As nations gather at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, top of the agenda will be the culmination of a process known as the “global stocktake”.
This core component of the Paris Agreement involves an exhaustive appraisal of how far the world has come in tackling climate change and how far it still has to go.
Over the past two years, governments, scientists and civil society groups have submitted thousands of documents into this process and spent hundreds of hours debating their contents.
The main technical conclusions emerging from the stocktake are not new. Nations are not cutting emissions fast enough, they are not sufficiently prepared for climate hazards and developed countries are not providing enough support to developing countries,
But the stocktake is more than just a review of progress. It is a key part of the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism”, which encourages countries to scale up their climate ambitions over time so as to avoid dangerous warming.
Governments have submitted proposals for how the main, political outcome of the stocktake could accelerate climate action. Ideas include phasing out fossil fuels, tripling renewable energy capacity and raising climate finance to the trillions that developing countries need.
At COP28, countries will negotiate which elements make it into the final outcome, which will help determine the pace of change in the coming years.
However, one expert tells Carbon Brief that, with so much on the table, the global stocktake risks becoming a “dumping ground” for “politically thorny discussions”, which may hamper its ability to drive meaningful change.
- What is the Global Stocktake?
- What is the scope of the stocktake?
- How has the stocktake progressed so far?
- How could the global stocktake accelerate climate action?
- What are countries and blocs expecting from the stocktake?
- What do experts and observers expect from the global stocktake and what it means for climate action?
What is the global stocktake?
The global stocktake (GST) is a five-yearly temperature check that is a vital part of the Paris Agreement, housed under Article 14.
Nations that signed on to the agreement in 2015 also agreed to monitor, assess and periodically review collective progress towards meeting the Paris long-term temperature goal and to take stock of their climate actions.
The GST is meant to help countries collectively assess where they are, where they want to go and how to get there in terms of climate action and to identify gaps to course correct.
It is meant to be an assessment of mitigation and adaptation actions so far, as well as climate finance provided and technology transferred from developed to developing countries, “in the light of equity and the best available science”, per the Paris Agreement.
The GST is split into three phases: an information collection phase to gather inputs from all parties and non-parties, a technical assessment phase of these inputs and other evidence, and a “consideration of outputs” phase, for countries to decide what to collectively take away from the process.
The final, political phase is scheduled to conclude at COP28, to inform the next round of submissions of countries’ climate pledges in 2024-2025 and to “enhanc[e] international cooperation for international climate action”.
What is the scope of the stocktake?
The information feeding into the GST comprised more than 170,000 pages of documents from governments, business and civil society groups, supported by over 252 hours of meetings and discussions.
These submissions were categorised into three main areas of climate action, which were decided back in 2018 at COP24 in Katowice, Poland.
Nations agreed to evaluate progress on mitigation – cutting emissions – as well as adaptation to climate hazards and “means of implementation and support”.
The latter point refers to how much finance has been raised to help developing countries take climate action. It also covers nations sharing low-carbon technologies and increasing their capacities to deal with the challenges ahead.
Parties specified numerous “sources of input”, including greenhouse gas inventories, assessments of national climate plans and analysis of adaptation projects.
They also agreed that the stocktake “may take into account, as appropriate” two more major topics.
These were the unavoidable loss and damage resulting from climate change and “response measures”, which includes the social and economic consequences of climate action, for example on people working in the fossil-fuel industry.
In the final synthesis report that emerged from the technical phase of the stocktake, which will inform political decisions taken at COP28, loss and damage was included as part of the section on adaptation. Response measures were filed under mitigation.
However, in the draft GST text that has been prepared ahead of COP28, these issues are separated out under their own subheads. Civil society groups have emphasised the importance of ensuring loss and damage, in particular, is prominent in proceedings.
How has the stocktake progressed so far?
The GST began after COP26 in 2021, with a period of data collection that continued until March 2023. Prior to this, parties had negotiated the rules of the stocktake process and what kind of “inputs” would feed into it.
During this period, country reports, scientific studies and other documents were submitted into the stocktake process for consideration.
The second phase – the technical assessment – began in June 2022. This consisted of three “dialogues” that took place at the UN intersessional talks in Bonn in 2022 and 2023, and at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
These sessions provided time for evidence to be discussed by country representatives, civil society groups and climate experts.
The dialogues proceeded relatively smoothly within the UN talks but, as Carbon Brief has reported, familiar issues emerged within them.
Examples include disputes between developed and developing countries over historical responsibility for climate change and civil society groups highlighting the role of fossil-fuel lobbyists in the discussions.
The outcomes of each technical dialogue were recorded in summary reports released a few months after the close of each session.
These were followed by a 46-page synthesis report prepared by the stocktake’s co-facilitators, with the assistance of the UN Climate Change secretariat. This serves as a “comprehensive overview” of all the inputs and discussions.
The evidence laid out in this report will serve as the basis for the political part of the GST at COP28.
Nations have already submitted documents to the UN outlining how they interpret the synthesis report’s findings and the stocktake-related outcomes they would like to see emerge from the COP28 summit.
How could the global stocktake accelerate climate action?
The GST synthesis report concludes that there is a “rapidly narrowing window to raise ambition and implement existing commitments in order to limit warming to 1.5C”.
Achieving the 1.5C target, or even the “well below 2C” goal, requires nations to fill the extensive “implementation gaps” between their climate strategies and real-world action.
It would also require them to come forward with new strategies that are Paris Agreement-aligned. According to the synthesis report, existing pledges would result in warming of 2.4-2.6C, with the possibility of cutting this to 1.7-2.1C if long-term net-zero targets are fully implemented.
As part of the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism”, the stocktake is explicitly intended to encourage such raising of ambition. There are several ways in which governments and civil society groups are proposing it could achieve this.
Much of the focus is on signalling to countries what they should submit in their new, enhanced climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
Nations are obliged to submit NDCs every five years and the next round is due in 2025. The synthesis report notes that “more ambitious mitigation targets in NDCs are needed to reduce emissions more rapidly”.
Greater ambition could involve new targets for both 2030 and 2035, and NDCs that cover emissions from entire national economies, not just parts of them.
It could also involve NDCs based on absolute emissions reductions rather than cuts in emissions intensity. (Many nations have targets based on reducing emissions per unit of GDP, even as their overall emissions increase.)
Article 4.4 of the Paris text says that developed countries should “tak[e] the lead” with “economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets”, whereas developing countries were “encouraged” to move towards “economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets”.
As it stands, many developing countries with high emissions, including China, India and Saudi Arabia, have less comprehensive NDCs, as Tom Evans, a policy advisor on climate diplomacy at E3G, tells Carbon Brief:
“There [was] this agreement that developed countries would set economy-wide targets from the get go, and the developing countries would move towards setting them over time… Many of the developed countries – the EU and the US – [say] ‘over time’ is now.”
At COP26, nations were “requested” to come forward with more ambitious plans in 2022, but this was largely ignored. The 2025 deadline for new NDCs, on the other hand, is part of the original Paris Agreement and is therefore widely accepted.
In their suggestions for the GST outcome, some have made a point of emphasising that new NDCs should be submitted as early as possible – either “well ahead of” or up to a year before COP30, at the end of 2025.
Perhaps the most high-profile elements being considered for inclusion in the final stocktake outcome are sector-specific proposals, including targets for phasing out fossil fuels, tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling energy efficiency around the world. (For more on these ideas, and others, see: What are countries and blocs expecting from the stocktake?)
Another priority for some is ensuring that, beyond simply committing to global goals, countries use their new NDCs to explain how exactly they would contribute to such targets.
Evans tells Carbon Brief that while there is a lot of focus on “flashy” topics such as fossil fuel phaseout, NDCs remain the main mechanism for making the Paris Agreement work. “The NDCs are what you can actually hold everyone accountable to. It’s the agreed terrain,” he says.
Alongside measures to cut emissions, developing nations in particular would like to see the GST usher in greater ambition around climate adaptation.
The synthesis report concludes that progress on both adaptation and loss and damage “must undergo a step change in fulfilling the ambition set out in the Paris Agreement”.
Negotiations over a “global goal on adaptation” (GGA) will still be on-going at COP28. As a result, this component in the international effort to make countries more resilient to climate change will not feed into the stocktake.
However, Sandeep Chamling Rai, a global advisor on adaptation policy at WWF, tells Carbon Brief that the stocktake could still work to inform and reinforce the GGA:
“For this first round of the GST, parties might create a concrete link with the GGA and might have more concrete links established for the second global stocktake cycle.”
A key element of adaptation and mitigation efforts for many developing countries will be assurances that adequate climate finance is provided after the first stocktake.
Groups such as the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) have made it clear that, from their perspective, any scaling up of mitigation ambition needs to go hand-in-hand with scaling up climate finance.
Avantika Goswami, a climate policy researcher at the Centre for Science and Environment in India, tells Carbon Brief:
“Without dedicated efforts to ramp up finance, you’re not going to achieve the triple [renewable] energy target, so that’s definitely something that needs to be reckoned with in the global stocktake outcome.”
The synthesis report concludes that “accelerated action is required to scale up climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds”.
More broadly, the report also says it is “essential to unlock and redeploy trillions of dollars to meet global investment needs” and make global financial flows consistent with Paris Agreement goals.
Countries must finalise a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for developing country climate finance in 2024.
Developing countries want to see a goal that is more ambitious and based on an assessment of their needs – rather than picked arbitrarily, as with the previous “$100bn by 2020” target. Many have stated they want to see the analysis from the stocktake inform this new goal.
Alongside finance, developing countries have also pushed for the GST outcome to include language that encourages developed countries to share their climate technologies and provide more support for capacity building in developing countries.
What are countries and blocs expecting from the stocktake?
From “keeping 1.5C alive” and fossil fuel phase-down language, to addressing unkept climate finance promises, countries’ expectations from the GST are varied.
Submissions made this year against the backdrop of increasing climate impacts reveal growing divergence between developed and developing countries.
Broader conversations suggest that the GST is being seen both as a defining moment for climate ambition for the coming decade and as a moment of accountability for decades of inaction.
Forward versus backward
One of the chief differences in expectation is whether the GST looks back at the lack of climate progress from the developed world to date – and if so, how far back does it look.
Alternatively, it could look more to the future and what should be done now, at a time when emerging economies contribute significantly to rising emissions and could arguably be expected to pledge more.
Developing countries that are part of the G77+China negotiating bloc demanded a full assessment of how rich countries have delivered – or failed to deliver – on their pre-2020 and post-2020 climate commitments.
The bloc called on the stocktake, in its political outputs, to highlight historical gaps in mitigation actions “since the start of the multilateral climate regime”. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was agreed in 1992.
The G77+China also asked that the GST cover results of work under the Kyoto Protocol, the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, while also suggesting that its outputs be “both backward and forward-looking”.
In contrast, developed countries including the UK, US, Japan and Australia stress the need for “forward-looking” GST outcomes, which encourage “major emitters” [a term seen by many as a loaded reference to India and China that obscures equity and historical responsibility for emissions] to “aggressively” increase the ambition of their 2030 and 2035 climate pledges.
Other developing country blocs, such as AILAC, have stated that the insistence on pre-2020 discussions “has only served to delay current deliberations” and that the “historical emissions gap is narrowing between developed countries and developing countries that have substantially increased their emissions.” The group called on “all Parties to be actively involved in climate action” but that “developed nations must exhibit stronger global leadership”.
According to analysis by the Centre for Science and Environment, BASIC, LMDC and African countries also raised the issue of inequities in IPCC models and their implications for decarbonisation, going forward.
Mitigation
The idea of “keeping 1.5C alive” has historically been a rallying cry from Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries.
In their submissions, most developed countries, including the UK and Japan, called for a GST outcome that recommends policies that “keep 1.5 alive”, for global emissions to peak in 2025 and for all 2030 targets of “major emitters” to be 1.5C aligned.
The US called for “phasing down unabated fossil fuel generation steadily and rapidly”, including “immediately ceasing to permit new unabated coal power generation”, as well as “increasing global carbon management capacity to capture 1.5bn tons of CO2 (GtCO2) annually by 2035.”
Russia, meanwhile, dubbed it “unacceptable” to analyse progress towards limiting the temperature rise to 1.5C instead of 2C, while suggesting gas should be considered “a transitional fuel”.
In turn, LMDCs submitted that the GST should “urge developed countries to achieve net-zero significantly ahead of the global timeframe”.
Meanwhile, Zambia on behalf of the African Group of Nations urged for “a political signal from COP28” that “affirms differentiated pathways for countries in the pursuit of net-zero and fossil fuel phasedown”.
It also suggested “no further exploration of fossil fuels in developed countries is targeted well ahead of 2030”, affording developing countries breathing space to close their energy access gap in the short-term.
In a joint US-China statement issued on 14 November, both countries stated that they were working together and with other countries to reach a consensus on a GST decision that could be adopted at COP28.
Elements put forward in the statement – such as “send[ing] signals with respect to the energy transition (renewable energy, coal/oil/gas)” – were significantly different from their individual positions on fossil fuels and on trade, indicating ongoing divergence.
Finance
Another key expectation from the GST is an assessment of climate finance failures so far, and how a new climate finance target can be informed by them.
“Trust has been eroded by inadequate delivery on the commitments made by developed Parties, including the failure to deliver on the $100bn target for the mobilisation of climate finance, and also by the failure of leadership by developed countries which led to a woefully inadequate mitigation outcome in 2020, putting more pressure on developing countries with less resources,” said South Africa in its submission.
While developed countries, such as Australia, acknowledge the failure to deliver on the $100bn target, they state that the stocktake should “celebrate and welcome the confidence of Parties that the goal is expected to be met” imminently and ask that “this should be more than a statement of disappointment, but a constructive reflection”.
Both Australia and the US called to increase the scope of countries providing climate finance, along with an assessment on whether finance furnished by rich countries so far has been effective, to increase donor confidence.
“The scope of countries that are capable of such support has evolved considerably since 2015, and the stocktake should reflect their responsibility in the decade of the 2020s and beyond,” said the US, in its submission to the GST.
Developing countries, including the Climate Vulnerable Forum, called for an assessment of pre-2020 climate finance, reform of multilateral development banks and not increasing the debt burden on vulnerable countries.
Adaptation and loss and damage
In their submissions, countries and blocs were generally in agreement that the framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation be finalised, and its targets inform and evolve with the GST.
On behalf of the African Group of Nations, Zambia called for the GST’s preamble to note “the lack of parity and balance in support between mitigation and adaptation” and to “affirm the understanding that adaptation and loss and damage are a global responsibility because they were caused by global emissions”.
The Least Developed Countries bloc called for a separate section on loss and damage, distinct from adaptation in the GST, while some developed countries sought to retain the existing structure.
While most developed countries echoed the need to operationalise the loss and damage fund that they agreed to at COP27, many referred to a “mosaic” of different sources and emphasised private finance mobilisation, with the US pointing to insurance solutions for loss and damage.
Trade, response measures and just transition
Trade policies, response measures and international cooperation also feature heavily in stocktake submissions, reflecting an external atmosphere pockmarked by geopolitical conflict.
In its September submission, China stated it wants the preamble to “acknowledge that the first global stocktake is taking place in rising unilateralism, protectionism, and anti-globalism, and enabling environment for climate actions is undergoing critical challenges, including inadequate means of implementation support, sanctions on low-carbon products and industries, restrictions on technology investment and cooperation, green barriers, discriminatory legislation [and] plurilateral constraints”.
G77+China, along with the LMDCs, expect the GST to “identify challenges to global cooperation” and prioritise multilateral measures over unilateral ones, such as trade barriers.
Latin American countries, in their submission, hoped for a broadening of the stocktake’s assessment of the socio-economic impact of response measures, given “unexpected consequences from initiatives such as deforestation control measures and low-carbon agricultural systems”.
The US meanwhile, highlighted its own domestic just transition policies, saying that “lack of implementation of response measures, especially by major emitters…building new unabated fossil fuel infrastructure not only contributes to global GHG emissions, but also risks stranded assets and job losses”.
Russia stated that the GST should “specifically consider the socio-economic risks and negative consequences of an accelerated phase-out of fossil fuels, including rising electricity prices, unemployment and capital expenditures for re-equipment of facilities.”
What do experts and observers expect from the global stocktake and what it means for climate action?
COP watchers, commentators and participants have markedly different views on what the outcomes of the GST will be and what they could achieve, much like the parties themselves.
The stocktake has been framed as a moment of reckoning, especially by those involved in the two-year process. UN Climate Change’s executive secretary Simon Stiell has described the GST as a “moment for course correction”, an opportunity to “bend the curve decisively on emissions” and as an “ambition, accountability and acceleration exercise”.
The US’ climate envoy John Kerry previously “expressed hope” that the stocktake and COP28 “will mark a chance to renew climate action”, Energy Monitor reported. Kerry is quoted as saying:
“A lot of interested parties around the world – whether NGOs, activists or companies – are no longer going to be impressed by repetition of previously announced things, or by sidestepping some of the realities of where we clearly now find ourselves.”
According to Farhan Akhtar, one of the co-facilitators of the stocktake’s technical dialogues, the process had the “broad participation” of all stakeholders: governments, experts and non-state actors. He stated:
“Across discussions, it was clear that the Paris Agreement has inspired widespread action that has significantly reduced forecasts of future warming. This global stocktake is taking place at a crucial moment to inspire further global action in responding to the climate crisis.”
While the stocktake’s synthesis report sparked headlines, the form of the final deal is a key question ahead of COP28.
Dr Jennifer Allan at Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics tells Carbon Brief that while the technical process has been “very inclusive” and has an “incredibly wide scope”, the format that its outcomes will take is “really uncertain…partly because the Paris Agreement and its rulebook are vague and silent on a lot of important issues”. These include a lack of clarity on how exactly the stocktake will inform the next set of pledges.
The stocktake is supposed to be in its political phase at this COP, but the text for a ministerial declaration is “nowhere near the level of completeness” for delegates to finalise quickly, warns Allan, stating that “it’s too late for a ministerial declaration, if that was ever envisioned.” This makes it likely that the outcome is restricted to a COP decision. She adds:
“For me, personally, this falls short of the type of political signalling that we need in order to ratchet up ambition. I think we’ll land at a short decision encompassing the few points on which parties agree.”
“What worries me is that there are many placeholders and calls for other agenda items to be brought in. If the GST decision becomes a dumping ground for other politically thorny discussions, like the mitigation work programme, then it will be very difficult to untie and land a solution. We may end up with something vague, which again could undermine its ability to inform more ambitious NDCs targeted to the priorities identified by the GST technical phase.”
The enormous variety and divergence in submissions and countries’ own wishlists for the final form of the deal – be it a target to double green hydrogen production or references to protectionism – make agreement in limited time seem unlikely.
Experts, therefore, welcomed the US-China statement and efforts to work with other countries towards consensus on a broad political GST decision, even if countries don’t see eye-to-eye on many, significant details.
For Indrajit Bose, climate change adviser at the Third World Network, the stocktake is an opportunity to “correct injustice”. Developed countries, he tells Carbon Brief, “must assume responsibility for this gap”, as they have “consistently failed to deliver their commitments under the Convention and tried to transfer the burden of their inaction onto developing countries”. He adds:
“They call for fossil fuel phase-out, but they have huge fossil fuel expansion plans. They speak of the importance of finance, but they have not delivered their past commitments and rely unrealistically on the private sector to do their job. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.”
According to Bose, the argument by developed countries to end differentiation between developed and developing countries based on the fact that the world has changed since the first climate agreements in 1992 “rings hollow”. He explains:
“[I]n more ways than one, the world has not changed. There is still massive poverty and development needs in the global south. Regular climate-induced disasters are further exacerbating their challenges. The global stocktake must correct this injustice and developed countries must show leadership in climate action, engage in good faith and stop considering people in the global south as unimportant, second-class citizens.”
To Dr Lavanya Rajamani, professor of international environmental law at the University of Oxford, this stocktake is the “most consequential because it’s coming in the middle of the critical decade up to 2030” and provides a template for future stocktakes.
However, its actual outcome, she told Carbon Brief last month, “is not likely to tell us something we don’t know”. She adds:
“There are gaps in implementation, ambition, fairness and accountability. These have all been documented very well in the synthesis report of the GST’s technical dialogue. I think what we might see – which would be helpful – is ways of actually plugging those gaps. How do we get back on track?”
Rajamani believes there will be an emphasis on scaling up renewable energy, phasing out all unabated fossil fuels and that there will “need to be a strong outcome on finance and support countries to actually be able to do these things”.
While she hopes that there is a “strong follow-up process” embedded in the stocktake to inform new pledges in 2025, she believes there has been a “subtle shift” in the framing around target-setting following on from the stocktake.
Rajamani explains:
“I think there is a pivot towards focusing on implementation and understanding that implementation triggers iteratively increasing ambition. Ramping up pressure on states to just set target after target is like building a house of cards.”
The second important shift to Rajamani is that “equity and fairness have been reframed”, both in terms of systems transitions domestically, and between states, where green development can be seen as “something that fosters ambition rather than something that detracts from it.”
She adds:
“We’re not going to get to where we need to without engaging with a wider landscape of action and actors, and engaging with the idea of the stocktake and the Paris Agreement as trigger[s] and catalys[ts for] domestic policy shifts towards the transformations that we need.”
The post Q&A: What is the ‘global stocktake’ and could it accelerate climate action? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What is the ‘global stocktake’ and could it accelerate climate action?
Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.
Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.
Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.
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The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.
“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.
“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.
Electrifying industry
Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.
A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.
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Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.
Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.
In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.
Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.
“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.
“Growing by greening”
China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.
Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.
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For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.
The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.
An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.
This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.
Stalling fossil fuel use
At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.
China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.
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A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.
“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.
A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.
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In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.
A lesson in sequencing
China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.
“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.
For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.
“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.
The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?
More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
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The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis
In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations, which participants were invited to consider and adapt in their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process.
Getting the rules ‘right’
In a statement to Climate Home News, Ghana, Paraguay and the UK – which are FCLP co-leads for its work on forest carbon credits – said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’
The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?
An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
A relatively ambitious deal to reduce the shipping industry’s 3% of global emissions now looks more likely after four days of closed-door talks in London, observers say.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO), which oversees the negotiations, said there had been “constructive discussions” and “genuine willingness within the group to make concrete further progress”.
Em Fenton, senior director at the NGO Opportunity Green who attended the talks last week, said they “demonstrated a strong spirit of solidarity in the face of blatant attempts to undermine the credibility, ambition and equity of a hard-fought multilateral agreement”.
After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on a “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF) – a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners aimed at incentivising them to use cleaner fuels, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.
But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention by US President Donald Trump and threats of US sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.
UCL analysis found that, of those who expressed a view at last week’s talks, 38 were in favour of an NZF-style solution while only 17 were against. Those opposed are “consistently composed of strongly fossil fuel-aligned governments”.
An observer of the talks, who did not want to be named, said the countries opposed include the US, Russia, India, Thailand, Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay, as well as eight oil-rich Gulf nations and shipowner-reliant Liberia and Panama. Governments that support an NZF-style deal include China, Brazil, Mexico, Türkiye, Canada, Australia, Chile, nine African nations, most European countries and small islands.
A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.
UCL’s analysis said it was “reassuring” that governments which had taken strong positions in the media against the NZF were being more compromising in the negotiations.
Tweaks are probable
While there is majority support for the NZF, UCL said adopting it would be difficult politically. “The process from here could therefore be as much about producing what appears to be a new package, but one that broadly ends up with similar outcomes in relation to objectives,” UCL argued.
But tweaking the NZF, which resulted from years of negotiations, comes with risks, it warned. For example, changes could reduce the new system’s planned support for low-income countries, turning them against it. Fenton said compromising should not mean “abandoning the principle of justice in the maritime transition”.
UCL said the speed at which shipowners must reduce their ships’ emissions or face fees is likely to be reduced in the short-term but raised in the long-term to meet a goal of net zero emissions by mid-century.
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This was a compromise put forward by NZF-supporter Brazil. However, an analysis by the the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) has found that this change would lead to more overall emissions than the original NZF trajectory.
UCL has warned it could incentivise liquefied natural gas as a shipping fuel over greener options, which include hydrogen-based methanol and ammonia.
Analysis by UCL and the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that, while a slower start to the NZF would reduce transport costs in the short term, it would increase them later due to the costs involved in switching the industry over from more polluting fuel to cleaner fuel.
NZF won’t meet emissions goals
IMarEst’s analysis finds that even in its current form – the most ambitious deal on the table – the NZF will not be sufficient for shipping to meet its emissions reduction goals.
It says that only a Pacific proposal to place a levy on ships’ total emissions – rather than just those above a certain level – would meet the industry’s targets to reduce emissions 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reach net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”. This is highly unlikely to be adopted.
Additional talks will be held from November 23-27 and from November 30-December 3 before a potentially final round of official negotiations begins on December 4.
The post London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal appeared first on Climate Home News.
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