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When Romain Ioualalen started a new campaigning job at Oil Change International, he was tasked with putting fossil fuels on the agenda of international climate talks.

That was in April 2020, just after the start of the pandemic. He told Climate Home recently that “it seemed like a pretty distant dream” at the time.

In fact, he used to joke that he had “found the only international climate policy job that didn’t require going to Cop because fossil fuels would never be a thing there”.

But become a thing they have. When Cop18 was held in Gulf oil and gas producer Qatar in 2012, the IISD think tank’s 28,000-word summary only mentioned fossil fuels once.

Those two words pop up 46 times in the same report produced after Cop28 where governments agreed for the first time to transition away from all fossil fuels in energy systems.

Asked why fossil fuels had gone from the fringes to the centre of negotiations, experts cited numerous reasons, which all worked together to build momentum over the years.

They referred to the falling cost of renewables, the mounting climate impacts, the interventions from authoritative mainstream voices, the tireless campaigning of the Pacific islands and civil society, and a healthy dose of good fortune.

Fossil fuels weren’t always absent though. Right at the start of climate talks, in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), mentions them. Although it does not condemn them, it implies they have got to go or, at least, be reduced.

It does this by recognising the “special difficulties of those countries, especially developing countries, whose economies are particularly dependent on fossil fuel production, use and exportation, as a consequence of action taken on limiting greenhouse gas emissions”.

Then Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello makes a toast to world leaders at the Rio Earth Summit (Photos: United Nations)

Kept outside

But after governments signed this landmark text, they gathered every year at a Cop for a quarter of a century without any of their agreements mentioning the need to reduce fossil fuels again.

Asked why, Joanna Depledge, who studies climate talks at Cambridge University, said fossil fuels had been actively kept outside the process, predominately by the Opec cartel of oil producers – Saudi Arabia, in particular – and by the USA.

She said Opec, the Saudis and others wanted, as they still do, to talk about emissions in general rather than particular sources of emissions like fossil fuels. 

For a long time “there wasn’t much questioning of that,” she said, “because the so-called comprehensive approach was seen as a good thing”. “There’s also an aversion to policy prescription in the climate change regime,” she added, “apart from the EU and the vulnerables, countries don’t like an international regime telling them what to do in particular sectors”. 

For decades, all the negotiations were focussed on signing an agreement that would commit all countries to take action to limit global warming. After several time and hope-depleting failures, they eventually succeeded in Paris in 2015.

Diplomats celebrate as the Paris Agreement is agreed in 2015 (Photos: UNFCCC)

Having agreed on the headline goal, they could discuss how to go about meeting it. That’s when one particular fossil fuel rose up the agenda – the most polluting one, coal.

Depledge says that it was Poland that unwittingly put coal in the crosshairs. The country is Europe’s biggest defender of coal and hosted the talks in 2008, 2013 and 2018.

In 2018, Cop24 was held in the heart of Poland’s coal country in Katowice, where delegates choked on polluted air and gazed at adverts from the Cop’s partners in the coal industry. 

The next year, the UK was announced as host of Cop26. Its coal record couldn’t be more different to Poland’s. Between 1990 and 2019, it reduced its coal use for electricity by 96% – replacing it mainly with gas and later wind.

Its government was keen to export this strategy to other countries, co-founding the Powering Past Coal Alliance in 2017. The work of launching this alliance “built momentum around having coal as the main outcome of Cop26”, said Center for Climate and Energy Solutions vice-president Kaveh Guilanpour.

A protester covers her mouth as she marches through Katowice during Cop24 (Photos: Greenpeace)

Then UK prime minister Boris Johnson confirmed this focus, saying Cop26 should be about “coal, car, cash and trees” and Cop president Alok Sharma said the summit should “consign coal to history”.

It was not just the UK with coal in the crosshairs though. The head of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres had been calling for an end to new coal power plants since 2019 and in August 2021 said the latest IPCC scientific report must “must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”

The same year, China, Japan and South Korea all said they would stop financing new foreign coal-fired power plants – a decision most Western nations and multilateral development banks had already taken.

With this momentum, the UK was able to convince governments to agree to “phase down” coal – the first-ever mention of a fossil fuel in a Cop agreement.

Not every country agreed to this enthusiastically though. Between them, China and India use two-thirds of the world’s coal and they teamed up to water down the language at the last minute from “phase out” to “phase down”, sparking tears from Sharma.

India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav speaks to Sharma at Cop26 (Photos: Kiara Worth/UNFCCC)

The next year, Cop delegates gathered in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. For the first week, the Cop looked set to be about one issue only. Not fossil fuels but rich countries paying for the loss and damage poorer ones are suffering from as a result of climate change.

That changed at the end of the first week of negotiations when Bloomberg reported that India had called on the Cop president to target all fossil fuels in the Cop27 agreement. Depledge said India was angered that the fossil fuel the country relies on – coal- was being singled out while the oil and gas that rich nations favour went unchallenged.

By that point, oil and gas had already started to feel some of the heat that coal was under.  Guterres’ rhetoric was broadening to all fossil fuels and Denmark and Costa Rica had co-founded at Cop26 a coalition of countries pledging to stop pumping oil and gas.

Ioualalen, who was involved in the initiative, said that was a “big, big thing” as it “put the notion that you could actually take measures to constrain the development of fossil fuel production on the map”.

So when India made their intervention in Egypt, they were pushing at a more open door. A significant minority of countries – including the European Union, small islands, Chile and Colombia – seized on the proposal.

Ministers from the “high ambition coalition” hold a press conference at Cop27 (Photos: Kiara Worth/UNFCCC)

But oil and gas-reliant states like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia voiced their opposition. The Egyptian presidency left it out and, at 4am on the day many negotiators were flying home, governments from the “high-ambition coalition” accepted defeat

After it was agreed, these ministers showed their displeasure. Tuvalu called it a “missed opportunity”, Chile said they were “very disappointed” and the EU said it was “not enough on [emissions reduction]”.

They had lost the battle but sounded determined to win the war and the decision to make Sultan Al-Jaber, the CEO of oil and gas firm Adnoc, the next Cop president only ramped up the focus on fossil fuels.

“The Cop28 presidency, as being a petro state, was initially a major concern”, recalled Harjeet Singh, Climate Action Network’s head of global political strategy. “However, it ironically served as a unique opportunity to exert significant pressure, leading to substantial discussions on curtailing all three fossil fuels.”

Singh said “this momentum transformed what was once a fleeting mention of fossil fuels at Cop26 in 2021 into a robust debate within the UN climate change dialogues” and allowed campaigners to highlight the “hypocrisy of rich nations targeting coal use in the developing world while simultaneously expanding oil and gas production”.

Al Jaber himself responded to criticism by saying that a fossil phase out was both “essential” and “inevitable” despite his company’s plans to increase production. Guilanpour said that the UAE’s status as an oil and gas producer and ally of Saudi Arabia gave them “credibility” with potential opponents of the fossil fuel phase out.

Sultan Al Jaber and Simon Stiell celebrate as the Cop28 agreement is passed (Photos: Cop28/Mahmoud Khaled)

By the time India hosted the G20 summit in Delhi last September, fossil fuels were at the very top of the climate agenda. India tried but failed to get 20 of the world’s biggest economies to agree to phase out fossil fuels.

The battleground was set for Cop28, where fossil fuels came to dominate the talks after the loss and damage fund had been agreed on the first day. But the Saudis and others wouldn’t agree to “phase out” or “phase down”, preferring the eventual compromise of “transitioning away from fossil fuels”.

After Cop28, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister downplayed the significance of this agreement, calling it just an “option” on an “a la carte menu” and stressing the difference from “phase out” – an interpretation that E3G analyst Tom Evans called “incredibly misleading”.

Despite the Saudi dismissal, the head of the UNFCCC Simon Stiell called it the “beginning of the end” for the fossil fuel era. Guilanpour celebrated the decision too, saying that if that had been offered at the start of the year, “most people would have bitten your hand off”.

With that now agreed, fossil fuels are likely to take a back seat in the negotiations. Depledge predicted they would “move away from words and on to hard cash and the dollars”, with a new post-2025 climate finance target set to be agreed at Cop29.

Outside of negotiations, governments’ plans to keep producing fossil fuels are likely to come under ever more scrutiny in the media and public discourse, 

That became clear just hours after the Cop28 agreement was signed. In the room next door, Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva and then German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock held back-to-back press conferences at which they were both grilled on how their governments’ production plans fit with the deal they’d just agreed.


Ioualalen said that how climate leadership is judged has now changed. "You cannot just say that you are going to be a climate leader, that you're going to reach net zero, if you're going to continue increasing your oil and gas production - that's become very clear," he said.

And when governments release their next round of climate plans in 2025, the role of fossil fuels will be closely watched. That year's Cop presidency will be Brazil - whose competing desires to pump more oil and gas and to save the Amazon rainforest and planet are sure to be noted.

While investment into the supply of fossil fuels is still rising, the IEA predicts that demand will soon peak. Whether supply is restrained and whether demand plateaus or falls sharply are two of the key climate questions of the decade.

Climate Home asked Ioualalen whether all the years of work getting fossil fuels on the agenda will help with that. "It's too early to say", he replied. "I'm seeing a lot of debate on the outcomes [of Cop28] on whether it's historic or an absolute catastrophe or greenwash etcetera - the reality is that it's probably a bit of both".

The post How fossil fuels went from sidelines to headlines in climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

How fossil fuels went from sidelines to headlines in climate talks

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Big fishing nations secure last-minute seat to write rules on deep sea conservation

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January 20, 2026

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As a treaty to protect the High Seas entered into force this month with backing from more than 80 countries, major fishing nations China, Japan and Brazil secured a last-minute seat at the table to negotiate the procedural rules, funding and other key issues ahead of the treaty’s first COP.

The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) pact – known as the High Seas Treaty – was agreed in 2023. It is seen as key to achieving a global goal to protect at least 30% of the planet’s ecosystems by 2030, as it lays the legal foundation for creating international marine protected areas (MPAs) in the deep ocean. The high seas encompass two-thirds of the world’s ocean.

Last September, the treaty reached the key threshold of 60 national ratifications needed for it to enter into force – a number that has kept growing and currently stands at 83. In total, 145 countries have signed the pact, which indicates their intention to ratify it. The treaty formally took effect on January 17.

    “In a world of accelerating crises – climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution – the agreement fills a critical governance gap to secure a resilient and productive ocean for all,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement.

    Julio Cordano, Chile’s director of environment, climate change and oceans, said the treaty is “one of the most important victories of our time”. He added that the Nazca and Salas y Gómez ridge – off the coast of South America in the Pacific – could be one of the first intact biodiversity hotspots to gain protection.

    Scientists have warned the ocean is losing its capacity to act as a carbon sink, as emissions and global temperatures rise. Currently, the ocean traps around 90% of the excess planetary heat building up from global warming. Marine protected areas could become a tool to restore “blue carbon sinks”, by boosting carbon absorption in the seafloor and protecting carbon-trapping organisms such as microalgae.

    Last-minute ratifications

    Countries that have ratified the BBNJ will now be bound by some of its rules, including a key provision requiring countries to carry out environmental impact assessments (EIA) for activities that could have an impact on the deep ocean’s biodiversity, such as fisheries.

    Activities that affect the ocean floor, such as deep-sea mining, will still fall under the jurisdiction of the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

    Nations are still negotiating the rules of the BBNJ’s other provisions, including creating new MPAs and sharing genetic resources from biodiversity in the deep ocean. They will meet in one last negotiating session in late March, ahead of the treaty’s first COP (conference of the parties) set to take place in late 2026 or early 2027.

    China and Japan – which are major fishing nations that operate in deep waters – ratified the BBNJ in December 2025, just as the treaty was about to enter into force. Other top fishing nations on the high seas like South Korea and Spain had already ratified the BBNJ last year.

    Power play: Can a defensive Europe stick with decarbonisation in Davos?

    Tom Pickerell, ocean programme director at the World Resources Institute (WRI), said that while the last-minute ratifications from China, Japan and Brazil were not required for the treaty’s entry into force, they were about high-seas players ensuring they have a “seat at the table”.

    “As major fishing nations and geopolitical powers, these countries recognise that upcoming BBNJ COP negotiations will shape rules affecting critical commercial sectors – from shipping and fisheries to biotechnology – and influence how governments engage with the treaty going forward,” Pickerell told Climate Home News.

    Some major Western countries – including the US, Canada, Germany and the UK – have yet to ratify the treaty and unless they do, they will be left out of drafting its procedural rules. A group of 18 environmental groups urged the UK government to ratify it quickly, saying it would be a “failure of leadership” to miss the BBNJ’s first COP.

    Finalising the rules

    Countries will meet from March 23 to April 2 for the treaty’s last “preparatory commission” (PrepCom) session in New York, which is set to draft a proposal for the treaty’s procedural rules, among them on funding processes and where the secretariat will be hosted – with current offers coming from China in the city of Xiamen, Chile’s Valparaiso and Brussels in Belgium.

    Janine Felson, a diplomat from Belize and co-chair of the “PrepCom”, told journalists in an online briefing “we’re now at a critical stage” because, with the treaty having entered into force, the preparatory commission is “pretty much a definitive moment for the agreement”.

    Felson said countries will meet to “tidy up those rules that are necessary for the conference of the parties to convene” and for states to begin implementation. The first COP will adopt the rules of engagement.

    She noted there are “some contentious issues” on whether the BBNJ should follow the structure of other international treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), as well as differing opinions on how prescriptive its procedures should be.

    “While there is this tension on how far can we be held to precedent, there is also recognition that this BBNJ agreement has quite a bit to contribute in enhancing global ocean governance,” she added.

    The post Big fishing nations secure last-minute seat to write rules on deep sea conservation appeared first on Climate Home News.

    Big fishing nations secure last-minute seat to write rules on deep sea conservation

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    Climate Change

    Climate at Davos: Energy security in the geopolitical driving seat 

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    January 20, 2026

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    The annual World Economic Forum got underway on Tuesday in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, providing a snowy stage for government and business leaders to opine on international affairs. With attention focused on the latest crisis – a potential US-European trade war over Greenland – climate change has slid down the agenda.

    Despite this, a number of panels are addressing issues like electric vehicles, energy security and climate science. Keep up with top takeaways from those discussions and other climate news from Davos in our bulletin, which we’ll update throughout the day.

    From oil to electrons – energy security enters a new era

    Energy crises spurred by geopolitical tensions are nothing new – remember the 1970s oil shock spurred by the embargo Arab producers slapped on countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, leading to rocketing inflation and huge economic pain.

    But, a Davos panel on energy security heard, the situation has since changed. Oil now accounts for less than 30% of the world’s energy supply, down from more than 50% in 1973. This shift, combined with a supply glut, means oil is taking more of a back seat, according to International Energy Agency boss Fatih Birol.

    Instead, in an “age of electricity” driven by transport and technology, energy diplomacy is more focused on key elements of that supply chain, in the form of critical minerals, natural gas and the security buffer renewables can provide. That requires new thinking, Birol added.

    “Energy and geopolitics were always interwoven but I have never ever seen that the energy security risks are so multiplied,” he said. “Energy security, in my view, should be elevated to the level of national security today.”

    In this context, he noted how many countries are now seeking to generate their own energy as far as possible, including from nuclear and renewables, and when doing energy deals, they are considering not only costs but also whether they can rely on partners in the long-term.

      In the case of Europe – which saw energy prices jump after sanctions on Russian gas imports in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine – energy security rooted in homegrown supply is a top priority, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Davos on Tuesday.

      Outlining the bloc’s “affordable energy action plan” in a keynote speech at the World Economic Forum, she emphasised that Europe is “massively investing in our energy security and independence” with interconnectors and grids based on domestically produced sources of power.

      The EU, she said, is trying to promote nuclear and renewables as much as possible “to bring down prices and cut dependencies; to put an end to price volatility, manipulation and supply shocks,” calling for a faster transition to clean energy.

      “Because homegrown, reliable, resilient and cheaper energy will drive our economic growth and deliver for Europeans and secure our independence,” she added.

      Comment – Power play: Can a defensive Europe stick with decarbonisation in Davos?

      AES boss calls for “more technical talk” on supply chains

      Earlier, the energy security panel tackled the risks related to supply chains for clean energy and electrification, which are being partly fuelled by rising demand from data centres and electric vehicles.

      The minerals and metals that are required for batteries, cables and other components are largely under the control of China, which has invested massively in extracting and processing those materials both at home and overseas. Efforts to boost energy security by breaking dependence on China will continue shaping diplomacy now and in the future, the experts noted.

      Copper – a key raw material for the energy transition – is set for a 70% increase in demand over the next 25 years, said Mike Henry, CEO of mining giant BHP, with remaining deposits now harder to exploit. Prices are on an upward trend, and this offers opportunities for Latin America, a region rich in the metal, he added.

      At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals

      Andrés Gluski, CEO of AES – which describes itself as “the largest US-based global power company”, generating and selling all kinds of energy to companies – said there is a lack of discussion about supply chains compared with ideological positioning on energy sources.

      Instead he called for “more technical talk” about boosting battery storage to smooth out electricity supply and using existing infrastructure “smarter”. While new nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors are promising, it will be at least a decade before they can be deployed effectively, he noted.

      In the meantime, with electricity demand rising rapidly, the politicisation of the debate around renewables as an energy source “makes no sense whatsoever”, he added.

      The post Climate at Davos: Energy security in the geopolitical driving seat  appeared first on Climate Home News.

      Climate at Davos: Energy security in the geopolitical driving seat 

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      A Record Wildfire Season Inspires Wyoming to Prepare for an Increasingly Fiery Future

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      21 hours ago

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      January 20, 2026

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      As the Cowboy State faces larger and costlier blazes, scientists warn that the flames could make many of its iconic landscapes unrecognizable within decades.

      By Jake Bolster

      In six generations, Jake Christian’s family had never seen a fire like the one that blazed toward his ranch near Buffalo, Wyoming, late in the summer of 2024. Its flames towered a dozen feet in the air, consuming grassland at a terrifying speed and jumping a four-lane highway on its race northward.

      A Record Wildfire Season Inspires Wyoming to Prepare for an Increasingly Fiery Future

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