Mohamed Adow is the Founder and Director of Power Shift Africa
A sobering truth hangs over the COP30 climate talks in Belém: negotiators are discussing adaptation indicators with the enthusiasm of technocrats while quietly starving frontline communities of the resources they need to survive.
The UN’s latest adaptation gap report could not be clearer. Needs are skyrocketing. Finance is collapsing. And yet the global community continues to debate how to measure progress, rather than how to enable it. They act as if weighing a cow will make it fatter, rather than giving it any food.
This contradiction exposes the heart of the climate crisis: adaptation is not merely a technical challenge; it is a political and moral one. Every finance gap is a justice gap. Behind every unmet target are farmers who cannot plant, families who cannot rebuild, and communities forced into displacement because “resilience” was promised but never delivered.
Adaptation is the difference between dignity and despair. It determines whether societies can endure rising temperatures, intensifying floods, or prolonged droughts — or whether they are pushed beyond the limits of survival.
Yet, as negotiators haggle over the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) and its indicators, the foundations needed to achieve these goals are crumbling. How do we talk about climate-resilient development when the means to achieve it are drying up? How do we measure resilience while draining the very resources that make resilience possible?
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At COP30, countries must resist the impulse to rush through a weak indicator framework simply to claim progress. This would give us a system that measures activity, not impact. – that measures paperwork, not protection.
Africa is championing a fit for purpose GGA, but some have misunderstood and wrongly accused it of stalling the GGA process. But Africa is not delaying adaptation work. Africa is living adaptation every day. For us, adaptation is not a choice or a policy preference or an interesting side issue. It is an existential threat that is already reshaping livelihoods, economies, and ecosystems.
Africa needs this COP to get the GGA right. What we reject is an approach that turns adaptation into an exercise in reporting rather than a vehicle for survival.
A meaningful GGA must track whether finance actually reaches those who need it, whether technologies are shared equitably, and whether vulnerable countries are being supported to build early-warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, water security, and heat-resilient health systems. Without this backbone of finance and technology-sharing by the rich world, adaptation indicators become little more than an empty checklist.
And this is where COP30 stands at a crossroads. If rich countries succeed in pushing through a set of indicators that sideline finance, it will confirm that the world’s poorest are once again being asked to run a race with no shoes. No community can adapt without resources. No farmer can withstand worsening heatwaves without irrigation and drought-resistant seeds. No coastal town can protect its people without early-warning systems and resilient infrastructure. To pretend otherwise is not merely flawed policy; it is a profound injustice.
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Some will argue that indicators and finance should remain separate discussions. But this is a fiction. You cannot track progress on adaptation without the means to adapt. Adaptation is where political decisions determine whether people live safely or suffer needlessly.
The world is not short of evidence of this suffering, it is short of political courage. Extreme weather displaces more than 30 million people a year, with Africa bearing the brunt. While communities rebuild with scarce resources, developed countries continue to cut aid or repackage support as loans which shackles poor countries with eye-watering debt. This does not build resilience — it entrenches vulnerability.
The Global Goal on Adaptation will become a white elephant if it is not paired with predictable, grant-based finance. Indicators that pretend adaptation is happening without resourcing it will fail the people they claim to protect. COP30 is the moment to close the distance between science and solidarity: wealthy nations must scale up adaptation finance, share technologies, and support long-term resilience planning.
Until then, the world’s most vulnerable will continue carrying the heaviest burden with the lightest support — a defining injustice of our time.
The post Global Goal on Adaptation: Weighing the cow won’t make it fatter appeared first on Climate Home News.
Global Goal on Adaptation: Weighing the cow won’t make it fatter
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.