Published

1 year ago

December 24, 2024

Alice Rush

Brice Böhmer is climate and environment lead at Transparency International.

As the dust settles after COP29, a feeling of despondency and betrayal has set in. But amid the inevitable post-mortem, the international climate community must ask itself: are we really that surprised?

This is the third year running that a repressive petrostate has hosted COP, and the second where the summit – intended to help reduce global emissions – has instead been used as a deal-brokering conference for some of the world’s biggest polluters.

The murky world of climate diplomacy

The fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry were all over Baku, chiefly those of the host country itself. An undercover Global Witness investigation caught the Azerbaijani COP29 chief executive using his role to discuss fossil fuel “investment opportunities” in the run-up to the conference. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan’s president opened the event by hailing oil and gas as a “gift from god”. His government then went on to sign new gas deals with Bulgaria and Slovakia while, elsewhere, developing nations were frantically scrambling for vital climate financing.

Overall, at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to COP29 according to Kick Big Polluters Out. In reality, however, it’s not possible to determine the true scale of the industry’s involvement. Our own analysis found that half of the registered participants (26,104) either chose not to disclose their relationship with their nominator, or hid behind unhelpfully vague categories such as ‘guest’ and ‘other’.

While it’s true that a fraught geopolitical landscape and the re-election of Donald Trump as US president meant negotiators in Baku were always facing an uphill battle, the vulnerabilities of climate diplomacy to climate corruption can no longer be ignored.

Tell us your top three climate issues for 2025! We’ll share the results in the New Year

In fact, the upsurge of climate denialism and dwindling faith in multilateralism makes rooting out undue fossil fuel influence and other conflicts of interest more important than ever.

The threat of climate corruption is an issue for at least two significant reasons. Most obviously, it undermines the integrity of the process when those who stand to gain little from a green transition – and everything to gain from the continued extraction of fossil fuels – are granted privileged access.

There is also the issue of trust. How can nations fully trust the negotiating process when it is so clearly infiltrated by private interests? Attendees need reassurances that their commitment will lead to meaningful progress, not exploited as diplomatic cover for behind-closed-doors manoeuvres and fossil fuel deal-making.

Strengthening climate multilateralism

As ever when it comes to questions of corruption, sunlight is the best disinfectant. To preserve the integrity of COP specifically – and multilateral climate action in general – we should be asking ourselves: which countries are being permitted to host COP? What suitability tests have they undergone? Who are they granting privileged access to?

Relatedly, Brazil’s President Lula recently announced that, in preparation for COP30, he is working towards a “global ethical assessment” bringing together different sectors of civil society to reflect on climate action “from the perspective of justice, equity, and solidarity”. His government has also joined forces with the UN to address disinformation campaigns that derail climate action.

Our recent report with the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, an organisation that aims to expose the threats to democracy, economic justice and the environment posed by financial secrecy and transnational corruption, offers recommendations to sustain this momentum and channel it into COP reform ahead of next year’s UN climate summit in Belém.

Big emitters accused of hiding behind climate treaties in international hearing

These include strengthening the selection process for host nations. Currently, these are chosen on a rotating basis between the five UN regional groupings. Regional group members consult with each other and make an offer to the UN climate secretariat (UNFCCC), which then adopts a decision before going on a fact-finding mission to determine that all “logistical, technical and financial elements for hosting the sessions are available” and reports back to the COP Bureau. This committee – which is elected from representatives of countries nominated by each of the UN regional groups and small island developing states – advises the COP president, acts as a focal point between governments and leads on issues of process management.

Our report proposes stricter criteria, by allowing only countries that have been vetted by the COP Bureau and whose proposal demonstrates commitment to the goals of the UN climate convention and the Paris Agreement, the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, international human rights law and managing potential conflicts of interest to be appointed hosts. The influential Club of Rome recently called for similar measures.

With Turkey, a country judged to have “critically insufficient” climate targets, and Australia, the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in 2021, currently competing for the COP31 presidency, host selection reform cannot come soon enough.

What was decided at the COP29 climate summit in Baku?

Full disclosure

Publishing the participant list, meanwhile, has proved an effective way of boosting public scrutiny at COP. The UNFCCC should build on this by mandating that delegates fully disclose their nominator-affiliation to allow for even more transparency. Host deals involving corporations and organisations granted partner status for the ‘Green Zone’ (where civil society gathers outside the government-led negotiations) should also be made publicly accessible.

In addition, the COP Bureau should review the Code of Ethics for Elected and Appointed Officers to ensure that hosts disclose any relationships, financial or otherwise, that could compromise the objectivity and impartiality of the presidency. Had such measures been in place pre-Baku, they would surely have helped limit the extent to which the summit appears to have been used to promote businesses connected to Azerbaijan’s first family; not least the $5.2 million government contract awarded, without any competitive tender process, to Aliyev’s son-in-law for summit accommodation, as reported by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

The entrance to the COP29 summit venue in Baku, Azerbaijan, November 2024 (Photo: Climate Home News/Megan Rowling)

To deter such cronyism, the Code of Ethics should include the powers to replace the COP President and other host-nation officials if they violate their duties of fairness, transparency and accountability.

To reinforce this approach, host country agreements should make the UNFCCC secretariat’s approval of partners compulsory. They should also follow the UNFCCC processes for due diligence and prevent sponsorship by entities “whose products, services or operations may negatively affect the objectives, activities or reputation of the secretariat, including but not limited to entities whose core products or core related services include fossil fuels”.

Multilateral climate diplomacy is far from perfect, but it remains our best hope of achieving meaningful climate action. The UNFCCC, with the co-operation of countries in the COP Bureau, must lead by example through major structural changes to the organisation and execution of COPs, extinguishing the threat of corruption and ensuring climate summits are preserved for those who want to fight climate change – not those profiting from it.

The post Here’s how we take back control of COP from the world’s biggest polluters appeared first on Climate Home News.

Here’s how we take back control of COP from the world’s biggest polluters

Climate Change

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

Published

17 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

21 hours 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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