The centrepiece of every UN climate summit is for countries to negotiate the wording of a large number of legal agreements – and COP30 in the Brazilian city of Belém is no different.
These texts are hashed out behind closed doors in the “blue zone” at the COP, where diplomats from nearly 200 nations haggle over every paragraph and each individual verb.
Over the course of the two-week summit, negotiators will be trying to reach consensus on more than 100 separate agreements – but, first, they must agree which issues are on the agenda.
The complexity of this process can make it challenging to keep track of what countries are fighting about and how negotiations are progressing.
Carbon Brief’s real-time text tracker, below, offers a helping hand by decoding the agenda and keeping a searchable record of every document for each part of the negotiations.
The first column of the interactive tracker lists the topic of each agenda item, with further columns including dates, page counts and links to the original PDFs.
The table is searchable via the interactive text box and can be sorted using the arrow icons.
Key negotiations at COP30 include those on the “global goal on adaptation”, as well as the question of whether or how to reform the COP process itself, a discussion that appears on the agenda under the innocuous heading: “Arrangements for intergovernmental meetings.”
While most of the items on the agenda are agreed in advance, parties can suggest late additions. These must be signed off before negotiations can begin, often resulting in an “agenda fight”.
Recent negotiations have all started with an agenda fight over two proposals from the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) – a group that includes China, India and Saudi Arabia.
The LMDC proposals relate to the provision of climate finance by developed countries – under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement – and to what they describe as “unilateral trade measures”, a term understood to include the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM).
The LMDCs have asked again that these issues be included on the agenda at COP30.
Ahead of the opening of the summit, Carbon Brief’s text tracker counts 111 substantive items on the agenda, not including procedural matters, such as the election of COP officials.
However, it is likely that not all of these items will ultimately end up being included.
The figure below illustrates the status of the COP30 negotiations overall, in a traffic-light format. Each agenda item is colour-coded according to its current status.
For topics shown in red, negotiators have not yet managed to put anything down on paper, perhaps because parties have fundamentally different views on how they should proceed.
For items in orange, negotiators are working on an “informal text”, which is an early draft setting out the views of different parties, but not yet expressed in formal legal language.
Once a draft legal agreement becomes available, topics will be colour-coded yellow. At this point, areas of remaining disagreement will be denoted in the text with [square brackets] and “options”.
As such, texts with many square brackets or options tend to be an indicator of a high level of disagreement between parties within this negotiation track. For this reason, the tracker table above counts and displays the number of outstanding brackets and options in each document.
During the course of the summit, negotiators may work through multiple iterations of text on each agenda item. These documents may include “bridging text”, designed to resolve differences of opinion and to find a “landing zone” that all groups can agree on.
Agreement is reached on a given topic once all brackets and options have been resolved, at which point the issue will be coloured green in Carbon Brief’s traffic-light chart.
Where agreement cannot be reached, discussions may be subject to “rule 16”, meaning negotiations are postponed until the next session. These topics are colour-coded grey.
The figure below gives an at-a-glance overview of the status of the main topics up for negotiation.
As parties narrow down the options and brackets towards the end of each summit, they start to generate “clean” texts, which contain no areas of disagreement and can be converted into “draft decisions” that are ready for formal adoption at the closing plenary of the meeting.
Finally, at the closing plenary, each draft decision must be gavelled through by the COP president, signifying its formal adoption as a legal agreement and outcome of the summit.
This last step is usually a formality, but dramatic exceptions are possible.
During the closing plenary at COP29, the president of the meeting failed to adopt a deal relating to the “global stocktake” from 2023, which had called for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels.
Carbon Brief also ran text trackers for COP28 and COP29.
The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP30 climate summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP30 climate summit
Consumers remain vulnerable to price spikes despite record domestic oil and gas production. But experts doubt the crisis will boost clean energy, absent strong policy.
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A World War II-era policy is stopping old coal plants from closing, despite high costs and the wishes of their owners.
At one time, the U.S. electricity grid ran mostly on coal.
Italy has delayed the permanent closure of its four coal-fired power plants to 2038, after the war in the Middle East caused the cost of producing electricity from gas to spike.
The government inserted the measure into a broader bill aimed at addressing the energy crisis. Parliament approved the legislation on Wednesday after the government tied it to a confidence vote, meaning that losing the vote would see the right-wing coalition government collapse.
The decision marks a climbdown from a pledge first made under centre-left Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni in 2017 to phase out coal by 2025 on the mainland and by 2028 on the island of Sardinia.
The Mediterranean island’s 1.5 million people remain heavily dependent on coal for electricity due to limited grid connections with the European mainland and a slow rollout of renewable energy.
Riccardo Molinari, a member of Parliament for the governing coalition Lega party, which championed the amendment, said the plants could be kept open as a “strategic reserve”, which can be turned on if needed.
“Unnecessary” decision
But analysts say the practical impact of the move is likely to be limited. Luca Bergamaschi, executive director of Italian climate think tank ECCO, described the extension as “largely symbolic”.
“Keeping them open will not materially affect electricity prices, which are driven by gas – for most hours of the day – and EU market rules,” he told Climate Home News. “The decision sends a negative signal but we don’t expect any meaningful impact on prices or emissions, which shows how unnecessary this is”.
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Coal has already been largely phased out of Italy’s power mix. Generation from coal has fallen over 90% since 2012 and accounted for less than 2% of electricity production last year, almost entirely in Sardinia.
In 2024, Italy got about half of its electricity from gas and half from clean sources like hydropower, solar and wind.
Coal plants on stand-by
Italy has four coal-fired power plants left but only two, both in Sardinia, are still producing electricity.
The other two are run by the country’s largest utility Enel, in Brindisi and Civitavecchia. They were shut down at the end of last year after they became uneconomic.
The company had planned to begin decommissioning them, but the government intervened at the last minute, requiring them to remain on standby in case of an energy crisis.
Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, Italy’s Minister of Environment and Energy Security, said at the end of March that these two power plants could be switched back on “right away, with a government decree”.
“If the price of gas exceeds 70 euros per megawatt hour, producing with coal would be convenient,” he told Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.
European gas prices spiked to just below that level in mid-March as the Iran war escalated, but have since come down to around 50 euros per megawatt hour.
Coal surge in Asia
Italy’s move comes amid a broader, though limited, shift back towards coal in some parts of the world as countries respond to restricted gas supply. Germany slightly increased coal-fired generation in March and has considered reactivating idle plants as a precaution.
Outside Europe, the trend has been more pronounced. Several Asian countries heavily exposed to disruptions in Gulf gas supplies have increased coal use.
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Japan has allowed its coal power plants to operate at a higher rate to reduce the need for liquified natural gas (LNG). Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines have also increased electricity generation from coal since the start of the conflict in the Middle East.
But analysis from Zero Carbon Analytics suggested that producing electricity from solar is cheaper than coal in most south-east Asian countries.
“Energy security in Southeast Asia will not come from switching between fossil fuels,” Amy Kong added. “It will come from reducing dependence on them altogether.”
The post Italy pushes coal exit back after gas prices rise appeared first on Climate Home News.
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