Amid a rapidly fracturing geopolitical order, there have been growing calls for China to “step into [the] leadership gap” left by the US on climate change.
While China has resisted such suggestions – at least officially – it has spent much of the past 12 months nurturing its international status as a partner for other countries, in areas ranging from the economy and global governance through to climate change.
President Xi Jinping has maintained a schedule packed with foreign-policy engagements, meeting with world leaders from Russia and India through to the EU.
Moreover, this April he made his first international climate speech since 2021, while attending a meeting on climate and the just transition hosted by Brazil.
As well as underscoring his nation’s ongoing commitment to climate action, Xi’s presence also hinted at the growing coordination between China and Brazil in this area.
More broadly, there is growing recognition of greater alignment between non-western countries – particularly in the global south – in the face of more aggressive US foreign policy.
Analysts note that pressure from the US could push groups such as the BRICS – of which Brazil and China are two founding members, alongside Russia and India – to become more cohesive and develop more concrete cooperation channels.
In a recent interview with Carbon Brief, UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte said that the “world is changing”, becoming “flatter” and that the BRICS – which now includes 11 countries, including South Africa, Egypt and Indonesia – are “more and more important”.
This Q&A explores the membership, climate stance and energy sectors of the BRICS nations, as well as the potential for China and the bloc to lead on climate change.
- What is the BRICS group?
- How do the BRICS approach climate change?
- Are Brazil and China in the BRICS ‘driving seat’?
- What is the role of fossil fuels in the BRICS?
- What is the economic impact of clean-tech?
- Will China and the BRICS emerge as climate leaders?
What is the BRICS group?
The BRICS group represents a number of emerging economies that aim to “strengthen” cooperation amongst themselves and to “increas[e] the influence of global south countries in international governance”.
They coordinate on a range of topics, from international finance to climate diplomacy.
It was founded by Brazil, Russia, India and China – hence, the original name “BRIC” – which later became “BRICS” with the inclusion of South Africa. More recently, it expanded again to include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Iran.
Saudi Arabia has been formally invited to join the bloc, but has not yet accepted the invitation. A number of others participate in the grouping as partner countries, including Malaysia, Thailand and Nigeria.
Together, the full members of the group represent 27% of global gross domestic product (GDP), 49% of the world’s population and 52% of emissions, according to Carbon Brief calculations illustrated below.
Four of the members – Brazil, China, India and South Africa – also form the BASIC bloc, a group with a significant voice at UN climate summits and other negotiations.
BASIC was formed in Beijing in 2009, with representatives from the four countries meeting to coordinate on climate negotiations from the standpoint of major emerging economies.
This culminated at the COP15 climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, when the BASIC group issued a joint set of “non-negotiable terms” and went on to work directly with the US to agree the Copenhagen Accord.
The bloc has used less combative tactics in subsequent COPs, but it continues to issue joint statements on climate change and to strongly advocate for certain issues.
At both COP28 and COP29, BASIC submitted a proposal to have “unilateral trade measures related to climate change” – referring to policies such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) – added to the meeting agenda.
The request was denied both times.
How do the BRICS approach climate change?
Alongside BASIC, the BRICS group is also becoming increasingly focused on climate policy.
COP30 executive director Ana Toni, speaking at a September 2025 event at Tsinghua University attended online by Carbon Brief, said that BRICS countries have “realised that climate is not just a financial issue or a niche”, but rather a “pillar for prosperity, development and growth”.
Lucas Carlos Lima, professor of international law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, wrote in an April 2025 article for Modern Diplomacy that recent joint statements show the BRICS had “placed climate change squarely at the centre of the bloc’s agenda”.
The group has also been playing an increasingly significant role in other multilateral fora. For example, a BRICS proposal at the COP16 UN biodiversity negotiations in February formed the basis of an agreement to mobilise at least $200bn per year to protect nature.
Susana Muhamad, president of the COP16 nature talks, told Reuters in March that BRICS nations had been “bridge builders” in the negotiations.
She added:
“I understand there’s a lot of countries wanting to join BRICS, because…if you have to confront something like the US, you are not alone.”
Environment ministers of BRICS countries also recently issued a joint statement that “reaffirm[ed] our steadfast commitments” to addressing climate change, adding that BRICS “can positively contribute to…the global environmental agenda.”
Their finance ministers also agreed in May on a climate-finance framework, outlining priorities including “the reform of multilateral development banks, the scaling up of concessional finance and the mobilising of private capital to support climate efforts in the global south”.
The framework represents “common and collective BRICS action in the area of climate finance” for the first time, notes Tatiana Rosito, international affairs secretary at Brazil’s finance ministry.
The framework was adopted at the BRICS summit in July, where a number of leaders gathered to sign a joint declaration demanding that “accessible, timely and affordable climate finance” is provided to developing countries.
This, it adds, “is a responsibility of developed countries” under the Paris Agreement.
The statement also highlighted the nations’ “resolve to remain united in the pursuit of the purpose and goals of the Paris Agreement”, featuring 21 paragraphs in a section on climate change spanning just transitions, carbon markets and critical minerals.
“It is encouraging that BRICS nations called for more climate lending, deeper green bond markets and better carbon accounting,” Mirela Sandrini, interim executive director for Brazil at the World Resources Institute, said in a statement. She added:
“South-south collaboration of this scale and ambition can inject much-needed momentum into international climate diplomacy ahead of COP30.”
However, the BRICS leaders’ declaration also “acknowledge[s] fossil fuels will still play an important role in the world’s energy mix, particularly for emerging markets and developing economies”.
The inclusion of this language “undermin[es] the positives” of the bloc’s other statements on climate action, according to a response from Jacobo Ocharan, head of political strategies at Climate Action Network International.
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, global climate and energy lead at WWF, agrees, saying climate change is “treated as background noise” in the joint statement, with “no clear articulation of the BRICS+ role in the global climate response”.
Are Brazil and China in the BRICS ‘driving seat’?
Much of the recent BRICS focus on climate change is due to Brazil being “in the driver’s seat”, says Kate Logan, director of the China climate hub and climate diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), speaking to Carbon Brief.
As well as hosting COP30, Brazil recently chaired the G20 and is currently presiding over the BRICS. It used both of these forums to prioritise climate action on the agenda, she adds.
There has been frequent coordination between COP30, Brazilian and Chinese officials in the run-up to the conference.
This included a meeting of BRICS environment ministers held in April 2025, a separate April meeting between COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago and Chinese minister for the environment and ecology Huang Runqiu, as well as an earlier meeting in March between Huang and UN climate chief Simon Stiell.
Most significantly, Chinese president Xi Jinping appeared at a closed-door April 2025 meeting of global leaders organised by the UN and Brazil, telling his audience that “China’s actions to address climate change will not slow down”.
Many analysts saw the statement as a clear signal of China’s support for multilateralism, in sharp contrast to the US withdrawing from climate negotiations.
Xi’s participation in the meeting also underscored growing solidarity between China and Brazil on accelerating climate action.
Brazil and China have a long history of cooperation on environmental issues, including through the China-Brazil High-Level Coordination and Cooperation Commission (COSBAN).
The Brazilian government describes COSBAN as the “highest-level governmental mechanism” between the two countries. It includes tracks specifically focused on energy, agriculture and mining, as well as the environment and climate change.
But there has been a notable uptick in engagement under the new Lula administration.
For the current Brazilian administration, China is an “essential partner in global climate solutions”, according to a briefing note published by the Brazilian climate network Observatório do Clima.
A related opinion article in Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paolo, written by Stela Herschmann, climate policy specialist at the Observatório do Clima, and Beibei Yin, founder of environmental consultancy Bambu Consulting, argues that China and Brazil could form the “new G2” – the moniker given to the US-China alignment that they say shaped global climate policy for “more than two decades”.
They add that Brazil, through its unique role in the world and current position, can help “fill the current vacuum” of climate leadership. They write:
“Brazil enjoys the respect of the international community because it often mediates the divisions between developed and developing countries in climate negotiations…The presidency of COP30 and BRICS adds to this, making the country a natural candidate to fill the current vacuum of climate leadership.”
However, the two countries’ climate approaches have diverged at times.
Jennifer Allan, senior lecturer in international relations at Cardiff University, tells Carbon Brief: “These countries have several similar views, but also have diverged in the past.”
For example, she says, Brazil’s suggestion at COP26 of a “concentric” approach to cutting emissions, with emerging economies offering more stringent targets than other developing countries, was opposed by China, which wanted to “maintain the firewall” between developed and developing countries.
What is the role of fossil fuels in the BRICS?
Many BRICS nations remain heavily reliant on fossil fuels, both for electricity generation and to support their wider energy systems.
However, this picture is starting to shift, with almost all BRICS members having adopted net-zero targets ranging from 2050 for Brazil, South Africa and others, through to 2060 for China and Russia, or 2070 for India.
More tangibly, the addition of new clean-power projects means that fossil-fueled electricity generating capacity now makes up less than half of the installed total in the BRICS group as a whole in 2024, as shown in the figure below.
Non-fossil power, driven by “unprecedented” renewable energy growth in China, India and Brazil, accounted for 53% of the installed electricity generating capacity in BRICS countries overall in 2024, according to recent analysis by the thinktank Global Energy Monitor (GEM). This puts them in line with the global average.
Ethiopia, Brazil and China boast higher-than-average shares of clean capacity – at 100%, 88% and 57% respectively. India’s clean-capacity share stands at 43%.
Continued BRICS focus on clean energy makes it “unlikely that fossil capacity will overtake non-fossil again”, James Norman, research analyst at GEM, tells Carbon Brief, adding that much of this is driven by significant renewable additions in some members, particularly China.
While some BRICS members are continuing to commission “significant amounts of new coal-fired capacity”, he says, it remains uncertain whether these new plants will be completed, or if they will go on to operate at full capacity.
Several BRICS members are also leading producers and exporters of fossil fuels. Russia is a major exporter of all types of fossil fuels, the Statistical Review of World Energy shows, while the UAE, Iran and Indonesia have large oil- or coal-exporting industries.
The data shows that China and India, meanwhile, are by some distance the world’s largest and second-largest coal users, respectively, predominantly fueled by domestic mining. China alone accounts for more than half of global coal production and use.
Norman acknowledges that “fossil dominance remains largely unchanged” among some BRICS members.
He states that countries such as Iran, with “entrenched modes of power production”, or with “limited strategic interest in overhauling the energy sector, such as Russia”, are on a different trajectory to countries such as Brazil or China.
Nevertheless, he says, the “strong economic case for solar and wind”, as well as the fact that nearly all BRICS countries have announced renewable energy targets, “makes continued growth in clean energy across the group highly likely”.
In the short term, meanwhile, the continued reliance of some members on fossil fuels might not lessen the BRICS group’s climate ambition overall. It is “notable” that Russia does not seem to be “blocking” the “solid outcomes” of recent BRICS climate negotiations, Logan tells Carbon Brief.
Indeed, the 2024 Kazan declaration, which featured a lengthy and detailed section on climate change, was released under the Russian BRICS presidency.
Still, the group is not a united front in all areas, for example the rivalry between China and India. Tensions remain high between the two countries on a number of issues, from border disputes to supply chains and geopolitical alliances.
This has spilled into climate-related topics, with India complaining about China’s construction of mega-dams in the Himalayas and launching anti-dumping investigations into solar imports from China.
At COP29, China and India at times took up conflicting stances during negotiations – most notably during the final stages of the climate finance deal, where China “helped prevent” efforts by India to block the deal, Logan wrote in an analysis for Dialogue Earth.
Another area of contention for India at COP29 was CBAM, which it said contributed to a “very, very competitive, hostile environment” that made it “difficult” to enable an energy transition.
By contrast, Logan tells Carbon Brief, China is “much less worried” about CBAM.
(Brazil, too, is unlikely to push hard to include CBAM and other “unilateral” trade measures in the COP30 agenda, Allan says, in order to maintain its “neutral” position as the holder of the COP presidency and the trust of other parties. Indeed, it is reportedly pushing for this issue to be taken up in a new forum, completely outside the climate talks.)
Nevertheless, India and China are united in climate negotiations by their commitment to ensuring all agreements uphold the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC).
“This is something [in which] they’ll continue to be aligned”, Logan says, “but how it plays out in practice is where you start to see divergences”.
A recent rapprochement in China-India relations saw Indian prime minister Narendra Modi visit China for the first time in seven years.
The two countries also came together at the International Maritime Organization, where they successfully pushed for publicly-available data on shipping emissions to be anonymised.
Earlier, Brazil, China, South Africa and several other developing countries also lobbied against the creation of a global levy on shipping emissions.
Allen notes that whether or not BRICS and BASIC can align on climate may, ultimately, be a moot point, given that BASIC is just one of several coalitions that China operates in and that it is currently “less active” than other coalitions.
For example, she says, unlike the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) group, BASIC “doesn’t negotiate as a group in contact groups” at the UN climate talks. She adds:
“Multiple coalitions are a way for [a country] to multipl[y] their influence, while also perhaps hiding its individual views among those of the group.”
What is the economic impact of clean-tech?
Beyond the realms of climate diplomacy, it is increasingly clear that there is a hard-nosed economic reality to the positions being taken by China and other BRICS nations.
Indeed, as China works with Brazil and the BRICS to centre emerging markets’ concerns in climate policy, it also plays a key role in the economics of the energy transition.
The country accounts for more than 80% of global solar manufacturing, more than 70% of electric vehicle production and more than 75% of battery production.
While most of this is consumed domestically, exports of each of these categories – which it often calls the “new-three” – are “booming”, finance news outlet Caixin reports.
Historically these exports would have been destined for developed countries. But, in 2024, “half of all China’s exports of solar and wind power equipment and electric vehicles (EVs) [went] to the global south”, Lauri Myllyvirta and Hubert Thieriot, lead analyst and data lead at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), write at Dialogue Earth.
Separate analysis by Myllyvirta for Carbon Brief revealed that China’s exports of clean-energy technologies in 2024 alone will reduce emissions in the rest of the world by 1%, avoiding some 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 over their lifetimes).
Moreover, clean-energy industries accounted for more than 10% of China’s GDP in 2024 for the first time ever, driving a quarter of economic growth that year.
Meanwhile, Chinese lending overseas is also increasingly focused on low-carbon infrastructure, according to the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.
Their analysis finds that the “share of renewable energy in China’s portfolio has increased significantly”, with solar and wind projects “dominat[ing]” the types of projects funded in 2022 and 2023.
This stands in sharp contrast to typical Chinese lending activity before 2021, which showed a preference for conventional power projects, such as coal and hydropower.
According to Myllyvirta and Thieriot, the “important role that clean-energy technology plays in the country’s economy and exports” will encourage China to ensure that the global energy transition “keeps accelerating”.
They add: “That will be seen in bilateral lending and diplomacy, and could also lead the country to take more forward-leaning positions in multilateral climate negotiations.”
Will China and the BRICS emerge as climate leaders?
With the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement under the Trump administration, there have been increasing calls for China to take up the mantle of climate leadership.
Many are watching for signs of whether China’s upcoming international climate pledge, which may be published by the UN general assembly meeting next week, will contain ambitious targets that will encourage greater global ambition.
Beatriz Mattos, research coordinator at Brazil-based climate-research institute Plataforma CIPÓ, tells Carbon Brief that China’s position as a “major investor in the renewable energy sector” means there is “enormous potential” for both it and the BRICS to assume a climate leadership role.
China, at least publicly, is eschewing these calls. In an interview with state-owned magazine China Newsweek, climate envoy Liu Zhenmin said in response to a question about China’s climate leadership that the calls are just “the west giving us a ‘tall hat’” – an expression meaning trying to flatter China. He added:
“Of course, within their respective camps, major countries should play a more leading role, such as the EU and US in the developed countries camp, and the BASIC countries in the developing countries camp. But BASIC cannot be a substitute for all developing countries, and developing countries will still participate in [climate] negotiations within the framework of ‘G77+China’. This is the basis for cooperation in the global south.”
Notably, this does not seem to preclude China from agreeing to “demonstrate leadership” in tandem with others, as seen in an EU-China joint statement on climate change published in late July.
BASIC is “important for China in climate negotiations given the influence of other large emerging economies”, Yixian Sun, associate professor in international development at the University of Bath, tells Carbon Brief.
“On many issues (especially sensitive issues regarding its developing country status), China doesn’t want to stand out by itself,” he says, with the grouping providing cover in negotiations.
Mattos agrees, stating that “remaining part of this group serves as a way [for China] to reinforce its identity as a developing country in climate negotiations”.
More broadly, it will likely continue to align with the other BRICS nations, when this offers a way to advance its positions in climate negotiations.
Sun expects Brazil and China to sustain their elevated levels of climate cooperation even after Brazil hands over the COP presidency, based on their 2023 joint statement. However, he says there are still questions around what new bilateral climate initiatives would look like and how “concrete” they would be in practice.
Looking ahead, Logan notes, BRICS could also be in a position to sustain its influence if India hosts COP33 in 2028.
“BRICS has in multiple documents endorsed India’s bid for COP33”, she says, which, given India’s presidency of BRICS in 2026, could allow Brazil and China to “influence India in a more constructive direction” on climate, over a number of years.
The post Q&A: Will China and the BRICS fill the ‘leadership gap’ on climate change? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Will China and the BRICS fill the ‘leadership gap’ on climate change?
The leaders and climate ministers of governments around the world will be invited to meetings on the Pacific islands of Fiji, Palau and Tuvalu in the months leading up to the COP31 climate summit in November.
Under a deal struck between Pacific nations, Fiji will host the official annual pre-COP meeting, at which climate ministers and negotiators discuss contentious issues with the COP Presidency to help make the climate summit smoother.
This pre-COP, expected to be held in early October, will include a “special leaders’ component” hosted in neighbouring Tuvalu – 2.5-hour flight north – according to a statement issued by the Australian COP31 President of Negotiations Chris Bowen on LinkedIn on Thursday.
Bowen said this “will bring a global focus to the most pressing challenges facing our region and support investment in solutions which are fit for purpose for our region.” Australia will provide operational and logistical support for the event, he said.
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Like many Pacific island nations, Tuvalu, which is home to around 10,000 people, is threatened by rising sea levels, as salt water and waves damage homes, water supplies, farms and infrastructure.
Dozens of heads of state and government usually attend COP summits, but only a handful take part in pre-COP meetings. COP31 will be held in the Turkish city of Antalya in November, after an unusual compromise deal struck between Australia and Türkiye.
In addition, Pacific country Palau will host a climate event as part of the annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – which convenes 18 Pacific nations – in August.
Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that this meeting would be a “launching board” to build momentum for COP31 and would draw new commitments from other countries to help Pacific nations cut emissions and adapt to climate change.
“At the PIF our priorities are going to be 100 per cent renewables, the ocean-climate nexus and … accelerating investments that build resilience from climate change,” he told ABC.
The post World leaders invited to see Pacific climate destruction before COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.
World leaders invited to see Pacific climate destruction before COP31
Alejandro Álvarez Iragorry is a Venezuelan ecologist and coordinator of Clima 21, an environmental NGO. Cat Rainsford is a transition minerals investigator for Global Witness and former Venezuela analyst for a Latin American think tank.
In 1975, former Venezuelan oil minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo gave a now infamous warning.
“Oil will bring us ruin,” he declared. “It is the devil’s excrement. We are drowning in the devil’s excrement.”
At the time, his words seemed excessively gloomy to many Venezuelans. The country was in a period of rapid modernisation, fuelled by its booming oil economy. Caracas was a thriving cultural hotspot. Everything seemed good. But history proved Pérez right.
Over the following decades, Venezuela’s oil dependence came to seem like a curse. After the 1980s oil price crash, political turmoil paved the way for the election of populist Hugo Chávez, who built a socialist state on oil money, only for falling prices and corruption to drive it into ruin.
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By 2025, poverty and growing repression under Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro had forced nearly 8 million Venezuelans to leave the country.
Venezuela is now at a crossroads. Since the US abducted Maduro on January 3 and seized control of the country’s oil revenues in a nakedly imperial act, all attention has been on getting the country’s dilapidated oil infrastructure pumping again.
But Venezuelans deserve more than plunder and fighting over a planet-wrecking resource that has fostered chronic instability and dispossession. Right now, 80% of Venezuelans live below the poverty line. Venezuelans are desperate for jobs, income and change.
Real change, though, won’t come through more oil dependency or profiteering by foreign elites. Instead, it is renewable energy that offers a pathway forward, towards sovereignty, stability and peace.
Guri Dam and Venezuela’s hydropower decline
Venezuela boasts some of the strongest potential for renewable energy generation in the region. Two-thirds of the country’s own electricity comes from hydropower, mostly from the massive Guri Dam in the southern state of Bolívar. This is one of the largest dams in Latin America with a capacity of over 10 gigawatts, even providing power to parts of Colombia and Brazil.
Guri has become another symbol of Venezuela’s mismanagement. Lack of diversification caused over-reliance on Guri for domestic power, making the system vulnerable to droughts. Poor maintenance reduced Guri’s capacity and planned supporting projects such as the Tocoma Dam were bled dry by corruption. The country was left plagued by blackouts and increasingly turned to dirty thermoelectric plants and petrol generators for power.
Today, industry analysis suggests that Venezuela is producing at about 30% of its hydropower capacity. Rehabilitating this neglected infrastructure could re-establish clean power as the backbone of domestic industry, while the country’s abundant river system offers numerous opportunities for smaller, sustainable hydro projects that promote rural electrification.
Venezuela also has huge, untapped promise in wind power that could provide vital diversification from hydropower. The coastal states of Zulia and Falcón boast wind speeds in the ideal range for electricity generation, with potential to add up to 12 gigawatts to the grid. Yet planned projects in both states have stalled, leaving abandoned turbines rusting in fields and millions of dollars unaccounted for.
Solar power is more neglected. One announced solar plant on the island of Los Roques remains non-functional a decade later, and a Chávez-era programme to supply solar panels to rural households ground to a halt when oil prices fell. Yet nearly a fifth of the country receives levels of solar radiation that rival leading regions such as northern Chile.
Developing Venezuela’s renewables potential would be a massive undertaking. Investment would be needed, local concerns around a just and equitable transition would have to be navigated and infrastructure development carefully managed.
Rebuilding Venezuela with a climate-driven energy transition
A shift in political vision would be needed to ensure that Venezuela’s renewable energy was not used to simply free up more oil for export, as in the past, but to power a diversified domestic economy free from oil-driven cycles of boom and bust.
Ultimately, these decisions must be taken by democratically elected leaders. But to date, no timeline for elections has been set, and Venezuela’s future hangs in the balance. Supporting the country to make this shift is in all of our interests.
What’s clear is that Venezuela’s energy future should not lie in oil. Fossil fuel majors have not leapt to commit the estimated $100 billion needed to revitalise the sector, with ExxonMobil declaring Venezuela “uninvestable”. The issues are not only political. Venezuela’s heavy, sour crude is expensive to refine, making it dubious whether many projects would reach break-even margins.
Behind it all looms the spectre of climate change. The world must urgently move away from fossil fuels. Beyond environmental concerns, it’s simply good economics.
Recent analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency finds that 91% of new renewable energy projects are now cheaper than their fossil fuel alternatives. China, the world’s leading oil buyer, is among the most rapid adopters.
Tethering Venezuela’s future to an outdated commodity leaves the country in a lose-lose situation. Either oil demand drops and Venezuela is left with nothing. Or climate change runs rampant, devastating vulnerable communities with coastal loss, flooding, fires and heatwaves. Meanwhile, Venezuela remains locked in the same destructive economic swings that once led to dictatorship and mass emigration. There is another way.
Venezuelans rightfully demand a political transition, with their own chosen leaders. But to ensure this transition is lasting and stable, Venezuela needs more – it needs an energy transition.
The post There is hope for Venezuela’s future – and it isn’t based on oil appeared first on Climate Home News.
There is hope for Venezuela’s future – and it isn’t based on oil
A cleaner cooking initiative in Myanmar is set to generate the first-ever batch of carbon credits under the new UN carbon market, more than a decade after the mechanism was first envisioned in the Paris Agreement.
The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body has approved the issuance of 60,000 credits, which correspond to tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced by distributing more efficient cookstoves that need less firewood and, therefore, ease pressure on carbon-storing forests, the project developers say. The approval of the credit issuance will become effective after a 28‑day appeal and grievance period.
The programme started in 2019 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – and is being implemented by a South Korean NGO with investment from private South Korean firms.
The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.
Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its national climate plan.
Making ‘a big difference’
The approval of the credits issuance represents a major milestone for the UN carbon market established under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement. By generating carbon credits that both governments and private firms can use, the mechanism aims to accelerate global climate action and channel additional finance to developing nations.
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UNFCCC chief Simon Stiell said the approval of the first credits from a clean cooking project shows “how this mechanism can support solutions that make a big difference in people’s daily lives, as well as channeling finance to where it delivers real-life benefits on the ground”.
“Over two billion people globally are without access to clean cooking, which kills millions every year. Clean cooking protects health, saves forests, cuts emissions and helps empower women and girls, who are typically hardest hit by household air pollution,” he added in a statement.
Concerns over clean cookstove credits
Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods. Proceeds from the sale of carbon credits made up 35% of the revenue generated by for-profit clean cooking companies in 2023, according to a report by the Clean Cooking Initiative.
But many cookstove offsetting projects have faced significant criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions. Their main criticism is that the rules allow project developers to overestimate the impact of fuel collection on deforestation, while relying on surveys to track stove usage that are prone to bias and can further inflate reported impacts.
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The project in Myanmar follows a contested methodology developed under the Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it is “insufficiently rigorous”.
An analysis conducted last year by Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch claimed that the project would generate 26 times more credits than it should, when comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.
‘Conservative’ values cut credit volume
But, after transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project applied updated values and “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, according to the UNFCCC, which added that this resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued than would have been the case in the CDM.
“The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism.
Over 1,500 projects originally developed under the CDM requested the transition to the new mechanism, including controversial schemes subsidising fossil gas-powered plants in China and India. But, so far, the transfer of only 165 of all those projects has been approved by their respective host nations, which have until the end of June to make a final decision.
The UN climate body said this means that “a wide variety of real-world climate projects are already in line to follow” in sectors such as renewable energy, waste management and agriculture. But the transfer of old programmes from the CDM has long been contested with critics arguing that weak and discredited rules allow projects to overestimate emission reductions.
Genuinely new projects unrelated to the CDM are expected to start operating under the Paris Agreement mechanism once the Supervisory Body approves the first custom-made methodologies.
The post UN’s new carbon market delivers first credits through Myanmar cookstove project appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN’s new carbon market delivers first credits through Myanmar cookstove project
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Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
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Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
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Climate Change2 years ago
Spanish-language misinformation on renewable energy spreads online, report shows
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Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change Videos2 years ago
The toxic gas flares fuelling Nigeria’s climate change – BBC News
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Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits