Ben Abraham is a senior consultant at the Talanoa Institute and a former senior climate finance adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
COP30 must deliver a significant outcome on finance to meet its billing as an “implementation COP”. For whatever commitments Parties reach on mitigation, adaptation, or protecting nature, they will not come to pass if finance flows do not align with their implementation.
At COP29 in Baku, countries agreed a new collective goal on climate finance. By 2035, it aims to channel $300 billion a year in public climate support and $1.3 trillion in wider investment to developing nations. The announcement made headlines, but many countries in the Global South left disappointed, arguing the sums still fell far short of what is needed.
And they have a point. Estimates of climate investment needs in the Global South until 2030 are on the order of $5.1 trillion-$6.8 trillion. At a global level, the International Energy Agency estimates annual clean energy investment must reach $4 trillion – more than triple current levels – to achieve net zero emissions by mid-century. At the same time, governments spent $7 trillion on global fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone.
The imbalance is stark. While the finance flowing in the right direction is increasing, too much continues to support high-carbon activities, and too little reaches the communities most exposed to climate impacts. For example, only a tiny share (2.5%) of global climate finance flows reach sub-Saharan Africa, despite the region’s acute vulnerabilities.
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These figures illustrate the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that while there is sufficient global capital to close the investment gap for meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, urgent action is required to redirect it.
Fully delivering on the new climate finance goal agreed at COP29 will be critical to the success of the Paris Agreement and donor countries are due to make renewed climate finance commitments this year. But as the statistics show, this cannot be where the conversation on climate finance ends.
This is where Article 2.1c of the Paris Agreement comes in.
Aligning finance with global climate goals
The long-term goals of the Paris Agreement envision aligning global finance flows with climate action. Article 2.1c of the pact is the goal of “Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.” It sits equally alongside the goals of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees (Article 2.1a) and adapting to climate change (Article 2.1b).
There has also already been action in the real economy towards this goal. Many major banks and investors have pledged to align their portfolios with net zero and, despite backlashes in some contexts, the majority are still committed to do so. More than 50 diverse jurisdictions are developing or using sustainable finance taxonomies, and the market for green and social bonds has expanded rapidly, reaching $6 trillion in 2025.
But valiant as these bottom-up efforts are, they are fighting an uphill battle. Without political support from the top they will continue to lack the speed and scale required.
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Balance and integrity are also issues: finance flows for adaptation receive much less attention than for mitigation (measures that reduce emissions), developing countries remain on the periphery of many initiatives, and oversight of potential greenwashing is insufficient.
Meanwhile, what have the UN climate negotiations done to address global finance flows? The answer is, unfortunately, not much. But COP30 presents an opportunity to change this.
Sending political signals on green finance
Since COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, a series of workshops on Article 2.1c has created space for technical exchanges but not yet produced decisions to drive real-world change. The final workshop in this series has just taken place in Rome, and leaders will decide how to take forward Article 2.1c when they gather in Belém in November.
At the Rome workshop, the need for the UN climate process to better support the realignment of finance flows was widely recognised. Otherwise, the rules and norms shaping these efforts will remain uncoordinated and left to other institutions where climate is not prioritised and decision-making is much less inclusive and transparent.
While no COP decision can magically make all finance go green, the annual summits can send powerful political signals and leverage the Paris Agreement architecture to facilitate action and accountability.
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For Article 2.1c, this could be done by establishing a framework for tracking progress towards aligning finance with climate goals, guiding policies to redirect investment, and ensuring developing countries can access the capital they need. The framework should also support balanced attention to both adaptation and mitigation.
Political backing for the implementation of Article 2.1c would support COP30’s response to the ambition gap, with the national climate plans submitted so far still way off bringing us on track to limit global warming to 1.5C.
The importance of a COP30 decision on Article 2.1c
Properly crafted, a decision on Article 2.1c could send a powerful signal that governments understand climate action is not just about having ambition, but also about aligning the financial system with those ambitions.
For developing countries, this could signal that finance flows will finally help turn plans on paper into projects that change lives. For markets, it could provide the certainty needed to unlock greater private investment. For citizens, it can restore faith in international climate cooperation by tackling the issue at its core.
Among all the decisions Belém could produce, a strong outcome on Article 2.1c could prove the most significant. If finance continues to support fossil fuels at today’s levels, the Paris Agreement will fail. If it is equitably redirected to clean energy and resilience, there is still a chance to deliver.
While authority for the full suite of actions needed to achieve this lies beyond the remit of the UN climate regime, there is an important role for the COP process to play. Its credibility in an era of implementation depends on it.
The post How COP30 could deliver an ambitious outcome on global finance flows appeared first on Climate Home News.
How COP30 could deliver an ambitious outcome on global finance flows
At Climate Home News, we found this year a pretty depressing one to cover, shaped as it was by Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science and action at home and abroad – and rounded off by the UN declaring global warming will break through the key 1.5C limit the world set itself in 2015.
But it wasn’t all bad. Nobody had decided to follow the US out of the Paris Agreement by the time it turned 10 this month. Anti-climate candidates in Canada and Australia, backed by Trump, lost elections convincingly. And 2025 may also have been the year carbon dioxide emissions fell for the first time.
What’s more, our reporting this year saw results in the real world. After we revealed that Chilean doctors believe pollution from copper mines in the northern hub of Calama is causing autism, campaigners sued state-owned mining company Codelco. The case is ongoing.
One of the lawyers representing the campaigners said “when [Climate Home News] revealed our silent suffering and our fight, we felt we had finally been heard and had entered the national conversation thanks to international media coverage. That was the final push to file the lawsuit.”
If you want to fund more impactful reporting like this in 2026, please subscribe and unlock all of our content for just the price of a coffee per week. Or to keep up with our latest coverage, you can sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky and Facebook.
Below are nine of our best stories this year and, if that’s not enough, here’s nine more from 2024.
1. Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand
In the year of trade wars, Trump extended Biden-era tariffs on solar panels from China to neighbouring countries. Nicha Wachpanich spoke to some of those workers who subsequently lost their jobs making panels at Chinese-run factories in Thailand and found that the US levies and bad behaviour by bosses had combined to crush their dreams of a better life.
2. Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs
Trump being Trump, and axing US climate finance, is no reason to let other wealthy donor nations off the hook. We examined the latest spreadsheets for annual adaptation aid and found Japan is counting support for massive infrastructure projects in its figures, despite them having only a dubious role in helping people adapt to climate change.
Our reporter Tanbirul Miraj Ripon visited one such project – the Matarbari port in Bangladesh. He found that the port handles coal and gas imports and has destroyed locals’ homes and livelihoods. Despite this, on paper it represents $363 million in Japanese climate adaptation finance, the biggest single climate resilience project being funded by a wealthy country in 2023.
3. Ethiopia’s bold EV ambitions hit bumps in rural areas
Other nations are trying hard to go green but finding it tricky. This year, Ethiopia hosted the Africa Climate Summit, was selected as the host of COP32 and opened the continent’s biggest hydropower dam.
It plans to use some of this clean power to charge electric vehicles, after banning imports of cars with internal combustion engines (even as the European Union is softening its own 2035 ban on ICEs). While that will reduce Ethiopia’s already tiny emissions and its fossil fuel import bills, it won’t be easy in a nation where only half the population has electricity access, as Solomon Yimer and Vivian Chime reported.
4. Ending poverty and gangs: How Zambia seeks to cash in on the global drive for EVs
Other African governments are trying to cash in on their minerals, which big players like China, the US and increasingly Saudi Arabia want for green technologies and/or making equipment for wars.
Pamela Kapekele went to look at the situation in Zambia’s Copperbelt province – where you can probably guess what they produce! She found that good tax regulations and working conditions will be needed if locals are to see the benefits of surging demand for the metal.
Later in the year, an acid spill from a copper-mine tailings dam that contaminated the country’s main river showed the value of environmental regulation too. Reporting from Nigeria’s lithium and South Africa’s platinum mines also highlighted the challenges of making minerals mining and processing cleaner and fairer for communities.
5. Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?
Some sectors – like international aviation and shipping – tend to fall outside the scope of national media, and it’s a gap we’ve aimed to fill. Together with Singapore’s Straits Times, we tracked the supply chain for what the airline industry calls “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF) and found that virgin and barely used palm oil – which threatens rainforests – is being passed off as waste cooking oil and used to power planes in Europe.
Malaysia is a particular hotspot for this fraud, as government subsidies there make virgin palm oil cheap in the shops – and it can be sold for a higher price as “used” cooking oil, providing a profit motive for flipping it. Our investigation was picked up by the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Malaysian authorities, who have since launched a crackdown on this kind of fraud.
But with verification of the materials used for SAF relying on just a handful of commercial auditors conducting mainly paper-based checks, airlines currently cannot know for sure if their green jet fuel is actually sustainable. Their advertising to passengers should – but often doesn’t – reflect this uncertainty.
6. Brazil’s environment minister suggests roadmap to end fossil fuels at COP30
Our reporting was often prescient this year. We called it correctly that the US would leave the Paris Agreement but not the UNFCCC, that Argentina would not follow America out of Paris, that Ethiopia rather than Nigeria would be chosen as COP32 host and that petrostates would try to kill a new green shipping framework at the International Maritime Organization.
We are also pretty sure we were the first – at least in English – to pick up on Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva’s proposal for COP30 to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels, which she aired back in June at London Climate Week. That proposal was pushed by President Lula at the start of COP30, dominated much of the conversation at the summit and will continue to be discussed throughout 2026.
8. PR firm working for Shell wins COP30 media contract
In the summer of 2025, our crack investigative reporter Matteo Civillini got the scoop on how the Brazilian government, via a contract tendered by the UN, was working with Edelman on international media relations for the COP30 climate summit while the global PR giant was simultaneously engaged in promoting Shell’s fossil fuel interests in Brazil.
This story was picked up by a range of other media, and amplified calls for agencies whose clients include fossil fuel firms to be excluded from the climate negotiations. Advocacy group Clean Creatives was inspired by Matteo’s reporting to launch a campaign against Edelman’s COP involvement. That culminated in an open letter from influencers and creators with a combined audience of over 24 million calling for Edelman to be dropped. The drumbeat on this theme is likely to get louder in 2026.
8. “House of cards”: Verra used junk carbon credits to fix Shell’s offsetting scandal
And talking of smoke and mirrors, just when we thought the murky web of carbon offsetting linking oil and gas major Shell to sham rice-farming projects in China couldn’t get any more convoluted, it did exactly that.
By combing through the records of carbon-credit registry Verra – the world’s biggest – Matteo confirmed that nearly a million bogus offsets from 10 disqualified methane reduction projects had been compensated for with the same number of junk credits from another four such projects that were also axed by Verra.
“It’s frankly unbelievable that Verra considers it appropriate to compensate for hot air credits with other hot air credits,” Jonathan Crook, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told us. “To pretend this is a satisfactory resolution is both absurd and deeply alarming.”
Verra insists the replacement credits were technically available to plug the gap left by the first batch – even though the second set, too, now need to be swapped out. Shell is keeping its distance, saying it does not manage or operate “the projects in question” despite being earlier involved in the Chinese rice-farming programmes as their “authorised representative”. Mind-boggling indeed!
9. Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries
In what was on balance a bad year, we brought you some hope too. A landmark advisory opinion on climate change and human rights from the International Court of Justice in The Hague was stronger than anyone imagined and may open the door to lawsuits against polluting countries and companies in 2026.
Other good news stories included analysts suggesting China’s fossil fuel use could peak this year, the UN’s loss and damage fund launching its first call for proposals, South Korea and Morocco moving to phase out coal and a boom in imports of solar panels to Africa.
Hope came too from ordinary people and their ingenuity – like the untrained Jordanians interviewed by Yamuna Matheswaran, hooking up solar panels to old Tesla batteries, lowering both their electricity bills and their carbon emissions into the bargain.
The post Nine of our best climate stories from 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
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