Published

1 year ago

December 24, 2024

Alice Rush

Rich nations agreed to channel at least $300 billion a year by 2035 for developing countries to ramp up climate action under a new finance goal adopted at the COP29 climate summit, after bad-tempered talks in which vulnerable countries pushed for a bigger slice of the pie.

The new goal, which kicks in after 2025, replaces the existing annual target of $100bn, which was met two years late in 2022 and is widely seen as insufficient to meet rocketing needs among poorer nations to shift to clean energy and adapt to extreme weather and rising seas.

The $300bn goal – with developed countries “taking the lead” in providing money and mobilising private-sector investment – will be at the core of a wider effort to scale up financing to at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 “from all public and private sources”.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell described the new finance goal as “an insurance policy for humanity, amid worsening climate impacts hitting every country”.

“This deal will keep the clean energy boom growing and protect billions of lives,” he said, warning that “like any insurance policy – it only works – if the premiums are paid in full, and on time.”

In the closing plenary of the two-week summit, some developing nations, including Cuba and India, expressed dissatisfaction with the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), criticising its “paltry size” and the weight given to funding from multilateral development banks. They said it does not respond to their requirements to grow sustainably and keep their people safe.

“The goal is too little. Too distant,” Chandni Raina, an adviser with India’s Ministry of Finance told the closing plenary. “The proposed goal shall not solve anything for us.”

Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said her Pacific island state was leaving “with a small portion of the funding climate-vulnerable countries urgently need”. “It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start, and we’ve made it clear that these funds must come with fewer obstacles so they reach those who need them most,” she added.

“Tale of delivery”

But EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told the plenary that COP29 would be remembered “as a start of a new era for climate finance”, saying the EU believes “it is ambitious, it is needed, it is realistic and it is achievable. We are confident this will be a tale of delivery,” he added.

The agreement came after a day of drama as the COP29 talks in Baku ran overtime, with groups of the poorest nations and small island states staging a temporary walkout, raising fears that a deal would not be reached at the so-called “Finance COP”.

COP29 Bulletin Day 12: Carbon market rules adopted after walkout delays finance talks

Those vulnerable groups wanted to ensure they would get fixed amounts under the new goal, arguing they are hit hardest by the impacts of global warming and have the least resources to protect their people and go green. In the end, they compromised, settling for a process that will explore options to “design and implement” allocation floors for them.

Baku to Belem Roadmap

That effort will be part of a “Baku to Belem Roadmap to $1.3 trillion” that will look for “additional resources” to drive low-carbon, climate-resilient development and support the rollout of developed-country plans for cutting emissions and adapting to climate change.

This roadmap, which will be developed over the coming year leading up to the COP30 conference in Belem, Brazil, was put forward by the African Group, Barbados, Colombia, Honduras and Panama in Baku this week.

Details remain sketchy but Colombia’s environment minister Susana Muhamad referred to “innovative possibilities that our countries have been working on”. A taskforce co-led by France, Kenya and Barbados, for example, has been considering how to introduce levies on shipping, aviation, fossil fuels and financial transactions.

Win for China, Gulf states

The final COP29 deal on the new finance goal was a compromise between efforts by rich countries to limit the amount of additional government finance they will have to stump up – with many citing fiscal constraints – and the growing gap between funding and needs in climate-stressed parts of the world.

Developing countries rejected a strong push by wealthy governments to include their richer, more polluting members, especially China and Gulf nations, in the official donor base. The text only “encourages” developing countries to make contributions to the new finance goal “on a voluntary basis”.

Namibia uses COP29 climate summit to push for oil and gas investments

As the talks in Baku got dangerously close to ending without an agreement, the Azerbaijan presidency came in for sharp criticism for putting a proposed figure for the government-led core of the finance goal on the table too late.

It eventually did so on Friday, which should have been the final day of the two-week talks, with an initial suggestion of $250 billion a year provoking disappointment and anger from developing countries, who argued they were being forced to sacrifice their people.

Compromises

In the end, they settled for not much more in return for commitments to avoid worsening already high debt levels and easing access to funding, including from the UN’s dedicated climate funds. The text promises to pursue efforts to at least triple annual outflows from those funds from 2022 levels by 2030, rather than earmarking a percentage of the goal for them, as earlier proposed.

Developing countries also capitulated on demands for sub-goals to channel more money to under-funded work on adaptation, as well as repairing growing loss and damage from droughts, floods, storms and rising oceans. These sub-goals were left out of the agreed text.

Climate justice activists slammed the new goal for being far too low and failing to set a target that would prioritise grants over loans.

Champa Patel, executive director of governments and policy with the Climate Group, said $300bn a year “doesn’t even come close to the transformational finance needed to tackle the climate crisis”.

Don’t mention fossil fuels

As drama unfolded over finance, countries also adopted at COP29 a weakened decision on cutting carbon emissions, which failed to explicitly mention last year’s pledge to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. A second text on mitigation was postponed to mid-2025, after it was also weakened by opposition from Saudi Arabia.

The adopted Mitigation Work Programme, a non-binding process meant to enhance climate mitigation, was adopted at the closing plenary. The adopted version fails to mention last year’s landmark decision to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which it did include in earlier versions.

A second text meant to be the main outcome on cutting emissions in Baku did not reach consensus, after also getting weakened. The “UAE Dialogue” follows up on last year’s review of climate policies known as the Global Stocktake (GST) – the main decision from last year’s COP in Dubai.

The last version of the UAE Dialogue referenced “paragraph 28” of the UAE consensus, where the fossil fuel transition was included, but the text falls short of explicitly mentioning the landmark pledge to reduce fossil fuels.

Instead, the latest draft reaffirmed the role of “transitional fuels” also mentioned in last year’s GST, which experts interpreted to mean fossil gas among other technologies.

Saudi Arabia successfully blocked any fossil fuel language at COP29, after their negotiators said at a plenary session on Thursday that they would “not accept any text that targets any specific sectors including fossil fuel”. The Saudi government has also blocked this in other major environmental summits, among them the biodiversity COP16 and the G20.

In the last draft, the COP29 presidency also removed two proposals to expand energy storage capacity to 1,500 gigawatts by 2030 and to add 25 million km of power grids by 2030. Both would have been new targets building on the decision to triple renewable energy capacity by the same date.

At the closing plenary, several country groups expressed their disappointment with the text and said they could not accept it in its current form.

“We are concerned to see attempts to backtrack the agreements made last year,” said Chilean lead negotiator Julio Cordano. “The text does not enjoy consensus”.

“We made historic commitments a year ago, including to transition away from fossil fuels. We came here to translate that commitment into meaningful action, and quite simply, we have fallen short,” said a delegate from Canada.

In the end, COP president Mukhtar Babayev opted to defer the text until next year, when countries will review the process again in mid-year talks in Bonn. A final decision is expected at COP30.

The UAE Dialogue was one of the key agreements meant to inform the upcoming round of new nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Most of them will now have to make progress without an explicit mandate from the COP.

As COP29 came to a close, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that he “had hoped for a more ambitious outcome – on both finance and mitigation – to meet the great challenge we face. But this agreement provides a base on which to build,” he added.

(Reporting and editing by Megan Rowling, Joe Lo and Sebastian Rodriguez)

The post Fractious COP29 lands $300bn climate finance goal, dashing hopes of the poorest appeared first on Climate Home News.

Fractious COP29 lands $300bn climate finance goal, dashing hopes of the poorest

Climate Change

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Published

20 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Alice Rush

Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.

By David Sun

When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Climate Change

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Published

1 day ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:

“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.

“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.

“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.

“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.

“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”

-ENDS-

Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library

Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Climate Change

DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case

Published

1 day ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Iran war fallout continues

WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.

SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.

COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”

Around the world

WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.

1%

The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Nearly_750_studies_have_found_that_climate_change_has_made_extreme_events_more_severe_or_likely

Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)

Spotlight

New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.

Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.

The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.

Reductions vs removals

The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.

One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.

When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.

The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.

Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:

“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”

‘Global dialogue’

While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.

Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.

Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:

“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”

Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.

Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:

“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”

While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.

She added:

“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”

Watch, read, listen

COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.

THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.

SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.

Coming up

23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon

Pick of the jobs

International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

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