The majority of developed countries are paying less than 50% of their “fair share” towards biodiversity finance, according to new analysis.
These nations contributed less than $11bn in total in 2022, the year that a landmark global nature deal, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), was agreed at COP15.
Taking into account the historical responsibility for biodiversity loss over the past 60 years, the London-based development thinktank ODI has calculated a “fair share” for each country towards a minimum collective target agreed in 2022 aimed at raising $20bn annually by 2025 for biodiversity conservation.
In 2022 – the most recent year for which data is available – only Norway, Sweden and Germany contributed their “fair share”, the analysis shows. The UK, Italy and Canada – host of the COP15 biodiversity summit, where the deal was struck – each contributed less than 40% of their share.
Japan was the “worst performer in absolute terms”, falling short of its fair share by $2.4bn in 2022 and “will need to at least triple its biodiversity finance” by 2025, ODI says.
“These big economies continue to drop the ball on biodiversity finance,” Sarah Colenbrander, co-author and ODI director of climate and sustainability, tells Carbon Brief.
Additionally, pledges to a separate “framework fund” established at COP15 have amounted to less than $250m, with Japan yet to pay a single yen of the ¥650m ($4.47m) it had pledged to the fund.
With COP16 set to start in Cali, Colombia, next week, Carbon Brief looks at the progress towards meeting the GBF’s finance targets, what constitutes a “fair share” and what needs to happen to fund nature conservation over the decade ahead.
What was agreed on finance at COP15?
At COP15 in 2022, 196 countries agreed to an ambitious global deal to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, dubbed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
The “Paris Agreement for nature” was gavelled through despite objections from developing countries, with parties given little time to examine the fine print on how these targets would be financed.
The GBF has a target to mobilise “at least $200bn per year” for biodiversity conservation by 2030 from “all sources”– domestic, international, public and private.
Of this, developed countries – along with others that “voluntarily assume” their obligations – are expected to “substantially and progressively increase” their international finance flows for nature “to at least $20bn per year by 2025, and to at least $30bn per year by 2030”, the GBF text states.
The $20bn target has attracted criticism from developing countries.
One objection is the amount, given that the biodiversity “finance gap” – the shortfall between current funding for conservation globally and what is needed – is estimated at $700bn per year. The GBF states that countries must close this gap by 2030 through ending harmful subsidies ($500bn per year) and mobilising resources from the global north to south ($200bn per year).
According to Dr David Obura, chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, insufficient finance was a “primary factor in the failure to achieve” any of the Aichi biodiversity targets, which were agreed by nations in 2010, with rich nations raising less than $4bn a year in funds on average between 2015 and 2020.
In the run-up to COP15, developing countries demanded that developed countries increase their financial contribution to $100bn per year, mirroring the floor of climate-finance commitments up to 2025.
Another criticism is the collective nature of the target, along with little clarity on how it will be met. According to ODI, this approach “often shields wealthy nations from individual responsibility”.
Instead, apportioning individual responsibility can mitigate that risk and increase accountability and transparency, the authors say.
Are developed countries on course to meet nature finance goals?
There is no internationally agreed-upon definition of biodiversity finance. This can lead to confusing – and sometimes inflated – estimates of just how much countries have contributed to protect nature.
There are two main channels of international public finance that developed countries can use to meet their biodiversity finance commitments under the GBF: official development finance (ODF); and the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF).
ODF combines bilateral “official development assistance” (ODA) and other official flows (OOF).
While these flows from developed to biodiversity-rich, developing nations are written into the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to acknowledge historical responsibility for species loss, it was only in 2022 that countries agreed on the specific “$20bn by 2025” and “$30bn by 2030” targets.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is one of the main sources of biodiversity finance data on whether countries are meeting their funding targets. (Although it also acknowledges its own limitations and assumptions around what it counts as biodiversity finance.)
There are large differences in how much public finance is intended strictly for biodiversity (“biodiversity-specific”) and how much is intended for other projects where conservation is either a significant goal or a marginal co-benefit (“biodiversity-related”).
According to the OECD, developed countries – including the US – contributed $12.1bn towards biodiversity finance in 2022, an increase of 3% from 2021. However, biodiversity-specific funding – with the principal objective of reducing biodiversity loss – declined from $4.6bn in 2015 to $3.8bn in 2022.
As seen with climate finance, the form that this finance takes matters just as much as the quantity.
For example, the OECD says that some of these large donors have mostly used loans for biodiversity-related development finance, including France (87% of their contributions), Poland (85%), Japan (81%) and Canada (51%). Loans are seen as problematic by developing countries because they add to the debt burden that they are already facing.
The OECD also notes that the largest spike in biodiversity finance over 2015-22 was from development banks, mostly in the form of loans to already debt-distressed, but nature-rich nations. (See: Carbon Brief’s Q&A on debt-for-nature swaps.)
The figure below shows how different donors have contributed to what the OECD describes as an “all-time high” in development finance for nature in 2022.
With contributions from multilateral institutions alongside the biodiversity-related finance from developed countries, including the US, the total funding for biodiversity crossed $20bn in the year 2022.
How do each country’s contributions compare to their ‘fair share’?
One limitation of biodiversity finance data tracked by the OECD is that developed countries are often represented as a single unit, obscuring progress – or lack thereof – on a national level.
This, according to ODI, fails to reflect each country’s individual responsibility for biodiversity depletion. In order to better reflect countries’ roles, ODI has assessed each country’s “fair share” of the target of $20bn per year by 2025.
This calculation is based on each developed country’s specific ecological footprint between 1960 and 2021. (This “trade-adjusted footprint” accounts for a country’s consumption, including imports and exports, to give a more accurate picture of how consumption at home impacts biodiversity globally.) It also incorporates each country’s capacity to pay, measured by gross national income, and its population in 2022.
The chart below shows the biodiversity finance contributions of developed countries in 2022 against their “fair share” and the shortfall in meeting the GBF’s targets.
While ODI acknowledges that the $20bn is a fraction of the $700bn a year that biodiversity actually needs between now and 2030, it stresses that “this new data should spur a conversation around a delivery plan” for this sum.
Lead author and climate economist Dr Laetitia Pettinotti, who developed ODI’s “fair share” methodology, adds:
“There is an equivalent in climate finance, designed ahead of COP26 [in 2021] to catalyse further contributions, and there’s no reason why the same can’t be applied to this goal. Every year beyond the deadline is another year of deteriorating ecosystem services and declining biodiversity. These aren’t just numbers; this target matters to us all.”
The authors also acknowledge that their “fair-share” calculations do not take into account the “substantial biodiversity loss before 1961”, which “continues to contribute to less resilient ecosystems today”.
According to thinktank Third World Network (TWN), which was not involved in the report, using a 60-year cumulative ecological footprint “as a proxy for historical responsibility” does not fully reflect the “vast ecological debt” rich countries owe to poorer nations, “beginning since the colonial era”.
In a statement shared with Carbon Brief, TWN said:
“Calculating rich countries’ fair share of financing cannot be solely benchmarked against $20bn. $20bn per year was committed in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The target is on a cumulative sliding scale – by 2025, the total provision should amount to at least $60bn, and increase thereafter to at least $30bn annually by 2030. This amounts to at least $210bn by 2030.”
The chart below shows how the target would accumulate per year, if “at least $20bn a year” was raised and then increased to $30bn per year until 2030.
How much is being contributed to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund?
The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) was established at COP15 in 2022 as another channel for countries and companies to contribute to the biodiversity finance target.
It is currently housed under the World Bank’s “green” lending arm – the Global Environment Facility (GEF) – although developing countries continue to call for an entirely new fund governed by the COP.
Despite an initial flurry of pledges, rich nations have contributed less than $250m to the fund, as of 31 August this year, according to data the GEF has shared with Carbon Brief.
Additionally, according to the GEF data, Japan has yet to pay any of the￥650m ($4.4m) it has pledged to the fund, while Luxembourg has so far paid only $1.1m of the $7.7m it has pledged.
In August, COP16 president Susanna Muhamad urged global-north governments to “make a gesture to increase trust in the conference and actually put their money” into the GBFF to demonstrate their commitment.
Unlike development finance flows, which can be hard to track and isolate, the GBFF publicly reports all of its financing to the COP and can clearly identify how countries are contributing to target 19.
Dr Chizuru Aoki, manager of the division of conventions and funds at the GEF, tells Carbon Brief:
“We welcome the commitment of the COP president to a successful outcome, including on resource mobilisation…Biodiversity needs much more funding [and t]he GEF is the heart of global finance for biodiversity and provides parties with an efficient and transparent vehicle to achieve target 19(a).”
While the fund has received no new pledges in recent months, according to Aoki, additional financial pledges are expected to be made during COP16.
Of the $244m received so far, the GBFF has already allocated more than half ($110m), with almost $40m going to four projects in Brazil, Gabon and Mexico. These include creating protected areas and sampling environmental DNA in Brazil’s Caatinga – the world’s largest semi-arid region, once home to the endangered Spix’s macaw.
The fund has to allocate at least 36% of its resources to least-developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS).
It also has set an “aspirational target” of 20% of all its resources to go to Indigenous peoples and local communities.
However, new analysis by Indigenous rights campaign group Survival International points out that the fund is falling “far short” of this “aspiration” and “more than 50%” of all the money allocated so far will go through global-north environmental charities, such as WWF and Conservation International, to execute and implement projects in developing countries.
How has private finance contributed to meeting the nature finance target?
Target 19 also refers to “leveraging private finance” and “innovative schemes”, such as biodiversity offsets and credits, that will see an increased push and pushback at COP16. (See Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A on biodiversity offsets).
According to the OECD, private philanthropic flows for biodiversity grew from $501m in 2017 to $932m in 2021 and then decreased to $700m in 2022.
At the same time, private finance flows that have a direct negative impact on nature amount to $5tn a year, according to the State of Finance for Nature report.
Maelle Pelisson, the advocacy director for Business for Nature, tells Carbon Brief:
“Whilst it’s positive to see a growth in private philanthropies contributing to biodiversity finance, private philanthropy alone is not going to be sufficient to address nature loss…Governments should adopt and implement measures to ensure businesses include the value of nature in short- and long-term decisions, including requirements on disclosure and transition plans.”
The GBFF can receive contributions from private companies, with an expert group set up in June to advise the fund on issues that might arise, such as potential conflicts of interest. However, to date, no private companies have pledged contributions to the fund.
What are developing countries expecting to see at COP16?
Discussions on biodiversity finance in the run up to COP16 have been “difficult” and “polarised”, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin has reported.
In meetings on resource mobilisation earlier this year, developing countries “urged” rich countries to fulfil their commitments to close the biodiversity finance gap.
Many country groups continue to demand a separate global fund for biodiversity finance under the COP, distinct from the GBFF. (See: Carbon Brief’s interactive feature on who wants what at COP16.)
Developing countries have also called for a panel of experts to analyse “all financial flows” and “determine the extent to which parties have met their obligations under target 19”.
Both these suggestions remain heavily bracketed ahead of COP16 in Cali.
Nicky Kingunia Ineet, the DRC negotiator who had raised an objection before the gavel went down in Montreal, tells Carbon Brief:
“The creation of a special fund dedicated to biodiversity remains a sine qua non in the search for solutions linked to the mobilisation of resources in favour of biodiversity. This specific fund should be new, predictable and adequate, under the control and guidance of the COP, and accountable to it. The existing mechanism is provisional [and unfortunately] has not mobilised [the] resources as hoped.”
“Developed country parties should provide the necessary financial resources to developing countries to enable them to meet the additional costs of implementing the [CBD] and the GBF. This is wholly insufficient.”
Sarah Colenbrander, co-author of the report and ODI’s director of climate and sustainability, tells Carbon Brief:
“The US, Japan, Spain and Canada pride themselves on their countries’ natural beauty and their fantastic national parks, but these big economies continue to drop the ball on international biodiversity finance.”
The post Developed countries failing to pay ‘fair share’ of nature finance ahead of COP16 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Developed countries failing to pay ‘fair share’ of nature finance ahead of COP16
Amira Odeh Quiñones is a hydrologist and Caribbean organiser for the 350.org climate campaign group
El Niño, likely to be one of the strongest in modern history, has arrived on Caribbean shores.
Drought is slowly creeping up on our islands. But unlike the fiery wildfires ravaging parts of Europe, there’s no smoke signalling the damage being done, no sirens to warn of the danger. Only announcements from public health officials to stay indoors and remain hydrated — as if outdoor workers and farming communities have the luxury to heed such advice.
During El Niño, strong atmospheric winds alter rain patterns and trap heat across the Caribbean. But while we have experienced El Niño many times before, it has become very visible in recent years how climate change is making this natural phenomenon worse.
Across the Greater Antilles, temperatures are soaring past 38°C (100°F), with real-feel indexes reaching a gruelling 43°C in parts of Puerto Rico where I live. Cuba has it worse. Widespread power outages mean that methods for cooling down are unavailable for most of the day, leaving millions of vulnerable people at risk of heat stroke when temperatures hit 38°C.
Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels
During the last strong drought a decade ago, I had water only two days a week in my home. Today, there are many families whose taps are about to run completely dry. Water authorities have already begun strict rationing in some municipalities, with more on the list scheduled for rationing if conditions don’t change.
Water rationing is far more than an inconvenience; it is an immediate health risk. This means thousands of people need to constantly haul heavy buckets up flights of stairs just so they could bathe, cook, stay hydrated – the basics of survival.
Heat causes health problems
Puerto Rico is home to roughly 300,000 elderly residents. Many live alone, isolated and without support. They risk severe physical injury when carrying heavy water containers, and are wont to suffer from silent heat exhaustion in unventilated rooms.
Furthermore, when water shortages force residents to store water in open household containers, it inadvertently creates breeding grounds for Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Paired with scorching temperatures that tend to shorten the mosquito breeding cycle, the region is facing explosive outbreaks of dengue fever that endanger our most vulnerable: children and the elderly.
The economic fallout is equally devastating. Dry fields mean millions of dollars in lost crops, forcing small agricultural businesses to collapse, needing urgent government relief to survive. Extreme fuel shortages have already paralyzed Cuba’s agricultural sector, cutting food output by 60% – the El Niño dry spell threatens to decimate it.
At sea, warmer ocean waters fuel massive influxes of sargassum seaweed. Rotting sargassum chokes our beaches, destroying the local tourism industry that so many working families rely on. Tangled seaweed also damages nets and boat engines, slashing fish catches and driving up equipment costs for local fishers.
In the south of Puerto Rico, the coastal town of La Parguera is currently witnessing a historic amount of sargassum on its shores. This has halted most of the boating activity in the area, which is the seaside town’s main tourist draw and economic driver.
All over the Caribbean, from town halls to local group gatherings, the story I hear is always the same: constant headaches, lost work hours, failing health, and a sense that quality of life is silently being stolen. The compounding effects of heatwaves, drought, and marine destruction are exhausting our people, our islands.
Climate change to blame
Climate change makes each El Niño year hotter and more damaging. Higher baseline global temperatures increase the energy and moisture available for extreme weather. Latest projections show that El Niño may push the monthly global average temperature past 2°C of warming for the first time in early 2027. In the Caribbean islands, that will not just be breaking records – it’ll be breaking lives.
Recently, I had the opportunity to share a panel with climate scientists behind what is known as the field of “attribution science” – or the science that compares today’s climate conditions to what the Earth’s climate would be like without human activity, particularly burning fossil fuels. They’re unequivocal: it’s no longer a question of whether extreme weather is caused by climate change, it’s just a question of how much.
-
Southeast Asia’s fragile grids threaten billions in clean energy investment
Renewables developers need reliable electricity infrastructure and stable policies to help the region meet climate goals and surging demand for power -
Quarter of countries still missing UN climate plans 18 months after deadline
Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina and the Philippines are among the 45 nations which have breached the Paris Agreement by not submitting their climate plan to the UN -
China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste
Long-term contracts guarantee coal plants buyers regardless of demand, crowding out renewables, report finds
Attribution science recently got a boost from the U.S.’ top scientific advisory body. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recognized that researchers’ methods have advanced considerably in recent years, resulting in better assessments on how much extreme weather can be attributed to human-caused climate change. It noted that attribution findings could be relevant in some types of legal cases, including those seeking damages from oil companies for climate impacts.
This crisis, which is already taking a heavy toll on our communities’ survival, needs real, urgent, and structural action that goes beyond aid. With similar droughts now gripping parts of Asia and Africa, we’re falling into the familiar narrative of treating the looming humanitarian crisis as if no one was to blame, as if it is being caused solely by a natural phenomenon we can’t control.
It’s not. The world was already on fire before its regular visitor, El Niño, came. While we need humanitarian action, we need climate action too, in order to permanently put out the flames.
The post When taps run dry in the Caribbean, it’s not enough to blame El Niño appeared first on Climate Home News.
When taps run dry in the Caribbean, it’s not enough to blame El Niño
China has released a five-year plan dedicated to addressing climate change.
The 15th five-year plan for a national response to climate change is the latest in a series to outline in-depth climate and energy targets for the 2026-2030 period.
These include five-year plans for “building a Beautiful China”, developing a “new-type energy system” and developing renewable energy.
There are also separate “action plans” for the 2026-2030 period, such as for peaking carbon emissions.
China has pledged to peak its emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality before 2060.
The new plan does not include any major new targets, instead consolidating and reaffirming existing policies.
Nevertheless, it includes significant signals on key policy areas, such as non-carbon dioxide (CO2) greenhouse gases, global climate governance and carbon markets.
Below, Carbon Brief examines some of the notable elements in the latest five-year plan and what it reveals about China’s policy direction through to 2030.
What does the climate plan cover?
The Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) released the plan in late July, in unison with 18 other government departments. These include the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, and the National Energy Administration.
The document covers a range of topics, including CO2 emissions, other greenhouse gases (non-CO2 GHGs), carbon markets, carbon footprints, climate adaptation and international cooperation on climate change.
For the first time at the five-year plan level, the plan creates a comprehensive target system covering all areas of climate policy, say officials in a MEE Q&A.
They describe it as “the main policy instrument” for advancing China’s climate action during 2026-2030.
China rarely issues high-level multi-year policies dedicated to “responding to climate change”. In 2014, the NDRC published a plan on the topic running through to 2020, but this was not linked to a five-year plan period.
Qin Yan, principal analyst at ClearBlue Markets, tells Carbon Brief that the plan shows that China’s climate governance has reached “an unprecedented strategic level”.
She adds that the plan creates an “all-encompassing target system” to support China’s Paris Agreement climate pledges for 2030 and 2035.
In its 2030 pledge, China aimed to peak emissions “before 2030” and reduce carbon intensity – its emissions per unit of GDP – by more than 65% from 2005 levels.
Last year, president Xi Jinping personally announced China’s 2035 pledge to cut China’s greenhouse gas emissions to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035, while “striving to do better”.
The five-year plan marks a new phase in China’s climate policy, according to researchers at CIB Research, an economic research body affiliated with the Industrial Bank, whose largest shareholder is the Fujian provincial government.
Their analysis adds that the plan represents a broad effort to strengthen China’s climate-governance system, implementation mechanisms and underlying capacity.
Nevertheless, several headline targets and policies in the document simply reiterate already established plans.
These include:
- Cutting carbon intensity by 17% across the five years
- Reducing carbon intensity per product in industries under China’s carbon market by 3%
- Substituting fossil fuels with renewables
- Strengthening climate adaptation
- Supporting the “free flow” of cleantech
What does the plan say about non-CO2 GHGs?
The plan also goes into detail on China’s approach to non-CO2 GHGs. This includes reaffirming a target of an emissions “reduction capacity” from these gases totalling 30m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) by 2030, although the baseline is unclear.
The target previously appeared in the overarching five-year plan, as well as the plan for building a “Beautiful China”.
The goal refers to emissions reductions, which can be realised through implementing current non-CO2 emissions reduction policies and projects, says Chen Meian, programme director and senior analyst at the Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress (iGDP).
She adds that it is “relatively achievable”, with sources including increasing the number of coal-mine methane utilisation projects.
She points to an MEE explanatory note for a draft methodology under the China Certified Emission Reduction (CCER) scheme, China’s voluntary carbon-credit market. Chen says the note suggests that projects using ventilation air methane and coal-mine methane with concentrations below 8% alone could deliver around 20MtCO2e of reduction by 2030.
The note states that, currently, such projects are estimated to be able to “generate annual emission reductions of approximately 4.5MtCO2e”.
In addition, Chen says, measures targeting industrial nitrous oxide (N2O) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) could help make up the remainder needed to meet the target.
According to iGDP analysis of biennial reports submitted by China to the UNFCCC, China emitted around 14,000MtCO2e of GHGs in 2021, excluding land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF).
Non-CO2 GHGs accounted for around 2,700MtCO2e, or 19%, of the total, the majority of which was methane, as shown in the figure below.
China’s plans to curb these super-pollutants in the five-year period include coal-mine methane utilisation projects, end-of-pipe destruction technologies for HFCs and guidance on the use of catalysts to reduce N2O emissions.
The plan also calls for the recovery and replacement of sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) in power equipment.
For Chen, the plan’s focus on SF6 control is particularly noteworthy. She says the gas is “finally receiving policy attention” and that proactive action is “timely and will help avoid future emissions growth” as China’s power system expands.
What does the plan say about global climate governance?
One of the plan’s clearest objectives for international cooperation is for China to play a more active role in global climate governance.
By 2030, it says China should markedly increase its “influence, guiding power, shaping power and moral appeal” in this area.
It says China’s climate action could also feed into the Global Governance Initiative, a policy initiative aimed at reforming the global governance system.
China will also aim to “build a new narrative on climate governance”, it adds.
Prof Thomas Hale, a professor in public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, writes on LinkedIn that the plan “marks a major rhetorical shift” towards China being increasingly willing to “lead and shape” global climate action.
Another clear focal point for international cooperation is in carbon markets.
The plan calls for China to expand the global influence of its carbon market, such as through international rule-setting, cooperation on standards and by hosting the China Carbon Market Conference.
Qin says China’s more active role in global carbon pricing is already evident in the launch of the open coalition on compliance carbon markets with the EU and Brazil. This coalition is expected to adopt a work plan at the China Carbon Market Conference in September.
Qin also notes that China “could become the world’s largest [carbon] offset buyer” as its energy transition progresses.
The country would, therefore, “benefit from helping shape global rules under the Article 6 framework [for carbon trading under the Paris Agreement]”, she adds.
Related
Interview: Dr Sun Yixian on his new database tracking Chinese climate ‘leadership’
Q&A: What do China’s provincial five-year plans say about climate and energy?
Analysis: China’s new carbon metric leaves Germany-sized gap in its emissions
Q&A: China’s leadership calls for ‘strict control’ of fossil fuels
The post Q&A: What is in China’s new five-year plan for climate change? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What is in China’s new five-year plan for climate change?
About a quarter of the countries signed up to the Paris Agreement are still breaching its rules by failing to submit a new national climate plan, 18 months after the February 2025 deadline.
Forty-five nations had not submitted a plan known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC), according to the Paris Agreement Implementation and Compliance Committee’s (PAICC) newly-published report of its 7-10 July 2026 meeting. One, Oman, has published it since the meeting.
Twelve countries ignored the committee’s repeated attempts to find out why they had not yet produced a climate plan, the report said. They will be invited to the committee’s next meeting, from September 1-4, so it can identify the challenges and constraints they face.
Members of the committee are divided, as they were at their last meeting, on whether to name those countries publicly and will debate the question again in September.
The PAICC does not have any power to punish governments, as building these powers into the Paris Agreement was thought to be so controversial that it could have stopped some governments from joining, experts have previously told Climate Home News.
A key requirement of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement is that governments publish a more ambitious NDC every five years, setting targets to reduce their planet-heating emissions and outlining their policies to adapt to climate change, in order to meet the accord’s goals on limiting global warming and protecting people from its effects.
The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in 2025.
Some medium-sized emitters
Countries without an updated NDC include Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina and the Phillippines, all of which rank among the world’s 40 largest greenhouse gas emitters. The rest of the countries are smaller, poorer nations, with many in Africa or the Caribbean.
Some nations have argued that they cannot put together an NDC – which requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy – because of exceptional circumstances. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC committee, seen by Climate Home News, says that the country’s civil war has led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.
-
Southeast Asia’s fragile grids threaten billions in clean energy investment
Renewables developers need reliable electricity infrastructure and stable policies to help the region meet climate goals and surging demand for power -
Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels
Despite a leadership gap, outgoing environment minister Irene Vélez Torres says the anti-fossil fuel coalition can “live without Colombia” -
Egypt seeks to unlock renewable potential to power regional clean energy hub
Europe is investing in Egypt’s bid to position itself as a clean electricity exporter to reduce its emissions and generate a new source of income
The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement, although the US submitted a 2035 NDC under the Biden administration before Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN climate accords.
The committee also expressed concern that the UN’s NDC registry continued to label the climate plans of countries that are no longer party to the Paris Agreement as “active”, according to its report. The US submission has since been archived.
Since the last PAICC meeting in March, ten countries have published NDCs. The committee did not name them but they include India, Algeria, Cameroon and Guyana.
The post Quarter of countries still missing UN climate plans 18 months after deadline appeared first on Climate Home News.
Quarter of countries still missing UN climate plans 18 months after deadline
-
Climate Change12 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases12 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy10 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测