During the closing session of COP30, the representative of the Holy See – the governing body of the Vatican – was booed. That reaction was triggered by his statement requesting that any mentions of gender should be “understood as grounded on the biological sexual identity that is male and female”.

The comments followed a heated debate that had threatened to derail talks on the new Gender Action Plan (GAP) in Belém, stirring concerns that growing political pressure in the wider world to roll back advances on gender issues had seeped into the UN climate process.

Gender was a hotter-than-usual topic at this COP. Negotiators were tasked with agreeing a new GAP – a document to guide how gender features in climate decisions and action over the next 10 years, including balanced participation in climate talks, ensuring that climate projects consider different gender needs in their implementation, and collecting data that is broken down by gender.

Part of a broader work programme on gender, which was renewed during COP29, work on the GAP started at June’s mid-year talks in Bonn. That produced a text containing 99 brackets, denoting issues to be resolved. As disagreement among parties multiplied in Brazil, the last draft made public during COP30 had 496 brackets, making it a small miracle that a final version of the GAP was approved at the summit.

COP30 fails to land deal on fossil fuel transition but triples finance for climate adaptation

The most controversial issue was the definition of gender, which the Holy See, Argentina, Paraguay and Iran wanted to refer to as “biological sex”, reflecting their concerns about trans and non-binary people. One draft version of the text included a footnote added by each of those countries marking their objections. None of them made it into the final decision.

While Russia did not submit its own footnote, Climate Home News understands that it pushed hard to replace the term “gender” with “women and girls” and “men and boys”. During its intervention at the closing plenary, Russia’s delegate said his government works to strengthen the institution of marriage, which it understands as “a relationship between a man and a woman”.

Another thorny issue was “sexual and reproductive health”, a term that did not appear in the final text. The Holy See was among those that fought hard to exclude it. Archbishop Giambattista Diquattro, the head of delegation, said in an interview with Vatican News that tackling this topic was “a diversion from the real issue under discussion”, adding that “the inclusion in the text of sexual and reproductive rights, which include abortion”, is something the city-state could not “in any way accept.”

“Cruel” intrusion into climate debate

Partway through COP30, as the rows over gender surfaced, women’s rights organisations denounced the situation at a press conference.

“We’ve always had fights on the Gender Action Plan… but this is different. This is trying to actually push women back by having this binary definition,” said Mary Robinson, former Irish president who is now a member of the Elders. “It’s so cruel. I mean, it’s actually unbelievable that this would enter into our space.”

Bridget Burns, executive director of the Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO), said it felt like a coordinated backlash – and it wasn’t limited to the gender negotiations.

Argentina and Paraguay also raised objections to definitions of gender in the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) negotiations. But they didn’t get what they wanted there either.

“The outcomes we got in the JTWP decision are the most ambitious from a rights and inclusion perspective ever,” said Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition with Climate Action Network International, noting that the protestations by specific countries on gender would only be added to the UN climate summit’s report. “They didn’t get what they wanted, which was a footnote in each decision.”

Had that happened, it would have posed “a very serious threat to the process”, said Rosemberg. Burns said allowing definitions on what words mean for individual parties to creep into the formal decision texts could have set “a bad precedent”.

Claudia Rubio Giraldo, associate for policy and programmes at WEDO, said that such resistance to human rights language shows how important advocacy is – and advocacy groups should be ready to act when negotiation rooms that were previously “progressive points of discussion” become “battlegrounds” on human rights in climate action.

Nonetheless, noted Burns, this was the first time sexual and reproductive rights had entered a gender draft, albeit in brackets.

And she pointed to a deliverable in the final GAP document that asks governments to submit the findings of national assessments, including on “health, violence against women and girls, and care work in the context of gender and climate change”.

“We’re hopeful that [this] gives us the opportunity for countries who are making progress on this to actually share their solutions,” Burns added.

A GAP without money

On finance, however, campaigners were disappointed with the outcome. They had pushed for women to be given direct access to funding – and for gender to be addressed as part of the climate finance negotiations. Yet, even at a COP where one of the main wins was a tripling of finance for adaptation by 2035, there was little progress on funding for “gender-responsive” work.

Burns described the talks as “a massive failure” on that front. But she pointed to the COP29 decision to renew the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender, which says that the Green Climate Fund, the biggest UN climate fund, should “strengthen the gender-responsiveness of climate finance”, and facilitate access to climate finance for grassroots women’s organisations.

In 2022, they received just 4% of government aid spent on adaptation. On mitigation efforts to reduce emissions, that number dropped to 2%.

Burns said advocacy groups will also push for finance across broader areas like tax, trade and debt to intersect with gender needs and unlock more funds for climate programmes targeted at women.

For now, she said, it is important to ensure COP30’s progress is protected and that the agreement on the GAP in Belém in allows for “focusing on solutions and ways in which we can both enhance climate action and gender equality without having to renegotiate our rights every single year”.

The post “Coordinated backlash”: Activists say COP30 gender spat reflects wider threat appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Coordinated backlash”: Activists say COP30 gender spat reflects wider threat

Fluvanna County planners will vote in January to assess whether a proposal by Tenaska Energy fits its comprehensive plan.

By Charles Paullin

FORK UNION, Va.–The Fluvanna County Planning Commission again has delayed a vote on a proposed natural gas plant in Virginia that would bolster the PJM Interconnection regional grid.

County Planning Commission in Virginia Delays Vote Again on Proposed Gas Plant That Aims to Link to PJM Grid

The decade-long alliance between developed countries led by the European Union (EU) and the developing countries most vulnerable to climate change – including small island states and the world’s poorest countries – frayed at COP30 in Belém, with both sides expressing disappointment.

On the penultimate day of talks, the EU said it would only offer more finance to help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change if there was an agreement to strengthen and speed up implementation of national climate plans, including a transition away from fossil fuels in the decision text.

This approach angered several negotiators from developing countries, who said efforts to cope with extreme weather and rising seas were too important to be traded off in this manner.

After COP, Least Developed Countries (LDC) negotiator Manjeet Dhakal told Climate Home News that adaptation was “not something to trade”. His native Nepal, for example, needs funding to put in place measures like early warning systems for flooding from glacial lakes and river floods, he said.

On the other side, EU negotiators accused climate-vulnerable countries of not giving strong enough support to Europe’s push for a roadmap away from fossil fuels.

Danish climate minister Lars Aagaard told a post-COP podcast in Danish that small islands and others had only supported the EU “in a half-assed way”.

This signals a weakening of the close relationship between the two sides that was cemented at COP21 in 2015 when they stood firmly together in the push for the Paris Agreement to include the lower global warming limit of 1.5C, as partners in what was dubbed the “High Ambition Coalition”.

Adaptation and fossil fuels linked

In Belém, after two weeks of late-night talks, governments at COP30 could only agree to a vague goal of at least tripling adaptation finance by 2035 and – instead of launching work on a fossil fuel roadmap – to create a “Global Implementation Accelerator” which may or may not include such a roadmap at some point in the future.

To get things started, Brazil’s COP30 president said he would draft a voluntary roadmap outside of the UN climate process.

Developed countries resisted a more ambitious call to triple adaptation finance by 2030 to $120 billion a year. The EU noted that an overall climate finance goal – of $300bn a year by 2035 – had been agreed only last year at COP29 and said they did not want to set an additional goal outside of its scope.

At the same time, a coalition of around 80 countries was pushing for COP30 to agree to launch a roadmap away from fossil fuels. This coalition included both developed and developing nations – particularly many LDCs, small islands and Latin American nations.

On the second Friday morning of the talks, the EU’s top climate official Wopke Hoekstra linked the two issues, telling a closed-door meeting of ministers: “if we deliver on the mitigation [emissions reductions] here together, yes you can ask the EU to move beyond its comfort zone on the financing of adaptation”.

Later that day, the African Group’s lead negotiator Richard Muyungi put out a statement saying that “some want [tripling of adaptation finance] deleted unless we trade it for a fossil-fuel phase-out deal. That is unacceptable. Adaptation is a right, not a bargaining chip.” He added: “This is an implementation COP, the continent has compromised enough. Africa will not leave with nothing.”

Thibyan Ibrahim, a negotiator for the alliance of small island states (AOSIS), told Climate Home News that climate-vulnerable countries were “disappointed and frustrated that developed countries aren’t taking the initiative to fill the gap in leadership after the withdrawal of the US”.

“While they [the rest] are not leaving the Paris Agreement, it is frustrating to see rolling back of ambition and commitments, rather than stepping up and becoming a partner of choice for developing countries,” the Maldivian negotiator said.

“Half-assed” support from small islands

On the other side, some EU negotiators expressed disappointment in the LDCs and AOSIS, accusing them of not being vocal enough in supporting a roadmap away from fossil fuels – something both groups deny.

Lars Aagaard, the climate minister from Denmark who led the EU’s negotiations, told the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) in Danish that “those who normally support us” like the “small island states etcetera” only stood up for us “in a half-assed way” on moving away from fossil fuels. He added that the EU could “feel that the alliances that were there before were not so strong”.

He speculated that the US may have played a role in making countries that would normally support the EU on fossil fuels “conspicuously silent”. In October, after US threats to restrict visas and sanction nations, many Caribbean countries voted with the US and Saudi Arabia to postpone a green shipping deal at the International Maritime Organization in London. The US did not send an official delegation to COP30.

Former Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad told a Climate Home News event halfway through COP30 that “we have countries in the Caribbean that have been leaders on the finance that cannot speak any more globally about [it] because they have been threatened” by the US.

Some negotiators and observers have said the EU could have got more support for a fossil fuel transition roadmap if the bloc had come with a compelling offer on adaptation finance. But Aagaard dismissed this argument, telling DR in Danish: “There is not a day on Earth when I give any money to Tuvalu or Jamaica, then the Saudis think ‘Oh, how sweet they are… now I vote for us to get off fossil fuels’.”

Some LDC and AOSIS negotiators also denied that their support for a fossil fuel transition plan would have been stronger with more adaptation money on the table. “Not necessarily,” said AOSIS’s Ibrahim while the LDCs’ Dhakal said both mitigation and adaptation are important, and Sierra Leone’s environment minister Jiwoh Abdulai insisted “the two are not mutually exclusive for us”.

But Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said that at both COP29 and COP30 there had been a “disenchanted vulnerable group of countries”, adding “this dynamic is likely to persist if Western nations remain distracted from climate finance”.

“Faced with diminishing climate aid from the West and the availability of cheap solar panels from China, they are likely to find the latter far more attractive,” he added.

The lesson Aagaard said he had taken from COP30 was that Europe needs to pursue its own interests more relentlessly and not be naive. “The thing about being the moral one and doing the right thing and hoping that others will follow suit – that dream has pretty much been wrecked for me,” he told DR.

The post EU alliance with climate-vulnerable nations frays over finance trade-off appeared first on Climate Home News.

EU alliance with climate-vulnerable nations frays over finance trade-off