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.
Several major banks that helped set up the UN’s now-defunct Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) in 2021 have since continued to lend money to coal companies, a new report has revealed.
Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Deutsche Bank and Santander were heavily involved in the NZBA and the associated Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) when it was launched by Mark Carney, then a UN climate envoy and now Canada’s leader, in the run-up to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Despite their involvement, data released this week shows those banks and some others did not reduce the amount of money they lent, nor the value of their underwriting, to coal activities between 2022 and 2025. Around half of the NZBA members who were engaged in coal financing over that time increased it and half cut it, according to the report by German environmental research group Urgewald.
Ana Botín, executive chair of Santander, was a member of the GFANZ CEO principals’ group and said at the time of the NZBA launch that her Spanish bank was “proud to be part of the founding members of this new alliance and to accelerate progress towards net zero”.
Since then, the report’s data documents that Santander has provided loans and underwriting worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year to coal companies, particularly American coal-power plant operators Duke Energy and the Southern Company. Santander did not respond to a request for comment.
Urgewald’s research adjusts the value of loans and underwriting provided to coal companies based on how much of a company’s revenues come from the most polluting fossil fuel. So a hypothetical $100 million loan to German utility RWE is valued at $21 million, as 21% of RWE’s revenue is from coal.
The research does not take account of whether companies are expanding their coal business or phasing it out for greener alternatives. Some banks have said their coal clients need to put in place transition plans by a certain date. Some also say that, by a certain date, they will stop lending money to clients that get more than a set percentage of their revenue from coal.
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What’s on the climate calendar for October 2026?
Brazilians are heading to the polls, diplomats are gathering in the Pacific for Pre-COP, and it’s crunch time for the IPCC -
UN chief urges countries to adopt fossil fuel transition plans with timelines
In his last speech to the UN General Assembly, António Guterres for the first time called on every nation to deliver a plan to phase out coal, oil and gas while protecting workers
Most companies expanding coal are in Asian nations like China, India and Indonesia and are largely financed by banks from their own countries. But there are examples of NZBA founding members supporting companies that are actively prolonging the life of their coal businesses.
For example, Glencore, a Switzerland-based multinational that gets 4% of its revenue from coal, has just won preliminary regulatory approval to keep on coal mining in Australia’s Hunter Valley until 2045. Last year, the company was supported by loans and underwriting from Bank of America, Citigroup, Santander, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Standard Chartered.
Good and bad news
Some NZBA founding members like Swiss giant UBS have reduced their loans and underwriting for coal companies, the data suggests. Others – like Triodos and Kenya Commercial Bank – have provided no support for coal companies since at least 2021.
Urgewald researcher Hannah O’Neill told Climate Home News that “the banking sector is not moving in one direction. There is a growing divide between banks that are tightening their coal policies and reducing their exposure, and those where coal policies remain weak or where financing continues.”
Unlike the UN’s Race to Zero campaign, with which it partnered, the NZBA did not require its members to end financing for fossil fuels like coal, leading to accusations by climate campaigners that its rules were too weak.
Despite this, after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president in November 2024, several North American banks quit the alliance and the NZBA’s requirements were diluted in April 2025. After further withdrawals, the group shut itself down in October 2025.
Globally, the Urgewald report found that many banks in the European Union, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Taiwan have reduced their coal finance since governments agreed at COP26 to phase down coal power.
But with Chinese, American, Indonesian and South Korean banks increasing their support, total bank financing for the coal industry has remained broadly the same each year since 2022.
“Coal financing is not disappearing – but it is concentrating in banks and markets where coal policies are either missing or weak,” said Heffa Schücking, director of Urgewald.
Urgewald’s definition of coal companies includes firms and their subsidiaries that explore for, process, trade, transport and mine coal, or burn it in power plants to produce electricity, or manufacture equipment for the coal industry. It does not include companies that use coal to make cement or steel – and an adjustment is made to account for how much of the business model is coal-related.
Banks defend delays
At the time of publication, most of the banks named in the report for increasing their coal finance had not responded to requests for comment. But a spokesperson for Deutsche Bank pointed Climate Home News to its May 2026 announcement that it was delaying its requirement for existing clients to present it with transition plans and cut their coal exposure.
Instead of having to present these plans by the end of 2025, the bank has given them until the end of 2027. They will also have to ensure that their revenue share from thermal coal falls below half by then, the bank added. New clients need energy transition plans to access finance.
Deutsche Bank said at the time it was delaying its requirements because of the “increasingly complex regulatory environment as well as differing speeds of energy transition in various regions beyond what was anticipated by Deutsche Bank in 2023”.
Big banks’ lending to coal backers undermines Indonesia’s green plans
A spokesperson for Barclays told Climate Home News: “Many companies in this report are diversified energy or mining companies. We do not provide financing to companies that generate more than 30% of revenues from thermal coal mining or power generation, and we will phase out all financing by 2035.”
The Barclays spokesperson added: “Barclays is financing an energy sector in transition, providing finance to meet current energy needs and also financing the scaling of clean energy. Over the past three years, we have facilitated more than $300 billion of sustainable and transition finance, including billions to cleaner energy projects, and invested millions into climate tech.”
The post Big banks behind “net zero” alliance continued lending to coal firms appeared first on Climate Home News.
Big banks behind “net zero” alliance continued lending to coal firms
Harjeet Singh is the global convenor of the Fill the Fund campaign and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. Julie-Anne Richards is strategic campaign lead for the Make Big Polluters Pay campaign in Australia.
This year, a glacier collapse in Nepal’s Himalayan valleys swept away the lives of at least 1,500 people, with recovery costs of US$5 billion, or 10% of national GDP. But this was not a tragedy for which no one can be blamed. This was a crime with a balance sheet – one whose costs are paid by people who did nothing to cause it, and whose profits are booked by polluting corporations that did everything.
Across the Pacific, the calculation of injustice is now brutally clear. According to Oxfam Australia, the average yearly GDP loss of Pacific countries from climate disasters has increased four-fold over the last decade, reaching 14.3% of GDP. The number of Pacific people battered by climate disasters has risen by 700% in a decade. Whole villages are being packed up and moved as the sea takes the land beneath them.
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What’s on the climate calendar for October 2026?
Brazilians are heading to the polls, diplomats are gathering in the Pacific for Pre-COP, and it’s crunch time for the IPCC
Let’s look at the other ledger. This year, as climate change and an oil shock drove up the cost of living for ordinary families, Woodside – touted as “one of Australia’s biggest winners” from the war in the Middle East – reported revenues jumping nearly 30% to AUD$6 billion in just three months.
In Australia, Oxfam finds that in 2023-2024, fossil fuel corporations paid only AUD$22.8 billion in corporate income tax – just 5% of their AUD$436 billion in total reported income – while 26 out of 80, or one in every three large fossil fuel corporations, did not pay corporate income tax at all.
The polluters are not struggling to pay for the damage they cause. They are choosing not to.
This is the moral obscenity at the heart of the climate crisis: the money exists. It is simply flowing in the wrong direction. And nowhere is that clearer than in the funds the world built to protect the vulnerable, now left to languish.
Funds struggle to fill their coffers
The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) has received US$2.8 billion in requests from 119 countries. And Nepal has sought an urgent US$20 million for immediate needs. Yet the Fund has only US$342 million in total to give.
The Pacific Resilience Facility – a fund the Pacific designed for itself, to prepare its own communities – sits well short of even its modest US$500 million capitalisation target. And the Adaptation Fund is running on empty. While adaptation needs in developing countries could reach US$387 billion a year by 2030, according to the latest UNEP Adaptation Gap report, the Fund’s resource mobilisation target of a modest US$300 million for 2025 fell far short, with only US$135 million pledged.
This is a matter of priorities, not of resources. For decades, the world has accepted a simple principle – the polluter pays principle – whether through the OECD, of which Australia is a member, or Europe’s carbon pricing. New York and Vermont have already passed laws to make Big Oil pay into climate superfunds, and ten more US states are moving to follow.
The idea is neither radical nor new. It’s time to make big polluters pay.
Comment: After Hormuz, Nepal and wildfires, people want action to make polluters pay
What is urgently needed is the courage to apply it to the fossil fuel corporations that have spent decades avoiding it. In November, Australia takes up the presidency of the COP31 negotiations, committing to stand shoulder to shoulder with its Pacific neighbours.
Australia, together with the Turkish COP31 Presidency, must guide and inspire progress at the upcoming climate conference, including on new climate finance pledges by developed countries (which agreed to mobilise at least $300 billion by 2035) and triple the funds available to the FRLD, the Adaptation Fund and the other UN climate funds.
Rich countries agreed to these goals two years ago at COP29. Yet, the reality is that developing countries’ need for climate finance is in the trillions annually, while developed countries continue to delay providing even what they have already committed. A clear signal recognising the importance of delivering the promised climate finance must come at next week’s Pre-COP in the Pacific, and COP31 in Antalya must go on to deliver against existing promises or risk an irreparable breakdown in trust.
Time for a climate pollution levy
Countries must also ensure funding for loss and damage takes its rightful place as the third pillar of climate finance, alongside mitigation and adaptation, in negotiations regarding the UNFCCC climate finance work programme and Article 9 on shifting finance flows towards a low-carbon, resilient world.
Australia, as President of Negotiations and as a Pacific nation, cannot ask the world to fill these funds while it lets its own coal and gas giants off the hook. Australia should not only stop approving new and expanded coal and gas mines, it should also introduce a Climate Pollution Levy on big coal, oil and gas corporations – a charge on every tonne of carbon pollution they extract and profit from. Independent analysis shows such a levy could raise tens of billions of dollars a year, and can be designed so the cost falls on the corporations, not on households.
This is not charity – it is compensation. It is the beginning of accountability. And the public is far ahead of its leaders: eight in 10 people worldwide, and a clear majority of Australians, want fossil fuel firms taxed to pay for the damage they cause.
Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn
The money must go where the harm lands. A Climate Pollution Levy should feed the funds frontline communities are relying on – fully capitalising the Pacific Resilience Facility this year, replenishing the Adaptation Fund, and delivering the billions the loss and damage fund needs.
It is essential for these funds to be able to provide grant-based finance that reaches communities directly, not more loans that push drowning nations deeper into debt. With Nepal’s recovery costs estimated at around 10% of the country’s GDP, if we leave it to fend for itself without loss and damage funding, Nepal will likely be saddled with debt and could fail to recover adequately, increasing poverty and inequality.
We have heard enough empty pledges. We have watched enough funds announced with fanfare, only then to be starved in silence. The era of asking polluters politely is over. Australia, as COP31 president, has a rare chance to prove that the polluter pays principle means something and apply it to those who have profited the most.
The post As COP31 co-host, Australia should make its polluters pay for climate damage appeared first on Climate Home News.
As COP31 co-host, Australia should make its polluters pay for climate damage
This is a republication of October’s edition of The Climate Agenda – a subscriber-only newsletter designed to keep you informed of the key events, negotiations and announcements happening every month. If you want to receive The Climate Agenda straight to your inbox at the start of each month, sign up as a subscriber today.
This month, we’ll be on the ground reporting from the Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia later this month and following all the developments as we build towards COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye next month. Here’s what you need to know for October, why it matters and what to expect.
Brazilian Election
First round: Sunday 4 October – Second round: Sunday 25 October
This poll is being closely watched by Brazilian environmentalists as it’s likely to make a big difference to Brazil’s international climate politics and the health of the Amazon rainforest.
The two clear front-runners are current left-wing President Lula and right-wing Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who ruled from 2019 to 2023 but was declared ineligible to hold public office because of his attacks on the electoral system and is now under house arrest.
In the unlikely event that either candidate wins more than half the votes in the first round, they will be elected as the country’s leader. Latest polls have Lula on 39% and Bolsonaro on 35% (though the numbers are shifting) with several minor candidates in the single-digits. If none of them get a majority, there will be a one-on-one run-off on October 25.
The Latin American nation is set to record its lowest-ever level of deforestation, as efforts to rein in illegal clearing and restore Indigenous rights progressed under Lula. But Brazilian experts are warning that the huge agribusiness lobby in Congress, whose interests shape what happens in the Amazon, will be emboldened if Bolsonaro takes power, with the Supreme Court also risking a turn to the right.
As for climate politics, some seasoned watchers fear that Flávio – a climate change denier like his dad – could even try to pull Brazil out of the Paris Agreement. That would leave other countries to take forward Brazil’s COP30 global roadmaps on transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF) and ending deforestation – both of which are due to be delivered by COP31.
For Brazil’s own TAFF roadmap – commissioned earlier this year but so far nowhere to be seen – the election may have less of an impact, given Lula is as keen as any other politician to extract oil and gas from the Amazon, amid cross-party support for fossil fuel production.
Read more: Brazil leads “encouraging” decline in global rainforest destruction in 2025
Pre-COP
Monday 5 October – Thursday 8 October – Fiji and Tuvalu
The annual Pre-COP meeting is usually a business-like gathering of government negotiators, sounding out each other’s positions and laying the groundwork for deals at the main COP summit. But this year’s “pre” has been jazzed up by Australia’s partnership with Pacific governments keen to elevate their climate issues on the international stage.
“We will bring the eyes of the world to our region, highlight the threat that climate change poses to it, and show how Pacific voices are shaping global action to counter it,” Australian PM Anthony Albanese said of the event.
On Monday, before the Pre-COP officially starts, a group of senior government figures – including a handful of leaders – will visit the world’s second lowest-lying nation Tuvalu, as UN boss Antonio Guterres did in 2019.
They will visit areas affected by sea level rise, see climate resilience projects and meet local communities before flying 2.5 hours south to Fiji to join up with the Pre-COP – which starts on Tuesday – and speak at a “Leaders’ plenary session” that evening.
The Pre-COP runs until Thursday. Governments are expected to try to advance on some kind of a roadmap for protecting oceans from climate change, while Fiji says Pacific nations will emphasise the need to follow science and step up efforts to limit warming to 1.5C.
Australia is also due to present an action plan to improve access to climate finance for small island nations and least-developed countries, so that governments, development banks and climate funds can endorse it ahead of the Antalya summit.
Alongside the official Pre-COP discussions, a “green zone” will host talks organised by civil society on topics like public transport, carbon markets and the International Court of Justice advisory opinion. Unfortunately, these events won’t be available to follow online.
Read more: Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood
Read more: At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
Article 6.4 Supervisory Body
Monday 5 October – Friday 9 October – Bonn, Germany
The UN carbon market’s rule-making body meets for one last jam-packed session ahead of COP31, with decisions pending on several high-stakes issues that could shape the future of the new crediting mechanism.
Top of the agenda is a rulebook for clean cooking projects, which aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves. These projects generate some of the most popular carbon credits but have also drawn some of the heaviest criticism for overstating their climate benefits through lax accounting.
Technical experts have recommended the Supervisory Body tighten the rules compared to existing crediting programmes, including by forcing cookstove project developers for the first time to guard against the risk of the climate benefits of their credits – the trees saved from becoming cooking fuel – being wiped out by fire, drought or logging.
The proposal on the so-called reversal risk assessment has sparked a “coordinated” lobbying campaign from the industry, some conservation NGOs and UNEP, arguing that stronger protections could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits.
Read more: Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) plenary
Monday 12 October – Friday 16 October – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Scientists and government officials will try, once again, to agree on a timeline to produce the highly influential AR7 assessment report from the UN’s climate science body.
The faultlines that have blocked a deal at several previous sessions are well established: a large group of predominantly developed countries, small island and progressive Latin American states and the poorest nations want the reports to be ready in time to inform the UN’s next global assessment of climate action, due to be completed in November 2028.
A small group of primarily big emerging economies disagree, claiming this timeline would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and restrict their ability to provide scientific input into the process.
Three options will be on the table in Addis Ababa. Two of them would see all three flagship assessment reports approved by July 2028 and September 2028 respectively, just in time to feed into the second Global Stocktake.
The third, based on proposals from Saudi Arabia and India, would deliver only the Working Group 1 report, on the physical science of climate change, by May 2028. The reports from Working Groups 2 and 3, covering climate impacts and ways to cut emissions, would not be approved until mid-2029, well after the stocktake concludes at COP33.
Delegates are also expected to discuss the IPCC’s increasingly strained budget, made worse by a funding gap left by the withdrawal of the United States. The panel has warned that, without a sustained increase in contributions, its trust fund’s cash balance would run out by the end of 2028, putting the delivery of the AR7 set of reports at risk and forcing cuts to in-person meetings, translation and outreach.
Read more: Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
Read more: As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
World Bank & IMF Annual Meetings
Tuesday 12 October – Sunday 18 October – Bangkok, Thailand
With their biggest shareholder – the US – resolutely opposed to climate action, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are likely to try to avoid mentioning climate change at their annual meetings in Bangkok – and there are no headline events on the subject.
But they aren’t in complete control of the agenda. Thailand will host a discussion on financing a green resilient economy and World Bank President Ajay Banga is likely to be challenged on climate at a live-streamed civil society townhall on October 12.
With tricky negotiations on the World Bank’s climate finance target concluded earlier this year (it was dropped), talks are moving on to the sustainability framework of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, which invests in the private sector. Civil society is calling for its rules on protecting people and the planet to be maintained and strengthened.
The IMF’s guidance note to staff – which shapes the circumstances under which climate can be included in IMF programmes – will also be negotiated. Longer term, the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, which channels funding to green projects, will be reviewed but not before 2028 at the earliest.
Read more: World Bank’s climate work can endure without finance target, experts say
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17
Monday 19 October – Friday 30 October – Yerevan, Armenia
The biodiversity COP – a sister convention to the UN climate process – will for the first time take stock of progress towards key goals in its 2022 landmark agreement, the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). These include a headline target to protect and conserve at least 30% of the planet’s land and marine ecosystems by 2030.
A draft report prepared by a scientific panel warns that “unless collective implementation accelerates rapidly, the 2030 targets and mission will not be achieved”. In fact, governments are failing on 22 out of 23 targets. The final report is expected to be published ahead of COP17, where governments are expected to react strongly.
UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker told journalists earlier this month that the most significant progress is expected to occur towards the end of the decade, as 174 countries took the first four years to develop national targets.
Finance, meanwhile, is set to become a contentious issue, as the draft report says developed countries fell short on a target to provide $20bn per year in international public finance for nature protection, reaching only about $17bn per year from 2020 to 2023. They have also yet to meet a wider goal to mobilise $200bn per year counting all kinds of finance.
Much like in climate talks, the EU has proposed to broaden the base of donors to include emerging economies who want to “voluntarily assume the obligations” of developed countries. Saudi Arabia and Qatar want nothing to do with this proposal. China has said bringing in new contributors should not weaken the obligations of developed countries. Expect a fight in Yerevan.
A preliminary meeting in Nairobi in August resulted in a heavily bracketed text that delegates will have to unravel in Armenia. One observer said countries had “overall missed the level of urgency” needed.
Keep an eye out for our webinar live from Yerevan later this month, where we’ll provide an update on the talks and how governments are responding to science’s demands for quicker action.
Read more: Mombasa ocean summit drives progress on marine protection, but threats persist
Read more: UN biodiversity talks agree finance roadmap, postponing decision on a new fund
European Climate Resilience & Risk Management Framework
Wednesday 28 October – Brussels, Belgium
Following a torrid summer beset by recurring heatwaves, drought and outbreaks of forest fires across the continent, the European Commission will present its keenly awaited climate resilience and risk management framework to help member states protect their populations from worsening climate change impacts.
As part of the policy package, the Commission will identify 100 of Europe’s most climate-vulnerable territories. And alongside an assessment of the risks, there will be guidance at which level they should be managed – regional, national or by the EU. Currently, confusion often arises over who is responsible for preventing, preparing for and managing disasters across the bloc.
The framework will also aim to make Europe a “champion in adaptation technologies” – such as drought-resistant crops, flood prevention or energy-efficient cooling – which have been described by EU President Ursula von der Leyen as “a huge emerging market”.
With only around a quarter of catastrophe losses in Europe covered by private insurance, the Commission also plans to set up a Climate Insurance Alliance to boost that figure.
READ MORE: WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in
The post What’s on the climate calendar for October 2026? appeared first on Climate Home News.
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