Sydney, Thursday 7 May 2026 — Greenpeace has criticised the Albanese Government for trying to distract Australians who are calling for a fair tax on gas corporations, with an announcement of a gas reservation policy which has left more questions than answers
The Albanese Government today announced their new gas reservation policy, which will notionally require gas exporters to supply 20 per cent of their exports to the Australian market — but has left unresolved questions about how the reservation will operate in practice, and whether it will protect Australians from high gas prices and the environmental destruction that comes with new gas drilling projects.
On the same day as the Senate is due to release its report into the taxation of gas resources, the Government has also approved a new production license for Amplitude Energy to drill for offshore gas in waters near the Twelve Apostles in Victoria and released even more areas of pristine ocean off the coast of Victoria for gas drilling.
Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “This policy, which on paper makes gas corporations reserve 20 per cent of the gas they currently export, lacks any substantive detail, raising more questions than it answers.
“The only thing that is clear from this half-baked announcement is that the government is using it as a smokescreen to distract from the fact they are still refusing to heed the calls from the overwhelming majority of Australians, who are calling on them to tax gas exports properly.
“Announcing this policy just days before the budget and on the same day the gas tax inquiry report makes that crystal clear.
“On the very same day the Federal Government has also announced a petroleum production permit allowing Amplitude Energy to drill for offshore gas in waters near the Twelve Apostles in Victoria.
“New gas which risks our pristine ocean environment and climate is exactly the kind of destruction we should be avoiding by making gas exporters supply Australians first.“
-ENDS-
Media contact:
Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lucy.keller@greenpeace.org
The amount of public funding pledged to help developing countries tackle climate change has dropped by more than 70% in 2026, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Developed countries are required under UN climate treaties to provide “climate finance” and have traditionally announced multi-year pledges to feed into their global commitments.
Most of these pledges expired in 2025 and, since then, the US has withdrawn from international climate efforts and many European aid budgets have been cut.
A civil-society tracker shows that only five nations have announced new multi-year pledges, including just one major donor – the UK.
Germany, France and Japan are among the key contributors that have so far failed to set out plans for new climate finance, while none is expected from the US.
As a result, the total amount of public climate finance pledged over the next few years amounts to just $11.7bn a year in spending, down from recent levels of around $40bn.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that global conflict, fiscal constraints and the rise of the far right are all making it harder for developed-country governments to pledge new funds.
As the COP31 summit in Turkey gets underway, developing countries are stressing their urgent need for new finance, after nations agreed to a new global target just two years ago.
Missing pledges
Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries are obliged to provide climate finance to help developing countries cut their emissions and prepare for climate disasters.
This financial assistance can be channelled through multilateral development banks, UN climate funds and investments “mobilised” from the private sector.
But a large chunk is also expected to come directly from the public coffers of developed countries – primarily their foreign-aid budgets. This public spending has made up roughly a third of climate finance flowing to developing countries in recent years.
The EU, the US and others agreed just two years ago that they would “take the lead” on scaling up annual climate finance from $100bn in the early 2020s to $300bn by 2035.
Donor countries have traditionally supported such goals by announcing multi-year targets that indicate how much they plan to spend on climate finance.
Nearly all of these pledges expired in 2025 – and hardly any major donors have announced new ones to replace them, covering the period out to 2030.
This lack of new commitments is captured in a tracker of old and new financial commitments by climate NGOs NRDC and E3G.
Carbon Brief analysis of this data, based on an annualised breakdown of targets, shows that developed countries had previously pledged around £42bn a year in public finance.
As the chart below shows, based on current pledges, this has fallen by around 71% to £11.8bn, on average, over the remainder of the 2020s.
Not all contributors announced public climate-finance pledges in advance for the pre-2026 period. Some did not hit their stated targets, while others exceeded them.
While official data for 2025 is not yet available, bilateral public finance reached £43.9bn in 2024, broadly in line with the amount pledged by developed countries.
Big contributors
International climate finance has been consistently dominated by five nations – Japan, Germany, France, the US and the UK.
These countries – together with the EU – have provided around 90% of all the bilateral, public climate finance going to developing countries in recent years.
Of these key players, only the UK has announced a new pledge, committing £6bn ($8bn) of aid between 2026-27 and 2028-29, plus £6.7bn ($8.9bn) from outside its aid budget.
This accounts for half of all the annual funds pledged from 2026 onwards – averaging $5.7bn a year.
The European Commission makes up most of the remainder, with an average annual contribution of $4.5bn promised out to 2027.
Rather than a new pledge, this is due to the commission promising to spend €28bn ($31.8bn) over its 2021-2027 budget period. Its post-2027 contribution is currently being discussed as part of wider EU budget negotiations.
Canada has promised to spend CA$5.3bn ($4.1bn) by 2030, averaging $860m a year. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium have also pledged relatively small sums.
Overall, despite developed countries committing to scale up climate finance, these new pledges are either less ambitious – or only slightly more ambitious – than previous ones. This can be seen in the chart below.
The UK’s pledge appears more ambitious, but this is because the government has changed how it counts climate finance to include $8.9bn in “additional” public finance. When only the like-for-like aid components are compared, the new pledge amounts to a drop in ambition. (For more details, see the methodology.)
The most significant absence is the US, which committed to reaching $11.4bn in annual support by 2024 under the Biden administration.
Since president Donald Trump took power, the US has – for the second time – withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and shrunk its aid budget. It will not provide any official climate finance in the coming years.
Another notable absence is Australia, which is jointly hosting the upcoming COP31 summit, alongside Turkey. Josie Lee, policy and advocacy lead at Oxfam Australia, tells Carbon Brief:
“If Australia fails to announce a climate-finance pledge as president of negotiations, it would send a problematic message to those resisting action on climate change that might serve to embolden their agenda.”
Japan is the largest overall contributor of public climate finance, but it has not traditionally announced targets for this type of spending. Instead, the government set out overall goals that also bundle in finance “mobilised” from the private sector.
As a result, its public-finance ambitions have not been included in this analysis.
So far, the Japanese government has not announced any new multi-year climate-finance pledges, from either the public or the private sector.
European cuts
Europe provides the majority of international climate finance, but European governments have massively cut their aid spending in recent years, citing economic strain and defence spending needs.
Germany and France, the two largest European climate-finance contributors, both pledged to reach €6bn ($6.8bn) per year by 2025. Neither has committed to anything beyond that.
Both nations have slashed their aid budgets in recent years, including funding for climate programmes. Germany missed its 2025 climate-finance goal due to these cuts.
Dr Anja Carolin Gebel, a senior policy advisor at Germanwatch, tells Carbon Brief that this issue has become more politically fraught since the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won the 2025 election and began leading a coalition government:
“The issue of climate change – and, subsequently, climate finance – has taken a back seat in the current government coalition.”
There has also been a political shift in France, Gaïa Febvre, international policy coordinator at Réseau Action Climat, tells Carbon Brief. She adds:
“The upcoming presidential election and the growing influence of the far right are likely to make new international financial commitments politically more difficult.”
Other significant European donors are also undergoing political turmoil.
Spain’s centre-left government has triggered a snap election for the end of November, making a new climate-finance pledge during COP31 less likely.
Following a narrow election win, a centre-left bloc in Sweden is still in the process of trying to form a new coalition government.
Some nations have signalled that their climate finance will continue flowing, even though they have not officially set out specific new pledges.
The Dutch government, for example, has said it will provide “at least” €300m ($334m) of specific climate funding annually out to 2031. However, it has also indicated that its total public climate finance is likely to be considerably higher in both 2026 and 2027.
To highlight the lack of new pledges, developing countries are championing a “climate-finance work programme” at COP31, which could provide a space to discuss scaling up public climate finance from developed countries.
In response, the EU has stressed that its member states are the “largest providers” of public climate finance and called on developing countries to submit overdue plans for cutting emissions. The EU and its member states provided a record €32.3bn ($40bn) in 2025.
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Against this backdrop, EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra recently told Bloomberg that “any conversation on new fresh money is dead in the water”.
Joe Thwaites, international climate finance director at NRDC, who runs the commitment tracker, tells Carbon Brief that “developed countries would be wise to show how they are continuing to lead on climate finance”. He says:
“The lack of new announcements is making the finance negotiations tougher than they need to be. The debate around the climate-finance work programme is arising because developing countries have little clarity about how much public climate finance there will be in coming years.”
Methodology
This analysis is based on the climate-finance commitments tracker, run by the NGOs NRDC and E3G, supplemented with additional research.
Only the 23 “developed” countries that are obliged to provide climate finance are considered in this analysis, plus the EU. This includes western Europe, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Japan and Norway both provide substantial sums of climate finance, but have not announced specific public-finance pledges and therefore are not included.
Carbon Brief converted multi-year pledges into single years, with 2025 used as the baseline “pre-2026” year. Some countries committed to reaching a certain amount “by 2025”, in which case that value is used. Others said they would provide a total amount over several years, in which case the average value per year is used. Belgium, Switzerland and the US only set initial targets as far as 2024, so their 2024 values were used instead of 2025.
These values were compared with the average annual contribution for the remainder of the 2020s, based on the new pledges from the UK, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Some climate finance has been committed by the Netherlands, but this is not expected to be its total contribution. The EU, Portugal and Greece have earlier pledges that extend into the latter half of the 2020s, although the latter two make very small contributions.
NRDC and E3G include all the UK’s newly pledged public finance in their tracker, including $8.9bn in “additional” public finance, which covers “equity, debt, guarantees, insurance and export credit” to mobilise private finance.
In previous Carbon Brief analysis comparing the UK’s new climate-finance target to its old one, this funding was not included. This is because the government did not previously count these funds towards its climate-finance goals, instead focusing exclusively on aid spending.
This analysis does not include pledges that some countries, including Germany and France, have made to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). However, these pledges would not substantially change the main finding, shifting the overall reduction from 71% to 70%.
The post Analysis: Climate-finance pledges fall 70% as countries meet at COP31 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Climate-finance pledges fall 70% as countries meet at COP31
In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.
As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.
After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.
Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.
The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas.
International campaign lacks domestic punch
Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.
It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.
Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.
“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”
The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.
President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.
Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.
Single-use plastics ban
To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.
But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs.
Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.
The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.
To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.