From tree-planting to spreading silicate rock dust over land, the methods for “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) vary in approach, impacts, readiness and cost.
The second “State of CDR” report, led by a collaboration of scientific institutions from Europe and the US, aims to summarise where the world currently stands when it comes to removing CO2 from the air.
The report covers everything from how many tonnes are currently being “drawn down” from the atmosphere and stored through to the development of research grants, policies and media coverage.
Scientists are clear that countries must cut their emissions as fast as possible to reach climate goals.
But the use of CDR to counterbalance emissions that are difficult to eliminate completely, such as methane from rice farming, will be “unavoidable” if the world is to reach net-zero, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
However, some environmental groups have concerns that highly polluting companies and countries view CDR as an alternative to reducing emissions, with one activist describing reports such as this as a “dangerous distraction”.
Carbon Brief has trawled through the new report’s 222 pages and pulled out nine key takeaways, focusing on the updates since last year’s report.
- ‘Novel’ CDR is growing more rapidly than conventional methods, despite downward revision
- The report identifies a new subset of future scenarios that take sustainable development into account
- There continues to be a CDR ‘gap’ to the Paris temperature goal
- Innovation is generally intensifying, but with some recent slowdowns
- There has been ‘steady growth’ in CDR research grants
- On social media, the focus on different CDR methods has changed over the past 12 years
- Media coverage of CDR tends to peak around COPs
- Policies are needed that create demand for carbon removals
- Monitoring, reporting and verification is ‘essential’ for scaling up CDR, but there are dozens of different protocols
‘Novel’ CDR is growing more rapidly than conventional methods, despite downward revision
There are many ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. These methods have “different levels of readiness, potential and durability” and various “sustainability risks that could limit their deployment”, the report says.
CDR techniques, also known as “negative emissions”, already remove 2bn tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, the report says, versus the 40bn tonnes that human activities emit each year.
Almost all of this comes from “conventional” CDR methods. “Conventional” methods are those that are “well established” and “widely reported” by countries as part of land use, land-use change and forestry activities (often referred to as “LULUCF”), chiefly through tree-planting and forest restoration.
Early-stage or “novel” CDR methods currently remove a much smaller 1.3m tonnes of CO2 each year – less than 0.1% of total CDR.
This is demonstrated in the graphic below, which compares “conventional” CDR (grey) to “novel” techniques (yellow to black).
“Novel” techniques include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), a technology where plants are burned for energy, with the CO2 emitted captured from air and stored under land or sea.
It also includes “biochar”, which involves spreading charcoal over land to boost soil carbon, and “enhanced rock weathering”, which involves spreading finely ground silicate rock over land or sea to enhance the natural weathering process.
Despite making up the smallest proportion of CDR, “novel” techniques are growing faster than “conventional” methods, in terms of tonnes of CO2 removed each year.
“Novel” CDR removed 660,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2021 and 1.35m tonnes of CO2 in 2023, the report says.
However, the estimate for “novel” CDR in 2023 is smaller than it was projected to be in the first edition of the state of CDR report.
This is due to “improved estimation methods” in the new state of the climate report, which are in alignment with the methods used by the Global Carbon Budget, the authors say.
The report says that countries with the highest levels of CDR through tree-planting and forest restoration are China, the US, Brazil and Russia. If the EU27 were a country, it would be the first or second largest nation for tree-planting.
Based on available data, the country with the largest contribution to novel CDR is the US, as it hosts all the BECCS plants that are currently in operation, the report adds.
The report identifies a new subset of future scenarios that take sustainable development into account
Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to limit global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an ambition of keeping them at 1.5C.
Scientists have devised a range of possible scenarios for how the world could keep temperatures at 1.5C. All of these scenarios feature some level of CDR, the report notes.
The report says that, although the Paris Agreement states that climate action must be done “in the context of sustainable development”, most scenarios do not explicitly consider social and environmental sustainability.
For the first time this year, the report identified a subset of scenarios that could be considered “more sustainable”.
The authors considered a scenario to be “sustainable” if it involved:
- Halting deforestation and ecosystem degradation, as well as protecting biodiversity.
- Reducing the number of people at risk from hunger.
- Limiting the growth of global energy demand, while enhancing equitable access to energy.
- Limiting reliance on energy from biomass, to reduce pressure on land and water.
- Keeping temperature rise well below 2C, striving to limit it to 1.5C.
Across this group of “sustainable” 1.5C scenarios, a central range of 7-9bn tonnes of CO2 will need to be removed each year by 2050, the report says.
It adds that “sustainable” scenarios “deploy less cumulative CDR and much less novel CDR than other mitigation scenarios”.
The chart below shows the amount of CO2 removed each year between 2020 and 2050 under a range of 1.5C-consistent scenarios.
It highlights three “focus scenarios” for meeting 1.5C in a “sustainable way”. This includes one focused on energy demand reduction, one on boosting renewable generation and one on expanding conventional and novel CDR.
There continues to be a CDR ‘gap’ to the Paris temperature goal
The report says that there is still a “gap” between the amount of CDR included in 1.5C-consistent pathways and the amount pledged by countries in their national climate plans, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs), and long-term strategies.
Compared to the last edition, this report considers a wider range of national pledges on CDR, including pledges made up until the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023.
The charts below illustrate the size of the CDR gap in 2030 and 2050, by showing the level of proposed CDR (light grey) and the level needed in various 1.5C-consistent pathways (yellow).
It illustrates that the size of the CDR gap depends on how much CDR is used to reach 1.5C. (This was the subject of a recent research paper covered by Carbon Brief.)
The CDR gap is small when the most ambitious national proposals are compared with levels in the “1.5C with no novel CDR scenario”, the report says.
Out of three scenarios shown on the chart above, the CDR gap ranges in size between 900m tonnes and 2.8bn tonnes of CO2 per year in 2030 and 400m tonnes and 5.4bn tonnes per year in 2050.
The report adds that, compared to its own estimates, the “actual gap is likely higher”. This is because “scenarios assume that significant emission reductions are already taking place, when in fact global emissions have continued to rise”.
Innovation is generally intensifying, but with some recent slowdowns
The report uses various “indicators of innovation” to show that CDR activity is “generally intensifying, although with some recent slowdowns”.
The report points to the continued rapid growth in published scientific research on CDR, as well as the launch of “major” demonstration programmes.
These include the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs in the US – which have been allocated $3.5bn in funding through president Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – and Mission Innovation, an international initiative that includes a goal to “enable CDR technologies to achieve a net reduction of 100m metric tonnes of CO2 per year globally by 2030”.
The report notes that although new CDR patents “experienced rapid growth between 2000 and 2010”, they have since started to decline. However, it adds, patents “have become more diverse and novel methods play a larger role”.
The figure below summarises these findings, showing the changing counts of research grants, publications and inventions (right), as well as the split between different regions (left) and CDR methods (middle).
There is a similarly mixed bag of progress in other indicators. For example, on CDR startup companies, the report says:
“Investment in CDR startups has grown significantly over the past decade, outpacing the climate-tech sector as a whole – although it declined in 2023, and CDR accounts for just 1.1% of investment in climate-tech start-ups.”
The report notes that direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) has “become a primary focus for corporate and other large investors in CDR”, adding:
“Major CDR startups such as Climeworks and Carbon Engineering have received investments from corporations that are looking to offset emissions from their core business (e.g. Microsoft, Airbus, Chevron, JP Morgan).”
The report also concludes that CDR companies and industry groups have announced capacity targets that “show ambition to reach, by mid-century or sooner, levels of CDR consistent with meeting the Paris temperature goal”. However, it adds, they have “little grounds for credibility at present”.
There has been ‘steady growth’ in CDR research grants
The report includes – for the first time – analysis of research grants that have been awarded for CDR as one of its indicators of innovation.
This analysis uses the Dimensions database of research projects granted by third-party funding bodies, which includes the number of projects and – in about three-quarters of cases – the amount of funding.
Between 1991 and 2022, the analysis identifies grants from 131 funding organisations, such as research councils, foundations and philanthropic groups. (The data only covers specific grants, not funding coming through an institution’s central budget.) These grants went to around 1,600 research organisations and total around $2.6bn, the report estimates.
As the chart below illustrates, both the quantity (yellow bars) and value (grey) of grants have “grown steadily” in recent years. The report says:
“The number of research grants for CDR has grown from 35 active grants during 2000 to 1,160 during 2022…About 74% of all research grants on CDR in the data set started within the last 10 years (2013-22).”
The annual value of grants has grown from about $5m in 2000 to about $190m in 2022, the report adds.
Almost 70% of all active CDR research grants over 2000-22 focus on soil carbon sequestration (35%) or biochar (33%), the report says. Although, as the chart below shows, grants “have been diversifying over time”, with an increasing share for other methods by 2022, such as DACCS (11%), peatland restoration (8%), coastal wetland restoration (7%), enhanced rock weathering (5%) and BECCS (5%).
The majority of research investment is in Canada and the US, the report says. The two countries account for 40% of all active research grants between 2000 and 2022 and 59% of the funding.
The 27 countries of the EU collectively account for around 19% of CDR funding, the report says, while just three non-EU countries – Norway, Switzerland and the UK – together account for 11%. Meanwhile, it adds, China “funds many CDR projects, but the financial support reported is comparatively small”.
On social media, the focus on different CDR methods has changed over the past 12 years
The second edition of the report includes an update to its analysis of how CDR is discussed on Twitter. This includes extending its dataset to the end of 2022 and adding “new data on user types and posting frequency”.
In total, the dataset covers 570,000 English-language tweets over 2020-22 (and does not include retweets). The authors used machine learning to classify whether the tone of the tweets were positive, negative or neutral.
Overall, the report finds that the amount of attention that CDR received from English-speaking Twitter accounts in 2022 was similar to 2021, but “with generally more positive sentiment towards familiar and conventional CDR methods than to other methods”.
Looking across the whole time period, the authors find that “earlier tweets mainly focused on specific CDR methods, such as soil carbon sequestration, coastal wetland restoration, ocean fertilisation, afforestation and biochar”. They add that “recent years have seen an increase in the share of tweets about CDR in general, as well as an expansion to novel CDR methods such as DACCS and BECCS”.
The analysis also finds that CDR tweets have become more positive over time. For example, “tweets on biological capture methods have a positive sentiment much more often than a negative sentiment, aligning with the survey literature on perceptions”, the report says.
The majority of tweets (70%) come from users in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, the report finds, but also from those in Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Norway and Switzerland. The report notes that “sentiments tend to be more negative in Australia, Canada and Germany than in India, the UK and the US”.
The authors also find differences in which CDR methods are being tweeted about. They write:
“For example, users from Australia, India and the US post more about soil carbon sequestration than others. UK users post more about peatland restoration and coastal wetland restoration, while Ghanian users focus on biochar and general CDR.”
Media coverage of CDR tends to peak around COPs
The report includes new analysis of how CDR has been reported in English-speaking media around the world over the past three decades.
The chart below illustrates how CDR reporting has increased since 1990. The analysis of more than 9,000 articles shows that the “main period of media reporting” started in 2007.
The authors identify a “major increase” in CDR news coverage from 2019, peaking in the run up to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 as countries updated their Paris Agreement pledges. They write:
“Since many of these targets included net-zero pledges, the resulting climate policy discourse tended to feature CDR prominently.”
For much of the three-decade period, peaks in CDR reporting have coincided with climate summits, the report adds, including “COP13 in Bali in 2007, where several international forestry initiatives were announced; and COP6 in The Hague in 2000, where the role of forests as carbon sinks first sparked significant debate under the UNFCCC process”.
Mentions of CDR in the news are “relatively concentrated in specific news media and countries”, the report notes. As the upper chart below shows, Australian and UK press dominate coverage, accounting for eight of the top 10 sources for most articles.
The lower chart shows a breakdown of which CDR methods tend to feature in news articles for individual countries. Soil carbon sequestration features heavily in Australia, the authors note, “reflecting its higher state of integration into Australian climate policy”.
Elsewhere, peatland restoration is “more prominent in the Irish and UK press”, the report says, while afforestation and coastal wetland restoration have larger shares in India and Pakistan.
Further analysis of a random sample of 1,500 news articles suggests that CDR reporting tends to “intersect with other concepts and mitigation approaches, including (fossil-based) carbon capture and storage [CCS], carbon capture and utilisation [CCU] (e.g. synthetic fuel production, biofuels) and avoided emissions (e.g. forest carbon offsets)”.
The authors add:
“Journalists do not necessarily distinguish between these different categories of mitigation, yet it is important to communicate the specific role of CDR as distinct from emission reduction efforts.”
Policies are needed that create demand for carbon removals
The report says that, in order to increase CDR innovation and scale-up, “policies
are needed that create demand for carbon removals”.
It says that “CDR policy gained momentum in 2023”. It observed “active efforts” in many countries for “technology push policies”, including research projects and demonstration schemes.
However, it says that “demand-pull policies”, those aimed at creating demand for CDR, “remain weak”.
NDCs contain “few mentions of policies that could create a significant demand for CDR”, it says, and “monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), which is important for facilitating transactions in CDR markets, is not fully developed at present”.
When compared to action from policymakers, the voluntary carbon market is “playing a key role in scaling up CDR”, the report says.
The voluntary carbon market is a place where polluting businesses can buy credits from carbon-cutting projects, allowing the firms to claim they reduced their own emissions. It has been much criticised by researchers for failing to live up to promises to cut emissions.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that just 3% of carbon credits for sale on the four largest voluntary offset registries are for CDR projects, with the rest being for “avoided emissions” projects.
The first edition of the state of CDR report includes case studies for CDR policies in Brazil, EU, US and UK. The second edition includes new case studies for Canada, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
Monitoring, reporting and verification is ‘essential’ for scaling up CDR, but there are dozens of different protocols
The report notes that monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) for CDR is “critical” for ensuring that CO2 has been captured from the atmosphere and stored durably. The report defines MRV as the process of:
- Measuring or quantifying CO2 removals from a CDR activity and monitoring those CO2 removals over the course of a CDR activity.
- Reporting on those removals.
- Receiving third-party verification of the removals that have been reported.
Approaches to MRV are described in “protocols”, which the report defines as any document that outlines methods or sets quality requirements or guidelines for certification.
Robust MRV is “crucial” for “effective voluntary carbon markets, government-created markets, regulations and national reporting”, the authors say. However, at the moment, there are “many overlapping protocols, which makes comparison and oversight of CDR difficult for investors and governments alike”.
The report identifies 102 MRV protocols for CDR, which are shown in the chart below according to the year in which they were developed.
The authors note that 63% are for conventional CDR, 65% are for voluntary markets and 58% are for international activities. Some 40% have been developed since 2022.
Across the world, “Europe (including the UK) accounts for 44% of total MRV protocol development, North America makes up 42%, Oceania 5%, Asia 4%, Latin America 3% and Africa 2%”, the report says.
MRV policymaking differs across these jurisdictions, it notes:
“For example, the EU and the UK have prioritised developing CDR standards and guidelines; the US, meanwhile, has focused on scaling up market-ready CDR and developing MRV tools for specific applications, such as marine CDR. The voluntary carbon market has played a leading role, with projects developing methods for monitoring, reporting and verifying CDR projects.”
In addition, there are different MRV challenges for each CDR method, the authors say:
“For novel CDR, more research is needed to develop and test MRV technology, including at large-scale demonstration sites.”
One challenge for novel CDR methods, such as DACCS, is that they often use proprietary techniques that are not publicly available. Their MRV protocols are, therefore, “inaccessible”, the authors say, and so it is not possible to compare them with those that are public.
For conventional CDR, “questions persist” around designing flexible MRV approaches that can accommodate different contexts, scales and approaches, the report says.
While the authors describe the current lack of IPCC greenhouse gas guidance methodologies for most novel CDR methods as a “major gap”, they note that the planned IPCC methodology report on CDR, CCS and CCU “is expected to outline a framework for including novel CDR methods in national inventories”.
This framework “will likely guide best practice in the voluntary carbon market and the development of national policies”, the study says.
The post Nine key takeaways about the ‘state of CO2 removal’ in 2024 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
As COP30 reaches its midway point in the Brazilian city of Belém, Carbon Brief has hosted its second “ask us anything” webinar to exclusively answer questions submitted by holders of the Insider Pass.
The webinar kicked off with an overview of where the negotiations are on Day 8, plus what it was like to be among the 70,000-strong “people’s march” on Saturday.
At present, there are 44 agreed texts at COP30, with many negotiating streams remaining highly contested, as shown by Carbon Brief’s live text tracker.
Topics discussed during the webinar included the potential of a “cover text” at COP30, plus updates on negotiations such as the global goal on adaptation and the just-transition work programme.
Journalists also answered questions on the potential for a “fossil-fuel phaseout roadmap”, the impact of finance – including the Baku to Belém roadmap, which was released the week before COP30 – and Article 6.
The webinar was moderated by Carbon Brief’s director and editor, Leo Hickman, and featured six of our journalists – half of them on the ground in Belém – covering all elements of the summit:
- Dr Simon Evans – deputy editor and senior policy editor
- Daisy Dunne – associate editor
- Josh Gabbatiss – policy correspondent
- Orla Dwyer – food, land and nature reporter
- Aruna Chandrasekhar – land, food systems and nature journalist
- Molly Lempriere – policy section editor
A recording of the webinar (below) is now available to watch on YouTube.
Watch Carbon Brief’s first COP30 “ask us anything” webinar here.
The post COP30: Carbon Brief’s second ‘ask us anything’ webinar appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 14 November 2025: COP30 DeBriefed: Finance and 1.5C loom large at talks; China’s emissions dip; Negotiations explained
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Finance and 1.5C dominate talks
AGENDA ADOPTED: Negotiations at the COP30 UN climate talks began in the Brazilian city of Belém this week, attended in person by Carbon Brief’s Daisy Dunne, Josh Gabbatiss and Anika Patel. The Brazilian hosts scored an unexpected early win by dodging an “agenda fight” over proposals to add various contentious issues to the official docket. Despite the neat footwork, four issues kept off the agreed agenda – climate finance; emissions reporting; trade measures; ambition and 1.5C – still loom large, having merely been diverted into “presidency consultations”.
PRESIDENCY PROMISES: By Wednesday, the presidency was promising “good news” at a plenary later that day, which had been due to offer an update on progress with the four extra items. Instead, it ended abruptly, with COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago promising to say more at another plenary scheduled for tomorrow. It remains unclear how the presidency intends to deal with these thorny issues, leaving the COP rumour-mill in full swing.
MINISTERIAL MAGIC: Aside from the extra issues, the official agenda at COP30 already has more than 100 items to contend with, including how to track progress on adaptation and how to ensure a “just transition” as emissions-cutting measures are implemented. (You can follow them all via the Carbon Brief text tracker.) While draft texts have started to emerge, many items remain stalled, with persistent divisions along familiar lines (see below). Negotiators will be hoping that ministers arriving over the weekend are primed to unlock progress. Brazil has appointed pairs of these politicians to push for deals in key areas.
Around the world
- Ethiopia has said it will host COP32 after beating out a bid from Nigeria, Reuters reported. Turkey and Australia are still in deadlock over who should host COP31, with a decision due by the end of these talks, BBC News reported.
- China will not contribute to Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Facility, Bloomberg reported, while Devex said two multilateral development banks are considering paying in. More than $5.5bn has been pledged so far, which BusinessGreen noted is “well short” of a $25bn target. The fund was labelled a “false solution” by some Indigenous and civil society groups.
- After Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels ahead of COP’s opening, rumours are swirling over how this might take shape. A new declaration spearheaded by Colombia and a roadmap with backing from a number of countries, including Denmark, the UK, France, Kenya and Germany, are being floated as possible options.
- China is currently among the countries pushing for “provision of finance from rich countries and unilateral trade measures” to be included on the agenda, reported Climate Home News. Chinese delegation head Li Gao told Agence France-Presse it is “crucial” for developed countries to fulfil their $300bn commitment.
- Dozens of Indigenous protesters forced their way into COP’s blue zone on Tuesday night, expressing anger at a lack of access to the negotiations, Reuters said. On Friday, a peaceful protest blocked the entrance to the blue zone, causing lengthy queues as delegates were forced to use a side door.
344%
The rise in the global use of solar from 2024 to 2035 under “stated policies”, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis of the latest World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency.
Latest climate research
- The 2025 Global Carbon Budget, covered in detail by Carbon Brief, finds that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement will rise 1.1% in 2025 | Earth System Science Data
- In its November 2025 update, Climate Action Tracker says that its projections of global warming by 2100 have “barely moved” in four years | Climate Action Tracker
- The AI server industry in the US is unlikely to meet its 2030 net-zero goals “without substantial reliance on highly uncertain” carbon offsets | Nature Sustainability
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
China’s carbon dioxide emissions have “now been flat or falling for 18 months” since March 2024, analysis for Carbon Brief has found, due, in particular, to the transport, cement and steel sectors. The analysis has been covered widely in publications including China’s Global Times, the New York Times, Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg and on the frontpage of the Guardian.
Spotlight
What to expect from COP30 talks
This week, Carbon Brief’s expert team walk through what is happening with the biggest issues being negotiated at COP30.
‘Cover text’
Can you judge a COP by its cover text? At COP, the presidency has the option to pull together a new negotiated “cover text”, an overarching political overview of decisions agreed at the summit, along with other issues not on the agenda that it wants to draw attention to.
COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago might have dismissed a catch-all “cover decision” as a “last-minute solution” ahead of COP and dodged the question since, but other parties have been less shy in hinting that a cover text is, indeed, coming.
Cover decisions are often the product of fraught negotiations, high stakes, too little time and too many parties to accommodate.
This year, there is added pressure to address what is happening in the wider world outside the “negotiations” and to politically signal that the UN climate process is alive and making progress, despite the withdrawal of the US.
What elements could go into it? As a member of the “BASIC” group of nations comprising Brazil, South Africa, India and China, trade measures could find a place. But ideas pushed by Brazilian president Lula for new “roadmaps” away from fossil fuels and deforestation might find a place. Finance, however, could be much trickier to fit in.
Adaptation
One of the key expected outcomes of COP30 is agreement on a list of 100 indicators that can be used to measure progress under the “global goal on adaptation” (GGA). After two years of work by experts, negotiations got underway with a suggested list that had been whittled down from nearly 10,000 possible indicators.
Despite the focus on the GGA by the COP30 presidency and others, division has quickly emerged around the timeline for the adoption of the indicators. The African Group has notably requested a two-year work programme to further refine the list, while other parties are pushing for the indicators to be adopted in Belém as planned.
On Wednesday, an informal note was published that compiled elements for a draft decision. Significantly, for the first time under the GGA, this included a call for developed countries to “at least triple their collective provision” of adaptation finance by 2030, with a target to reach $120bn. This echoed a suggested target originally set out by the negotiating group of least developed countries (LDCs), supported by the African Group, Arab Group and the Association of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC) countries.
Just transition and mitigation work programmes
Over the past year, civil society groups have been calling for the establishment of a mechanism to enact the agreed UNFCCC principles of a “just transition”. This gained momentum on Wednesday within negotiations of the just transition work programme (JTWP), when the G77 and China called for the development of the “Belem Action Mechanism” (BAM).
Chile, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), India and other developing countries supported the mechanism. However, Norway, the UK, Australia and Japan pushed back. Other long-standing points of contention have also raised their heads, including around unilateral trade measures and references to fossil fuels and aligning to global temperature goals.
Within the mitigation work programme (MWP) talks, negotiators are looking to build on two dialogues held this year. The main themes at COP30 are the links between the MWP and the global stocktake (see below) and the future of the programme itself.
Old divisions have emerged in negotiations, focused predominantly on the mandate of the MWP and the potential development of a digital platform as part of its continuation.
UAE dialogue
The landmark outcome of the first “global stocktake”, agreed at COP28 in Dubai, called on all countries to contribute to a “transition away from fossil fuels”. It also mandated a “UAE dialogue” on “implementing the global stocktake outcomes”.
Two years later, countries remain deadlocked over what this dialogue should discuss. Many want it to cover all parts of the stocktake, including the energy transition, while others want an exclusive focus on climate finance. They also disagree on whether the dialogue should have substantive outcomes, including a formal process to keep discussing the issues raised.
Having failed to reach agreement at COP29 last year, the latest draft text shows parties are just as far apart in Belém, nearly halfway into the summit.
Finance
Climate finance for developing countries does not occupy a high-profile position in the formal COP30 negotiations. Yet, as demonstrated by its role in adaptation talks and the agenda dispute, finance still has the potential to derail proceedings.
Ahead of the conference, the COP30 and COP29 presidencies released their “Baku to Belém roadmap”, exploring how finance could be ramped up to $1.3tn by 2035.
An influential group of experts also released new analysis showing a “feasible path” to this goal, leaning on private finance. They said this work would provide a “valuable signal” to those in the finance sector.
However, with no position in the Belém negotiations, it was unclear how – or whether – the roadmap would be taken forward by governments beyond COP30.
Instead, finance negotiators have been occupied with technical matters, but these still show signs of division. For example, some developing-party groups have pushed back against an EU priority goal to extend a “dialogue” about “making finance flows consistent” with climate objectives.
Watch, read, listen
UNDER THREAT: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism told the story of Kim Rebholz – an environmentalist who was threatened for his work curbing illegal logging in Democratic Republic of Congo’s mangrove parks.
SPOTLIGHT ON STARMER: YouTuber Simon Clark has published a video of himself interviewing prime minister Keir Starmer about the UK’s actions on climate and nature, at COP30 and domestically.
INSIDE COP:Outrage and Optimism is running a “special edition” podcast series in partnership with the COP30 presidency, bringing “exclusive, behind-the-scenes access” to the conference.
Coming up
- 14-21 November: UN Climate Change conference (COP30) heads into its crucial second week in Belém
- 15 November: Informal stocktaking plenary of COP30 talks by the Brazilian presidency
- 17 November: Launch of the Global Methane Status Report
Pick of the jobs
- International Energy Agency, intern, China programme | Stipend: €1,000/month. Location: Paris
- Channel 4, sustainability production executive | Salary: £48,125. Location: Bristol, Glasgow or Leeds, UK
- World Bank, environmental specialist | Salary: “GF” grade. Location: Yaounde, Cameroon
- Greenpeace, climate and energy campaigner | Salary: Unknown. Location: Bangkok, Thailand
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 14 November 2025: COP30 DeBriefed: Finance and 1.5C loom large at talks; China’s emissions dip; Negotiations explained appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Developed countries have poured billions of dollars into railways across Asia, solar projects in Africa and thousands of other climate-related initiatives overseas, according to a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.
A group of nations, including much of Europe, the US and Japan, is obliged under the Paris Agreement to provide international “climate finance” to developing countries.
This financial support can come in forms such as grants and loans from various sources, including aid budgets, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and private investments.
The flagship climate-finance target for more than a decade was to hit “$100bn a year” by 2020, which developed countries met – albeit two years late – in 2022.
Carbon Brief and the Guardian have analysed data across more than 20,000 global climate projects funded using public money from developed nations, including official 2021 and 2022 figures, which have only just been published.
The data provides a detailed insight into how the $100bn goal was reached, including funding for everything from sustainable farming in Niger to electricity projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
With developed countries now pledging to ramp up climate finance further, the analysis also shows how donors often rely on loans and private finance to meet their obligations.
- The $100bn target was reached in 2022, boosted by private finance and the US
- Relatively wealthy countries – including China and the UAE – were major recipients
- A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects
- There was funding for more than 500 clean-power projects in African countries
- Some ‘least developed’ countries relied heavily on loans
- US shares in development banks significantly inflated its total contribution
- Adaptation finance still lags, but climate-vulnerable countries received more
- Methodology
The $100bn target was reached in 2022, boosted by private finance and the US
A small handful of countries have consistently been the top climate-finance donors. This remained the case in 2021 and 2022, with just four countries – Japan, Germany, France and the US – responsible for half of all climate finance, the analysis shows.
Not only was 2022 the first year in which the $100bn goal was achieved, it also saw the largest ever single-year increase in climate finance – a rise of $26.3bn, or 29%, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
(It is worth noting that while OECD figures are often referenced as the most “official” climate-finance totals, they are contested.)
Half of this increase came from a $12.6bn rise in support from MDBs – financial institutions that are owned and funded by member states. The rest can be attributed to two main factors.
First, while several donors ramped up spending, the US drove by far the biggest increase in “bilateral” finance, provided directly by the country itself.
After years of stalling during the first Donald Trump presidency, when Joe Biden took office in 2021, the nation’s bilateral climate aid more than tripled between that year and the next.
Meanwhile, after years of “stagnating” at around $15bn, the amount of private investments “mobilised” in developing countries by developed-country spending surged to around $22bn in 2022, according to OECD estimates.
As the chart below shows, the combination of increased US contributions and higher private investments pushed climate finance up by nearly $14bn in 2022, helping it to reach $115.9bn in total.
Both of these trends are still pertinent in 2025, following a new pledge made at COP29 by developed countries to ramp up climate finance to “at least” $300bn a year by 2035.
After years of increasing rapidly under Biden, US bilateral climate finance for developing countries has been effectively eliminated during Trump’s second presidential term. Other major donors, including Germany, France and the UK, have also cut their aid budgets.
This means there will be more pressure on other sources of climate finance in the coming years. In particular, developed countries hope that private finance can help to raise finance into the trillions of dollars required to achieve developing countries’ climate goals.
Some higher-income countries – including China and the UAE – were major recipients
The greatest beneficiaries of international climate finance tend to be large, middle-income countries, such as Egypt, the Philippines and Brazil, according to the analysis.
(The World Bank classifies countries as being low-, lower-middle, upper-middle or high-income, according to their gross national income per person.)
Lower-middle income India received $14.1bn in 2021 and 2022 – nearly all as loans – making it by far the largest recipient, as the chart below shows.
Most of India’s top projects were metro and rail lines in cities, such as Delhi and Mumbai, which accounted for 46% of its total climate finance in those years, Carbon Brief analysis shows. (See: A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects.)
As the world’s second-largest economy and a major funder of energy projects overseas, China – classified as upper-middle income by the World Bank – has faced mounting pressure to start officially providing climate finance. At the same time, the nation received more than $3bn of climate finance over this period, as it is still classed as a developing country under the UN climate system.
High-income Gulf petrostates are also among the countries receiving funds. For example, the UAE received Japanese finance of $1.3bn for an electricity transmission project and a waste-to-energy project.
To some extent, such large shares simply reflect the size of many middle-income countries. India received 9% of all bilateral and multilateral climate finance, but it is home to 18% of the global population.
The focus on these nations also reflects the kind of big-budget infrastructure that is being funded.
“Middle-income economies tend to have the financial and institutional capacity to design, appraise and deliver large-scale projects,” Sarah Colenbrander, climate programme director at global affairs thinktank ODI, tells Carbon Brief.
Donors might focus on relatively higher-income or powerful nations out of self-interest, for example, to align with geopolitical, trade or commercial interests. But, as Colenbrander tells Carbon Brief, there are also plenty of “high-minded” reasons to do so, not least the opportunity to help curb their relatively high emissions.
A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects
Japan is the largest climate-finance donor, accounting for a fifth of all bilateral and multilateral finance in 2021 and 2022, the analysis shows.
Of the 20 largest bilateral projects, 13 were Japanese. These include $7.6bn of loans for eight rail and metro systems in major cities across India, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
In fact, Japan’s funding for rail projects was so substantial that it made up 11% of all bilateral finance. This amounts to 4% of climate finance from all sources.
While these rail projects are likely to provide benefits to developing countries, they also highlight some of the issues identified by aid experts with Japan’s climate-finance practices.
As was the case for more than 80% of Japan’s climate finance, all of these projects were funded with loans, which must be paid back. Nearly a fifth of Japan’s total loans were described as “non-concessional”, meaning they were offered on terms equivalent to those offered on the open market, rather than at more favourable rates.
Many Japan-backed projects also stipulate that Japanese companies and workers must be hired to work on them, reflecting the government’s policies to “proactively support” and “facilitate” the overseas expansion of Japanese business using aid.
Documents show that rail projects in India and the Philippines were granted on this basis.
This practice can be beneficial, especially in sectors such as rail infrastructure, where Japanese companies have considerable expertise. Yet, analysts have questioned Japan’s approach, which they argue can disproportionately benefit the donor itself.
“Counting these loans as climate finance presents a moral hazard…And such loans tied to Japanese businesses make it worse,” Yuri Onodera, a climate specialist at Friends of the Earth Japan, tells Carbon Brief.
There was funding for more than 500 clean-power projects in African countries
Around 730 million people still lack access to electricity, with roughly 80% of those people living in sub-Saharan Africa.
As part of their climate-finance pledges, donor countries often support renewable projects, transmission lines and other initiatives that can provide clean power to those in need.
Carbon Brief and the Guardian have identified funding for more than 500 clean-power and transmission projects in African countries that lack universal electricity access. In total, these funds amounted to $7.6bn over the two years 2021-22.
Among them was support for Chad’s first-ever solar project, a new hydropower plant in Mozambique and the expansion of electricity grids in Nigeria.
The distribution of funds across the continent – excluding multi-country programmes – can be seen in the map below.
A lack of clear rules about what can be classified as “climate finance” in the UN climate process means donors sometimes include support for fossil fuels – particularly gas power – in their totals.
For example, Japan counted an $18m loan to a Japanese liquified natural gas (LNG) company in Senegal and roughly $1m for gas projects in Tanzania.
However, such funding accounted for a tiny fraction of sub-Saharan Africa’s climate finance overall, amounting to less than 1% of all power-sector funding across the region, based on the projects identified in this analysis.
Some ‘least developed’ countries relied heavily on loans
One of the most persistent criticisms levelled at climate finance by developing-country governments and civil society groups is that so much of it is provided in the form of loans.
While loans are commonly used to fund major projects, they are sometimes offered on unfavourable terms and add to the burden of countries that are already struggling with debt.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has shown that the 44 “least developed countries” (LDCs) spend twice as much servicing debts as they receive in climate finance.
Developed nations pledged $33.4bn in 2021 and 2022 to the 44 LDCs to help them finance climate projects. In total, $17.2bn – more than half of the funding – was provided as loans, primarily from Japan, France and development banks.
The chart below shows how, for a number of LDCs, loans continue to be the main way in which they receive international climate funds.
For example, Angola received $216.7m in loans from France – primarily to support its water infrastructure – and $571.6m in loans from various multilateral institutions, together amounting to nearly all the nation’s climate finance over this period.
Oxfam, which describes developed countries as “unjustly indebting poor countries” via loans, estimates that the “true value” of climate finance in 2022 was $28-35bn, roughly a quarter of the OECD’s estimate. This is largely due to Oxfam discounting much of the value of loans.
However, Jan Kowalzig, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam Germany, tells Carbon Brief that, “generally, LDCs receive loans at better conditions” than they would have been able to secure on the open market, sometimes referred to as “concessional” loans.
US shares in development banks significantly raised its total contribution
The US has been one of the world’s top climate-finance providers, accounting for around 15% of all bilateral and multilateral contributions in 2021 and 2022.
Despite this, US contributions have consistently been viewed as relatively low when considering the nation’s wealth and historical role in driving climate change.
Moreover, much of the climate finance that can be attributed to the US comes from its MDB shareholdings, rather than direct contributions from its aid budget.
These banks are owned by member countries and the US is a dominant shareholder in many of them.
The analysis reveals that around three-quarters of US climate finance provided in 2021-22 came via multilateral sources, particularly the World Bank. (For information on how this analysis attributes multilateral funding to donors, see Methodology.)
Among other major donors – specifically Japan, France and Germany – only a third of their finance was channelled through multilateral institutions. As the chart below shows, multilateral contributions lifted the US from being the fifth-largest donor to the third-largest.
While the Trump administration has cut virtually all overseas climate funding and broadly rejected multilateral institutions, the US has not yet abandoned its influential stake in MDBs.
Prior to COP29 in 2024, only MDB funds that could be attributed to developed country inputs were counted towards the $100bn goal, as part of those nations’ Paris Agreement duties.
However, countries have now agreed that “all climate-related outflows” from MDBs – no matter which donor country they are attributed to – will count towards the new $300bn goal.
This means that, as long as MDBs continue extensively funding climate projects, there will still be a large slice of climate finance that can be attributed to the US, even as it exits the Paris Agreement.
Adaptation finance still lags, but climate-vulnerable countries received more
Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries committed to achieving “a balance between adaptation and mitigation” in their climate finance.
The idea is that, while it is important to focus on mitigation – or cutting emissions – by supporting projects such as clean energy, there is also a need to help developing countries prepare for the threat of climate change.
Generally, adaptation projects are less likely to provide a return on investment and are, therefore, more reliant on grant-based finance.
In practice, a “balance” between adaptation and mitigation has never been reached. Over the period of this analysis, 58% of climate finance was for mitigation, 33% was for adaptation and the remainder was for projects that contributed to both goals.
This reflects a preference for mitigation-based financing via loans among some major donors, particularly Japan and France. Both countries provided just a third of their finance for adaptation projects in 2021 and 2022.
However, among some of the most climate-vulnerable countries – including land-locked parts of Africa and small islands – most funding was for adaptation, as the chart below shows.
Among the projects receiving climate-adaptation funds were those supporting sustainable agriculture in Niger, improving disaster resilience in Micronesia and helping those in Somalia who have been internally displaced by “climate change and food crises”.
Methodology
The joint Guardian and Carbon Brief analysis of climate finance includes the bilateral and multilateral public finance that developed countries pledged for climate projects in developing countries. It covers the years 2021 and 2022.
(These “developed” countries are the 23 “Annex II” nations, plus the EU, that are obliged to provide climate finance under the Paris Agreement.)
The analysis excludes other types of funding that contribute to the $100bn climate-finance target for climate projects, such as export credits and private finance “mobilised” by public investments. Where these have been referenced, the figures are OECD estimates. They are excluded from the analysis because export credits are a small fraction of the total, while private finance mobilised cannot be attributed to specific donor countries.
Data for bilateral funding comes from the biennial transparency reports (BTRs) each country submits to the UNFCCC. The lag in official reporting means the most recent figures – published around the end of 2024 and start of 2025 – only go up to 2022.
Many of the bilateral projects recorded by countries do not specify single recipients, but instead mention several countries. These projects have not been included when calculating the amount of finance individual developing countries received, but they are included in the total figures.
The multilateral funding, including projects funded by MDBs and multilateral climate funds, comes from the OECD. Many countries – including developing countries – pay into these institutions, which then use their money to fund climate projects and, in the case of MDBs, raise additional finance from capital markets.
This analysis calculated the shares of the “outflows” from multilateral institutions that can be attributed to developed countries. It adapts the approach used by the OECD to calculate these attributable shares for developed countries as a whole group.
As the OECD does not publish individual donor country shares that make up the total developed-country contribution, this analysis calculated each country’s attributable shares based on shareholdings in MDBs and cumulative contributions to multilateral funds. This was based on a methodology used by analysts at the World Resources Institute and ODI. There were some multilateral funds that could not be assigned using this methodology, which are therefore not captured in each country’s multilateral contribution.
The post Analysis: Seven charts showing how the $100bn climate-finance goal was met appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Seven charts showing how the $100bn climate-finance goal was met
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