Climate Home News is hosting ‘Oil, carbon and loss: navigating Cop28’, a series of three online events to guide you through Cop28. Join us to hear from the experts and ask your questions.
Expect drama at this year’s UN climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Emotions are running high as the Israel-Palestine conflict tests geopolitical alliances. In a region economically dependent on oil and gas exports, the imperative to quit fossil fuels will be front and centre. Countries at the sharp end of the climate crisis finally have loss and damage finance in sight and are fighting for a fair deal.
Setting the scene, 22 November
Key themes of Cop28 include the energy transition, loss and damage finance, and carbon trading rules. Where does recent climate diplomacy leave us and what is still to play for?
The speakers for this event will be:
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- Avinash Persaud: Advisor to Barbados PM Mia Amor Mottley, member of loss and damage transitional committee.
- Rachel Kyte: Former advisor to UNSG on climate, former head of SEforAll, now head of Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity initiative.
This discussion will be led by Megan Darby, the editor of Climate Home News. Register in the Zoom discussion using this link to be able to send your questions.
Register here
Reading the politics, 5 December
Reviewing announcements from the world leaders’ summit. What political signals did they send and how will they play into the final week of negotiations?
Endgame analysis, 12 December
On the official end date of the conference, barring a miracle, the real negotiations will just be getting started. What decisions are expected and what trade-offs remain?
The post Oil, carbon and loss: navigating Cop28 with Climate Home News appeared first on Climate Home News.
Oil, carbon and loss: navigating Cop28 with Climate Home News
Some governments have backed using Brazil’s voluntary roadmaps on fossil fuels and deforestation to inform the next UN assessment of global climate action, a key process that concludes in 2028, the COP30 presidency told Climate Home News.
Brazil published the roadmaps on transitioning away from fossil fuels and on halting deforestation by 2030 this week, after failing to secure an agreement in Belém to make them part of formal negotiations. The documents set out a menu of policies countries could use to start acting on both issues straight away.
At their launch, Brazilian top climate officials argued the roadmaps could feed into the second stocktake negotiations. Through that process, due to start at this year’s COP, countries are meant to take stock of collective progress on climate action and decide on a plan to ramp up ambition in future policies.
In an interview with Climate Home News in London, COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago said that “some European governments” had signalled their support for the Brazil-led roadmaps to inform the global stocktake negotiations.
“I hope that there will be many other countries that may support this,” he said. “It’s not that you have to take the entire package, because who are we to come up with the solution? But some elements of the roadmaps may be useful.”
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Brazil’s fossil fuel roadmap sketches out first global timetable
The COP30 presidency’s voluntary timetable asks countries to plan first, then build up clean energy – only turning to oil and gas supplies from 2031 -
COP30 roadmap says faster use of existing tools can halt forest loss by 2030
The plan launched by Brazil to help the world end deforestation charts a path to meeting the global goal, but requires national efforts and finance to be stepped up, experts say -
COP31 Briefing: What to expect from the Antalya climate summit?
Electrification, the fossil fuel transition, adaptation to rising impacts, climate science and trade are key themes as governments gather for COP31 in Türkiye
Corrêa do Lago cautioned that countries might not publicly come forward to champion the lengthy documents at COP31, because “governments have to read [the roadmaps] and they have to be very careful”.
The fossil fuel roadmap invites countries to draw up their own domestic plans to cut fossil fuel use and production and build clean energy systems by 2028, while putting the main push on cutting coal, oil and gas supply after 2031. The deforestation roadmap urges countries to use existing tools to ramp up finance and forest monitoring, and to tackle harmful trade incentives, among other measures.
Santa Marta coalition could put roadmap to use
As his presidency draws to a close, Corrêa do Lago said Brazil would keep championing the roadmaps but that “others will decide” whether they are taken up in the formal UN negotiations. Those talks, where decisions require consensus among nearly 200 countries, might not be the best venue, he added.
He suggested a potential home for the fossil fuel roadmap, outside of the UN negotiations, could be the Santa Marta process. A group of nearly 60 governments met for the first time in April in Colombia to discuss how to wean their economies off fossil fuels.
Countries in Santa Marta signalled their interest in developing national roadmaps away from fossil fuels, as well as building trade systems that favour renewable energy and reforming global finance to remove barriers to the energy transition.
Corrêa do Lago said the coalition “can have a very important role” in putting the fossil fuel roadmap to use, because its members are already focused on implementation and could use the roadmap and “even perfect it”.
Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country
UK says there’s no time to waste
Speaking alongside the COP30 president at an event in London, UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte said the transition away from fossil fuels was “in danger of becoming just a slogan”. She praised Brazil for “helping us turn it into a planning principle” despite the lack of consensus in the formal UN talks.
But Kyte added that the speed at which countries constrain fossil fuel supply was “critical”. Pointing to soaring oil and gas prices, which have put energy policy at the centre of debate in countries such as the UK, she said: “I don’t think we got time to wait until the early 2030s.”
Brazil is among the countries still planning an expansion of oil and gas exploration, with recently re-elected President Lula da Silva saying recent discoveries near the Amazon river could be “a passport to the country’s future”.
Kyte added that the UK “would come right behind this roadmap and agree that you have done something diplomatically that we needed”, and said it is important for COP31 co-presidencies Australia and Türkiye, as well as COP32 president Ethiopia, to “find a way to move this forward”.
The post European nations signal support for fossil fuel roadmap, says COP30 president appeared first on Climate Home News.
European nations signal support for fossil fuel roadmap, says COP30 president
The ongoing “super El Niño” is likely to peak at the end of 2026 and push average global temperatures to record levels next year.
That is according to Carbon Brief’s latest “state of the climate” update, which analyses El Niño forecasts from more than a dozen climate models, as well as six global temperature datasets.
Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor, described this year’s El Niño as “simply staggering” when answering questions from CB+ members during a CB Connect “ask me anything” session.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
This year’s El Niño event – which has been underway since June – has already broken a number of records and reshaped the world’s weather, fuelling fires in Indonesia and “super typhoons” in the west Pacific.
The strength of an El Niño is tracked using the “Niño3.4 anomaly”, which is a measure of how much warmer sea surface temperatures are than average in a section of the central Pacific.
Analysis of more than 600 forecasts from 14 different climate models by Hausfather for Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” update shows how models project this year’s El Niño will peak with an anomaly of around 4C. This would be more than a degree above the previous record in 2015-16.
Writing on CB Connect on 5 November, Hausfather wrote:
“This El Niño event is developing so quickly and is reaching sea surface temperatures so warm that it’s simply staggering. We haven’t seen anything like this in the historical record and it may end up being the strongest El Niño event in the past millennium.”
This year’s El Niño has already chalked up a number of milestones.
On 18 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño3.4 region broke the satellite-era record set in 2015 when it reached 3.11C.
Meanwhile, September as a whole recorded the highest monthly Niño3.4 region temperature anomaly – 2.84C – since sea surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.
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Hausfather wrote on CB Connect that this year’s El Niño had been “running well above any prior El Niño event since June, at times by a full degree [Celsius]”.
Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” analysis indicates that El Niño is set to continue to intensify into December, with 10 out of 14 models expecting temperatures in the Niño3.4 region to peak in the final month of this year. The remainder anticipate a November peak.
While human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for almost all of long-term global warming, temperatures in specific years are strongly influenced by El Niño events.
The “state of the climate” analysis explains that this year’s El Niño event will have its largest effect on global temperatures in 2027. This is because global temperatures typically lag warming in the tropical Pacific by around three months.
Carbon Brief projects that the 2027 average global temperature will reach around 1.74C above pre-industrial levels. It calculates a 96% chance that next year will be the warmest on record.
This projection is based on the historical relationship between year-on-year temperature changes and El Niño conditions the preceding autumn. It also factors in uncertainty around how global temperatures will develop across the remainder of 2026.
The post ‘Simply staggering’: Rapidly developing ‘super El Niño’ on track to peak in December appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Simply staggering’: Rapidly developing ‘super El Niño’ on track to peak in December
Some things are too precious to risk. And Scott Reef is one of them.
Today, we’re launching a bold new campaign starring iconic Australian actor Michael Caton and a green sea turtle named Sandy to rally Australians behind one simple message: Flip off Woodside to save Scott Reef.
Off the coast of Western Australia, Scott Reef is one of Australia’s most extraordinary marine environments. It is home to vulnerable green sea turtles, endangered pygmy blue whales and thousands of other marine species.
Each year, one thousand endangered green sea turtles return to Scott Reef to nest. It’s where they lay their eggs. It’s where baby turtles hatch. It’s where they make their first brave dash from the sand to the ocean. It’s their home.
But this remarkable ecosystem is under threat from Woodside’s plans to drill for gas, with up to 57 toxic wells proposed around the reef.
Turtles can’t speak up for their home, so we’re asking Australians to make their voices heard instead.
From one Aussie icon to another
At the heart of our new campaign is an iconic Australian voice, Michael Caton. Caton is using his voice to speak out for, what will soon be, another Australian icon – Scott Reef.
In a cinematic courtroom showdown, Caton lends his unmistakable voice to one of Scott Reef’s most vulnerable inhabitants: a green sea turtle fighting to protect her home from corporate destruction.
As Sandy the turtle defiantly flips her flippers at Woodside, Caton delivers a message that every Australian can get behind.
“Some things are too precious to risk.”
Because when it comes to protecting our natural environment, sometimes being polite just isn’t enough.
Turning a gesture into a movement
We’ve launching a campaign designed to do more than grab attention. We want to turn public concern into meaningful action.
The idea is simple: flip off Woodside and make sure our political leaders know exactly where Australians stand.
We’re calling on people across the country to share the campaign, get involved on social media and, most importantly, tag their local MPs.
We need Environment Minister Murray Watt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to hear loud and clear that Australians want Scott Reef protected, not sacrificed for another gas project.
