Indigenous peoples, climate activists, feminist organisations, clowns, friars, cyclists and more came together on Saturday under Belém’s baking sun for the “Great People’s March”, a demonstration demanding climate justice and territorial protection.
Thousands joined the first march outside the COP venue in four years, as the last three summits were held in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, places where street protests outside the COP venue were not permitted by the authorities.
Week 1 of COP30 ends with uneven progress and many thorny issues still unresolved. Want clarity on what’s at stake? Sign up for our Monday event.
Saturday’s march in Belém ended peacefully at the Aldeia COP, a village designated by the Brazilian government to host the more than 3,000 Indigenous people who travelled to attend the conference.
During the first week of COP, it was mainly Indigenous people who led the two biggest civil society actions: a flotilla sailing on the Amazon River delta on Wednesday and a blockade of the conference centre’s entrance on Friday. Thousands also participated on Saturday.
The props seen at the march included a statue of US President Donald Trump riding on the back of a worker and a figure of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva using a straw to drink “oil from the Amazon”. A network of green groups dressed in black staged a funeral for fossil fuels, carrying three huge coffins emblazoned with coal, oil and gas.
One of the Indigenous leaders present, Nelson of the Amazon Munduruku people – who organised the blockade of the COP venue entrance – said they were here “to fight, to bring the people’s vindication of resistance and struggle,” and reiterated their demand for a meeting with President Lula.
The soundtrack to the march changed from group to group of marchers, ranging from Indigenous chants and Brazilian music to shouts of Free Palestine and Free Congo.
Adaptation talks held hostage by finance
Finalising a list of 100 metrics to measure progress on adapting to more extreme weather and rising seas after two years of work may have seemed like a relatively straightforward technical win for the UN climate summit in Belém. The COP30 presidency were hoping they might even get it wrapped up in week one of the talks, which winds up on Saturday.
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No such luck, as the negotiating groups for Africa, Latin America and the Arab countries have decided they want to use the talks on indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation as a place to press for more funding from wealthy governments. Earlier in the week, as we reported, they asked for two more years to discuss the metrics, which include “means of implementation” – code for how adaptation will be paid for.
By the mid-point of the talks – when negotiators compile their work into texts that are either ready to be approved or need further refinement by ministers who arrive on Monday – the latest version of the adaptation text was entirely inside square brackets, meaning that none of it has yet been agreed among countries. It will now fall to the presidency to find a way forward.
The text they’ve been handed shows no sign of any convergence of views, and includes two main options on adaptation finance – one which would have nothing at all and the other which reflects developing-country proposals for a new quantitative goal of either $120 billion (from the Least-Developed Countries) or $150 billion (Arab Group) a year by 2030.
Under a current target set at COP26 in 2021, donor governments pledged to deliver at least $40 billion a year by 2025. But with aid budgets being cut by many, current predictions are that they are on track to deliver little more than $25 billion, which leaves a huge gap compared with needs.
Global South’s climate adaptation bill to top $300 billion a year by 2035: UN
Parts of the proposed text released on Saturday also aim to prevent developing countries from being expected to fund their own adaptation measures and say that the indicators would be voluntary and left to countries to decide how to use them, in a bid to avoid being told what they should do to make their agriculture, water and health systems and other infrastructure more resilient.
Debbie Hillier, Mercy Corps’ UNFCCC policy lead, noted that the new text brings together the full spectrum of positions raised by negotiators. “The large number of options and brackets underscores how much work still lies ahead and how crucial ministerial engagement will be in resolving the core political divergences,” she said.
She pointed to the reference to providing at least $120 billion in adaptation finance for developing countries as a signal that “pressure is mounting for a serious response to the scale of adaptation needs,” adding that the text “recognises the urgency of delivering additional and predictable public finance”.
On Friday, African Group of Negotiators Chair Richard Muyungi told Climate Home News that a two-year extension of discussions on the metrics may not be needed if there is political will to unlock more funding for adaptation.
“[If] we get the means of implementation in the indicators, I think we’ll be able to agree [them] within the shortest time possible,” he added.
While adaptation finance has erupted as an issue in the discussions on the metrics, negotiators on this track don’t actually have a mandate to decide finance matters. That is why the hot topic of whether and how to set a new target is also part of talks on the broader finance goal (NCQG) that was decided in Baku last year.
Sources told Climate Home News it may be more likely that adaptation could be allocated a share of the $300 billion a year developed countries agreed to mobilise for poorer nations by 2035 under the NCQG.
Future of $1.3-trillion roadmap uncertain at COP30
COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago today hosted a much-anticipated event on the Baku-Belém Roadmap, a document building on last year’s finance COP. It is meant to chart a way forward to meet a new goal to deliver $1.3 trillion-a-year for developing nations by 2035. But experts said the session failed to provide clear guidance and raised concerns that the roadmap could die in Belem.
The event, which is not part of formal negotiations, was originally scheduled for Tuesday but got pushed back to the weekend after countries failed to decide whether to start a conversation on finance at COP30.
Seven speakers – among them UN climate chief Simon Stiell – read statements for the first half of the 40-minute event, reiterating the roadmap’s main points — a shopping list of measures that could deliver the $1.3 trillion. A handful of governments and observers gave mostly positive feedback.
Ali Mohamed, special climate envoy of Kenya, proposed incorporating its short-term recommendations in the decisions made at COP30. One of those recommendations invites developed countries to consider working together on a delivery plan to achieve the $300 billion they are due to mobilise annually by 2035.
China’s delegate Chen Zhihua told the event that “greater clarity is needed on the implementation path” of that goal.
Corrêa do Lago emphasised that only the $300-billion core goal approved in Baku “is in the process of negotiation” and that the roadmap to 1.3T “is still something open”.
Roadmap to $1.3 trillion seeks to tip climate finance scales but way forward unclear
A representative of Colombia said, on behalf of the AILAC group of Latin American countries, that the report confuses actions to support developing countries with actions to transform all financing flows, and requested to discuss it formally in the UN climate regime.
Some observers were critical of the Brazil-led event at COP30, arguing that it risks leaving the formal negotiations with no clear guidance on finance.
“What happened today was not a conversation. It was not even a format that allows interaction with the presidency,” said Sandra Guzmán, director of the nonprofit Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean (GFLAC).
She added that not enough developing countries were represented because at the time climate finance negotiators were in other rooms, attempting to carry the talks forward.
Joe Thwaites, senior climate finance advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said the risk of lacking clear guidance is that developed countries could fail to deliver the finance goal, as happened in the past with a previous $100bn goal that was delivered two years late. “I’m really worried that we’re going to be in the same position for the $1.3 trillion, which is a goal 13 times the size,” he added.
Azerbaijani lead finance negotiator Elmaddin Mehdiyev told Climate Home that the mandate to deliver the Baku-Belem roadmap has been completed and focusing on implementation is now “much more important”.
He added that getting the roadmap endorsed or welcomed formally by governments at COP30 was not key to taking it forward as it is a “non-negotiated document”.
Asked about this possibility after the event, Corrêa do Lago told Climate Home News: “There’s a movement starting, but we’ll see how the countries react. I think it’s unlikely to happen in Belém.”
Brazil launches flagship climate and trade forum
The COP30 presidency this Saturday launched a forum for countries to discuss climate and trade, seen by Brazil as one of its “flagship” initiatives outside of the formal talks.
Trade has been one of the most contentious issues at the summit in Belém, after the Like Minded group of emerging economies pushed for an agenda item on the topic at the start of the UN climate talks.
Several countries in that group – among them China, India and Iran – have been hit by US or European trade restrictions such as the recent US tariffs on solar imports. “Collaboration remains the only viable path to solving the global crisis; only through unity can we overcome it,” said Li Gao, China’s head of delegation at the launch event for the Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade (IFCCT).
After a week of consultations, countries have yet to agree on whether to hold such a conversation at COP30 and the first reactions to the IFCCT were lukewarm. A senior EU negotiator said on Wednesday that the bloc does not want to address trade disputes at COP that belong in the World Trade Organization.
For now, the Brazil-led forum is in a consultation phase, including on “modalities and thematic focus”, according to its official website. The IFCCT is intended to run for an initial phase of three years from early 2026 to end 2028 and is open for countries to join, it says.
The post COP30 Bulletin Day 6: COP’s climate march takes to the streets again appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP30 Bulletin Day 6: First week ends with a colourful march and much work left to do
Governments need to start addressing climate change impacts and nature loss as a threat to national security and manage shocks before they hit rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, Britain’s foreign minister and other leaders told the opening of Climate Week NYC on Monday.
Ed Miliband – who was until July the UK’s energy minister – said the growing urgency and severity of extreme weather and related disasters require a shift in thinking, calling on governments to put the issues “front and centre”.
“Climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers – the security community, not just the activist community, the generals, not just the green campaigner,” he told an audience of policy and business leaders.
There is a need to assess risk differently, he added, by embedding climate and nature in national security systems, threat assessments and contingency planning. He also urged countries to pool information because climate shocks can travel fast through supply chains as well as influencing financial markets and migration patterns.
The framing of climate change as a threat to countries’ security and stability is not new, but it has gained greater emphasis as the impacts of global warming are biting harder in places like Europe, which is struggling with more intense heatwaves, drought and forest fires.
In mid-August, Miliband said in a social media post, reflecting on the UK’s hot and dry summer, that he would convene foreign ministers attending the UN General Assembly in late September to discuss how to respond to “this new national security threat” and build a coalition for action. But he did not give further details of that initiative on Monday.
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Australia calls for unified response
Other leaders in New York also reflected on the growing threat to their societies and economies from climate change impacts and exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his country “understands the dangers of global warming and the urgency of climate action as well as any nation”.
“We have seen it up close – from increasingly intense bushfires and floods, to the damage warming oceans are wreaking on our vulnerable coastlines,” he said in a speech, adding that with a record-breaking El Nino forecast, Australia and Pacific nations are preparing for a potential summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.
With scientific forecasts of worsening impacts now coming to pass, “this means the global community cannot afford to be frozen in time as the world warms around us”, he added. People cannot be left to cope alone, he said, emphasising that as leaders, “we need to come together, to meet the problem head on”.
Australia will lead the negotiations at the upcoming COP31 climate summit, and has brought the existential threat to Pacific countries from sea level rise into the diplomatic limelight. The pre-COP gathering next month will be hosted in Fiji, with a visit by leaders to Tuvalu.
Speaking to Climate Home News in New York, Panama’s environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro said the small Central American country faces hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from drought in the Panama Canal due to El Niño.
The Panama Canal Authority estimates income could be reduced by between $225 million and $400 million due to slower maritime traffic passing through the strait.
“What a great irony,” Navarro said. “Panama being a small, carbon-negative country pays the price for the big carbon-emitting countries.”
Climate investment “critical” to stability
Amina J. Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said there was a need for countries to stick with multilateral approaches to problems including climate change, despite the difficult geopolitical times the world is going through. She added, however, that it “does require your voices. It won’t happen by itself. We have to lean into it.”
The rest of the high-level UNGA week in New York will show the extent to which multilateral efforts to resolve the world’s problems – from climate change to poverty – have top-level support as leaders give their speeches, including the Brazilian and US presidents on Tuesday.
Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and geopolitics with think-tank E3G, said the statements by Miliband and other leaders at Climate Week NYC had underlined the political and government case to integrate climate considerations into security thinking and institutions at the highest level.
“In a world of escalating climate impacts and the record El Niño expected to heighten risks worldwide alongside energy volatility and geopolitical tensions, investing in global climate resilience and the clean energy transition are critical to credible strategies to enhance stability and national security,” she added in a statement.
Suneeta Kaimal from the Natural Resource Governance Initiative (NRGI) said that, while in previous years governments heavily focused their speeches on climate action, this year’s focus on energy security does not change the underlying challenge.
“The fact that the framing has changed from energy transition to energy security doesn’t change the reality that this transition needs to occur in energy systems. It’s just a different framework. It’s a more transactional framework, but it all points to the need for resilience,” she said.
Speaking at the opening session of Climate Week, Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described how her country had reacted to the spiralling costs it faced from the 1970s oil price crisis by investing in a large-scale district heating system fuelled instead by its abundant geothermal energy.
“Resilience wasn’t built while the crisis was happening. It was built in the years after – deliberately, patiently, as a national mission – so that the next shock wouldn’t hit as hard, if at all,” she said.
New COP goal on electrification
Speaking at a separate event on Monday, UN climate chief Simon Stiell pointed to a new voluntary target expected to be adopted at COP31 for 35% of global energy use to come from electricity by 2035 as a strategy that can help cushion countries, families and businesses from fossil fuel supply shocks and rising costs.
At the United Nations, the Turkish COP presidency gave more details of the electrification goal it first announced at the Bonn climate talks in June, including sharing with governments a final text of the pledge it wants them to get behind.
The pledge sets out a global ambition to advance electrification, highlighting the importance of supporting developing countries to identify their grid investment needs and access finance for electrification.
“It is a development strategy, an industrial strategy, a health strategy, and a security strategy,” Stiell said.
The post Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda
Climate Change
Albanese’s NY Climate Week address acknowledges scale of the climate challenge, but fossil fuels notably absent
SYDNEY, Tuesday 22 September 2026 — In response to Prime Minister Albanese’s keynote address at New York Climate Week, Dr Simon Bradshaw, COP31 Lead and climate expert at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“It is encouraging to see Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledging the immediate and profound climate threat to communities in the Pacific, Australia and worldwide, and the need to work together, with bravery and compassion. Now we must match those words with real action to phase out fossil fuels.
“Earlier this month in Palau, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committed Australia to helping accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and defend the crucial goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C — a survival line for Pacific island countries and all those paying the cost of our fossil fuel addiction through worsening floods, fires, drought and sea level rise.
“However, Australia continues to undermine its aspirations for global climate leadership by expanding fossil fuel production. The Albanese Government has approved an astonishing 37 new, extended or expanded coal and gas projects since first elected. Every one of which compounds the threats to our shared security and wellbeing. Remarkably, in his major climate speech in New York overnight, the Prime Minister failed to even mention fossil fuels.
“As our Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen has said, we are in a global fossil fuel crisis. Getting off fossil fuels through transitioning to renewable energy is the quickest pathway to greater security, stability and affordability for all. But right now Australia is throwing more fuel on the fire.
“We are now near certain to overshoot 1.5°C of warming. For the Pacific and Australia alike, this will be measured in more communities torn from their land and homes, and the loss of more people and places we love. There is a path back below 1.5°C of warming, and every fraction of a degree matters, but it will demand all minds and all hearts working together.
Australia fought hard for the privilege to chair the next round of global climate negotiations. The world is crying out for a clear vision and leadership from Australia as we head towards COP31 in Antalya.
“Australia must lead by example at home through an immediate end to new fossil fuel approvals, including rejecting Woodside’s mammoth Browse project. And must ensure that COP31 boosts our shared security by accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels. Get this right, and Australia will emerge as a responsible middle power and force for good in troubled times.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
This year’s so-called “super El Niño” is entering into record-breaking territory.
Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific now equal the previous daily record set in 2015 and will likely keep rising in the days ahead.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in the Pacific that reshapes weather patterns around the world and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
The current El Niño event – which has been underway since June and is expected to last until next year – has been developing faster than any previous event on record.
The strength of an event is tracked using the “Niño 3.4 anomaly”, which measures how much warmer sea surface temperatures in a section of the central Pacific are than average.
As of 19 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region stands at 3.07C, putting it in a statistical tie with the previous record of 3.08C.
Some scientists, using a different baseline for calculating the anomaly, have already called the new record.
Either way, this is remarkable, in part because of how early in the calendar year it is occurring. El Niño typically peaks in the winter months, most commonly in November or December.
Every strong El Niño on record has continued to strengthen after mid-September – and there is every reason to think that this one will as well.
(For more on El Niño, see Carbon Brief’s recent interactive explainer.)
Record territory
El Niño events are typically classed as “weak” when the Niño 3.4 anomaly reaches 0.5C, “moderate” above 1C, “strong” above 1.5C and “very strong” above 2.0C.
For this year’s event, the Niño 3.4 anomaly has now reached 3.07C, which puts it in a statistical tie with the record set on 18 November 2015, set during a “very strong” El Nino event.
The chart below shows how the strength of the current El Niño (red line) is dramatically outpacing both 2015-16 (blue) and another “very strong” event in 1997-98 (light blue).
To analyse the developing El Niño, Carbon Brief followed the convention of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Oceanic Niño index (ONI).
ONI is calculated by subtracting the latest 30-year average temperature in the Nino 3.4 region from daily sea surface temperatures. This approach allows for the most recent years to be compared against the most recent 30-year period. It removes much of the influence of longer-term, human-driven warming from the index.
(While meteorological organisations typically track changes to ONI on a three-month rolling average basis, Carbon Brief’s analysis looked at how the metric is changing on a daily basis.)
If ONI is calculated using a baseline of 1991-2020 then the current El Niño has already set a new record.
Since the start of June, El Niño’s strength has been greater than any other year. In early September in both 1997 and 2015, anomalies were around 1.9C – more than one degree below where they are this year.
An alternative index
There is another commonly used metric – the relative Oceanic Niño index (RONI) – used to study El Niño.
Introduced by NOAA in 2024, the RONI index adjusts for tropical ocean warming linked to human-caused climate change. To do this, it takes sea surface averages in the Nino 3.4 region and subtracts out temperature anomalies observed across the tropical oceans (between the latitudes of 20 degrees north and south).
This approach may better remove the influence of climate change in this specific region, but can also diminish the apparent strength of strong El Niño events, such as the current one, which extend well outside the Niño 3.4 region.
The chart below shows daily RONI values, which are record setting for this time of year, but remain below an all-time daily record set during the 1982-83 El Niño event.
RONI stood at around 2.5C in mid-September, some 0.7C below the 1982 record.
However, that record was set in late December, at the peak of the event.
The 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 events added between 0.5C and 1.9C to their RONI values between mid-September and their peaks.
On track to smash monthly and seasonal records
Because daily El Niño values are noisy, scientists typically turn to monthly or seasonal averages to compare El Niño events.
The latest full calendar month for which data is available – August 2026 – had a Niño 3.4 anomaly of around 2.45C. This is higher than the peak of every prior El Niño event on record except 2015-16 – where the anomaly reached 2.75C – and 1877-78, when the anomaly sat at around 2.7C, based on a reconstruction of sea surface temperatures using sparse ship data.
The figure below shows the monthly evolution of the five strongest El Niño events on record alongside 2026, as well the current forecast from 14 seasonal forecast models.
Taken together, the models project a peak monthly anomaly later this year of around 4.1C, with 80% of the 674 individual model runs falling between 3.4C and 4.6C.
Every single model run peaks above the 2015-16 record. The projected margin over that record, some 1.3C, is larger than the entire gap between the strongest and fifth-strongest El Niño of the past 150 years.
Some caution here is warranted, however. No seasonal forecast system has ever been verified against an event of this size, because none has ever occurred. The models also predicted temperatures slightly warmer than observed this summer, with real-world observations for August coming in around 0.3C below forecasts.
However, all strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter – and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too. If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.
El Nino’s effect on global temperatures typically lags rising ocean temperatures in the Pacific by several months, so most of the impact will be felt in 2027 rather than 2026.
Carbon Brief’s most recent “state of the climate” quarterly analysis found 2026 on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year on record. The next update in early October will examine what a record El Niño means for 2027.
The post Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record
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