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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
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year higher than in last year’s budget.
This is largely because the report now estimates a smaller “cement carbonation” sink in the wake of research published this year in Communications Sustainability. In other words, it estimates that cement is