Dozens of countries have called out growing “coordinated attacks” by fossil fuel interests aimed at undermining the role of climate science in the UN negotiations at the mid-year talks in Bonn.
Under the banner of ‘Friends of Science’, in an overflowing press conference room lined with negotiators and civil society supporters, diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”. That includes reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate science body, they said.
While steering clear of singling out any specific country, they said efforts to cast doubt on established scientific concepts, such as the 1.5 global warming limit, are led by “the usual suspects” and those who think “science threatens their economic prospects”.
Saudi Arabia and India have opposed calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios that would minimise the magnitude and duration of any overshoot of 1.5C, according to one negotiator in the room and summaries of closed-door discussions published by a reporting service.
UN chief António Guterres conceded last year that a temporary breach of the key warming limit is inevitable, while urging countries to redouble efforts to bring temperatures back down.
‘Polluted narrative’
Scientists have long established that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of man-made climate change and a rapid shift away from oil, coal and gas is essential to curb global warming.
Saudi Arabia is dependent on oil and gas exports, while India largely relies on coal to power its economic development.
One negotiator said that research on how climate action can be equitable for developing countries, produced by Indian universities, had been published too late to be incorporated into the last IPCC assessment report in 2023. This incident led the Indian government to try and discredit the IPCC, they said. Some Indian scientists have argued that the IPCC’s scenarios are unfair on developing countries.
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Saudi Arabia and India have played down the importance of making sure that the latest IPCC assessments – regarded as the gold standard of climate science – are available for the next global stocktake, the UN scorecard of climate action around the world.
“Anyone that is blocking references to science – they are not our friends,” Sivendra Michael, lead negotiator for Fiji, told a press conference, highlighting the rise of a “polluted narrative” both inside and outside the negotiating rooms.
1.5C is a ‘hard limit’
Speaking for the AILAC coalition of Latin American countries, Panama’s Ana Aguilar said they went to Bonn to negotiate positions, not to negotiate the facts laid out by science.
“We see coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the best available science driven by a narrow set of interests, not by the needs of our people,” she added. “We have seen this playbook before… manufacture doubt, delay the response and let the vulnerable people pay this bill.”
The ‘Friends of Science’ coalition stressed that the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement cannot be negotiated, as the survival of the most climate vulnerable communities is at stake if it is permanently breached.
“Science tells us that 1.5C is a hard limit for many countries, including the small island developing states and least developed countries,” said Manjeet Dhakal, a negotiator for Nepal. “We still have a chance to keep 1.5 degrees in reach and minimise the overshoot if we act fast and drastically.”
Long-running IPCC standoff
While diplomats claimed attacks on science are broadening, one long-standing issue of contention is whether the latest assessment reports of the IPCC will be ready in time for the next UN global stocktake due to start this November and end in 2028.
This matters because, as some experts have pointed out, previous IPCC findings played a key role in the first such exercise, which culminated at COP28 in Dubai in the landmark agreement on transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
Since the start of the latest IPCC assessment cycle, known as AR7, a battle over the timing has dragged on for over two years at successive IPCC meetings, with governments repeatedly failing to find a breakthrough.
A large majority of nations have been pushing for an accelerated timeline that would ensure the AR7 reports can be fed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings they want a longer process, arguing a fast-tracked assessment would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources.
Science and the stocktake
That fight has now bled into the Bonn talks where governments began discussing the arrangements for the next stocktake. At a session earlier this week, most developed countries, Latin American and small island states, and the world’s poorest nations emphasised the assessment of collective climate action must be guided by the “best available science” – code for the findings of the IPCC reports.
The Maldives, speaking for small island states, said IPCC science remains “essential to the integrity, credibility and usefulness” of the stocktake. AILAC said that starting the process “on the right footing” requires a political decision on the timeline to deliver the AR7 reports in time. Switzerland said IPCC reports “ask more than is politically comfortable, but that is precisely why they must guide every decision we make”.
Saudi Arabia, however, said no particular scientific input – and in particular what comes out of the IPCC – should be prioritised. Similarly, India warned against creating “some kind of preferred hierarchy” in the role that any specific source of information should play in the process.
Ghana’s Antwi-Boasiako Amoah, who chairs the African Group, told a press conference on Tuesday that some countries think rushing to get IPCC inputs into the global stocktake could “undermine or compromise the IPCC process”. “Africa is for science,” he said, without saying where the continent stands on the IPCC timeline.
Crunch talks in October
At the “Friends of Science” press conference, Dhakal pushed back on the idea that science would have to be rushed to be incorporated. He said the IPCC leadership has “perfectly made it clear” that they can deliver the report before the global stocktake. “It is the scientists who are saying they can deliver it on time,” he said.
The discussion will be picked up again at the next IPCC session in October, where its boss Jim Skea is hoping to reach an agreement. “As a scientist myself, I cannot overstate the importance of this decision,” he told governments in Bonn last week.
Andreas Sieber, head of political strategy at campaigning group 350.org, told Climate Home News that the debate may sound procedural, “but it is anything but”. “Science is the backbone of the Paris Agreement ambition cycle, and the evidence assessed through AR7 will help determine not only the emissions pathways countries pursue, but also how the world responds to mounting climate losses and who receives support,” he said in Bonn.
The post Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
Other than the Australian and Turkish co-hosts, the only G20 nations to address the COP31 leaders’ summit with speakers at the “head of state or government” level will be the UK, Brazil and China, according to a provisional list released on Wednesday.
The list, which is published by the United Nations and subject to change, includes only 77 countries whose leaders are listed to speak at the summit in Antalya on November 11-12. That would be nearly a third fewer than the 116 who spoke at COP28 in Dubai three years ago.
Yvo de Boer, a former head of the UN’s climate secretariat, told Climate Home News that the low turnout and “the absence of many nations that should be showing leadership on climate action and support for developing nations” sends “the wrong signal at a difficult time”.
Amid geopolitical conflicts, a struggling global economy and an inevitable overshoot of the 1.5C global warming limit, de Boer said that “climate action needs a strong show of support, not empty seats at a leaders’ summit”.
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Earlier this week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said G20 countries should lead on climate action, adding that while they have varying responsibilities in tackling global warming, “all countries, especially the big emitters, must do more”. As major economies spanning developed and developing nations, G20 countries account for more than three-quarters of annual global emissions.
China is likely to be represented at COP31 by Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang, as in the past three years, rather than President Xi Jinping, who has rarely left China since the COVID-19 pandemic and has not attended a climate COP since Paris in 2015.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is scheduled to speak, after telling parliament in September he would do so as part of his efforts to “meet the climate challenge” following a series of deadly heatwaves.
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Brazil’s President Lula has also said he will attend. Depending on the result of Sunday’s election against his far-right rival Flávio Bolsonaro, he will speak at COP31 as either a recently re-elected or outgoing president.
While the COP31 summit is being hosted by Türkiye in Antalya, Australia has the formal role of President of Negotiations and its prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will speak at the summit. Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not on the UN’s speaker list but is likely to give an opening speech.
Many of the countries whose leaders are due to attend COP31 are those suffering the worst effects of climate change. About a third are African countries and a quarter are small island developing nations. Türkiye’s Central Asian and Balkan neighbours are also well-represented.
COP31 no-shows
Among the major emitters not on the list are French President Emmanuel Macron, German leader Friedrich Merz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Canada’s Mark Carney and Japan’s Sanae Takaichi.
Macron, who is struggling to deal with rising social unrest across France, will reportedly attend commemorations marking the end of the First World War and a European Political Community summit instead. It is not known whether the others will eventually decide to attend COP31, or what they will do instead.
Climate change-sceptic US President Donald Trump has never attended a COP and is withdrawing the US from the UN climate convention (UNFCCC), under which COP meetings are held, after quitting the Paris Agreement for a second time.
Argentina’s Javier Milei has considered exiting the Paris Agreement but has so far not done so, although his government is one of around 30 countries yet to submit an updated national climate plan to the UN.
The post Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is director of the China-Indonesia Desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS). Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is executive director of CELIOS.
Indonesia bills its plans to mix wood with coal at dozens of power plants as a way to cut electricity generation emissions as the country transitions towards clean energy. But look closer, and the biomass co-firing plan could do far more harm than good.
Biomass co-firing involves mixing a small amount of wood or other plant matter, usually wood chips or wood pellets, into the coal that a power plant burns.
State electricity company PLN wants to use it at 52 coal-fired plants across the Southeast Asian nation – a target set out in its national electricity supply business plan and tied to Indonesia’s pledge, under its Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement, to raise renewables to 23% of the energy mix. PLN originally aimed to secure 10.2 million tonnes of biomass a year by 2025; that target has already slipped to 2031, as the country struggles to line up enough supply.
Most plants only mix in a small amount of wood, often between 1% and 5% of the fuel load, meaning they do not even have to change machinery. In truth, it lets coal plants keep doing what they have always done, just with a little wood added to the mix.
That presents two big problems.
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Firstly, creating additional demand for wood would put further deforestation pressure on the country’s thick and biodiverse tropical forests, already at risk from mining and palm oil plantations.
Secondly, by making old coal plants look a little greener on paper, the plan could hand them a reason to keep operating well beyond when they would otherwise be retired, meaning the fleet keeps emitting for longer than a genuine phase-out would allow.
This is not a real climate solution. It is coal wearing a green mask.
A threat to forests
To meet its co-firing mandate, Indonesia would need more than 10 million tonnes of wood pellets every year, an area of forest equivalent to 3.27 million football fields, according to a 2024 assessment by a group of NGOs.
The same report warned this could push deforestation as high as 2.1 million hectares a year, and found that a 10% cut in coal use through co-firing could threaten 10 million hectares of untouched forest in the areas where wood is collected. At Indonesia’s biggest power plants alone, switching just 10% of coal to wood could clear an area of forest roughly 35 times the size of Jakarta.
PLN and the forestry companies that supply it insist the wood comes from dedicated “energy plantation forests” – land set aside to grow fast-growing trees for fuel, not from clearing natural forest. But the same assessment found that of the 1.2 million hectares already designated for these plantations, more than 400,000 hectares still contain undisturbed tropical forest, which will come under growing pressure as demand rises. The claim that this wood comes from already-degraded land does not hold up to scrutiny.
Advocates of co-firing say wood is a clean fuel because trees can grow back. But when old natural forests are cleared to make way for fast-growing forestry plantations to grow trees for fuel, they release carbon that took decades or centuries to build up.
One study, by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), estimated that co-firing with just 10% wood across 52 power plants could create up to 26.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions each year, once the clearing of land and the production of wood pellets are counted.