Former US climate envoy and Secretary of State John Kerry has lamented the lack of progress in global climate negotiations on transitioning away from fossil fuels over the last two years.
Kerry told an audience of climate professionals at London’s Chatham House think-tank on Tuesday that he was still “reeling a little bit” from the COP30 climate summit in Belém, which he did not attend.
When going through papers at his home in Boston recently, he said he had found the front page of The Guardian from December 2023 with the headline: “Landmark COP28 deal agreed to transition away from fossil fuels”.
Kerry said that deal in Dubai, which he was involved in as the US’s lead negotiator at the time, was the “most important single mission statement since Paris”. But, he asked in London two years on, “what happened to the promise that we made future generations?”
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According to Kerry, at COP30, a draft text of the main political decision was put forward that was “so weak that our friends from the European Union, backed by the [UK’s] Starmer government, actually had to take the unusual step of threatening to walk out and protest”.
Kerry said this was because – in the words of the EU’s top climate official Wopke Hoekstra – the text contained “no science” and “no transitioning away, but instead weakness”. In the end, they had to back down on getting a roadmap in the text, amid strong push-back from major fossil fuel producing nations.
He also cited the New York Times’ headline on Saturday which ran, “Oil producers – but maybe not the planet – get a win as climate talks end”. Kerry said “that headline underscores that there’s really been a change in the last two years – a change that has been purposefully fought for and achieved by the expenditure of billions of dollars to pass on disinformation and to attack common sense itself”.
China escapes scrutiny
He blamed this backtracking since COP28 partly on the administration of Donald Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, which gave “new life” to “old excuses” for other countries like China.
Kerry, a semi-retired diplomat who enjoyed cordial relations with his Chinese counterpart, said China now “enjoys newfound freedom from scrutiny”, adding that in his time in the Obama and Biden administrations, the US had successfully pressured China to do more on climate change.
One developed-country diplomat told Climate Home News that, at COP30, China and Saudi Arabia were under less pressure to support a roadmap away from fossil fuels than would have been the case if a Democrat-run US had been at the talks. This time the US sent no official delegation.
Kerry said he would push Australia, which will run negotiations at COP31, to get discussions back on track by summoning the 20-25 nations most responsible for climate change, whose emissions cover about 80% of the global total, and try to get them to agree to a roadmap.
Australian climate minister Chris Bowen, who is set to lead the talks next year, said on Saturday that he and the Pacific Islands would “push to advance” a transition away from fossil fuels.
Instead of a negotiated plan, the COP30 Brazilian presidency has promised to produce a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels outside of the UN climate process, and report back on it at the next COP. Colombia and the Netherlands will co-host an international conference on the issue in April.
To laughter, Kerry ended his speech by saying that the battle can still be won if the opponents of fossil fuels “get your ass in gear to do the things you need to do”.
The post John Kerry laments lack of fossil fuel transition in COP30 agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.
John Kerry laments lack of fossil fuel transition in COP30 agreement
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
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.