Article Contents
Governments drew their battle lines this week over how COP30 should respond to an expected shortfall in ambition in countries’ national climate plans, raising the prospect of a fight at the UN summit in Belém.
Countries are divided over the need for the COP30 talks to formally discuss an upcoming UN review of newly announced targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That ‘synthesis report’ is widely expected to show that the world is not on track to limit global warming in line with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
The clash of views became public for the first time on Thursday as Brazil’s COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago hosted a first round of informal consultations with delegations in a bid to avert procedural arguments over the agenda delaying the start of negotiations, as has occurred in recent years.
Anticipating the row in a letter last month, the seasoned Brazilian diplomat on Thursday appealed to countries to “exercise restraint” at a time when UN climate diplomacy is facing “one of the greatest tests” ever.
Rich nations, least developed countries (LDCs), small island states, Latin American nations and the United Arab Emirates spoke in favour of a COP30 decision that acknowledges the progress and remaining gaps in nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and lays out a pathway for accelerating climate action in the years ahead.
But a group of high-income emerging countries – including China, Saudi Arabia and India – voiced strong opposition to that plan. They argued that discussions of those NDCs and the UN “synthesis report” assessing them are not on the summit’s agenda – and the only space for addressing a shortfall in ambition remains the Global Stocktake (GST).
-
Addis summit trumpets African climate solutions, while quietly backing gas
African nations sent a strong message on driving green growth with homegrown resources, but were criticised for their softer stance on fossil fuels -
Ethiopia’s preparedness puts it ahead of Nigeria in bid to host COP32, campaigners say
Ethiopia’s logistics, infrastructure and climate diplomacy make it seem better placed to host the 2027 UN climate talks than its West African rival – for now
A five-yearly process established by the Paris Agreement, the next GST is scheduled to be completed in 2028.
Two years ago, the first GST found the world was significantly off track to meet its climate goals. That exercise resulted at COP28 in Dubai in what was hailed as a historic global commitment to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems – but little has since been done to put that pledge into practice.
COP30 call for stronger climate plans
Speaking at Thursday’s consultation, the climate envoy for the low-lying Marshall Islands in the Pacific, said this round of NDCs – the third under the Paris Agreement – is “the last chance to course correct” emissions reductions in line with the 1.5C warming limit.
“We cannot wait for the next Global Stocktake,” she added. “That will be far too late for my country and millions of people around the world”.
Only a sixth of countries have presented their updated NDCs so far, including an emissions-cutting target for 2035, with those from many major economies including the European Union (EU), China and India still missing. A flurry of submissions is expected in the coming weeks ahead of an end-of-September deadline for their inclusion in the synthesis report.
The last such assessment, published last year, estimated that full implementation of the NDCs available at that point would lead to a 5.9% reduction in planet-heating emissions by 2030, compared to the 2019 level. That is far short of the 43% fall in global emissions the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said is needed by the end of this decade to be in line with the 1.5C target.
Nepal’s lead negotiator, taking the floor for the world’s poorest nations, said COP30 must offer “a clear plan” to address gaps in both climate ambition and the implementation of existing commitments. “It must provide confidence that we are moving forward, offer solutions to close the gap and reaffirm trust in multilateralism,” he added.
Responding to NDCs seen as “priority”
Colombia’s head of delegation argued that COP30 will be “a defining political moment for the international community”. “It will test whether parties are willing to match words with action and put forward contributions that genuinely keep 1.5C within reach,” she added.
Framing talks on the updated climate plans as one of COP30’s main objectives, most developed countries urged a strong response to the expected shortfall, ideally in the form of a negotiated outcome agreed by all nations.
In new book, WRI chief argues for climate optimism despite obstacles
The EU went as far as calling for the creation of a new item on the summit’s agenda that directly addresses the level of collective ambition of NDCs and the steps needed to plug remaining gaps. “This is the key priority for the EU,” said the climate negotiator for the bloc.
Switzerland, speaking on behalf of the self-styled Environmental Integrity Group, suggested that, at the talks in the Amazon city of Belém, countries could launch a new political process to “bring us closer to 1.5C”. That could include a forum for ministers to come together and identify opportunities for cooperation on climate action.
Emerging economies push back
Large emerging economies and the group of Arab countries pushed back on the need to discuss climate plans – arguing the topic is not on the agenda and would go against the “nationally determined” nature of the Paris Agreement. Instead, they called for talks to focus on finance and trade measures.
India said it is unclear why a separate discussion on the NDC synthesis report is needed when it is not an item on the formal agenda.
China argued that the COP30 presidency should not create a new process to consider NDCs that would risk diluting the GST. “The current multilateral process is complex and fragile,” said the country’s delegate, adding “any negative evaluation of NDCs might lead to a decrease in confidence and mutual trust”.
China on course to peak fossil fuel power as soon as this year, reports say
Speaking on behalf of the “Like-Minded” group of developing countries, Bolivia’s lead negotiator said the bloc is not in favour of reflecting messages from the NDCs in any COP30 decisions, and in particular in a political cover text, as the Global Stocktake remains the only dedicated space to assess collective climate efforts. He added that there is no consensus on the need to respond to the latest round of NDCs at COP30.
Saudi Arabia, on behalf of the group of Arab countries, raised the concern “that this push places undue pressure on developing countries with respect to ambition at a time when the Paris Agreement has clearly moved into an implementation phase”.
Saudi Arabia’s negotiator added that submitting national climate plans and assessing them in one year is “destructive” and out of step with the Paris Agreement. He urged the Brazilian presidency to focus on issues around finance and trade, which often refers to mechanisms such as the EU’s forthcoming carbon border tax.
More consultations on the calendar
While the disagreements were starkly evident this week, the COP30 presidency plans further consultations in the hope that countries can work out a way forward on how to respond to the NDC and other tricky issues before the summit in November.
An in-person consultation will take place on September 25 in New York, the day after a high-level UN event where countries are due to unveil their latest NDCs, and a second will be held on October 15, in Brasília as part of the “Pre-COP” meetings.
“The smooth adoption of the agenda at COP30 may be one of our strongest demonstrations to the outside world that this [UN climate] regime works, is alive and well,” Corrêa do Lago told country officials on Thursday.
The post Countries trail COP30 clash over global response to shortfall in national climate plans appeared first on Climate Home News.
Countries trail COP30 clash over global response to shortfall in national climate plans
Continue Reading
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a proj