Published

4 months ago

February 11, 2026

Alice Rush

The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the US from the intergovernmental science panel for nature “harms everybody, including them”, according to its chair.

Dr David Obura is a leading coral reef ecologist from Kenya and chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s authority on the science of nature decline.

In January, Donald Trump announced intentions to withdraw the US from IPBES, along with 65 other international organisations, including the UN climate science panel and its climate treaty.

In an interview with Carbon Brief, Obura says the warming that humans have already caused means “coral reefs are very likely at a tipping point” and that it is now inevitable that Earth “will lose what we have called coral reefs”.

A global goal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 will not be possible to achieve for every ecosystem, he continues, noting that a lack of action from countries means “we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point”.

Despite this, it is still possible to reverse the “enabling drivers” of biodiversity decline within the next four years, he adds, warning that leaders must act as “our economies and societies fully depend on nature”.

The interview was conducted at the sidelines of an IPBES meeting in Manchester, UK, where governments agreed to a new report detailing how the “undervaluing” of nature by businesses is fuelling biodiversity decline and putting the global economy at risk.

On US leaving IPBES: “Any major country not being part of it harms everybody, including themselves.”
On reversing nature loss by 2030: “We won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point.”
On the value of biodiversity: “Nature is really the life support system for people. Our economies and societies fully depend on nature.”
On coral reefs: “We will lose what we have called coral reefs up until this point.”
On nature justice: “The places that are most vulnerable don’t have the income, or the assets, to conserve biodiversity.”
On IPBES’s latest report: “One of the key findings is all businesses have impacts and dependencies on nature.”
On the next UN nature summit: “We need acceleration of activities and impact and effectiveness, more than anything else.”

Carbon Brief: Last month Trump announced plans for the US to exit IPBES and dozens of other global organisations. You described this at the time as “deeply disappointing”. What are your thoughts on the decision now and what will be the main impacts of the US leaving IPBES?

David Obura: Well, part of the reason that I’ve come to IPBES is because, of course, I believe in the multilateral process, because we bring 150 countries together, we’re part of the UN and the multilateral system and we’re based on knowledge [that provides] inputs to policymaking. We have a conceptual framework that looks from the bottom up on how people depend on nature. I’m also doing a lot of science on Earth systems at the planetary level, how our footprint is exceeding the scale of the planet. We have to make decisions together. We need the multilateral system to work to help facilitate that. It has never been perfect. Of course, I come from a region [Kenya] that hasn’t been, you know, powerful in the multilateral process.

But we need countries to come together, so any major country not being part of it harms everybody, including themselves. It’s very important to try and keep pushing through with the knowledge and keep doing the work that we’re doing, so that, over time, hopefully [the US will] rejoin. Because, in the end, we will really need that to happen.

CB: This is the first IPBES meeting since Trump made the announcement. Has it had an impact so far on these proceedings and is there any kind of US presence here?

DO: This plenary is like every plenary that we have had. The current members are here. Some members are not. And, of course, we have some states here as observers working out if they’re going to join or not. And then we have a lot of private sector observers and universities and so on. The impact of a country leaving – the US in this case – has no impact on the plenary itself, because they’re not here making decisions on the things that we do.

We, of course, don’t have US government members attending in technical areas, but we do have institutions and universities and academics here attending as they have in the past. So, in that sense, the plenary goes on as it goes on – the science and the knowledge is the same. The decision-making processes we have here are the same. And, as I said earlier, what has an impact is the actual action that takes place afterwards, because a lot of the recommendations that we make are based on enabling conditions that governments put in place, to bring in place sustainability actions and so on. When governments are not doing that, especially major economic drivers, then the whole system suffers.

CB: When you were appointed as chair of IPBES more than two years ago, you said that your aim was to strengthen cohesion and impact and also get the findings of IPBES in front of more people. So how would you rate your progress on this now that it’s been about a couple of years?

DO: Well, like any intergovernmental process, we have a certain amount of inertia in what we do and it takes a few years to consult on topics for assessments and then to do them and to improve them and get them out.

One of the main things we’re discussing right now is we have had a rolling work programme from when IPBES started until 2030 and we need to decide on the last few deliverables and how we work in that period. We are asking for a mandate to spend the next year really considering the multiple options that we have in proposing a way forward for the last few years of this work programme. I feel that the countries are very aligned. We have done a lot of work, produced a lot of outputs. It is challenging for governments and other stakeholders to read our assessments and reach into them to find what’s useful to them. They make constant calls for more support, in uptake, in capacity building and in policy support.

The second global assessment in 2028 will be our 17th assessment [overall]. We would like to focus on really bringing all this knowledge together across assessments in ways that are relevant to different governments, different stakeholder groups, different networks to help them reach into the knowledge that’s in the assessments. And I think the governments, of course, want that as well, because many of them are calling for it. Many of the governments that support us financially, of course, want to see a return of investment on the money that they have put in.

CB: Nations agreed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Back in 2023 we had a conversation for Carbon Brief and you said that you were “highly doubtful” this goal could be achieved for every ecosystem by that date. Where do you stand on this now?

DO: I work on coral reefs and part of the reason I’ve come to IPBES platform is because the amount of climate change we’re committed to with current fossil fuel emissions and the focus on economic growth means that corals will continue to decline 20, 30, 40 years into the future. I think of that there’s no real doubt. The question is how soon we put in place the right actions to halt climate change. That will then have a lag on how long it takes for corals to cope with that amount of climate change.

We can’t halt and reverse the decline of every ecosystem. But we can try and bend the curve to halt and reverse the drivers of decline. So, that’s some of the economic drivers that we talk about in the nexus and transformative change assessment, the indirect drivers and the value shifts we need to have. What the Global Biodiversity Framework [GBF, a global nature agreement made in 2022] aspires to do in terms of halting and reversing biodiversity decline – we absolutely need to do that. We can do it and we can put in place the enabling conditions for that by 2030 for sure. But we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point to halt [the loss of] all ecosystems.

We’re now in 2026, so this is three years plus after the GBF was adopted. We still need greater action from all countries and all stakeholders and businesses and so on. That’s what we’re really pushing for in our assessments.

CB: Biodiversity loss has historically been underappreciated by world leaders. As the world continues to be gripped by geopolitical uncertainty, conflict and financial pressures, what are your thoughts on the chances of leaders addressing the issue of biodiversity loss in a meaningful way?

DO: What are the chances of addressing biodiversity loss? I mean, we have to do it. It’s really our life support system and if we only focus on immediate crises and threats and don’t pay attention to the long-term threats and crises, that only creates more short-term crises down the line, we make it harder and harder to do that. I hope that what I’m hoping we get to understand better through IPBES science, as well as others, is that we’re not just reporting on the state of biodiversity because it’s nice to have it, but it’s [because] diversity of nature is really the life support system for people. Our economies and societies fully depend on nature. If we want them to prosper and be secure into the long-term future, we have to learn how to bring the impact and dependencies of business, which is a focus of this assessment, in line with nature. And until we do that, we will just continue to magnify the potential for future crises and their impacts.

CB: You mentioned already that your expertise is in coral reefs. A report last year warned that the world has reached its first climate tipping point, that of widespread dying of warm water coral reefs. Do you agree with that statement and can you discuss the wider state of coral reefs across the world at this present moment?

DO: The report that came out last year in 2025 was a global tipping point report and it’s actually in 2023 the first one of those [was published]. I was involved in that one and we basically took what the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has produced, which [is] compiled from the [scientific] literature [which said] that 1.5-2C was the critical range for coral reefs, where you go from losing 70-90% to 90-99% of coral reefs around the world. [It is] a bit hard to say exactly what that means. What we did was we actually reduced that range from 1.5C-2C to 1-1.5C, based on observations we’ve already made about loss of corals. In 2024, the world was 1.5C above historical conditions for one year. The IPCC number requires a 20-year average [for 1.5C to be crossed]. So, we’re not quite at the IPCC limit, but we’re very close. Also, with not putting in place fast enough emission reductions, warming will continue.

Coral reefs are very likely at a tipping point. And, so, I do agree with the statement. It means that we lose the fully connected regional, global system that coral reefs have been in the past. There will still be some coral reefs in places that have some natural protection mechanisms, whether it’s oceanographic or some levels of sedimentation in green water from rivers can help. And there’s resilience of corals as well. Some corals will be able to adapt somewhat, but not all – and not all the other species too. We will lose what we have called coral reefs up until this point. We’ll still continue to have simpler coral ecosystems into the future, but they won’t be quite the same.

It is a crisis point and my hope is that, in coming out from the coral reef world, I can communicate that this is, this has been a crisis for coral reefs. It’s a very important ecosystem, but we don’t want it to happen to more and more and more ecosystems that support more [than] hundreds of millions and billions of people as well. Because, if we let things go that far, then, of course, we have much bigger crises on our hands.

CB: Something else you’ve spoken about before is around equity being one of the big challenges when it comes to responding to biodiversity loss. Can you explain why you think that biodiversity loss should be seen as a justice issue?

DO: Well, biodiversity loss is a justice issue because we are a part of biodiversity and – just like the loss of ecosystems and habitats and species – people live locally as well. People experience biodiversity loss in their surroundings.

The places that are most vulnerable and don’t have the income, or the assets, to either conserve biodiversity, or need to rely on it too much so they degrade it – they feel the impacts of that loss much more directly than those who do have more assets. Also, the more assets you have, the more you can import biodiversity products and benefits from somewhere else.

So, it’s very much a justice issue, both from local levels experiencing it directly, but then also at global levels. We are part of it [biodiversity], we don’t own it. It’s a global good, or a common public good, so we need to be preserving it for all people on the planet. In that sense, there are many, many justice issues that are involved in both loss of biodiversity and how you deal with that as well.

CB: How would you say IPBES is working towards achieving greater equity in biodiversity science?

DO: One of the headline findings of our values assessment in 2022, which looked at multiple values different cultures have and different worldviews around the planet, [was that] by accommodating or considering different worldviews and different perspectives, you achieve greater equity because you’re already considering other worldviews in making decisions.

So, that’s an important first step – just making it much more apparent and upfront that we can’t just make decisions, especially global ones, from a single worldview and the dominant one is the market economic worldview that we have. That’s very important.

But, then, also in how we do our assessments and the knowledge systems that are incorporated in them. We integrate different knowledge systems together and try and juxtapose – or if they can be integrated, we do that, sometimes you can’t – but you just need to illustrate different worldviews and perspectives on the common issue of biodiversity loss or livelihoods or something like that.

We hope that our conceptual framework and our values framework really help bring in this awareness of multiple cultures and multiple perspectives in the multilateral system.

CB: When this interview is published, IPBES will have released its report on business and biodiversity. What are some of the key takeaways from this?

DO: Our assessments integrate so much information that the key messages are actually, in retrospect, quite obvious in a way. One of the key findings it will say is that all businesses have impacts and dependencies on nature.

Of course, when you think about it, of course they do. We often think, “oh, well ecotourism is dependent on nature”, but even a supermarket is dependent on nature because a lot of the produce comes from a natural system somewhere, maybe in a greenhouse or enhanced by fertiliser, but it still comes from natural systems. Any other business will have either impacts on the nature around it, or it needs tree shade outside so people can walk in and things like that.

So, that’s one of the main findings. It’s not just certain sectors that need to respond to biodiversity loss and minimise their impacts. All sectors need to. Another finding, of course, is that it’s very differentiated depending on the type of business and type of sector.

It’s also very differentiated in different parts of the world in terms of responsibilities and also capabilities. So small businesses, of course, have much less leeway, perhaps, to change what they’re doing, whereas big businesses do and they have more assets, so they can deal with shifts and changes much better.

It’s a methodological assessment, rather than assessing the state of businesses, or the state of nature in relation to businesses [and] they pull together a huge list of methodologies and tools and things that businesses can access and do to understand their impacts and dependencies and act on them. Then [there is] also guidance and advice for governments on how to enable businesses to do that with the right incentives and regulations and so on. In that sense, it helps bring knowledge together into a single place.

It has been fantastic to see the parallel programme that the UK government has organised [at the IPBES meeting in Manchester]. It has brought together a huge range of British businesses and consultancies and so on that help businesses understand their impacts on nature. There’s a huge thirst.

To some extent, I would have thought, with so much capacity already in some of these organisations, what would they learn from our assessments? But they’re really hungry to see the integration. They really want to see that this really does make a big difference, that others will do the same, that the government will really support moving in these directions. There’s a huge amount of effort in the findings coming out and I’m sure that that will be felt all around the world and in different countries in different ways.

CB: As we’re speaking now, you’re still in the midst of figuring out exactly what the report will say and going through line-by-line to figure this out. Something we’ve seen at other negotiations…has been these entrenched views from countries on certain key issues. And one thing I did notice in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin discussion of yesterday’s [4 February] negotiations was that it said that some delegations wanted to remove mentions of climate change from the report. Has this been a key sticking point here or have there been any difficulties from countries during these negotiations?

DO: The nature of these multilateral negotiations is that the science is, in a way, a central body of work that is built through consensus of bringing all this knowledge together. It’s almost like a centralising process. And, yes, different countries have different perspectives on what their priorities are and the messages they want to see or not.

We still, of course, deal with different positions from countries. What we hope to do is to be able to convene it so that we see that we serve the countries best by having the most unbiased reporting of what the science is saying in language that is accessible to and useful to policymakers, rather than not having language or not having mention of things in in the agreed text.

How it’ll work out, I don’t know. Each time is different from the others. I think one of the key things that’s really important for us is that you do have different governance tracks on different aspects of the world we deal in. So, the [UN] Sustainable Development Goals, as well [as negotiations] on climate change – the UNFCCC, the climate convention, is the governing body for that. There’s two goals on nature – the Convention on Biological Diversity and other multilateral agreements are the institutions that govern that part.

We have come from a nature-based perspective, with nature’s contributions to a good quality of life for people…We start in the nature goals, but we actually have content that relates to all the other goals. We need to consider climate impacts on nature, or climate impacts on people that affect how they use nature. The nexus assessment was, in a way, a mini SDG report. It looked at six different Sustainable Development Goals.

We try and make sure that while on the institutional mechanisms, certain countries may try and want us to report within our mandate on nature, we do have findings that relate to climate change that relate to income and poverty and food production and health systems [and] that we need to report [outwardly] so that people are aware of those and they can use those in decision-making contexts.

That’s a difficult discussion and every time it comes out a little bit differently. But we hope we move the agenda further towards 2030 in the SDGs. We have an indivisible system that we need to report on.

CB: The next UN biodiversity summit COP17 is taking place later this year. What are the main outcomes you’re hoping to see at that summit?

DO: The main outcomes I would hope to see from the biodiversity summit is greater alignment across the countries. We really need to move forward on delivering on the GBF as part of the sustainable development agenda as well. So there will be a review of progress. We need acceleration of activities and impact and effectiveness, more than anything else.

That means, of course, addressing all of the targets in the GBF. Not equally, necessarily, but they all need progress to support one another in the whole. We work to provide the science inputs that can help deliver that through the CBD [Convention on Biological Diversity] mechanisms as well. We hope they use our assessments to the fullest and that we see good progress coming out.

CB: Great, thank you very much for your time.

The post IPBES chair Dr David Obura: Trump’s US exit from global nature panel ‘harms everybody’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

IPBES chair Dr David Obura: Trump’s US exit from global nature panel ‘harms everybody’

Climate Change

DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids

Published

8 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

UK, Europe and India battle heatwaves

‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy” temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.

‘BRUTAL REMINDER’: In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.

Around the world

CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg.
NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.

Four million

The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.

Latest climate research

Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Map of the UK showing that at least 67 NHS sites have been forced to close due to weather-related flooding since 2021

A Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.

Spotlight

How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economy

This week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.

Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.

In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.

Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.

Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief.

However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.

“We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.

A nascent industry

Solar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.

The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.

Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.

However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.

“Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.

The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.

Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.

Powering rural communities

Many rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.

According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.

A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.

With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.

Watch, read, listen

MOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.

ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.

Coming up

31 May: Colombia presidential elections
31 May-5 June: Global Environment Facility council meeting, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
2-5 June: The Venice Agreement for Peatlands workshop, Kisumu, Kenya

Pick of the jobs

National Oceanography Centre, engagement assistant (external communications) | Salary: £28,254. Location: Southampton, UK
Dangote Industries, decarbonisation specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lagos, Nigeria
City of New York, chief decarbonization officer | Salary: $261,469. Location: New York City
Climate Central, writer and associate editor | Salary: $72,000-$75,000. Location: US (Remote)

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The post DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids

Climate Change

Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?

Published

8 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.

Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.

Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”

As the Mission 300 initiative advances, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).

Apr 30, 2026

Clean Energy Frontier

Kenya seeks regional coordination to build African mineral value chains

Kenyan President William Ruto is the latest African leader to announce an end to raw mineral exports as governments want to add more value to their resources

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Restricting raw materials exports is well-intentioned but without other policies to foster domestic processing, they can backfire

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Feb 4, 2026

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In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, GEAPP’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.

Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. So we want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country.

Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed.

Campaigners in Africa are demanding their governments stop the development of fossil fuels on the continent and embrace the opportunities of renewable energy
(Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)

The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.

Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.

We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.

The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.

Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?

A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that.

So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities.

Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?

A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses.

Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier.

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The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.

Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?

A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.

So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that.

Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?

A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.

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When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable.

To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.

Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.

The post Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?

Climate Change

AI boom means US is now ‘investing more’ in fossil-fuel power than China

Published

9 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

A rapid expansion of data centres across the nation is at the heart of the US tech sector’s plans to continue “dominat[ing]” the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

Annual investment in fossil-fuel power in China and the US, $bn. The figure for 2026 is an IEA estimate, based on current trends. Source: IEA.

The IEA’s latest world energy investment report shows that spending on renewables and electricity grids continues to dominate at the global scale.

In the US, Trump administration policies such as the phase-out of tax credits for renewables has led to the IEA revising its forecast for new wind and solar power downwards.

At the same time, US electricity demand is expected to rise by an average of 2% per year from 2026 to 2030, with data centres contributing half of the overall increase.

This is leading to what the IEA calls an “AI-driven push” to build new gas-power plants in the US, the world’s largest data-centre market and largest gas producer.

Globally, orders for new gas-power plants increased to 130 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 – a 25-year high – and US demand was a “major factor” in this, according to the IEA.

Much of the demand is coming from tech companies in the US seeking to bypass grid connection queues by building “captive” gas-power plants.

As the chart below shows, since the start of 2025 these US captive data centres alone have signed off on more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world – aside from the US itself.

Total value of new gas generation final investment decisions by country, region or use-case, between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, $bn. Source: IEA.

Overall, investment in grid upgrades, power equipment and electricity generation to support the buildout of data-centre infrastructure around the world hit $105bn in 2025, according to the IEA.

This is more than the total invested in the energy sector across the whole of Africa – a continent where more than 600 million people do not have access to electricity.

The IEA notes that strong demand for gas-power plants for data centres in the US – and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East – is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.

The agency also points out that as the tech sector becomes a “major energy investor”, accounting for around 40% of all corporate power-purchase agreements, it is also “underpinning momentum” for emerging clean technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal.