“Fragmented governance” between biodiversity, climate change, food, water and health is putting all of those systems at risk, according to a major new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
The report, known as the “nexus assessment”, explores the interlinkages between climate change, biodiversity, food, water and human health.
It says that focusing on a single element of the nexus at the expense of the others will have negative impacts for both humans and the planet.
At the same time, many of the actions that can be taken to address nature loss will have co-benefits for the climate.
The report also finds that funding for nature is dwarfed by both public and private finance that goes towards nature-harming activities.
However, it says, reforming global financial systems could help address the “funding gap” needed to effectively protect nature.
These conclusions form part of a “summary for policymakers”, a 57-page document that explains the key messages of the report. The full report will be published sometime next year.
IPBES is an independent body that provides scientific advice around biodiversity and biodiversity loss to policymakers, including through the Convention on Biological Diversity. It was modelled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and functions in much the same way.
Prof Pam McElwee, co-chair of the report and a professor at Rutgers University, told a press briefing that biodiversity, climate, food, water and health should not be treated as “single-issue crises”. She added:
“These are interlinked crises. They are compounding each other. They are making things worse, and the current business as usual approach is not only failing to tackle the drivers of these problems, [but] in some cases, we are wasting money because we’re duplicating policies, when in fact, we could be treating them as issues that need to be dealt with together.”
Here, Carbon Brief explains five key takeaways from the IPBES “nexus” assessment report.
1. Biodiversity loss puts food and water systems, human health and the climate at risk
3. Shifting to sustainable healthy diets will benefit people and the planet
4. All available options for restoring nature would also help to tackle and adapt to climate change
5. Reforming global financial systems can help close the biodiversity funding gap
1. Biodiversity loss puts food and water systems, human health and the climate at risk
The report explores how the decline of biodiversity in “all regions of the world” has serious consequences for food, water, health and climate change.
It stresses that biodiversity is “essential” to human existence, because it supports water and food supplies, underpins public health and contributes to the stability of the climate.
But over the last 30-50 years, biodiversity has declined by an average of 2-6% each decade across “all of the assessed indicators”, according to the report.
It notes that the ongoing decline has been caused by an intensification of the direct drivers of biodiversity loss: land- and sea-use change, climate change, overexploitation of resources, invasive alien species and pollution.
These trends have, in turn, been caused by “a wide range of indirect drivers”, including economic, demographic, cultural and technological changes, the report argues.
When these “direct” and “indirect” drivers of biodiversity loss interact with each other, they cause “cascading impacts among the nexus elements”, the report warns. In particular, it notes that climate change and biodiversity loss “interact and compound each other to negatively impact ecosystem resilience and all the other nexus elements”.
The document points to “fragmented governance” of biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change as a major obstacle preventing effective action on the issues.
While environmental regulations have been “partially successful”, they are “unlikely to be fully effective without more concerted efforts to address interlinkages among the nexus elements and their direct and indirect drivers”, it warns.
Prof Paula Harrison, co-chair of the report and a scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, says that governance systems need to reflect the interconnections between biodiversity, food, health, water and climate change. She told a press briefing on 16 December:
“Because our current governance systems are often different departments, they are working in silos. They are very fragmented, and they are working and developing policy in isolation – often these links [between climate, health, biodiversity, water and food] are not even acknowledged or ignored.
“What that actually means is that you can just get unintended consequences or trade-offs that emerge because people just weren’t thinking in the holistic way.”
For example, unsustainable agricultural practices introduced to increase food production result in biodiversity loss, unsustainable water usage, reduced food diversity and quality, and increased pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.
The graphic below provides an illustration of how unsustainable agriculture can impact all five of the nexus elements.
Moreover, the report finds that over the last 50 years, decision makers have prioritised “short-term benefits and financial returns for a small number of people”, while ignoring the negative impacts of their actions on the five nexus elements.
This oversight exacerbates societal inequalities, according to the report, given that communities in developing countries and Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, climate change and health risks.
Overall, it says that “dominant economic systems” are causing “unsustainable and inequitable economic growth”, noting that $7tn a year is invested in activities detrimental to nexus elements.
2. Focusing solely on food security leads to ‘severe trade-offs’ with climate, water and biodiversity
To assess how the five nexus elements – biodiversity, water, food, health and climate – will interact with each other over the 21st century, the authors used 186 scenarios from 52 studies to develop six “nexus scenario archetypes”.
The table below shows the overall projected impact on each nexus element under the different archetypes. The graphic beneath shows how the different nexus elements impact each other under each archetype.
In both graphics, blue arrows show a positive impact, red a negative impact and grey a variable impact. More arrows, or thicker lines, indicate a stronger impact.
The report calls archetypes one and two “sustainability scenarios”.
These are associated with sustainable consumption and production, healthy diets, reduced food waste and lower water use. These archetypes project positive long-term outcomes across all of the nexus elements.
Additionally, the benefits of economic growth are more evenly distributed across different “societal groups”, and multiple actors and knowledge systems – including Indigenous knowledge – are involved in decision-making.
The “nature-oriented nexus” – the first archetype – focuses on increasing protected areas and improving their effectiveness, with a focus on areas with high biodiversity. This takes “deliberate efforts to address existing and emerging injustices and inequality”.
The report finds evidence that “protecting up to 30% of terrestrial, freshwater and marine areas can provide nexus-wide benefits, if these are effectively managed for nature and people”.
The archetype also sees a transformation of global food systems, through changes including increased sustainable agricultural practices, reducing food waste, developing new food sources and promoting healthy, sustainable diets.
Archetype two, called the “balanced nexus”, is characterised by stronger environmental regulation and less reliance on technologies than the nature-oriented nexus. This archetype has a strong focus on restoration and sustainable use of natural resources. It has fewer positive impacts on biodiversity, water and climate and slightly more positive impacts for food and human health, compared to archetype one.
Meanwhile, archetypes three, four and five each prioritise a specific nexus element. These archetypes force “severe trade-offs among the nexus elements” and result in “unsustainable and inequitable economic growth”.
For example, archetype five – “food first” – uses “unsustainable” agricultural processes, which result in higher greenhouse gas emissions, land-use change, water use and nitrate pollution. This scenario sees nutritional health improve, but has negative impacts on biodiversity, water and climate change.
Archetypes five and six are “business-as-usual” scenarios, which represent the continuation of current trends. These are characterised by “intensive…material and energy consumption, increased greenhouse gas emissions, intensive land use and
unsustainable exploitation of natural resources”.
The sixth archetype is called “nature overexploitation” and is characterised by negative impacts across all five nexus elements. This archetype sees overconsumption of natural resources, unsustainable energy demand and “weak environmental regulation exacerbated by delayed action”.
The report warns that these business-as-usual scenarios result in “declining outcomes for biodiversity, mainly driven by unsustainable food production and resource extraction as well as climate change”.
The report concludes:
“Maximising all nexus elements simultaneously is unlikely to be possible, but achieving balance across policy goals will likely lead to beneficial outcomes for nature and people.”
3. Shifting to sustainable healthy diets will benefit people and the planet
The report says it is well established by scientists that shifting to sustainable healthy diets and reducing food waste would “benefit food security and health” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
This shift could also “free up land, providing in a range of cases co-benefits for nexus elements, such as biodiversity conservation and carbon sinks”, the report says.
The assessment examines 71 “response options” for tackling at least one element of the nexus between biodiversity, water, food security, health and climate change.
The report says that these responses “are not meant to be an exhaustive list”, but “represent a menu of options that can be applied in different contexts”, adding:
“Some response options may not be appropriate in all countries, and all would be implemented in accordance with national legislation and sovereignty and in accordance with relevant international obligations. Even within countries, effectiveness and acceptability depend critically on political, social and ecological context.”
The graphic below summarises the response options, which are grouped into 10 categories. The coloured tags indicate which element of the nexus the option addresses.
The graphic illustrates how most of the options for addressing food security involve consuming sustainably, managing ecosystem functions and ensuring Indigenous rights and equity.
Measures to consume sustainably in order to boost food security include shifting to sustainable healthy diets and reducing food waste.
The diagram also notes that human health could be improved by reducing meat overconsumption.
The report says it is well established that “behaviour change will be necessary to shift consumption practices”.
It says this can be enabled by the “increasing accessibility and desirability” of sustainable healthy diets. It also says that implementing food-based dietary guidelines to the public, “particularly targeting public school feeding programmes”, can create a “structured demand” for healthy and sustainable food.
This measure could also “increase opportunities for on-farm diversification aimed at increasing supply and consumption of local seasonal foods”, the report says.
The report also says that improving the sustainable use and management of ecosystems is “particularly important for the agricultural sector”.
This is because “the way food is produced, what foods are produced and consumed, where they are produced, and how much food is lost and wasted impact both nature and people”. It says the “ecological intensification” of croplands, rangelands and aquaculture can help to address food security while having benefits for people and nature.
“Ecological intensification” refers to the idea of using natural functions of an ecosystem to produce more food in a sustainable way – for example, by allowing wild insects to pollinate crops.
The report also says “agroecology” could have positive effects for biodiversity and addressing climate change. It says:
“Agroecology represents a shift to production systems where equitable access to land and a blend of scientific and Indigenous and local knowledge guide the sustainable management of biodiversity, crops and other resources.”
4. All available options for restoring nature would also help to tackle and adapt to climate change
All of the available options for restoring biodiversity examined by the report would come with co-benefits for tackling and adapting to climate change, although the size of this positive impact varies with each technique.
The figure below shows the positive (dark blue) and negative (red) impacts associated with the report’s 71 “response options” for tackling at least one element of the nexus between biodiversity, food security, health and climate change (see previous section for more on these options).
In the figure, positive and negative impacts are shown for biodiversity (butterfly icon), water (droplet), food security (wheat), health (heart) and climate change (thermometer). The size of the circle represents the relative size of the effect.
The figure shows that all of the options for addressing biodiversity loss (B01-14) come with a positive impact on efforts to tackle and adapt to climate change.
Furthermore, the report says, implementing multiple response options together can have a synergistic effect, “enhanc[ing] nexus-wide benefits”. Current approaches, it adds, “have failed to harness the full potential…because they have been designed and implemented in isolation”.
The report says it is well established that addressing nature loss by protecting natural ecosystems from further destruction could come with benefits for all elements of the nexus, adding:
“Conserving or halting conversion of forests and other ecosystems protects human health and wellbeing by combating climate change, reducing the impact of extreme weather events, such as storms, droughts and landslides, increasing water and air quality and reducing disease risk.”
It is also well established that restoring degraded ecosystems can help to tackle climate change “when it targets carbon storage in forests, peatlands, seagrass beds, salt marshes and marine and coastal ecosystems that contribute to carbon sequestration”, the report says.
Restoration is “most effective” when it is inclusive of the knowledge and rights of Indigenous peoples and when it covers large areas, according to the report.
Many of the response options offered in the report support the implementation or achievement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.
The report says:
“The capacity to contribute to multiple goals simultaneously is a common and powerful feature of nexus approaches. These response options are therefore a promising mechanism for integrating efforts and accelerating progress towards multiple policy goals and frameworks.”
However, it says, in order to achieve these goals within a nexus framework, “new types of indicators, data and processes may need to be put into place”. It adds that current, siloed methods of governance “have resulted in misaligned, duplicative and inconsistent governance and have failed to address direct and indirect drivers of change”.
5. Reforming global financial systems can help close the biodiversity funding gap
The report identifies the gap in finance needed to meet the needs for biodiversity action as between $300bn and $1tn per year.
Additionally, it says, achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals related to the nexus will require at least another $4tn in investment annually in water, food, health and climate change.
Given those large sums, the report calls for “urgent action” to “address the dominance of a narrow set of interests within economic and financial systems” and increase investment in biodiversity, food and water. It adds that these wider reforms could “amplif[y]” the additional investment made in the nexus.
For example, regulatory reform could make investment in nature more attractive by increasing the costs of biodiversity-harming activities. This is closely linked to target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls on countries to “eliminate, phase out or reform incentives” that are harmful to biodiversity.
Target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Source: CBD (2022)
According to the report, there is established but incomplete evidence that the world’s current economic and financial systems are contributing to biodiversity loss and resulting in increased “nature-related risks”, which, it adds, are “mutually reinforcing with risks from climate change”.
These risks are estimated to be “in the trillions of dollars”.
Spending “aimed at improving the status of biodiversity” is estimated at around $200bn per year.
Currently, the world spends 35 times more resources on activities that directly damage biodiversity than it does on preserving nature. This is exacerbated by an additional $300bn spent on illegal activities that harm nature, such as illegal deforestation and wildlife trafficking.
The report identifies three pathways that could help better align global financial flows for biodiversity and the rest of the nexus:
- Improving the availability and use of information on the “diverse values of nature”, such as by updating transparency and reporting requirements to reflect the nexus elements.
- Improving access to finance through multiple different financial instruments, including green bonds, reformed tax policies and payments for ecosystem services.
- Reducing negative incentives, including by improved investment safeguards and addressing harmful subsidies.
The graphic below shows the current state of funding for the nexus, with biodiversity-harming financial flows shown in red and biodiversity-positive finance in blue. The icons denote the funding that is directed to each element of the nexus: biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.
The graphic also shows how financial reforms could benefit the nexus by reducing negative finance and increasing biodiversity-supporting finance.
Of the finance that is currently directed towards biodiversity and the other components of the nexus, there are “some existing synergies”, the report suggests. However, more than half of the funding identified in the report goes solely to addressing a single element of the nexus: 48% for biodiversity, 8% for water and 1% for climate change.
Additionally, there is a “clear bias” in the distribution of biodiversity finance, with public funds primarily concentrated in North America, Europe and China, the report says. At the same time, only 5% of global private biodiversity finance is allocated to least-developed countries.
Addressing related concerns, such as the unsustainable debt burden faced by developing countries and striving for just and equitable transitions, can help support financing the nexus as well. The report concludes:
“Collectively, these efforts could reform the relationship between the economy and nature, enhance equity and deliver sustainable development outcomes.”
The post IPBES nexus report: Five takeaways for biodiversity, food, water, health and climate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
IPBES nexus report: Five takeaways for biodiversity, food, water, health and climate
The African continent’s hopes for a legally binding agreement to combat drought have been dashed again, as UN land restoration talks in Mongolia passed the issue onto the next set of talks in Egypt in two years’ time.
For over a decade, Africa has pushed for a UN protocol on drought risk management that would acknowledge drought as an issue requiring a regional and global – not just a national – response, potentially paving the way for more finance to help ensure water is available when drought hits.
A formal protocol would enable countries to transition from reacting to drought once it hits to “a proactive enabling mechanism to address drought and its effects such as migration”, said a Tunisian negotiator on behalf of the African Group of countries last week. Once land is regularly too dry and infertile to grow crops or graze animals, people often leave to seek a living elsewhere.
But this effort to adopt a protocol, led by Africa, has been resisted at successive land restoration COPs under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), mainly by developed countries, which argue that a legally weaker alternative – a framework – would be faster and cheaper to set up.
Governments at the previous COP in Saudi Arabia in 2024 failed to reach agreement despite talks running past midnight, while this year’s saw African officials coordinate a walkout from negotiating rooms on Wednesday morning, according to two sources at the talks.
Drought deal delayed until 2028
The IISD’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a non-governmental organisation which unlike the media is allowed to watch and report on closed-door talks, said a call to suspend negotiations on Wednesday showed negotiations had reached “boiling point” and “made some jaws drop”.
Negotiations resumed after a lunchtime meeting with the Mongolian COP presidency although governments were only eventually able to agree that they could not find consensus in Ulaanbaatar and should resume talks on an instrument to deal with drought in 2028.
Christine Colvin, WWF’s head of freshwater policy, told Climate Home News that, with droughts hitting from Honduras to the English region of Hampshire, something concrete – whether a protocol or a framework – is needed urgently “rather than the can being kicked down the road for another two years as will now happen with the protocol procrastination”.
But, in a closing press conference on Friday, the Mongolian minister presiding over talks celebrated that governments had reached consensus on several “contentious” issues and that agenda items blocked at this year’s COP17 would be put on the agenda for COP18 in Egypt.
US blocks agenda items
Other agenda items that divided countries were on measuring land degradation’s effects on women, enhancing the involvement of civil society and women in land COPs, and the UNCCD working more closely and effectively with the UN’s climate and nature conventions.
On the COP’s opening day two weeks ago, the US representative said the Trump government objects to these agenda items “on their premise and no amount of negotiation will allow us to join consensus on these items. As such we request that they be struck from the agenda at which time we will then be able to approve it, saving us valuable negotiating time.”
A US State Department spokesperson later told Climate Home News that the US wants the UN “to get back to basics by refocusing on its core mandate, eliminating overlap, and reducing competition for scarce resources”.
The spokesperson added, “that means prioritising the concrete work member states created [the UN] to do – rather than diverting limited time, attention, and resources toward social and political agendas, including gender-related initiatives.”
On COP’s first day, the European Union and Brazil pushed back against the blocking of these agenda items, with a Brazilian negotiator saying his country attaches “great importance” to them. But the Mongolian presidency directed governments to adopt the rest of the agenda without the controversial items, which were discussed privately with countries throughout the two weeks.
An EU statement, read out later by Irish minister Timmy Dooley, accused “some parties” (meaning national governments) of having adopted a “less constructive approach” and preventing “discussions on important matters from even commencing”.
The agenda items the US refused to engage with were never discussed and were only placed onto the agenda for the next COP on the last day. Those talks will take place in Egypt in two years’ time, with Donald Trump due then to be in his last year as US president.
No restoration without women
The blocking of the gender agenda item has stymied attempts, agreed on by governments at the last COP, to develop gender-specific indicators for the UNCCD’s next overall framework and to facilitate more women delegates at COPs. Women made up only about a quarter of delegates to COP15 in 2022, UNCCD analysis with the latest data shows
Criticising the move to keep gender off the agenda, the EU said in a statement that it welcomes “the attention being given at COP17 to women pastoralists and herders, recognising their contribution to sustainable land management and resilient rural livelihoods”.
The head of the UNCCD, former Egyptian environment minister Yasmine Fouad, said on Friday that “regardless that the agenda item was blocked”, she was proud that she and COP17 President Batmunkh Battsetseg had led the COP as women and attended the gender caucus (a meeting of groups supporting women at the talks).
“Without the women,” she told the closing press conference on Friday, “we will not be able to restore land, restore hope, restore life or restore even our children and grandchildren. And we will keep on pushing that agenda.”
The civil society agenda item aimed to allow NGOs to attend land COP negotiations, as they do at climate COPs, and included terms of reference for an Indigenous Peoples Caucus.
A representative of Indigenous Peoples told the COP’s closing plenary meeting that the group had “deep disappointment that the agenda of this COP has removed the dedicated space for indigenous peoples”. “We cannot restore the land while removing the voices of those who care for it,” she said.
On Tuesday, the UNCCD’s deputy head Andrea Meza was asked about Indigenous Peoples’ participation. She said that the blocking of “one agenda item” is “generating uncertainty in the progress” towards creating caucuses for Indigenous Peoples and for Local Communities within the talks.
Because of the “complex geopolitical situation” making it hard to obtain consensus, coalitions of the willing have become more important, she added.
Mining out, money in
Outside the formal negotiations, the summit was marked by a focus on the strongly Mongolian issues of the role played by pastoralists and rangelands like grasslands, as well as mining, in both degrading and restoring land.
Part of the conference was sponsored by Australian mining company Rio Tinto and its local partner Oyu Tolgoi. Their presence was protested by campaigners wearing T-shirts calling on the companies to “stop wasting drinking water” and to “get out of Mongolia”.
The UNCDD and others praised the success of the summit in raising more finance for land restoration. The COP saw institutions like the Asian Development Bank and Global Environment Facility pledge money to combat land degradation, with the UNCCD estimating that $645 million of new commitments were made.
An estimated $355 billion a year is needed through 2030 to meet global land restoration commitments, compared with around $77 billion currently invested. Private finance accounts for only around 6% of global investment, according to the UNCCD.
UNCCD chief scientist Baron Orr told a press conference that many of the announcements were public-private partnerships that use government money to “even the playing field” for companies that want to protect land, in a bid to ensure they are not disadvantaged compared with those that do not.
Such partnerships are a “huge opportunity”, he said, especially as “we’re not in a moment of public finance – public finance is tight in every country.”
The post Despite African walkout, fractious land COP ends without drought deal appeared first on Climate Home News.
Despite African walkout, fractious land COP ends without drought deal
Burdened by rising fuel import costs and an “ocean crisis” of record-breaking heat, Pacific island nations are seeking to build support for a new regional fund ahead of COP31, intended to channel investment into renewable energy, community resilience and ocean protection, experts said.
Leaders from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), including Australia and New Zealand, are expected to issue a call for global pledges to the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF) at a high-level meeting this coming week in Palau, seeking to build a new model for financing climate action.
The new regional fund was formally launched in May this year and is meant to “serve communities at a community level”, swiftly channelling investments for their projects on the ground, according to Fiji’s assistant minister for foreign affairs, Lenora Qereqeretabua.
“We are expecting pledges for the PRF, and these funds will go to communities that apply,” she told journalists at an online briefing. “We have organised it in such a way that it makes our application processes much, much easier than applying for global funding.”
Qereqeretabua added that she expects that PRF funds will be “utilised by communities to protect themselves from climate change and the effects of climate change.”
The Pacific Islands Forum meeting is expected to shape the region’s priorities ahead of this year’s pre-COP, hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu, and COP31, which will be co-led by Australia and Türkiye.
At COP31, a dedicated session on the climate finance needs of small island states will seek to drive pledges into the PRF. The fund has so far received about $172 million in capital – with about $67 million coming from Australia – and aims to close the year with $500 million.
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Ocean heat and fossil fuel shocks
Leaders from the Pacific will meet in Palau from Sunday amid an “ocean crisis” of record-breaking ocean heat caused by this year’s “super El Niño”, according to Kevin Chand, Pacific ocean policy director at National Geographic’s Pristine Seas conservation project.
Leaders at the PIF are expected to put forward commitments towards new marine protected areas, which will be key for shielding ecosystems from future climate extremes, Chand said. The forum is expected to issue a statement on the need for ocean action at COP31, and announce commitments towards reaching the global goal of protecting 30% of the planet’s land and sea ecosystems by 2030.
Rising ocean heat could lead to food insecurity and lost government earnings in the region, as key fish stocks like tuna start migrating away from their coastline in search of colder waters, said Coral Pasisi, director of climate change and sustainability at the Pacific Community (SPC).
Climate shocks are deepening existing economic pressures, as Pacific nations have spent up to a quarter of their GDP on fossil fuel imports due to the war in Iran, according to a recent report by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.
Wesley Morgan, one of the study’s authors, told journalists that partner nations “ought to be putting their money where their mouth is”, and should support the energy transition in the Pacific by covering the upfront costs of switching from polluting diesel to solar power, batteries and electricity grid upgrades.
China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain
Given the increase in climate-related shocks and sea-level rise, the PIF should also mention the need to phase out fossil fuel extraction and consumption, said Sindra Sharma, international policy lead at the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).
Last year’s COP30 failed to deliver a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which led to a group of countries – including several Pacific island nations – pursuing their own fossil fuel phase-out summit in Santa Marta, Colombia. Next year’s conference will be hosted by Tuvalu and co-chaired by Ireland, which should also receive backing from the PIF, Sharma said.
Both the chairs of the Santa Marta coalition and the Australian COP31 co-presidency have vowed to continue a push for this topic to be discussed at COP31.
New fund to test allies
As local communities in the Pacific struggle to access global climate funds, the PRF’s planned model for quick, direct disbursements has “very solid and good” intentions, Sharma said, but it will need political and financial backing from donor countries.
“The proof is going to be when the fund actually starts operating and delivering to communities,” she added. “If there is too much bureaucracy in being able to access the funds, for example. These things will have to be scrutinised.”
The facility aims to deliver funds in two categories: one for climate adaptation and “disaster resilience”, and another for social and community resilience that includes areas like community capacity-building, education, data analytics and financial management, among others. It will launch its first call for proposals at the PIF.
Morgan added that Australia will need to “leverage global interests” so that funding is directed to the Pacific Resilience Facility “or else the Pacific won’t be able to trust Australia as a partner”. The country ratified the PRF treaty in May, triggering its entry into force.
“The perception [of Australia] in the region is genuinely divided, and it’s worth being honest about it,” Sharma said, adding that the pre-COP31 in Fiji, which is usually limited to a technical space for negotiations, will determine how meaningful Australia’s advocacy for the Pacific can be.
This time, Pacific nations want to use the pre-COP in early October as an opportunity to demonstrate the challenges their largely low-lying islands face and to advocate for their political priorities, including a renewed global effort to limit global warming to 1.5C by cutting emissions faster and deeper. World leaders are due to visit Tuvalu to experience the frontline of rising sea levels, although Australia and Fiji have yet to confirm who will attend.
“In Bonn, Australia was largely missing on the negotiated outcomes that we so urgently need to see. It’s not enough to get Pacific priorities on the agenda. Agenda placement is not delivery,” Sharma added.
The post Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31
Climate Change
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
More than 40% of children under the age of 10 globally are already experiencing at least 20 additional “heat-stress days” due to climate change.
This is according to a new attribution study, published in Science Advances, which combines climate models with demographic data to assess the age groups and regions that are exposed to the most hot, humid days.
The study finds that children up to the age of nine already face more additional heat-stress days globally as a result of climate change than any other age group.
It adds that south Asia and west Africa are recording the greatest childhood exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat – largely because these regions have a rapidly growing population with the highest proportion of young children.
As the climate warms, children will continue to be more exposed to heat stress than any other age group, the paper warns.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that the findings should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Humid heat
High temperatures can be deadly. For example, the heatwaves that swept across Europe in the summer of 2026 have been linked to tens of thousands of “excess deaths”.
A prominent 2021 study found that children born in the 21st century will be exposed to more extreme weather events in their lifetimes than their parents and grandparents.
Four years later, a study conducted by scientists from the same team found that more than half of children born in 2020 – around 62 million people – will experience “unprecedented lifetime exposure” to heatwaves, even if warming is limited to 1.5C.
Now, the latest research from the same team finds that children already face greater exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat than adults as a result of human-caused climate change.
Extreme heat is particularly dangerous when combined with high humidity. In hot weather, the human body produces sweat to cool itself down. However, as humidity increases, sweating becomes less effective.
The study uses wet-bulb globe temperature – a measure of temperature that takes humidity and wind into account – to calculate heat stress. It defines a “heat-stress day” as any day with a wet-bulb globe temperature above 28C, as this is considered the threshold for “moderate heat stress”
The authors then use climate models to simulate global temperature patterns in the present-day climate. (The authors use the climate of 2023, in which human activity has caused 1.3C of warming, to represent the “present-day”.)
They then count the number of heat-stress days that each country records on average, per year. The authors then repeat this exercise, simulating a pre-industrial climate without human-caused warming.
By comparing the number of heat-stress days in the present-day climate with the number in a pre-industrial climate, the authors can determine how many extra heat-stress days were driven by climate change. They refer to these as “extra” or “attributable” heat-stress days.
The authors find that “low-latitude” countries, located in the tropics, record the most extra heat-stress days.
For example, the paper finds that people living in Côte d’Ivoire currently face 112 heat-stress days every year. It adds that around half of these are due to human-caused climate change.
In contrast, Germany sees only 0.1 heat-stress days per year in today’s climate on average, which is largely attributable to human-caused climate change.
Rosa Pietroiusti, a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and lead author on the study, explains why this number may seem lower than expected.
She tells Carbon Brief that the paper “really focuses on humid heat, at levels that are relatively rarely felt in Europe”. She adds:
“Our data also doesn’t capture the urban heat island effect, due to the resolution of the data we use, which also would lead to underestimations of heat stress locally, and lead to a mismatch with what people are experiencing at local scales, particularly in cities.”
Inequality
Extreme heat affects some people more severely than others. Children, people over 65 and those with pre-existing medical conditions or certain disabilities are among the most vulnerable. This is because their bodies are less able to regulate their temperature.
The authors use gridded demographic data to determine the age structure of each country. From this, they calculate how many people from each age cohort are exposed to extra heat days as a result of climate change.
The research finds that globally, 583 million children under the age of 10 already live through at least 20 attributable heat days every year. This accounts for 44% of all children in this age bracket.
In comparison, 190 million people aged 60-69 face at least 20 attributable heat days per year, accounting for 30% of this age cohort.
The authors find that children face the greatest exposure to humid heat for two main reasons.
First, there are more young people alive today than older people, with 1.3 billion children aged under 10 in the world, compared to 0.6 billion people aged 60-69.
Second, they find that countries in Africa and Asia typically have rapidly growing populations with more young children. In contrast, many countries in the northern hemisphere – which are typically cooler – have older populations.
The map below shows how many extra stress heat days each country currently faces as a result of human-caused climate change. Darker reds indicate a higher number of attributable heat days. The blue circles show the percentage of the population under the age of 10, with larger circles indicating a higher percentage.
Warming world
The authors also repeat their analysis for a 1.5C and 2C warmer world. They use population estimates from the SSP2 scenario, which projects that the world’s population will peak at more than nine billion in the second half of the 21st century, with most growth occurring in low-latitude regions – especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
The research finds that, in today’s climate, 11% of all under 10s currently experience 100 or more extra heat-stress days per year due to climate change. In worlds warmed by 1.5C and 2C, the percentage rises to 13% and 23%, respectively.
In contrast, only 6% of all people aged 60-69 currently face 100 or more extra heat-stress days each year due to climate change. This number rises to 9% and 17% for 1.5C and 2C worlds, respectively.
These results are shown in the plot below. The three rows represent the climates of 2023 (top), a 1.5C world (middle) and a 2C world (bottom). The columns show different age cohorts, from the oldest on the left to the youngest on the right.
Each circle contains 100 coloured dots, with each dot representing 1% of the age cohort.
The colour of the dot represents exposure to annual heat-stress day, with darker dots indicating more heat-stress days. Grey dots mean that people experience fewer than one extra heat-stress day per year due to human-caused climate change, while black dots mean more than 150 extra heat-stress days due to climate change.
The figure shows that higher warming levels expose more people to heat stress and that younger cohorts tend to be worst affected.
For example, the top-right circle represents heat stress for under 10s in the present-day climate. Three of these dots are coloured black, indicating that 3% faced at least 150 attributable heat-stress days in 2023.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief the study uses wet-bulb temperature because it is a “well-established heat stress metric”. However, she notes that it was not “explicitly defined to focus on children”. She continues:
“A really important step forward in the research community would be to link up climate science and health science experts to do research on what metrics are really most representative of, for example, health impacts and educational impacts that children will be suffering.”
Vulnerability
Dr Qinqin Kong, a postdoctoral researcher at the departments of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study, praises its “robust” methodology.
He tells Carbon Brief that the research provides “a timely quantitative evidence for discussions of climate justice, children’s rights and intergenerational equity”.
However, Kong suggests that the paper “may overstate the contrast between children and the elderly and underestimate the relative burden of older adults”.
He says:
“The elderly may also be more vulnerable due to their social circumstances. Children often benefit from parental supervision and caregiving, whereas many older adults live alone, have limited mobility and face barriers to accessing cooling or emergency assistance during heat events.”
Kong also notes that “people and societies in the mid-latitudes [for example, across much of Europe and North America] are less adapted to heat”, which may make them vulnerable to its impacts.
For example, he says that Europe “shows substantially stronger relative risk of heat mortality likely due to less heat-acclimatised populations, lower air conditioning prevalence and urban designs that don’t favour heat dissipation”.
Similarly, Dr Daniel Vecellio – a researcher at the University of Nebraska, who was not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that children are an “understudied cohort”.
However, he says there is “reason for hope” because “children are typically pretty good behavioural adapters to extreme heat” and because people who are “chronically exposed to extreme heat” will “have a better chance at better acclimatisation”.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief that global reporting on heatwaves is often skewed towards wealthier nations.
For example, she notes that large-scale databases of disasters, such as EM-DAT, often underrepresent heatwaves in Africa, due in part to a lack of news coverage and formal reporting. She adds:
“Studies like this, which start from the climate data, can start to fill some of these gaps.”
She adds that the paper should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries, who are most severely affected by the increase in heat-stress days, “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Pietroiusti, R. et al. (2026) Age-specific exposure to human-induced increases in humid heat, Science Advances, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aeb3232
The post Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
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