A United Nations initiative to ensure everyone on earth is protected by a multi-hazard early warning system (MHEWS) “has made real progress” but “too many people are still left exposed,” according to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
Since Guterres launched the Early Warning Systems for All goal in 2022, the number of countries reporting that they have an MHEWS has increased from 113 to 136, the UN announced on Wednesday. Around 60 nations are still not covered 15 months ahead of the UN’s 2027 deadline.
“We must close the remaining gaps, reach every country, and ensure that by the end of 2027, every person on earth is protected”, outgoing UN chief Guterres said.
The UN said the largest gaps in coverage are mainly among the world’s least developed countries, small island developing states and fragile and conflict-affected nations. These countries are also among those hardest hit by climate change.
Guterres said that early warning systems “save lives, protect livelihoods and shield communities from disaster”, highlighting the Colombian Red Cross’s response to drought in June as an example.
At an event on the initiative in New York on Monday, Huw Beynon from the UN Disaster Risk Reduction Office said that the systems had helped during floods in Kenya last year and when recent cyclones hit Madagascar.
Jagan Chapagain, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said in a statement that “reaching more people with early warnings is a success worth celebrating”.
Simple warnings not enough
The Early Warning Systems for All initiative supports about 160 countries and 31 countries have developed national roadmaps to install early warning systems. But Beynon said that, while most countries have a MHEWS, most also report limited capacity. “So you might have a warning disseminated but it’s not leading to the right action,” he said.
Speaking alongside Beynon, Nepali climate negotiator Manjeet Dhakal gave a recent example of this. He said Nepali authorities had sent text messages to 600,000 people – including him – who were in, or had recently been in, an area where flooding was likely.
The flood, caused by a glacial rock-ice collapse, swept through the valley at huge speed, with a wave at least 30 metres above the river, killing thousands. But the messages did not “articulate the magnitude of this disaster”, he said, adding “these are humans who have to craft that message and that scale of disaster has never [previously] occurred”. The Straits Times has reported that these messages did not say how fast or big the flood would be and were sent too late for many.
When heavy rainfall led to floods in the Spanish city of Valencia in 2024, some text messages with warnings were only sent out after flooding had started and did not give residents clear instructions of how to act, such as moving to higher floors and not driving. Many Valencians drowned in their cars or in the underground garages of their apartment blocks, according to official reports.
Remaining barriers
Rohini Kohli, the UN Development Programme’s head of climate adaptation policy, told Monday’s New York event that a challenge for MHEWS in developing countries is a lack of foundational data.
This can include equipment to measure physical factors like rainfall, river levels and soil moisture or human factors like where peoples homes or power lines are located. The UN’s Systematic Observations Financing Facility is trying to bridge this “critical gap”, she said.
Another barrier, Kohli said, is that acting on early warnings is often the responsibility of local rather than national authorities and they need the capacity to respond in the right way. “Like most adaptation, local leadership has to be at the centre for design and delivery,” she said.
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The IFRC’s Chapagain said that as “warnings alone are not enough”, authorities should “invest in trusted local actors so that communities can turn information into action and become agents of their own resilience, not simply recipients of alerts. Early action is what makes early warnings work.”
Kohli added that a lack of finance was also a problem for developing countries. She cited the UN’s adaptation gap report, which found that developing countries will need well over $300 billion a year by 2035 to adapt to climate change while they are currently receiving less than a tenth of that figure.
In 2022, the World Meteorological Organisation estimated that meeting the early warning systems for all goal would require a total of $1.5 billion.
The post Despite “real progress”, third of countries still lack early warning systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Despite “real progress”, third of countries still lack early warning systems
Other than the Australian and Turkish co-hosts, the only G20 nations to address the COP31 leaders’ summit with speakers at the “head of state or government” level will be the UK, Brazil and China, according to a provisional list released on Wednesday.
The list, which is published by the United Nations and subject to change, includes only 77 countries whose leaders are listed to speak at the summit in Antalya on November 11-12. That would be nearly a third fewer than the 116 who spoke at COP28 in Dubai three years ago.
Yvo de Boer, a former head of the UN’s climate secretariat, told Climate Home News that the low turnout and “the absence of many nations that should be showing leadership on climate action and support for developing nations” sends “the wrong signal at a difficult time”.
Amid geopolitical conflicts, a struggling global economy and an inevitable overshoot of the 1.5C global warming limit, de Boer said that “climate action needs a strong show of support, not empty seats at a leaders’ summit”.
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Earlier this week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said G20 countries should lead on climate action, adding that while they have varying responsibilities in tackling global warming, “all countries, especially the big emitters, must do more”. As major economies spanning developed and developing nations, G20 countries account for more than three-quarters of annual global emissions.
China is likely to be represented at COP31 by Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang, as in the past three years, rather than President Xi Jinping, who has rarely left China since the COVID-19 pandemic and has not attended a climate COP since Paris in 2015.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is scheduled to speak, after telling parliament in September he would do so as part of his efforts to “meet the climate challenge” following a series of deadly heatwaves.
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Brazil’s President Lula has also said he will attend. Depending on the result of Sunday’s election against his far-right rival Flávio Bolsonaro, he will speak at COP31 as either a recently re-elected or outgoing president.
While the COP31 summit is being hosted by Türkiye in Antalya, Australia has the formal role of President of Negotiations and its prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will speak at the summit. Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not on the UN’s speaker list but is likely to give an opening speech.
Many of the countries whose leaders are due to attend COP31 are those suffering the worst effects of climate change. About a third are African countries and a quarter are small island developing nations. Türkiye’s Central Asian and Balkan neighbours are also well-represented.
COP31 no-shows
Among the major emitters not on the list are French President Emmanuel Macron, German leader Friedrich Merz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Canada’s Mark Carney and Japan’s Sanae Takaichi.
Macron, who is struggling to deal with rising social unrest across France, will reportedly attend commemorations marking the end of the First World War and a European Political Community summit instead. It is not known whether the others will eventually decide to attend COP31, or what they will do instead.
Climate change-sceptic US President Donald Trump has never attended a COP and is withdrawing the US from the UN climate convention (UNFCCC), under which COP meetings are held, after quitting the Paris Agreement for a second time.
Argentina’s Javier Milei has considered exiting the Paris Agreement but has so far not done so, although his government is one of around 30 countries yet to submit an updated national climate plan to the UN.
The post Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS). Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is executive director of CELIOS.
Indonesia bills its plans to mix wood with coal at dozens of power plants as a way to cut electricity generation emissions as the country transitions towards clean energy. But look closer, and the biomass co-firing plan could do far more harm than good.
Biomass co-firing involves mixing a small amount of wood or other plant matter, usually wood chips or wood pellets, into the coal that a power plant burns.
State electricity company PLN wants to use it at 52 coal-fired plants across the Southeast Asian nation – a target set out in its national electricity supply business plan and tied to Indonesia’s pledge, under its Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement, to raise renewables to 23% of the energy mix. PLN originally aimed to secure 10.2 million tonnes of biomass a year by 2025; that target has already slipped to 2031, as the country struggles to line up enough supply.
Most plants only mix in a small amount of wood, often between 1% and 5% of the fuel load, meaning they do not even have to change machinery. In truth, it lets coal plants keep doing what they have always done, just with a little wood added to the mix.
That presents two big problems.
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Firstly, creating additional demand for wood would put further deforestation pressure on the country’s thick and biodiverse tropical forests, already at risk from mining and palm oil plantations.
Secondly, by making old coal plants look a little greener on paper, the plan could hand them a reason to keep operating well beyond when they would otherwise be retired, meaning the fleet keeps emitting for longer than a genuine phase-out would allow.
This is not a real climate solution. It is coal wearing a green mask.
A threat to forests
To meet its co-firing mandate, Indonesia would need more than 10 million tonnes of wood pellets every year, an area of forest equivalent to 3.27 million football fields, according to a 2024 assessment by a group of NGOs.
The same report warned this could push deforestation as high as 2.1 million hectares a year, and found that a 10% cut in coal use through co-firing could threaten 10 million hectares of untouched forest in the areas where wood is collected. At Indonesia’s biggest power plants alone, switching just 10% of coal to wood could clear an area of forest roughly 35 times the size of Jakarta.
PLN and the forestry companies that supply it insist the wood comes from dedicated “energy plantation forests” – land set aside to grow fast-growing trees for fuel, not from clearing natural forest. But the same assessment found that of the 1.2 million hectares already designated for these plantations, more than 400,000 hectares still contain undisturbed tropical forest, which will come under growing pressure as demand rises. The claim that this wood comes from already-degraded land does not hold up to scrutiny.
Advocates of co-firing say wood is a clean fuel because trees can grow back. But when old natural forests are cleared to make way for fast-growing forestry plantations to grow trees for fuel, they release carbon that took decades or centuries to build up.
One study, by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), estimated that co-firing with just 10% wood across 52 power plants could create up to 26.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions each year, once the clearing of land and the production of wood pellets are counted.
Wood pellets for export
Government rules have made this easier, not harder. Companies that already hold industrial timber plantation permits can convert them into energy plantations, giving them a ready-made legal route into the wood pellet business without applying for new forest land.
Indroyono Soesilo, chairman of the Indonesian Forestry Entrepreneurs Association (APHI), has publicly called on the government for tax breaks and relief from state forestry levies in exchange for making that switch.
Research by Trend Asia found that the push into energy plantations for biomass is dominated not by small or informal loggers but by large companies already notorious for deforestation, including APP Group, Korindo Group, Barito Pacific and Wilmar International. In short, some of the same companies long associated with clearing forests are being given an easier path and a green label to keep doing it.
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