A growing group of countries wants COP30 to kick off the process of crafting a roadmap for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, which are by far the largest driver of planetary heating.
More than 80 countries on Tuesday issued a call for the “Mutirão” decision – expected to be the main political outcome of the Belém summit – to include a commitment to develop a blueprint that builds on the landmark COP28 agreement in Dubai, which for the first time signalled a global shift away from oil, coal and gas.
The call’s supporters include industrialised nations like the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as large developing countries such as Colombia and Kenya, and low-lying Pacific island states.
“This is a global coalition with Global North and Global South countries coming together and saying with one voice: this is an issue which cannot be swept under the carpet,” UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told a press conference on Tuesday. “We have an opportunity to make COP30 the moment we take forward what we agreed at COP28,” he added.
-
Big banks’ lending to coal backers undermines Indonesia’s green plans
Foreign banks involved in Indonesia’s $20-billion Just Energy Transition Partnership have also funded companies working on coal power expansion, a TBIJ and Climate Home News investigation reveals -
Countries must confront fossil fuels head-on in their NDCs
Other nations should follow the rare example set by Colombia and Vanuatu, whose climate plans contain explicit goals for cutting back on oil, gas and coal
Since all governments agreed for the first time at the UN climate conference in Dubai to explicitly reference fossil fuels in an official climate summit outcome, major fossil fuel-producing countries – led vocally by Gulf states like Saudi Arabia – have pushed back against efforts to build on that landmark decision.
But calls for the creation of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels have been gathering momentum in Belém since Brazilian President Lula da Silva mentioned the idea at the leaders’ summit nearly two weeks ago.
“Key for 1.5C”
Rapid developments over the past ten days in the Amazon city have caught many countries off guard. The European Union has yet to form a joint position on the roadmap, for instance, even though the bloc supports the implementation of the Dubai agreement.
Tina Stege, climate envoy for the low-lying Marshall Islands, said a global shift away from fossil fuels is “key for keeping the door open on 1.5C and limiting the scale and duration of any overshoot”. UN Secretary General António Guterres conceded last month that the global average temperature will breach, at least temporarily, the key threshold set in the Paris Agreement.
Stege added that the current reference to a fossil fuel roadmap in the draft outcome decision presented by Brazil’s COP presidency on Tuesday morning was “weak and presented as an option”, while “it must be strengthened and it must be adopted”.
COP30 Bulletin Day 8: Draft decision draws battle lines on fossil fuel transition, finance and trade
The draft “Mutirão” decision – which the COP30 hosts hope to land by the end of Wednesday – mentions the transition away from fossil fuels among a wide sweep of options for how to find agreement on the thorniest issues being discussed in Belém.
One option would encourage governments to convene a roundtable aimed at supporting countries to develop “just, orderly and equitable transition roadmaps”, including for reducing dependency on fuels and stopping deforestation. However, that appears to refer to domestic blueprints and stops short of advocating for a global roadmap that over 80 countries are calling for.
Backlash expected from oil producers
Irene Vélez, Colombia’s Environment Minister, said such a roadmap “must be the legacy of COP30”.
“I wish that we won’t have to tell the world that the dozens of countries that are here have let them down – not only to those who mobilised today but to future generations,” she added. “We must rise to the occasion”.
Antonio Hill, a COP veteran from the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), told Climate Home it is not surprising that strong calls for a fossil fuel transition blueprint are coming from Brazil and Colombia.
“They are relatively high-cost producers [of oil and gas], they have relatively short horizons in terms of their reserves, and they’re facing structural decline,” he added. “They actually don’t have the luxury of waiting it out.”
But their push for the inclusion of a fossil fuel roadmap in the COP30 outcome is all but guaranteed to prompt a strong backlash from several other large nations heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports and consumption.
Petrostates within the Arab group, led by Saudi Arabia, are expected to mount the strongest opposition. And while renewable energy-rich Kenya has endorsed Tuesday’s call, many other African countries remain wary of committing to a fossil-fuel phase-out.
Fair and funded transition
Richard Muyungi, the chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN), told Climate Home News last Friday that African countries had yet to coordinate their views on the issue, which he described as “very important”.
“But… generally as a continent, we are the least responsible for the [climate] problem, and this is the continent which chooses to harness all the available energy sources to develop,” he said, adding that Africa should not be forced or pushed towards a trajectory that threatens to undermine its development agenda.
Former German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said countries pushing for a roadmap need to reassure their counterparts that this will not be a “top-down” exercise.
“We are talking about a nationally-driven, fair and inclusive process that would also bring in the finance [element],” she told Climate Home News. “For big fossil fuel producers, it is an opportunity to have a dialogue with consumers so that it can be just, orderly and equitable.”
The post Pressure builds for fossil fuel transition plan at COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.
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.
related
Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022
Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts
Analysis: 84% of nations miss deadline to identify ‘nature-harming’ subsidies by 2025
UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo
The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.