Countries that pump out large amounts of greenhouse gases could “retain or expand” their fossil fuel industries while treating such emissions as “inevitable” in their net-zero accounting, according to a new study.
Some sectors, such as livestock farming and heavy industry, are viewed as particularly hard to decarbonise. This is due, in part, to a perceived lack of cheap technological solutions.
Any “residual emissions” from these practices will have to be balanced by removals from the atmosphere, if nations want to claim they have achieved their net-zero goals.
The new study, published in One Earth, analyses the strategies that nations have submitted to the UN to understand their approach to these emissions, and how they define them.
It finds significant uncertainty, with just 26 out of 71 countries with long-term plans having outlined how much they expect to still be emitting by 2050.
These nations alone say their residual emissions could be up to 2.9bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) – equivalent to around 5% of the current global total.
Fossil-fuel producing nations, such as Australia and Canada, plan to continue producing large volumes of emissions – before removing them via carbon capture technologies or paying for them to be offset elsewhere.
The study authors warn that the slow development and rollout of CO2 removal technologies means this approach could lead to net-zero ambitions ending in “failure”.
Hard-to-abate?
“Residual” emissions are defined as those that remain once a nation, or some other entity, has gone as far as it thinks is possible to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The concept is closely tied with the net-zero targets that many nations have set for the middle of the century. A country must remove CO2 from the atmosphere that is equivalent in volume to its residual emissions, in order to say it has reached net-zero.
The amount of residual emissions each country is left with therefore dictates how much it will have to invest in CO2 removal – either by planting trees or building machines that directly remove the CO2 from the atmosphere.
So far, countries have shown very little progress in developing technologies to remove CO2.
Yet, as the new study explains, “there is a tendency to treat residual emissions as inevitable”. One key reason for this is that these emissions are expected to largely come from so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors.
These sectors are generally framed as those that lack cheap and widely available technologies to drastically cut their emissions. Examples include steel production, aviation and many aspects of livestock agriculture, such as rearing cows, growing rice and using fertilisers..
Yet, despite these common framings, in practice, both residual emissions and hard-to-abate sectors remain poorly defined. Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that even “hard-to-abate” sectors can feasibly be decarbonised using available technologies.
According to Prof Naomi Vaughan, a climate change researcher at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and one of the new study’s co-authors, this means “net-zero can hide a multitude of sins”. Speaking to Carbon Brief, she asks:
“What are you choosing – as an industry or as a country – to decide is hard to abate…And what genuinely is?”
In order to interrogate this, the team led by Harry Smith, a UEA PhD student focusing on the role of CO2 removal in climate policy, set out to understand what different countries were describing as “residual emissions” and how they were justifying this description.
Big residuals
Under the Paris Agreement, nations are encouraged to submit long-term low-emission development strategies (LT-LEDS). If a country has a mid-century net-zero target, this document will explain how it intends to get there.
In their study, Smith and his colleagues analyse every LT-LEDS submitted to the UN by October 2023 – covering a total of 67 countries. They also include four extra long-term strategies produced by EU member states, but not submitted to the UN.
The 71 nations with long-term strategies for tackling climate change cover 71% of global emissions, the study notes.
However, the majority – 41 in total – do not quantify residual emissions at all in their plans. These include major emitters with net-zero targets, such as China, India and Russia.
The researchers identify 26 countries that have calculated the amount of emissions they expect to still be producing at the point they reach net-zero.
In total, this amounts to between 2.6-2.9GtCO2e, excluding emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). (The range results from countries including several different scenarios in their strategies.)
The study also compares the scale of each nation’s residual emissions to the highest level its emissions have reached in a year. If countries are yet to peak, data from 2021 was used.
The authors conclude that, on average, the 16 developed “Annex I” countries assessed in this study plan on still producing 21% of their peak emissions when they reach net-zero.
Meanwhile, the nine developing and emerging “Annex II” economies expect to continue producing 34% of their peak emissions, the study finds. This estimate excludes Cambodia, which plans to keep increasing its emissions but cancelling them out by turning its extensive forests into a net carbon sink.
The chart below shows residual emissions (red) as a share of each nation’s peak emissions (blue) – or its most recent annual emissions, if its emissions have not yet peaked. Residual emissions from the US alone are set to be higher than the total emissions of nearly every other country.
Justifying emissions
To understand more about how governments justify the residual emissions in their strategies, the researchers analyse the sectors where emissions remain high out into the second half of this century.
Overall, agriculture is expected to see the least progress in emissions reductions, contributing roughly one-third of residual emissions across all the nations assessed, the study finds.
Methane from livestock and emissions from fertilisers are frequently cited as some of the “hardest-to-abate”. Developed countries only expect their agricultural emissions to drop 37%, on average, by the time they hit net-zero.
(International aviation and shipping, while viewed as some of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, are simply excluded from most countries’ long-term plans, meaning they do not feature prominently in this analysis.)
The researchers also look in greater depth at the rationales given by each country for defining emissions as “residual” or “hard-to-abate”, by analysing 357 statements on the topic within the long-term strategies. They group the statements into different categories, based on which sectors are described and the type of language used.
As the chart below shows, countries frequently provide no justification at all for their continued production of residual emissions in particular sectors.
The definition of “residual” varies considerably between countries, with governments focusing on different aspects depending on their circumstances. Smith tells Carbon Brief:
“What you find is this range of rationales [that are] not just technical…They’re not just political either…It’s a kind of pick your buffet of rationales.”
The most common arguments concern residual emissions from industry and transport – particularly the production of cement and steel, the emissions of F-gases and domestic aviation and shipping. (The researchers note a “mismatch” here, with arguments explaining residual emissions from agriculture often overlooked, despite it being the largest contributor.)
Countries most frequently cite the lack of new technologies and limits to existing ones as the reasons for continued emissions from these sectors.
Despite these assertions, hundreds of industry leaders from the heavy industry and heavy-duty transport sectors have described net-zero goals as “technically and financially possible by mid-century”.
For example, a recent report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) concluded that “the technologies to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors have seen significant progress in recent years and are today largely available”.
‘Retain or expand’
The large amounts of residual emissions in most nations’ long-term strategies reveals that many are expecting to lean heavily on carbon removal to meet their net-zero targets, the study says.
The study notes that this “risks the credibility of their target[s] and risks a failure to meet national and global net-zero”, given the known limits to carbon removals.
In some cases, this could also mean shifting responsibility elsewhere by purchasing carbon offsets from other countries.
Moreover, the study adds that some nations “may attempt to retain or expand their fossil fuel production”, and pass off resulting emissions as “residual”. Vaughan explains that countries may lean towards looser definitions of residual emissions, if it benefits them:
“If you have a country with a very significant investment in the fossil fuel industry or extraction industries, then there is an incentive to imagine getting to net-zero where you still have quite a lot of emissions – but you’re using lot’s of CO2 removal to get there.”
The authors highlight Australia and Canada, two nations that currently produce large amounts of fossil fuels. Both include scenarios in their net-zero strategies – albeit at the high end of several potential outcomes – where emissions only fall by around half by 2050.
In Australia’s case, this scenario relies on purchasing large amounts of carbon offsets from other countries. Canada relies on very high use of CO2 removal technologies.
Prof Holly Jean Buck, a climate researcher at the University of Buffalo who published an initial investigation into residual emissions in countries’ LT-LEDS last year, but was not involved in this research. She says tackling the “ambiguity” around these emissions is key:
“We don’t know if countries are planning to phase out fossil fuels…We have infrastructure that has long lifetimes in terms of how long it takes to build it and how long it will be in operation. Without specificity around which sectors or activities we hope to fully decarbonise and electricity, it’s hard for countries to do that planning.”
More political
Experts tell Carbon Brief the new study is a welcome contribution to a relatively sparse literature on residual emissions.
Buck says it is a “thorough and careful” study that expands on her work, both by increasing the number of strategies assessed and broadening the scope of the analysis.
Her assessment only focused on high-ambition strategies for LT-LEDS from Annex I countries. The new research led by Smith and his colleagues includes a broader range of scenarios, and suggests that residual emissions could be even higher in 2050 than thought.
The study proposes a number of measures to tighten the definition of “residual” emissions and help countries better address them. This includes stronger reporting requirements for national strategies.
The researchers also propose separate targets for emissions reductions and CO2 removals, in order to prevent countries continuing to burn fossil fuels while simply pledging to remove emissions.
Dr William Lamb, a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief he supports this idea and adds:
“I would also like to see the discussion of residual emissions become more political than it currently is. If countries were asking questions such as ‘how fast can we phase out fossil fuels?’ and ‘what human needs and services do we need to deliver, at minimum impact to the climate?’ then their long-term strategies would look very different.”
The post Major emitters ‘may retain or expand’ fossil fuels despite net-zero plans appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Major emitters ‘may retain or expand’ fossil fuels despite net-zero plans
Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.
Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.
Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.
China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain
The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.
“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.
“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.
Electrifying industry
Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.
A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.
-
China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste
Long-term contracts guarantee coal plants buyers regardless of demand, crowding out renewables, report finds -
China’s coal-chemicals boom risks repeating the mistakes of the past
By reviving the problematic industry in the name of energy security, China runs the risk of higher emissions, stranded assets and setting back its ambitions as a clean energy leader -
China’s carbon emissions rise again as more clean power is wasted
The economic powerhouse burned more coal and gas in the first quarter of 2026, despite record wind and solar build-out
Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.
Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.
In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.
Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.
“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.
“Growing by greening”
China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.
Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.
China and Brazil join pledge to triple global nuclear energy capacity
For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.
The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.
An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.
This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.
Stalling fossil fuel use
At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.
China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.
Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift
A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.
“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.
A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.
-
EU, UK lead push for electrification as “powerful weapon” against fossil fuels
A group of dozens of countries seeks to build momentum for a COP31 pledge to electrify 35% of global energy use by 2035 as an alternative to fossil fuels -
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Co-hosts Türkiye and Australia want countries to sign on to global targets in three of their priority areas for this year’s COP climate negotiations -
Africa can lead the Age of Electrification
The electrification agenda presents both an extraordinary opportunity for Africa and an immense challenge for the continent
In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.
A lesson in sequencing
China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.
“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.
For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.
“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.
The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
UK’s budget juggling trick with rainforest loan for bus-fare cap needs transparency
Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?
More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
-
Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub
Fears of a flood of environmentally-dubious carbon credits have faded, with most old projects not able to transition to new UN market -
UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns
Civil society groups allege the cookstove project in Myanmar exaggerated its climate impact while maintaining ties with military junta
The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis
In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations, which participants were invited to consider and adapt in their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process.
Getting the rules ‘right’
In a statement to Climate Home News, Ghana, Paraguay and the UK – which are FCLP co-leads for its work on forest carbon credits – said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’
The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
Palestine: Israel’s bombing has left Gaza vulnerable to climate change
Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?
An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says
Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
A relatively ambitious deal to reduce the shipping industry’s 3% of global emissions now looks more likely after four days of closed-door talks in London, observers say.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO), which oversees the negotiations, said there had been “constructive discussions” and “genuine willingness within the group to make concrete further progress”.
Em Fenton, senior director at the NGO Opportunity Green who attended the talks last week, said they “demonstrated a strong spirit of solidarity in the face of blatant attempts to undermine the credibility, ambition and equity of a hard-fought multilateral agreement”.
After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on a “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF) – a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners aimed at incentivising them to use cleaner fuels, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.
But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention by US President Donald Trump and threats of US sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.
UCL analysis found that, of those who expressed a view at last week’s talks, 38 were in favour of an NZF-style solution while only 17 were against. Those opposed are “consistently composed of strongly fossil fuel-aligned governments”.
An observer of the talks, who did not want to be named, said the countries opposed include the US, Russia, India, Thailand, Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay, as well as eight oil-rich Gulf nations and shipowner-reliant Liberia and Panama. Governments that support an NZF-style deal include China, Brazil, Mexico, Türkiye, Canada, Australia, Chile, nine African nations, most European countries and small islands.
A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.
UCL’s analysis said it was “reassuring” that governments which had taken strong positions in the media against the NZF were being more compromising in the negotiations.
Tweaks are probable
While there is majority support for the NZF, UCL said adopting it would be difficult politically. “The process from here could therefore be as much about producing what appears to be a new package, but one that broadly ends up with similar outcomes in relation to objectives,” UCL argued.
But tweaking the NZF, which resulted from years of negotiations, comes with risks, it warned. For example, changes could reduce the new system’s planned support for low-income countries, turning them against it. Fenton said compromising should not mean “abandoning the principle of justice in the maritime transition”.
UCL said the speed at which shipowners must reduce their ships’ emissions or face fees is likely to be reduced in the short-term but raised in the long-term to meet a goal of net zero emissions by mid-century.
-
Palestine: Israel’s bombing has left Gaza vulnerable to climate change
With homes, hospitals and water storage destroyed, Palestine’s government says that Gazans have little protection from climate impacts and sets conditional emissions targets -
More support needed to power Africa’s food systems with renewables, experts say
Renewable energy could help African food businesses boost productivity and competitiveness, but the upfront cost, fragmented markets and limited financing stand in the way -
Loss and damage fund urged to hold crisis meeting on Nepal
The new fund is coming under pressure from developing nations to respond quickly to climate disasters rather than just financing longer-term projects
This was a compromise put forward by NZF-supporter Brazil. However, an analysis by the the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) has found that this change would lead to more overall emissions than the original NZF trajectory.
UCL has warned it could incentivise liquefied natural gas as a shipping fuel over greener options, which include hydrogen-based methanol and ammonia.
Analysis by UCL and the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that, while a slower start to the NZF would reduce transport costs in the short term, it would increase them later due to the costs involved in switching the industry over from more polluting fuel to cleaner fuel.
NZF won’t meet emissions goals
IMarEst’s analysis finds that even in its current form – the most ambitious deal on the table – the NZF will not be sufficient for shipping to meet its emissions reduction goals.
It says that only a Pacific proposal to place a levy on ships’ total emissions – rather than just those above a certain level – would meet the industry’s targets to reduce emissions 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reach net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”. This is highly unlikely to be adopted.
Additional talks will be held from November 23-27 and from November 30-December 3 before a potentially final round of official negotiations begins on December 4.
The post London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal appeared first on Climate Home News.
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Renewable Energy11 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits