UN climate chief Simon Stiell has said he hopes to see fewer people attend the annual COP climate negotiations after participants at COP28 in Dubai last December hit a record high of nearly 84,000.
Stiell said this month that he personally “would certainly like to see future COPs reduce in size”, telling an audience at London’s Chatham House think-tank that “bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better”.
In Dubai, where the 2023 summit was held from November 30 to December 13, the Expo City site was so large that important delegates were ferried around on golf buggies while electric scooters were available to get around the public area, known as the Green Zone.
“Size does not necessarily translate to the quality of outcomes,” Stiell said in London, noting that the UN climate change secretariat (UNFCCC) is discussing the issue with the hosts of COP29 in Azerbaijan this year and COP30 next year in Brazil.
Last week, Climate Home reporters visited the COP29 host city of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan – on a tour sponsored by the COP29 presidency – and also the location of COP30, the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém, to see how preparations are going for the November 2024 and 2025 gatherings.
Azerbaijan’s government is expecting just 40,000 people to come to the Baku Olympic Stadium for the talks this year, while Belém’s remoteness, congested roads and lack of hotels are likely to substantially limit how many people can attend the “Amazon COP”.
The number of people attending COPs has shot up in recent years. Close to 40,000 people went to COP26 in Glasgow, around 50,000 were in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for COP27 and nearly 84,000 headed to Dubai last year. But most of the 28 COPs held since 1995 have been attended by fewer than 10,000 people.
Just over half of last year’s participants belonged to government delegations, with most of the rest comprising staff working at the conference or activists from non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
In practice, the boundaries of these categories are blurred though, as government delegations often include business representatives, NGO employees, journalists and others.
Baku’s Olympic Stadium
The government of Azerbaijan will host COP29 in the country’s Caspian seaside capital, Baku. A member of the organising committee told Climate Home they are expecting around 40,000 people.
The government has not had much time to prepare, as it was only tasked with the presidency last November at COP28 after Eastern Europe’s geopolitical divisions delayed the decision on which country would host the summit.
But it already has a venue: the Olympic Stadium on the outskirts of Baku. According to state media, COP29 chief operations officer Narmin Jarchalova said temporary structures will be built around the stadium to accommodate the negotiations and side events. These are likely to be in car-park areas.
The city is used to hosting major events. Ten thousand come each year for Formula One’s Baku Grand Prix and the 69,870-capacity Olympic Stadium has hosted the 2015 European Games, big concerts, the 2019 Europa League football final and Euro 2020 matches, although no Olympic Games despite the name.
Climate Home visited the area in April while in Baku, as part of a press trip organised by the COP29 presidency team. The stadium is connected to the city centre, where most hotels are located, by a Soviet-era metro railway with a one-way journey taking around 45 minutes.
A car journey should take about half of that, 20 minutes, but heavy traffic gridlocked the main roads in and out of Baku when Climate Home visited.
The Baku Olympic Stadium (Photo: Matteo Civillini)
Climate Home asked the COP29 team for information on how the temporary COP facilities will be built, powered and heated sustainably during the summit, but had received no response at the time of publication.
In February, Climate Home revealed that the government had told hotels in Baku not to sell rooms for COP29’s November 11-22 dates until further notice.
In London this month, UN climate chief Stiell said, with regard to the number of participants, that “we have an opportunity with Azerbaijan and we’re engaging with them”. He did not give further details.
COPs usually feature one big climate demonstration on the middle Saturday of the two-week talks. The UNFCCC is talking to the COP29 team about how this will be enabled.
Protesters march on the middle Saturday of COP26 in Glasgow, UK, in 2021 (Photos: Insure Our Future)
In a meeting at the energy ministry last week, COP29 CEO and deputy energy minister Elnur Soltanov told journalists, including Climate Home, that these discussions were “fruitful”.
Human rights groups like Freedom House say Azerbaijan does not respect freedom of assembly. Police violently arrested opposition protesters in 2019.
Soltanov was asked if the climate march will be allowed to take place in the city, which is governed by Azerbaijan’s police force, or only in the COP29 venue, which is under the jurisdiction of UN security guards.
He replied that “this is too specific a question” but said that protest is “part and parcel of people expressing their views, their anger, their desperation”.
Brazil’s Amazon COP
On Belém, which is in northern Brazil near the Amazon rainforest, Stiell said he was “actively discussing with the Brazilians how we can reduce the size of the COP so that the logistics of it can be supported at that hosted destination”.
Last June, Brazilian climate ministry official André Corrêa Lago told local media he was expecting 40,000-50,000 people. But there are concerns that the city will struggle to cope with those numbers.
Belém is not a major tourist destination and has less than 6,000 hotel rooms. Even at last year’s Amazon Summit – a smaller event than a COP – participants reported difficulty finding rooms and rates soared.
Construction workers are currently turning a 1.6 km-long disused airport runway into the Parque de Cidade (City Park), which will be the size of about 70 football pitches. The park and its new buildings will be the main COP30 venue.
The government of Pará State says it is almost one-third finished. The federal government, meanwhile, is reportedly considering hosting part of COP30 in bigger cities like Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.
A spokesperson for the federal government told Climate Home that “all possibilities to enable the reception of delegations and visitors are being evaluated”.
As well as the park and its new buildings, some of the conference will be held in an existing conference centre on the park’s southern tip called The Hangar – which hosted last year’s Amazon Summit.
The Hangar convention centre (Photo: Alice Martins Morais)
For COP30 delegates though, finding a hotel room and getting to the venue are likely to be challenging.
A spokesperson for the COP30 organising committee said last week that while 84,000 people went to COP28, the peak daily attendance was just 41,000 at the beginning of the conference when heads of state made their speeches.
An Ibis hotel near the COP30 site (Photo: Alice Martins Morais)
The spokesperson told Climate Home the organisers are looking at bringing in cruise ships for COP participants to sleep on, refurbishing schools to serve as hostels and encouraging people to rent out their rooms on Airbnb.
To promote the “modernisation” of the city’s existing hotel rooms, the government has given hotel operators tax exemptions on purchases for new equipment like minibars, televisions and air-conditioning.
The city’s airport, which the government aims to improve before COP30, has few regular international connections and is over three hours by plane from Brazil’s major hubs like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
There are no trains to Belém and getting the bus from Rio or Sao Paulo can take more than two days.
The Belém Bus Rapid Transit system is scheduled to be completed by COP30 (Photo: Alice Martins Morais)
Even inside the city, transport is challenging. The roads are congested, particularly in the centre where most of the hotels are, during rush-hour and when it rains.
The authorities have tried to solve the problem by widening roads and building dedicated bus lanes for a Bus Rapid Transit system.
While these are being constructed, they have made traffic worse – but the body in charge told Climate Home work is progressing according to schedule and should be completed by the second half of 2024 – well before the UN climate summit the following year.
“The new fleet will reinforce the capital’s transport system for COP30,” said a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transport Management Centre, adding that 40 of the 265 new air-conditioned buses will be electric.
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Nonetheless, the remoteness of the location is likely to translate into a bigger carbon footprint for delegates travelling from overseas.
While COPs have a sizable carbon footprint, researchers investigating misinformation have found this is often exaggerated on social and traditional media by those trying to undermine climate action.
Examples include pictures of private jets with captions falsely associating them with COP or of biofuel generators with captions erroneously claiming they are diesel.
Questioned about COPs’ carbon footprint by an audience member at London’s Chatham House, UN climate head Stiell replied that “at every COP, we get the reports – how many private planes [and] the CO2 footprint for hosting those COPs”.
But, he added, “taking a very pragmatic view, we need the right people around the table in order for this process to work and there will be a cost to that. How you ensure that those that are present are the ones necessary to contribute positively to the process is also important.”
(Reporting by Matteo Civillini in Baku, Alice Martins Morais in Belém and Joe Lo in London; videos by Fanis Kollias; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)
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Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.