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.

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

China’s use of coal for electricity grew in the first half of 2026 as a record amount of wind and solar power was wasted through curtailment, new research has found.

The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter brought 30 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity into operation in the six months to June and coal-fired generation rose 3% after falling last year, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Only 2.7GW of coal power was retired in the same period.

The coal expansion stems from a surge in power plant approvals that followed power shortages caused primarily by high coal prices in 2021, when blackouts and factory shutdowns hit roughly 20 Chinese provinces. Local governments responded by fast-tracking new coal projects as insurance against future outages.

A further 274 GW of coal capacity – equivalent to roughly a fifth of China’s existing coal fleet – is already either under construction or has permits to be built, meaning much of the sector’s expansion is locked in for years, the report says.

“Climate concern”

Qi Qin, the report’s author, said the coal lock-in is a “climate concern”. “After coal power plants are built, they will seek revenue and operating hours for decades and that can crowd out clean power and slow the retirement of the older coal power units,” she added.

The coal buildout is happening at the same time as Beijing signals a gradual shift in its energy rhetoric. In a document published last April, the Chinese government called for the country to “reasonably control” both China’s capacity to generate electricity from coal and, for the first time, how much electricity it actually generates from coal.

China has also pledged in its latest five-year plan to cut carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product – known as carbon intensity – by 17% between 2026 and 2030. It plans to reach net zero by 2060.

But, according to Qi, there is still a real gap between the direction of national policy and what is happening on the ground.

Growing renewables curtailments

While China generated less than half of its electricity from coal for the first time in the six months to last June, growing demand for electricity meant coal power generation still rose 3.4%, reversing a roughly 1% decline recorded in 2025, the report said.

Available clean electricity from solar and wind, which have seen a record expansion in China, would have been more than enough to meet the extra demand and drive coal power down if it had been fully used, the report said. Instead, the amount of clean electricity wasted kept growing.

Estimated rates of curtailment, the intentional reduction of electricity from a source, for wind and solar were up by about a half in the six-month period compared to last year, wasting the equivalent of Indonesia’s annual electricity output.

Coal’s protected status

Researchers said that was caused by the Chinese grid’s inability to absorb the additional clean electricity, in addition to energy contracts and pricing mechanisms skewed in favour of coal power.

Chinese coal generators are required to sign long-term contracts covering a fixed share of the previous year’s output, now standing at 70%. Qi said that, out of fear of electricity shortages, regulators introduced these arrangements to protect coal power plants by guaranteeing them predictable prices and utilisation rates.

Additionally, China has also begun paying coal plants to stand ready to generate electricity, rather than for actually running, through new capacity payments introduced this year.

China unveils underwhelming emissions-cutting target for 2035

Qi said that, while each of these mechanisms has a legitimate purpose on its own, they now combine to give coal power excessive protections. “When renewables are abundant, they [coal operators] don’t have the incentive and are not required to ramp down,” she added.

The report suggested lowering, or even suspending, coal-specific contract minimums in provinces that are experiencing clean energy being wasted or prolonged periods of zero or negative electricity prices. That would help coal transition to a more flexible backup role and facilitate the integration of renewables, the researchers argued.

They also urged the Chinese authorities to halt permits for new coal power projects and reassess those that have already been permitted, while favouring grid expansion, energy trade across provinces and storage as ways to boost energy reliability.

The post China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste appeared first on Climate Home News.

China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste

Bemnet Agata is a communications officer at the Tax Justice Network, where Alison Schultz is a research fellow.

We are entering an age of permanent volatility.

Climate change is making extreme weather more destructive. Geopolitical tensions are disrupting energy markets and supply chains. Governments are expected not only to decarbonise their economies, but to protect them against an increasingly unpredictable world. That requires sustained public investment at precisely the moment repeated shocks are placing ever greater pressure on public finances.

Governments are rightly debating how to mobilise the trillions needed for the energy transition. Yet one of the largest untapped sources of climate finance requires neither higher corporate tax rates nor new international funds. It lies in correcting one of the oldest assumptions underpinning the international corporate tax system.

One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax.

Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, production and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes its subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies.

Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest.

That legal fiction does more than misdescribe how multinational businesses operate. It enables profits to be shifted away from the places where real economic activity takes place and into jurisdictions where little or no tax is paid. This not only erodes public revenues, but also undermines the level playing field by giving multinational corporations tax advantages that purely domestic businesses cannot replicate.

$500 billion a year

Taxing multinational corporations as the integrated businesses they actually are could generate around $500 billion in additional corporate tax revenues every year. That’s almost 40% of the $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance that, two years ago, governments agreed should be mobilised by 2035. That is exactly what governments are negotiating this week under the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation in New York.

Imagine Apple sold one million iPhones in Kenya. Few people would dispute that those sales depend on the Kenyan economy. Every iPhone arrives through Kenyan ports, travels on Kenyan roads, is sold by Kenyan workers, connects through Kenyan telecommunications infrastructure and is protected by Kenyan courts. Apple’s success depends not only on its own innovation, but on the public investments and institutions that make economic activity possible.

The negotiations underway under the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation would replace this legal fiction with a system known as unitary taxation with formulary apportionment. Rather than allowing multinational corporations to pay tax where they say their profits arise, it would allocate taxing rights according to where they undertake genuine economic activity—where they employ workers, manufacture goods, provide services and sell to customers. It would replace today’s pay where you say model with one based on pay where you play

This is not about increasing corporate tax rates. It is about deciding where multinational corporations should pay tax on the profits they already earn. Allocating taxing rights in this way would benefit countries across the income spectrum. While higher-income countries would gain the most in absolute terms, lower-income countries would see the largest proportional increases.

France, for example, would collect an additional US$25.5 billion each year, while Kenya would increase its corporate tax revenues by 406%. At a time of mounting climate costs, those revenues could help governments drive the transition to clean energy while investing in the resilience needed to withstand future shocks.

An overdue correction

The strongest argument for reform, however, is not the scale of the projected revenue gains. It is that the proposal corrects a century-old foundational error by bringing international tax rules into closer alignment with how the modern economy actually works.

Every successful market depends on foundations that no company creates alone: public investment, functioning institutions and the participation of millions of workers and consumers. If multinational profits are generated collectively across many countries, the rules governing where those profits are taxed should recognise that reality rather than the legal and accounting artifices that determine where profits appear on paper.

The international tax system remains an outlier. Every other area of economic governance has long since recognised multinational corporations as integrated global businesses. Tax rules remain the last custodian of the legal fiction that multinational corporations are not, in fact, multinational.

The debate taking place in New York is therefore about much more than tax. It is about whether the rules underpinning the global economy still reflect the economy they are meant to govern—and whether they equip governments with the fiscal capacity to confront the defining challenges of the twenty-first century.

Energy sovereignty without fiscal sovereignty is an unfinished transition. Countries cannot build a more secure and resilient future if the wealth generated within their economies continues to escape taxation where it is created.

Recovering those revenues would strengthen public finances, giving governments not only the resources to accelerate the energy transition but also the fiscal capacity to plan, coordinate and sustain it over the long term. In an age of permanent volatility, that capacity may prove to be every country’s most important climate adaptation strategy.

The post A legal fiction blocking billions in climate finance will be challenged this week appeared first on Climate Home News.

A legal fiction blocking billions in climate finance will be challenged this week