A group of emerging economies chaired by China has proposed that what they regard as protectionism by developed countries should be discussed formally at the COP29 climate summit, setting up an “agenda fight” that could disrupt the talks.
The BASIC group of nations – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – has put forward an agenda item for COP29 in Baku, seen by Climate Home, that addresses “concerns with climate-change related unilateral restrictive trade measures”.
The submission to the UN says these trade measures “under the guise of climate objectives represent a systemic concern with disproportionate effects on developing [countries]”.
“Such measures increase the cost of worldwide climate action, hinder the efforts of developing countries to advance their climate commitments and ambition, undermine the basis of multilateral cooperation and contradict” UN climate agreements, the text adds.
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Aaron Cosbey, a trade expert with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), told a recent webinar that BASIC’s proposal was “explosive”, adding “the potential for these issues to derail progress at that COP is very real.”
EU carbon border levy
The BASIC proposal is likely to be fiercely resisted by the European Union (EU) and the United States. Although the submission does not mention specific policies, BASIC has criticised the EU’s plan for a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) – essentially a carbon tax on imports – as well as certain provisions contained in the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The COP29 president, Azerbaijan’s Mukhtar Babayev, and the head of the UN climate body, Simon Stiell, are tasked with drawing up a draft agenda for the UN summit from a list of submissions, after consulting with governments. At the start of COP29, all governments will review the suggested items and agree what makes it on to the final agenda. Arguments could delay the start of talks.
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Cosbey said the EU and others are “never going to agree” to the agenda item on trade, because its language is “prejudicial” and the issues it raises are already included under a track of the UN climate talks known as “response measures”.
“They will argue: ‘we don’t want to discuss this as a general agenda item – we want to put it in this box over here where we’ve been discussing it all these years’,” Cosbey added, noting it “may sound like a minor thing” but previous negotiations have been hung up for days over such “agenda fights”.
The BASIC countries have long opposed the CBAM – and they made a similar agenda proposal ahead of COP28. But, led by the group’s then chair Brazil, they backed down and accepted it being left off the agenda.
Cosbey said the question of whether it delays the adoption of the COP agenda this time around depends on whether BASIC countries are “serious” about wanting a formal discussion or are “putting it forward strategically” to draw attention to the issue and extract some concessions in return for dropping it.
The EU’s CBAM is a levy on certain carbon-intensive and heavily traded products imported into the bloc from countries that do not have a price on carbon. It was approved by the EU in 2021 and will come into force in 2026.
Its supporters argue it is necessary to avoid carbon leakage, whereby producers of energy-intensive products like steel, cement and aluminum move their operations out of the EU to countries with weaker environmental regulations.
But in a communique issued after their leaders met in Russia in late October, BASIC described the CBAM as a “unilateral, punitive and discriminatory protectionist” measure.
Aruna Sharma, a former secretary at the Indian steel ministry, told the same webinar the EU wants other countries to follow the pace of its emissions-cutting goals without consulting them properly. Measuring emissions of products in order to comply with the CBAM will be expensive, she added.
India’s then Steel Secretary Aruna Sharma speaks during an interview with Reuters in New Delhi, India, July 30, 2018. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
Costs of compliance
Chantal Line Carpentier, head of the New York office of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said many developing countries spend more on servicing their debt than on social welfare. “So how are these people supposed to be able to invest…in their [carbon] monitoring and verification systems when they can’t even finance their education or their health?” she asked.
IISD’s Cosbey added that even green exporters will have to pay to measure their emissions under CBAM, which adds up to “significant costs especially if you are a small producer”.
Both Cosbey and Sharma said these costs would grow if other nations brought in similar measures using different emissions measurement and reporting requirements. Cosbey said a proliferation of such systems would be “trade restrictive and undermine the ability of trade as an engine of development … to lift countries out of poverty”.
Canada, Australia and the UK are among the countries considering their own carbon trade levies.
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Sharma added that the EU’s CBAM does not take into account a concept that is core to UN climate agreements of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), under which developed countries are supposed to do more to tackle climate change than developing nations.
The EU has previously said the CBAM should be addressed at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rather than in the UN climate talks. But UNCTAD’s Carpentier said WTO talks do not recognise the CBDR principle – and that taking up the CBAM there would “lead to a forever discussion”.
An UNCTAD study suggested the EU could use some of the revenues from its CBAM levy to help developing countries clean up production of goods that are taxable under the scheme. Sharma noted that, while the EU makes a lot of its steel with electric arc furnaces, many of its trade partners still use more polluting blast furnaces fired with coking coal.
The US’s Inflation Reduction Act, introduced by the Biden administration, has also drawn criticism from other governments for including subsidies for electric vehicles that require a large share of their parts to be produced in North America.
This condition has angered other car-making countries which see it as an unfair attempt to get automakers to relocate to the US. The EU, the UK, Japan and South Korea have all complained to the US government over the provision.
(Reporting by Joe Lo, editing by Megan Rowling)
The post Emerging economies set up COP29 agenda fight over trade measures appeared first on Climate Home News.
Emerging economies set up COP29 agenda fight over trade measures
China’s rapidly-expanding clean energy generation and deepening electrification has made the country more resilient to energy shocks, bolstering its position ahead of the COP31 climate talks in Türkiye, where speeding up the world’s electrification is set to dominate.
The growth of China’s renewable energy capacity protected it from the economic fallout from the energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published on Thursday.
As oil and gas stopped flowing through the key fossil fuel trade route, leading prices to soar, China’s crude oil imports – the largest in the world – fell sharply, leading the country to start drawing down on its reserves and curbing its exports of petroleum products.
“Yet, the import reduction did not produce the economic and social disruption in China one might normally expect from a shock of this scale,” the report found.
As temporary adjustment cushioned the oil-import shock, clean power and the electrification of the transport sector buffered the economic costs.
The rise of renewable energy and nuclear power have reduced China’s fossil fuel imports bill by more than $9 billion since 2020, more than any other country, according to CREA.
“China remains exposed to imported fuels, particularly where oil is used as a chemical feedstock, but reducing fossil-fuel demand already contributes to energy security,” said Qi Qin, the report’s author.
The view from Beijing: vindicated
CREA’s analysis found the roll-out of electric vehicles (EVs) displaced 38 million tonnes of oil equivalent between March and August, equivalent to around 13% of China’s crude oil imports in the same period the previous year.
China’s ongoing reliance on coal-fired power plants also protected the country against oil and gas supply disruptions, although coal power generation remained broadly flat in the six months since the start of the Iran war, according to the report.
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Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Climate home News that China’s all-of-the-above approach to energy development has provided the country with the strategic flexibility to face the oil shock.
“While China has often been criticised in previous years for moving too slowly away from coal, this year’s global energy market volatility has given Chinese policymakers a renewed sense of confidence. There is a growing sentiment in Beijing that recent events have vindicated China’s energy strategy as both prudent and pragmatic,” he said.
Can China support the electrification pledge?
Despite its vast cleantech build-out and rapid electrification boosting its energy resilience, China has stopped short of endorsing an initiative by COP31 host Türkiye to increase the global share of electricity to 35% in final energy use by 2035.
Li Gao, vice minister at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, who will lead the Chinese delegation at COP31, told a press conference the electrification target was in line with Chinese policy. “We believe that increasing electrification levels will help promote a green and low-carbon energy transition and address climate change,” he said.
China’s position on the electrification initiative is one of the major questions hanging over the COP31 talks beginning in Antalya next week.
“What is clear is that China has the most to gain from accelerated electrification because of their manufacturing capabilities,” said Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Alliance.
In 2026 alone, China’s exports of solar panels, batteries, EV and other cleantech are on track to avoid emissions equivalent to Brazil’s annual emissions.
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Türkiye’s proposal doesn’t include a commitment to produce the power from clean energy, nor does it explicitly link electrification to the transition away from fossil fuels – issues on which the EU has signalled it is ready to push back.
But Chinese analysts say Beijing is unlikely to support linking a global electrification goal to commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.
Former French climate envoy Laurence Tubiana, the outgoing CEO of the European Climate Foundation, told Climate Home News that the EU and developed countries such as Brazil – which is influential within the BRICS group of large emerging economies – have a responsibility to push China to show leadership in the talks.
Driving the world’s electrification
The electrification of the Chinese economy has outpaced that of any other major economy.
In the US and the EU, the share of electrification has stagnated just above 20%. In China, it has doubled since 2005, reaching close to 30% in 2025.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects China will remain the single largest driver of global electricity demand growth through to 2030, as it electrifies its manufacturing sector as well as growing demand for cooling and EV charging.
Over the next five years, the IEA forecasts that China will increase its electricity consumption by as much as the total electricity consumption of the EU today.
In August, the Chinese government set a target to boost the share of electricity in its final energy consumption to 35% by 2030 – five years ahead of Türkiye’s proposed goal.
From laggard to frontrunner
Clean-power growth and electrification could meet all of China’s rising power demand, according to CREA. By 2030, this would mean renewable and nuclear energy could reach 54% of power generation – exceeding China’s target to generate half its electricity from non-fossil sources by the end of the decade.
Clean electricity already met all of China’s demand growth in 2025. “The challenge lies in sustaining such growth over several years,” said Qin.
From Beijing’s perspective, the global targets such as the electrification pledge “no longer appear particularly ambitious or threatening”, said Li, of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“China, long perceived as a climate laggard, is increasingly moving ahead of countries in the Global North. A global ceiling target is increasingly only a floor for China,” he emphasised.
The post Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country appeared first on Climate Home News.
Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country
On 3 November, the Brazilian presidency of the COP30 climate talks released its long-awaited “roadmap” on ending deforestation.
Ahead of the Belém summit, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a call for a “roadmap” to halt and reverse deforestation.
Although this voluntary roadmap was outside the COP’s official agenda, it snowballed into a rallying point at the “Amazon” COP.
By the end of the summit, 93 countries had signed on to the deforestation roadmap, committing to develop voluntary pathways to reverse forest loss and degradation by 2030.
The Brazilian presidency called on countries to describe what a pathway away from deforestation could look like, what challenges and support they needed.
This call was answered by 18 countries and four negotiating blocs that offered their inputs on the roadmap, along with scores of NGOs, research centres and other groups.
Now that the roadmap has been published, Carbon Brief explains where it came from, what it entails, why some did not sign on – and what’s next.
What is a deforestation ‘roadmap’?
The “deforestation roadmap” was one of the signature announcements of the Brazilian presidency of the COP30 climate summit in Belém – albeit one that fell outside the official, negotiated outcomes.
Brazilian president Lula first proposed the deforestation and forest degradation roadmap, alongside one on the fo