Published

1 year ago

December 24, 2024

Alice Rush

With just one day to go before the US heads to the polls, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are neck and neck in the race for the White House.

While climate change has not been high on the campaign agenda, the outcome of the presidential election will have huge implications for the world’s battle to limit the damage caused by global warming, like the hurricanes Milton and Helene that hit the south-east of the US hard in the last few months.

Former President Trump has promised to take the US out of the Paris climate agreement – as he did briefly during his first term in office – and is also reported to be under pressure to pull the US out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the first time if he becomes president.

While leaving the Paris Agreement would be legally straightforward, legal experts are divided on whether Trump could withdraw the US from the UNFCCC without the approval of the US Senate and – if he did – how easy it would be for a future president to re-join.

Analysts expect either move to weaken the influence of the US in the UN climate talks, limit the country’s own action against climate change and reduce pressure on other big greenhouse-gas emitters like China to submit ambitious climate plans to the UN next year.

Exiting the Paris pact

The Trump campaign has promised to take the US out of the Paris climate agreement if he wins, joining just three other countries outside the landmark climate deal: Iran, Libya and Yemen. During Trump’s last term in office, the climate-change sceptic managed to yank the US out only briefly – for less than four months.

The agreement – which then US President Barack Obama helped negotiate in 2015 – stipulated that countries could not ask to leave for three years after it came into force in 2016. At the earliest opportunity, on November 4, 2019, the Trump administration filed a request to withdraw – but formally a year must pass between a country notifying its withdrawal from the accord and its actual exit.

What Trump got wrong on China, coal and climate

The US left the Paris Agreement the day after the November 2020 presidential election was won by Democrat Joe Biden. On his first day in office – January 20, 2021 – Biden signed the papers for the US to rejoin, which it did a month later.

If elected again, this time around Trump would be able to file to quit the Paris Agreement on his first day in office and the US would leave a year later. This would mean the world’s second biggest-emitting country would no longer have to submit a national climate action plan to the United Nations every five years.

As all countries are supposed to publish an updated plan next year, however – before the US under Trump could officially leave – Washington would still be expected to submit one.

Any plan submitted by a Trump administration is likely to be far weaker than one from a Democrat-led government though – and that weakening could be contagious, particularly with regard to geopolitical rival China, the world’s carbon biggest polluter.

Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said a potential Trump victory in November would “take off any pressure China may feel” to make its own climate action plan ambitious.

Leaving the Paris Agreement would also mean the US does not have to report on its emissions each year, and it would have weaker legal responsibilities to provide climate finance to developing countries.

UNFCCC case uncertain

Trump could go even further though in cutting ties with the UN climate process. While the Trump campaign has not clarified its position, both Politico and Bloomberg reported that lobbyists have drafted executive orders they hope to get Trump to sign which would pull the US out of both the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The UNFCCC is the founding treaty of the UN climate talks, under which the Paris Agreement was negotiated. It was agreed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and includes all countries – even the three that have not ratified the Paris pact.

Nathaniel Keohane, who was a climate adviser to former President Obama and is now head of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told a webinar recently that “it would be a difference of kind – not just of degree, I think – relative to pulling out of the Paris Agreement”. Leaving the UNFCCC would “deeply harm long-term US interests”, he said, adding that while he opposed an exit from the Paris Agreement, “it was something that was more limited in its underlying, foundational aspects”.

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Nonetheless, David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute’s international climate initiative, told journalists “there are ways, even with a withdrawal, for the US or other parties to be fully engaged” – as the US has been under the UN Convention on Biodiversity which it never ratified.

Todd Stern, who was US climate envoy under Obama, told the audience at his book launch in London last week that he did not think Trump would leave the UNFCCC, and that it is unclear whether he legally could under the US constitution without the Senate’s backing.

That’s because unlike the Paris Agreement – for which Obama signed an instrument of acceptance on behalf of the US without submitting it to Congress – the UNFCCC was endorsed by the US Senate almost unanimously. The US constitution says the president has the power to make treaties “provided two thirds of the Senators present concur” – but doesn’t mention leaving treaties.

Asked if a President could leave the UNFCCC, Stern said: ““I don’t know and I don’t know if the lawyers know”.

One law professor, Dan Bodansky from Arizona State University, told Climate Home “the general consensus is that, in practice, the president can withdraw the United States from treaties to which the Senate gave advice and consent”.

The only similar previous case was in 1979, he said, when then President Jimmy Carter withdrew the US from its defence agreements with Taiwan as part of normalising relations with China. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater challenged the withdrawal in the Supreme Court whose judges were split on the matter. Four said it wasn’t a matter for the court, and one said the President could terminate treaties.

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But, in practice, Yale Law School professor Harold Koh, a former legal adviser to the State Department, told Bloomberg news agency that if a president did try to leave the UNFCCC “the second they did that, it would be litigated and it would go on for a couple of years”.

There’s also uncertainty among experts about whether a future president could rejoin the climate convention without the backing of two-thirds of the Senate. Signing up for the first time required that, but the original Senate backing in 1992 could be enough to enable re-entry.

UNFCCC budget squeeze

If Trump does pull the US out, Stockholm Environment Institute researcher Richard Klein said that “one of the most direct effects will be on the UNFCCC’s budget”.

The US currently contributes about a fifth of the Bonn-based organisation’s budget. It is already low on funds this year, forcing it to make cut-backs while taking on ever-greater responsibilities in the world’s effort to tackle climate change. With the US out, China would become the UNFCCC’s biggest funder.

A US exit would also change COP climate summits. COP stands for “Conference of the Parties” to the UNFCCC – and if the US left only the Paris Agreement, it would still be a party to the UNFCCC.

But if it left the UNFCCC, it would no longer be a party and become just an observer – the same category as business lobbyists and climate campaigners. As such, US officials would be barred from officially participating in negotiations on issues such as how to respond to the global assessment of climate action due at COP33 in 2028 – and placed lower down the pecking order in terms of making speeches.

Keohane said quitting the UN convention “would sort of tie both hands behind the back of the USA in terms of its ability to shape and inform the basic conversations going on within the [UNFCCC] and the COP”.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Legal experts say Trump could quit Paris pact – but leaving UNFCCC much harder appeared first on Climate Home News.

Legal experts say Trump could quit Paris pact – but leaving UNFCCC much harder

Climate Change

Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks

Published

8 hours ago

April 14, 2026

Alice Rush

Mae Buenaventura is the manager of the debt justice programme of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, a regional alliance of peoples’ movements, community organizations, coalitions, NGOs and networks

A potentially historic shift in public debt governance is set to unfold in Washington DC this week as Global South governments take a collective stand to stop a “silent killer” of development financing.

The first-ever UN-hosted borrowers’ forum will officially be launched on April 15 on the sidelines of the 2026 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Led by five convening countries – Zambia, Egypt, Nepal, the Maldives and Pakistan – the initiative is one of the key wins of last year’s 4th Financing for Development Conference (FFD4) in Sevilla, Spain.

The forum’s mandate is to establish a platform for borrower countries, supported by a UN secretariat, “to discuss technical issues, share information and experiences in addressing debt challenges, increase access to technical assistance and capacity-building in debt management, coordinate approaches and strengthen borrower countries’ voices in the global debt architecture”.

Instead of facing lenders alone, these countries will now use a UN-backed platform to share technical expertise and coordinate their approach to a global debt system that is fundamentally broken.

Debt grips climate-vulnerable nations

The human cost of the current debt architecture is staggering. According to the UN trade and development agency, UNCTAD, more than 40% of the global population – roughly 3.4 billion people – live in countries where the government is forced to spend more on debt payments than on the health, education and social protection of its citizens.

In so-called low-income countries, governments spend an average of 7.5% of their total budgets on debt service, with interest payments consuming up to 20% of total government revenue in these regions.

The Philippines is a case study in this financial stranglehold. It is part of a global majority forced to watch its public services crumble and infrastructure lag while its wealth is siphoned off to satisfy foreign lenders.

The policy of automatic appropriations – a legacy of the rule of late former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. – mandates that debt servicing takes precedence over any other public expenditure, effectively placing the demands of lenders above the needs of the Filipino people. Even as it faces a $1.5 trillion regional financing gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, its hands remain tied by a legal framework that values credit ratings over human lives.

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As a “middle-income country” (MIC), the Philippines is stuck in a frustrating purgatory. It is often deemed “too wealthy” for the G20’s debt-relief framework, yet too poor to absorb global economic shocks. Last year, Finance Undersecretary Joven Balbosa hit the nail on the head when he called for support that goes “beyond the simplistic income categorization” that ignores a country’s actual vulnerabilities.

Without an inclusive and equitable global debt architecture, nations including the Philippines are left to navigate catastrophic climate risks and economic shocks with zero fiscal breathing space.

No respite during climate disasters

The regional evidence of this systemic failure is everywhere. Take Pakistan, which in 2022 was hit by catastrophic flooding that submerged a third of the country and caused billions in losses. Despite this climate-driven disaster, World Bank data shows that Pakistan made payments in 2023 of $11.8 billion for public and publicly guaranteed (PPG) external debt, while its PPG external debt reached $93 billion that same year, surpassing pre-pandemic debt of $87 billion (2020).

Sri Lanka followed IMF prescriptions throughout 16 lending programs since 1991, only to become the first Asian country this century to default. Its MIC status prevents application for debt relief and restructuring measures. Today, the Sri Lankan people bear the brunt of harsh conditionalities, including raising VAT from 8% to 15%, slashing food and fuel subsidies, and the erosion of hard-earned worker pensions.

Residents sit in a Rescue 1122 boat as they evacuate from the flooded area, following monsoon rains and rising water levels of the Chenab River, in Qasim Bela village on the outskirts of Multan in Punjab province, Pakistan, September 11, 2025. REUTERS/Quratulain Asim

Currently, the global rules of lending and borrowing are set by a “creditors’ club” composed of the IMF, the World Bank and the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable it set up, and the Paris Club.

These institutions measure “debt sustainability” through a narrow lens of a country’s capacity to make timely repayments. They largely ignore internal economic inequalities, gender disparities and the existential threat of climate change.

Crises should trigger debt service cancellation

By organising the new borrowers’ forum, the Global South is signalling that the era of passive “standard-setting” by lenders is over.

The ultimate goal for global civil society and debt justice movements is the establishment of a UN Debt Convention; a democratic, binding and inclusive framework that governs both lenders and borrowers. This mechanism would ensure that debt restructuring and cancellation are sufficient to allow countries to fulfill their international human rights obligations and implement necessary climate actions.

Green Climate Fund picks locations for five developing country hubs

To be truly transformative, debt sustainability analyses must align with human rights and sustainable development needs. This means conducting impact assessments – both before and after loans are issued – to identify “illegitimate” debts that do not benefit the public.

Crucially, we need an automatic debt service cancellation mechanism that triggers during extreme climatic, environmental or health shocks. We also need a binding global debt registry to ensure that every loan is transparent and subject to public scrutiny.

Whether the borrowers’ forum becomes a true milestone depends on its courage to challenge the status quo. We can no longer allow debt to act as a “silent killer” of our future. It is time to demand a financial system that serves humanity, not just the balance sheets of the powerful.

The post Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks

Climate Change

Join Greenpeace to save Scott Reef from Woodside’s dirty gas

Published

8 hours ago

April 14, 2026

Alice Rush

Greenpeace and allies will be protesting outside Woodside’s Annual General Meeting to show the WA and federal governments strong community opposition to Woodside’s proposal to drill for gas at Scott Reef.

What: Protest outside Woodside Energy’s Annual General Meeting

When: 8am Thursday 23rd April 2026Where: Kagoshima Park (on the corner of Great Eastern Highway and Bolton Avenue)

RSVP now and join the protest

What’s at stake

Scott Reef is a pristine ocean ecosystem off the north-west coast of Australia.

It is home to endangered and endemic species, including pygmy blue whales and the dusky sea snake, and a nesting ground for green sea turtles. Scott Reef is a place of extraordinary natural beauty, and a vital marine environment that supports a wide range of marine life.

What Woodside is proposing

Dirty fossil fuel corporation, Woodside Energy, is seeking approval to drill more than 50 gas wells underneath and around Scott Reef as part of its Browse project.

The gas would be extracted and transported to the Burrup Hub, the most polluting fossil fuel project in Australia. This proposal would industrialise the doorstep of Australia’s largest freestanding oceanic reef system – threatening the marine life that relies on it and the climate.

Why this can’t go ahead

The WA Environmental Protection Authority has already identified the risks of this project as “unacceptable”, issuing a preliminary rejection.

Serious concerns include:

The risk of an oil spill
Impacts on pygmy blue whales
Damage to green sea turtle nesting grounds

These risks are severe, and potentially irreversible. But the decision hasn’t been made yet. The project is still being assessed.

The Federal Environment Minister is approaching a decision that will determine whether Scott Reef is protected – or vulnerable to decades of industrial gas destruction.

This is a defining moment.