Negotiators from around the world will soon descend on Brazil as it prepares to host the latest round of UN climate talks, on the banks of the Amazon river.
COP30 in Belém will see them discuss issues including the best ways to track progress on adaptation and how to pursue a global “just transition”.
Some of the event’s most important topics, such as countries’ new climate targets and raising international climate finance to $1.3tn, will officially take place outside the formal negotiations.
Nevertheless, these issues will likely drive much of the COP30 narrative.
In order to track parties’ positions on key negotiating points at the summit, Carbon Brief has analysed nearly 100 submissions to the UN and captured them in the interactive table below.
The first column in the table shows the countries and UN negotiating blocs, the second shows the topics up for debate and the third indicates specific issues within those topics.
The final column indicates the positions that the parties have expressed on each topic. These range from “priority” – meaning the party is likely to be pushing the issue – to “oppose”, meaning it is likely to push against it.
This is a “living document” that will be updated during the course of COP30.
Please get in touch if you would like to offer additions to the table by emailing policy@carbonbrief.org.
Explanations of the overarching issues and jargon-filled language that permeate the talks can be found below the interactive table.
Adaptation
At COP28 in 2023, governments adopted a “framework” for the “global goal on adaptation”, which was originally included in the Paris Agreement, but had seen little progress till then.
Over the following two years, negotiators and experts have been discussing a list of measurable “indicators” that can be used to track global progress on adaptation.
At COP30, a final list of 100 of these indicators is expected to be adopted, making it one of the key concrete outcomes expected at the summit in Belém.
From an initial list of more than 5,000 potential indicators, a group of experts worked to refine this down into a set of around 500 in June. This has been reduced further to 100 proposed final indicators, which will be negotiated at COP30.
These indicators must be both specific enough to allow for accurate measurement of progress and versatile enough to apply to the vast array of location-specific adaptation practices.
Beyond the list of indicators, divergences between parties remain around the topics of the “Baku Adaptation Roadmap”, the concept of “transformational adaptation” and adaptation finance. (See the Carbon Brief Q&A on the adaptation indicators for more details.)
Climate finance
As ever, discussions of “climate finance” – the financial resources channelled into climate action in developing countries – are likely to feature prominently at COP30.
Last year, countries had a deadline to decide on a new global climate-finance target known as the “new collective quantified goal on climate finance” (NCQG), meaning this issue took centre stage at the COP29 negotiations.
In Belém, formal climate-finance negotiations are less prominent. However, the launch of the “Baku to Belém roadmap to $1.3tn” ahead of the summit will provide an opportunity for parties to reflect on the topic and may influence wider negotiations.
The roadmap was mandated last year, due to a view among developing countries that the NCQG’s main target of “at least” $300bn a year by 2035 was insufficient.
Parties and negotiating blocs have made 36 submissions to the Baku to Belém consultation process, outlining what they want to see reflected in the final roadmap.
While the submissions refer to the Baku to Belém outcome specifically, they tend to reflect countries’ broader positions on the topic of climate finance.
Familiar issues, such as developing countries calling for more grant-based finance and developed countries stressing the importance of the private sector, feature prominently.
(For more analysis of countries’ positions on the roadmap, see Carbon Brief’s explainer on this topic.)
Just transition and global stocktake
Besides climate-adaptation indicators, the COP30 presidency has highlighted two other negotiating strands as priorities – the “just transition work programme” (JTWG) and the “dialogue” on implementing the outcome of the first “global stocktake”.
The former refers to discussions between parties about how best to support those affected by the transition to a low-carbon world.
As for the stocktake dialogue, this involves taking forward the outcomes from COP28, where countries were called on to contribute to various targets, including “tripling” global renewable energy capacity and “transitioning away” from fossil fuels.
There remain fundamental differences between parties about the scope of both of these discussions.
Broadly within the JTWP, developing countries want to see a holistic transition that takes into account not just fossil-fuel workers, but the wider communities and groups impacted by the low-carbon transition, along with financial support from developed countries needed to underpin this.
Developed countries generally want to keep the negotiations focused on labour and how to share knowledge from “best practice” examples of transition management.
Within the stocktake dialogue, some large developing countries – particularly the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) – want discussions to focus on climate finance.
Other developing countries and developed countries have pushed for a focus on climate ambition, including transitioning away from fossil fuels.
By the start of COP, nations are expected to have submitted their new climate plans under the Paris Agreement, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
To date, only around one-third of countries have announced or submitted their 2035 climate pledges, covering roughly half of global emissions.
The ambition – or lack of it – contained in these plans will set the stage for talks in Belém.
COP reforms
A decade on from the Paris Agreement, many experts have voiced concerns about the way COPs work and called for various reforms. (See Carbon Brief’s “COP experts: How could the UN climate talks be reformed?”)
Some of these proposals – including major changes such as the introduction of majority voting – have come from outside the COP process.
However, the Brazilian COP30 presidency has brought some of these discussions into the formal negotiations under the heading of “arrangements for intergovernmental meetings” (AIM). Here, countries have the opportunity to discuss improvements in the way the COP operates.
Under AIM, some parties have suggested ideas for streamlining the COP process, such as reducing the number of items on the agenda, potentially through multi-year planning so that discussions at each summit are more focused, or through limiting the number of new issues that can be introduced.
Other ideas include, capping the number of participants allowed to attend each summit and giving a more formal status to the COP “action agenda”, where pledges from countries or other actors are often made, but not always tracked and followed up.
See Carbon Brief’s previous interactive tables showing “who wants what” at COP26, COP27, COP28 and COP29.
The post Interactive: Who wants what at the COP30 climate change summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Who wants what at the COP30 climate change summit
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit