon Brief interviews author Weila Gong, non-resident scholar at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy’s 21st Century China Center and visiting scholar at UC Davis, on her research.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
- Gong on why cities are important: “Over 85% of China’s carbon emissions come from cities. The majority of Chinese people live in cities, so the extent to which cities can become truly low-carbon will also influence China’s climate success.”
- On what motivates local policymakers: “Mid-level bureaucrats need to think about how to create unique, innovative and visible policy actions to help draw attention to their region and their bosses.”
- On cities as a way to test new policies: “Part of the function of local governments in China is to experiment with policy at a local level, thereby helping national-level officials develop responses to emerging policy challenges.”
- On how local policymakers get results: “Even though we tend to think that local officials are very constrained in terms of policy or financial resources, they can often have the leverage and space to build coalitions.”
- On uneven city-level engagement: “To begin with, all regions received political support if they joined the [low-carbon city] pilot programme. But over the years, different regions have engaged very differently.”
- On the need for ‘entrepreneurial bureaucrats’: “China will always need local officials willing to introduce new legislations or try new policy instruments…For that, it needs entrepreneurial bureaucrats who are willing to turn ideas into actions.”
- On international cooperation: “Even with how geopolitics is really complicating things, many cities continue to have common challenges. For example, collaboration between Shanghai and Los Angeles on green shipping corridors is still ongoing”.
- On the effectiveness of mid-level bureaucrats: “They are creative, they know how to convince their boss about the importance of climate action and they know how that can bring opportunities for themselves and their boss. And because of how long they have worked in one area, they understand the local politics, policy processes and the coalitions needed to provide solutions.”
Carbon Brief: You’ve just written a book about climate policy in Chinese cities. Could you explain why subnational governments are important for China’s climate policy in general?
Weila Gong: China is the world’s largest carbon emitter, so the extent to which global efforts to address climate change can actually reach their goal is largely influenced by China’s efforts.
If you look at the structure of China’s carbon emissions, over 85% of China’s carbon emissions come from cities. The majority of Chinese people live in cities, so the extent to which cities can become truly low-carbon will also influence China’s climate success. That’s why I started to look at this research area.
We tend to think of China as a centralised, big system and a unitary state – state-run and top-down – but it actually also has multi-level governance. No climate action or national climate targets can be achieved without local engagement.
We also tend to think subnational level [actors], including the provincial, city and township levels, are barriers for environmental protection, because they are focused on promoting economic growth.
But I observed these actors participating in China’s low-carbon city pilot programme [as part of my fieldwork spanning most of the 2010s]. I was really surprised to see so many cities wanted to participate in the pilot, even though at the time there was no specific evaluation system that would reward their efforts.
We think of local governments just as implementers of central-level policy. When it comes to issues like climate change and also low-carbon development – in 2010 [policymakers found these concepts] very vague…So I was curious why those local officials would want to take on this issue, given that there was no immediate reward, either in terms of career development or in terms of increasing financial support from the central government.
CB: Could you help us understand the mindset of these bureaucrats? How do local-level officials design policies in China?
WG: The role of different local officials in promoting low-carbon policy is not very well understood. We tend to focus on top political figures, such as mayors or [municipal] party secretaries, because we see them as the most important policymakers.
But that is not entirely true. Those top local politicians are very important in supporting efforts to tackle problem areas…but the focus in my book is the mid-level bureaucrats.
Unlike mayors and party secretaries, mid-level officials tend to stay in one locality for their entire career. That helps us to understand why climate policy can become durable in some places and not others.
Mayors and party secretaries are important for [pushing through policy solutions to problem] issues, but they can also be key barriers for ensuring continuation of those policies – particularly when they change positions…as they tend to move to another locality every three to five years.
Therefore, these top-level officials are not the ones implementing low-carbon policies. That’s why I looked at the mid-level bureaucrats instead.
The conventional understanding of these bureaucrats is that they are obedient and only follow their bosses’ guidance. But actually, when low-carbon policies emerged as an important area for the central government in 2010, opportunities appeared for local governments to develop pilot projects.
Mid-level local officials saw this as a way to help their bosses – the mayors and party secretaries – increase their chances of getting promoted, which in turn would help the mid-level bureaucrats to advance their own career.
Impressing central government officials isn’t really a consideration for these officials…but their bosses need visible or more reliable local actions to show their ability to enforce low-carbon development.
As such, mid-level bureaucrats need to think about how to create unique, innovative and visible policy actions to help draw attention to their region and their bosses.
Secondly, mid-level bureaucrats are more interested in climate issues if it is in the interest of their agency or local government.
For example, Zhenjiang [a city in east China] came to be known as a leader in promoting low-carbon development due to a series of early institutional efforts to establish low-carbon development. In particular, in part because of this, it was chosen for a visit by president Xi Jinping in 2014.
As a result, the city created a specialised agency [on low-carbon development]. This made it one of the first regions to have full-time local officials that followed through on low-carbon policy implementation.
This increased their ability to declare their regulatory authority on low-carbon issues, by being able to promote new regulations, standards and so on, as well as enhancing the region’s and the local policymakers’ reputations by building institutions to ensure long-term enforcement.
Another motivation for many local governments is accessing finance through the pilot programmes. If their ideas impress the central-level government, local policymakers could get access to investment or other forms of financial resources from higher levels of government.
In the city of Nanchang, for example, officials were trying to negotiate access to external investment, because the main central government fund for low-carbon initiatives only provided minimal finance.
Nanchang officials tried to partner with the Austrian government on sustainable agriculture, working through China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).
It didn’t materialise in the end, but they still created a platform to attract international investment, and gathered tens of millions of yuan [millions of dollars] in central-level support because the fact they showed they were innovating allowed them to access more money through China’s institutional channels.
CB: Could you give an example of what drives innovative local climate policies?
WG: National-level policies and pilot programme schemes provide openings for local governments to really think about how and whether they should engage more in addressing climate change.
The national government has participated in international negotiations on climate for decades…but subnational-level cities and provinces only joined national efforts to address climate issues from the 2010s – starting with the low-carbon city programme.
So we can see that local responses to addressing climate change have been shaped by the opportunities provided by the national government, [who in turn] want more local-level participation to give them successful case studies to take to international conferences.
Local carbon emission trading systems (ETSs) are an example of giving local governments opportunities to experiment.
In my book, I look at the case of Shenzhen, which launched China’s first local ETS. [Shenzhen was one of seven regions selected to run a pilot ETS, ahead of the national ETS being established in 2018.]
Part of the function of local governments in China is to experiment with policy at a local level, thereby helping national-level officials develop responses to emerging policy challenges.
I remember a moment during my field research in 2012, when I was with a group of officials from both the national and local government.
The national government officials asked the local officials to come up with some best practices and solutions, to help them envision what could be done at the national level.
Then there are drivers at the international level, which I think is very interesting.
I observed that the officials particularly willing to take on climate issues usually had access to international training.
During the early stages of subnational climate engagement, organisations such as the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) worked with the NDRC and other national-level agencies to train local officials across the country.
This created more opportunities to help local officials understand what climate change and carbon markets were, and how to use policy instruments to support low-carbon development.
In Shenzhen, local bureaucrats also turned to their international partners to help them design policy.
The city created a study group to visit partners working on the EU ETS and learn how it was designed. They learned about price volatility in the EU ETS and pushed legislation through the local people’s congress [to mitigate this in their own system].
One thing that made the Shenzhen ETS so successful is what I call “entrepreneurial bureaucrats” [who have the ability to design, push through and maintain new local-level climate policies].
Shenzhen’s vice mayor worked with the local people’s congress to push the ETS legislation through. This was the first piece of legislation in China to require compulsory participation by more than 600 local industrial actors. It also granted the local government authority to decide the quotas and scope of the ETS.
These 600 entities also included Shenzhen’s public building sector[, a powerful local interest group].
This shows that, even though we tend to think that local officials are very constrained in terms of policy or financial resources, they can often have the leverage and space to build coalitions – even in China’s more centralised political system – and know how to mobilise political support.
CB: You chose to look at the effectiveness of four cities – Shenzhen, Zhenjiang, Xiamen and Nanchang – in climate policymaking. Why did you choose these cities and how representative are they of the rest of China?
WG: We tend to believe that only economically-advanced areas or environmentally-friendly cities will become champions for low-carbon development…But I was surprised, because Zhenjiang and Nanchang are not known for having an advanced economy, but [they nevertheless built impactful climate] institutions – regulations, standards and legislation that shape individual and organisational behaviours in the long term. I thought they were interesting examples of how local regions can really create those institutions.
Then there was Xiamen, which is seen as an environmentally-friendly city and economically is comparable to Shenzhen when you look at GDP per capita. Xiamen actually did not turn its low-carbon policy experimentation into long-term institutions, instead randomly proposing new initiatives [that were not sustained].
I conducted more than 100 interviews, talking with policy-practitioners inside and outside of government about specific policies, their processes and implementation.
I found that, over the course of eight years, these [cities] showed very different levels of engagement.
Some I categorised into substantive engagement, where the local government delivered on their climate goals. [Shenzhen falls into this category.]
Then there is performative engagement – such as in the case of Nanchang – where the local government was more interested in [using climate policies to] attract external investment and access projects from higher levels of government.
But they were not able to enforce the policies, because impressing higher levels of government became the primary motivation.
Zhenjiang was a case of symbolic engagement. It actually created a lot of institutions, such as a specialised agency and a screening system to ensure new [low-carbon] investment. When I was observing Zhenjiang, from 2012 to 2018, officials recognised they needed to be carbon-constrained.
The problem was that Zhenjiang has a very strong power sector – mainly coal power – which supplies the whole eastern coast. That meant, even though the government was very determined to promote low-carbon policies, they faced [opposition from] very strong local actors – meaning the government could only partially implement the targets they set.
Then there is sporadic engagement, as seen in Xiamen. [The city’s approach to climate policy was incremental and cautious] because of a lack of political support [from officials in Xiamen], as well as local coalitions between key actors. So instead, we find random initiatives being promoted.
This explains the uneven policy implementation in China. To begin with, all regions received political support if they joined the pilot programme. But over the years, different regions have engaged very differently, in terms of the regulations, standards and legislation they have introduced, and whether those were paired with enforcement by a group of trained personnel to follow through on those initiatives.
CB: What needs to be done to strengthen sub-national climate policy making?
WG: It’s very important to have groups of personnel trained on climate policy. Since 2010, when I started studying the low-carbon pilot programme, there were no provincial-level people or agencies fully responsible for climate change. Back then, there was only the [central-level] department of climate change under the NDRC.
By the time I finished the book, provincial-level departments of climate change had been created across all provinces. But almost nothing has been established at the city level, so most city-level climate initiatives are being managed under the agencies responsible for air quality.
That means climate change is only one of those local officials’ day-to-day responsibilities. Only a handful of cities have dedicated staff working on climate issues: Beijing, Shanghai, Zhenjiang, Shenzhen and Guiyang.
Nanchang devised some of China’s first legislation to include an annual [financial] budget for low-carbon development. But when I revisited the city, officials were not actually sure about how and whether that budget was being used, because there wasn’t a person responsible for it.
Therefore, even if there are resources available, they can go unused because local officials at the city level are so busy. If climate policy is not prioritised, or written into their job responsibilities, that can be a challenge for sustaining implementation.
In China’s governance structure, the national government comes up with ideas, and the provincial level transfers these ideas down to local-level governments. City-level governments are the ones implementing these ideas.
So we need full-time staff to follow through on policies from the beginning right up to implementation.
Secondly, while almost all cities have now made carbon-peaking plans, one area in which the Chinese government can make further progress is in data.
China has recently emphasised the need to strengthen carbon-emissions data collection and monitoring. But when I was conducting my research, most Chinese cities had not yet established regular carbon-accounting systems.
As such, inadequate energy statistics and insufficient detail remain key barriers to effective climate-policy implementation.
In addition, the relevant data usually is owned by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which does not always share it with other agencies. Local agencies can’t always access detailed data.
When I visited Xiamen, officials told me the local government is now improving emissions monitoring systems. But there should be more systematic and rigorous data collection, covering both carbon emissions and non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Also, much of the company-level data is self-reported, which could affect the accuracy of carbon-emissions statistics.
For continued climate action, it’s also important that the central government ensures that local officials have the institutional support needed to experiment and propose new ideas.
…China will always need local officials willing to introduce new legislations or try new policy instruments – like Shenzhen with its ETS, or establishing new carbon-monitoring platforms.
For that, it needs entrepreneurial bureaucrats who are willing to turn ideas into actions. Ensuring that local governments have the right set of conditions to do this is very important.
CB: What did you find most surprising when researching this book?
WG: That international collaboration is still very important. I found that many officials learnt about climate change through international engagement.
In the current situation, I think international engagement is still very important – particularly given how, even with how geopolitics is really complicating things, many cities continue to have common challenges. For example, collaboration between Shanghai and Los Angeles on green shipping corridors is still ongoing.
That can bring opportunities for continuing climate action at the city level in the face of rising international tensions, as long as national governments give them space to be involved in international climate action.
Another surprise was the factors of what exactly made climate action durable. I was really surprised that many of the cities that I revisited were still involved in the pilot programmes, despite the central government restructuring that shifted the climate change portfolio from the NDRC to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment – which created challenges for the local governments who had to navigate this.
I also thought that the change in mayors for all four cities would lead to climate initiatives falling off the agenda.
But actually, Zhenjiang, Xiamen and Nanchang all maintained their low-carbon initiatives, despite these changes. This showed it isn’t only strong mayors that bring success, but rather a group of trained personnel building and enforcing regulations and standards. So the importance of bureaucrats and bureaucracy in making climate action durable was actually way beyond my initial expectations.
I was also surprised that bureaucrats can be entrepreneurial, even though they work in a centralised system. They are creative, they know how to convince their boss about the importance of climate action and they know how that can bring opportunities for themselves and their boss. And because of how long they have worked in one area, they understand the local politics, policy processes and the coalitions needed to provide solutions.
The post Interview: How ‘mid-level bureaucrats’ are helping to shape Chinese climate policy appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interview: How ‘mid-level bureaucrats’ are helping to shape Chinese climate policy
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