On a humid day in February, a small group of workers huddled in front of a large solar panel factory inside Thailand’s biggest manufacturing hub in the eastern coastal province of Chonburi, home to some of the world’s top solar panel-producing companies.
The men and women, mostly in their twenties, all hoped to land a job on a production line assembling solar cells into panels destined for export.
They knew they may not hold the job for very long after reading complaints of former employees on social media about work being regularly cut when orders were low.
But the company promised fair pay and, needing work, they were willing to take the risk.
That risk is growing, as Thailand’s solar industry has become caught in an escalating trade war between the US and China, with Thai solar workers paying the price.
Large Chinese companies dominate Thailand’s solar manufacturing industry, which produces solar cells and panels for export to the US market.
But as Washington erects trade barriers to protect its homegrown solar sector from a rising tide of cheap Chinese imports, Thailand’s industry is being squeezed.
Solar manufacturers in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy that rely heavily on Chinese components are now facing nearly 400% tariffs to export their products to the US.
Analysts say the tariffs threaten to hurt Thailand’s manufacturing sector and its workers, and could have a knock-on impact on solar rollout in the country. But the changing trade landscape also creates an opportunity for producers to find new markets, including by accelerating solar deployment and the energy transition across the Southeast Asian region.
The heat of the solar trade war
For more than a decade, the US has waged a tariff war on growing imports of cheap Chinese solar panels, which it says harm its domestic industry.
China’s mass production of solar cells and modules has enabled the expansion of clean energy globally. The cost of solar panels has declined by 90% in the past decade. But China’s subsidised and cut-price solar production has also led to accusations of unfair trade practices.
In response, Chinese manufacturers relocated the final production stages to neighbouring Asian countries in an attempt to avoid the US import tax, turning Southeast Asia into a major solar-panel assembly hub and export base.
As Chinese exports of solar components to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia boomed, so did US imports of Southeast Asian solar panels.
By 2023, 80% of US solar module imports came from those four countries. Nearly a quarter came from Thailand alone.
But in recent months, several Chinese manufacturers with factories in Southeast Asia suspended some of their operations in the region, after the US announced a string of antidumping duties on solar imports from the four countries in a bid to close the loophole.
Thousands working in Thailand’s solar factories – most of whom had left the agricultural north of the county to seek better-paid employment in an industry which promised decent jobs – were put on leave or suddenly dismissed.
Climate Home News analysed local media reports and social media posts relating to worker dismissals at three leading solar manufacturers with factories in the Eastern Economic Corridor, the country’s largest manufacturing zone: Chinese companies Runergy and Trina Solar, one of the world’s largest solar PV manufacturing firms, and Canadian Solar, which has long conducted most of its manufacturing operations in China.
We found that close to 8,000 full-time staff and subcontracted workers were either temporarily or permanently dismissed in 2024. Over that time, US officials investigated a complaint from American manufacturers that companies with factories in Southeast Asia were dumping subsidised and unfairly cheap products on the US market.
An industry losing its grip on its biggest export market
Last month, US trade officials unveiled hefty tariffs of at least 375% on imports of solar cells from Thailand.
The US International Trade Commission, a bi-partisan government agency, is due to make a final decision about the tariffs in June. In private, analysts say they are likely to be approved.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) recently found that any price increases beyond 250% would make most Southeast Asian imports “untenable”.
“Any company in any country where the combined tariffs is greater than 250% will likely see their orders decline or get cancelled,” Grant Hauber, of IEEFA, told Climate Home.
Over the past year, US officials’ tariff deliberations rocked Thailand’s solar industry.
“There has been a broad suspension of operations among Chinese companies in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, with many closures likely to be permanent,” said Linxiao Zhu, a research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
“The region risks losing a significant share of its solar manufacturing capacity due to the loss of access to the US market.”
“Thailand’s solar manufacturing industry faces some serious challenges,” agreed Forbes Chanthorn, BloombergNEF’s Thailand energy transition analyst based in Singapore. “It is losing its grip on some of its biggest export markets without any short-term alternatives in sight.”
And the situation could go from bad to worse as US President Donald Trump threatens an additional 37% import tariff on all goods from Thailand – one of the highest rates in Washington’s planned universal tariff onslaught, now paused until June. If applied, this would push the tariffs on Thailand’s solar cells up to 426%.
In an interview, Charuwan Phipatana-Phuttapanta, a solar expert at Thailand’s energy ministry, acknowledged that the tariffs will impact employment in the country’s solar industry.
Workers fall victim to tariffs
Spanning three provinces on Thailand’s eastern coast, the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) is key to the government’s plan to transform the area into an economic powerhouse.
Enticed by generous tax breaks and cheap labour, international companies have flocked here to manufacture everything from air conditioners to batteries for electric vehicles and solar panels for the regional and global markets.
Several leading Chinese solar manufacturing companies set up shop in the EEC nearly a decade ago. Soon, Thailand’s solar exports to the US soared.
But in June 2024, a two-year US tariff waiver on solar products from Southeast Asia – introduced by Joe Biden to boost solar deployment in the country – came to an end. Companies in the region importing silicon wafers from China to make solar cells for export to the US became subject to tariffs.
In the days that followed, several manufacturers slowed down or suspended operations, letting go of staff to adjust to the new tax regime, Amnuay Ngamnet, director of Rayong Labour Protection and Welfare office, the labour ministry’s local representative, told Climate Home.
In Rayong alone, the most southern of the EEC’s three provinces, 3,200 full-time workers at five solar factories were put on leave between 2022-2024, according to official data.
Videos posted on TikTok in recent weeks show deserted parking lots and unusually quiet grounds around some solar factories.
“No matter how good you are, if life stumbles, you cannot succeed. Goodbye,” one solar worker posted on the social media platform with a photo of a dismissal letter.
Amnat (whose name has been changed because of concerns that speaking to the media might affect his job prospects) was among thousands affected.
Like many others, the 39-year-old left his hometown in the agricultural northeastern region in 2022 to find a better-paid job at a solar plant in the EEC.
“It seemed like a promising industry. I hoped to spend years there,” Amnat told Climate Home over the phone. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”
Amnat worked as a subcontractor at a few Chinese solar factories, eventually landing a staff position at Runergy, which manufactures solar cells and modules.
He worked six days a week and earned approximately 25,000 baht ($745) a month, way above the average income for unskilled workers.
But in October 2024, he was dismissed along with “almost all of the employees” at the factory, according to local media reports. Amnat told Climate Home the retrenchment affected nearly 3,000 workers.
Runergy did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The same month, Runergy opened its first module manufacturing plant in the US to keep supplying the American market – one of a number of solar companies hoping to benefit from tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
As a permanent employee, Amnat was compensated 75% of his monthly wage, a lifeline during the three months it took him to find another job. But others were not so lucky.
Thousands of workers hired as subcontractors and benefiting from fewer rights were left without work or pay overnight as companies suspended some of their operations.
At risk of labour rights violations
“After leaving the solar company, my girlfriend was left unemployed for two months. It was difficult for us,” a TikTok user who had complained about the dismissals on social media, told Climate Home. The subcontracting company employing her made her sign a dismissal letter, absolving it of paying the compensation she was entitled to, he explained.
Bunyuen Sukmai, a local labour lawyer and rights activist, told Climate Home “most workers are not aware that the practice violates their rights” despite being routinely deployed.
In the workers’ housing estate, a few kilometres outside the industrial zone, the offices of subcontracting firms are flanked by hair salons and restaurants. A steady stream of job-seekers fill in application forms and scan QR codes to follow job announcements on social media.
“Subcontractors are usually the first to be affected by industry changes. They usually receive lower benefits and are most at risk of having their rights violated,” said Sukmai. But legal cases over unfair dismissal are rare as few workers have the resources to go down the judicial route, he added.
A representative of Trina Solar in Thailand declined to respond to questions. Canadian Solar did not respond to Climate Home’s repeated requests for comment.
However, in a letter dated June 2024 and shared on social media, Canadian Solar said it had paused operations at one of its factories to make changes to its production line and improve machinery. “Due to the current economic conditions and trade competition, the company needs to adjust to the market situation and the direction of the domestic and international economy,” it said.
It added that it had “great confidence in the potential and economic conditions of Thailand” where it intended to continue operating.
In search of new markets
Some large Chinese panel-makers have already started setting up production lines in Indonesia and Laos, which are not currently affected by the US solar import duties.
The Middle East has also emerged as a growing destination for Chinese solar investments, including for the production of key solar components such as polysilicon ingots and wafers.
“These efforts are designed to forge a supply chain completely outside of China serving the Middle East, the US, and other markets that may be subject to tariff risks,” Zhu wrote in a recent report for The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
To continue operating in Thailand, analysts say large solar manufacturers will need to seek new export markets outside of the US.
In the short-term, exports could be redirected to the European Union and India. The Thai government is racing to finalise a free-trade deal with the EU, where demand growth for solar equipment may be stronger than in the US, Laura Schwartz, a senior Asia analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, told Climate Home.
“However, over half of China’s solar cell and module exports already go to Europe, so Thai exports would face stiff competition,” said Schwartz. And Indian solar developers will have to use locally made solar cells in government projects from June 2026.
But the tariffs could also mark “a turning point” for Southeast Asia’s solar industry, which could focus on supplying emerging markets in Africa and South America, and urgently accelerate the region’s own solar deployment, said Christina Ng, director of the Energy Shift Institute, a think-tank focused on Asia’s energy transition.
Thailand is dependent on gas for electricity generation but the government has set out plans for 51% of its electricity to come from renewables by 2037, with most of the additional renewable power expected from solar. Only around 3% of Thailand’s electricity currently comes from solar.
Thai companies assembling solar modules in the country are already calling for more incentives to expand a homegrown supply chain.
Krit Pornpilailuck, CEO of Solar PPM, fears Chinese solar manufacturers that can’t export their goods to the US “will flood the Southeast Asian market and plunge the price” of modules.
To protect the industry, Pornpilailak wants to see more support for Thai manufacturers to produce solar cells and other upstream components domestically.
“Thailand has more than six million tonnes of solar-grade quartz reserves that could be used to produce polysilicon – the key ingredient to produce solar wafers,” said Phipatana-Phuttapanta, the government’s solar expert. Although developing the resources would require “technical expertise and high investment”, she added.
“This is a chance for [manufacturers] to move up the value chain – from being seen as mainly low-cost assemblers to becoming leaders in more advanced clean energy technologies,” said Ng. “If the region takes this moment seriously and diversifies, it won’t just weather the disruption; it will emerge more resilient and competitive.”
The post Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand appeared first on Climate Home News.
Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand
Climate Change
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
More than 40% of children under the age of 10 globally are already experiencing at least 20 additional “heat-stress days” due to climate change.
This is according to a new attribution study, published in Science Advances, which combines climate models with demographic data to assess the age groups and regions that are exposed to the most hot, humid days.
The study finds that children up to the age of nine already face more additional heat-stress days globally as a result of climate change than any other age group.
It adds that south Asia and west Africa are recording the greatest childhood exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat – largely because these regions have a rapidly growing population with the highest proportion of young children.
As the climate warms, children will continue to be more exposed to heat stress than any other age group, the paper warns.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that the findings should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Humid heat
High temperatures can be deadly. For example, the heatwaves that swept across Europe in the summer of 2026 have been linked to tens of thousands of “excess deaths”.
A prominent 2021 study found that children born in the 21st century will be exposed to more extreme weather events in their lifetimes than their parents and grandparents.
Four years later, a study conducted by scientists from the same team found that more than half of children born in 2020 – around 62 million people – will experience “unprecedented lifetime exposure” to heatwaves, even if warming is limited to 1.5C.
Now, the latest research from the same team finds that children already face greater exposure to dangerous levels of humid heat than adults as a result of human-caused climate change.
Extreme heat is particularly dangerous when combined with high humidity. In hot weather, the human body produces sweat to cool itself down. However, as humidity increases, sweating becomes less effective.
The study uses wet-bulb globe temperature – a measure of temperature that takes humidity and wind into account – to calculate heat stress. It defines a “heat-stress day” as any day with a wet-bulb globe temperature above 28C, as this is considered the threshold for “moderate heat stress”
The authors then use climate models to simulate global temperature patterns in the present-day climate. (The authors use the climate of 2023, in which human activity has caused 1.3C of warming, to represent the “present-day”.)
They then count the number of heat-stress days that each country records on average, per year. The authors then repeat this exercise, simulating a pre-industrial climate without human-caused warming.
By comparing the number of heat-stress days in the present-day climate with the number in a pre-industrial climate, the authors can determine how many extra heat-stress days were driven by climate change. They refer to these as “extra” or “attributable” heat-stress days.
The authors find that “low-latitude” countries, located in the tropics, record the most extra heat-stress days.
For example, the paper finds that people living in Côte d’Ivoire currently face 112 heat-stress days every year. It adds that around half of these are due to human-caused climate change.
In contrast, Germany sees only 0.1 heat-stress days per year in today’s climate on average, which is largely attributable to human-caused climate change.
Rosa Pietroiusti, a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and lead author on the study, explains why this number may seem lower than expected.
She tells Carbon Brief that the paper “really focuses on humid heat, at levels that are relatively rarely felt in Europe”. She adds:
“Our data also doesn’t capture the urban heat island effect, due to the resolution of the data we use, which also would lead to underestimations of heat stress locally, and lead to a mismatch with what people are experiencing at local scales, particularly in cities.”
Inequality
Extreme heat affects some people more severely than others. Children, people over 65 and those with pre-existing medical conditions or certain disabilities are among the most vulnerable. This is because their bodies are less able to regulate their temperature.
The authors use gridded demographic data to determine the age structure of each country. From this, they calculate how many people from each age cohort are exposed to extra heat days as a result of climate change.
The research finds that globally, 583 million children under the age of 10 already live through at least 20 attributable heat days every year. This accounts for 44% of all children in this age bracket.
In comparison, 190 million people aged 60-69 face at least 20 attributable heat days per year, accounting for 30% of this age cohort.
The authors find that children face the greatest exposure to humid heat for two main reasons.
First, there are more young people alive today than older people, with 1.3 billion children aged under 10 in the world, compared to 0.6 billion people aged 60-69.
Second, they find that countries in Africa and Asia typically have rapidly growing populations with more young children. In contrast, many countries in the northern hemisphere – which are typically cooler – have older populations.
The map below shows how many extra stress heat days each country currently faces as a result of human-caused climate change. Darker reds indicate a higher number of attributable heat days. The blue circles show the percentage of the population under the age of 10, with larger circles indicating a higher percentage.
Warming world
The authors also repeat their analysis for a 1.5C and 2C warmer world. They use population estimates from the SSP2 scenario, which projects that the world’s population will peak at more than nine billion in the second half of the 21st century, with most growth occurring in low-latitude regions – especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
The research finds that, in today’s climate, 11% of all under 10s currently experience 100 or more extra heat-stress days per year due to climate change. In worlds warmed by 1.5C and 2C, the percentage rises to 13% and 23%, respectively.
In contrast, only 6% of all people aged 60-69 currently face 100 or more extra heat-stress days each year due to climate change. This number rises to 9% and 17% for 1.5C and 2C worlds, respectively.
These results are shown in the plot below. The three rows represent the climates of 2023 (top), a 1.5C world (middle) and a 2C world (bottom). The columns show different age cohorts, from the oldest on the left to the youngest on the right.
Each circle contains 100 coloured dots, with each dot representing 1% of the age cohort.
The colour of the dot represents exposure to annual heat-stress day, with darker dots indicating more heat-stress days. Grey dots mean that people experience fewer than one extra heat-stress day per year due to human-caused climate change, while black dots mean more than 150 extra heat-stress days due to climate change.
The figure shows that higher warming levels expose more people to heat stress and that younger cohorts tend to be worst affected.
For example, the top-right circle represents heat stress for under 10s in the present-day climate. Three of these dots are coloured black, indicating that 3% faced at least 150 attributable heat-stress days in 2023.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief the study uses wet-bulb temperature because it is a “well-established heat stress metric”. However, she notes that it was not “explicitly defined to focus on children”. She continues:
“A really important step forward in the research community would be to link up climate science and health science experts to do research on what metrics are really most representative of, for example, health impacts and educational impacts that children will be suffering.”
Vulnerability
Dr Qinqin Kong, a postdoctoral researcher at the departments of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study, praises its “robust” methodology.
He tells Carbon Brief that the research provides “a timely quantitative evidence for discussions of climate justice, children’s rights and intergenerational equity”.
However, Kong suggests that the paper “may overstate the contrast between children and the elderly and underestimate the relative burden of older adults”.
He says:
“The elderly may also be more vulnerable due to their social circumstances. Children often benefit from parental supervision and caregiving, whereas many older adults live alone, have limited mobility and face barriers to accessing cooling or emergency assistance during heat events.”
Kong also notes that “people and societies in the mid-latitudes [for example, across much of Europe and North America] are less adapted to heat”, which may make them vulnerable to its impacts.
For example, he says that Europe “shows substantially stronger relative risk of heat mortality likely due to less heat-acclimatised populations, lower air conditioning prevalence and urban designs that don’t favour heat dissipation”.
Similarly, Dr Daniel Vecellio – a researcher at the University of Nebraska, who was not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that children are an “understudied cohort”.
However, he says there is “reason for hope” because “children are typically pretty good behavioural adapters to extreme heat” and because people who are “chronically exposed to extreme heat” will “have a better chance at better acclimatisation”.
Pietroiusti tells Carbon Brief that global reporting on heatwaves is often skewed towards wealthier nations.
For example, she notes that large-scale databases of disasters, such as EM-DAT, often underrepresent heatwaves in Africa, due in part to a lack of news coverage and formal reporting. She adds:
“Studies like this, which start from the climate data, can start to fill some of these gaps.”
She adds that the paper should inform discussions about climate justice, noting that children in developing countries, who are most severely affected by the increase in heat-stress days, “have contributed the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions”.
Pietroiusti, R. et al. (2026) Age-specific exposure to human-induced increases in humid heat, Science Advances, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aeb3232
The post Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
The US is expected to resume its attempt to sink measures for a greener global shipping sector at closed-door talks between governments at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in early September.
The US and oil-producing allies like Saudi Arabia want to weaken a proposed plan for cleaner fuels that aims to reduce planet-heating emissions from the industry, which relies heavily on dirty bunker fuels. Shipping currently represents 3% of global emissions.
Those that want a softer system are likely to back a Liberian proposal which expert analysis suggests would see emissions fall by only half at most by 2050, far short of the sector’s agreed climate goals.
After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on the “Net Zero Framework” (NZF), a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.
But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention from US President Donald Trump and threats of sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.
Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister for the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, called the delay “unacceptable” given the urgency of accelerating climate change.
After a round of low-profile talks in May, the first of three further sets of talks on how to clean up shipping will begin at the IMO’s riverside headquarters in London on Tuesday, culminating in a final public session in November.
Em Fenton, who follows the talks as senior director of climate diplomacy at Opportunity Green, an NGO focused on aviation and shipping, said governments should not be sidetracked by alternative proposals to the NZF, calling them “a distraction from a hard-fought multilateral compromise”.
“If countries want to deliver a just and fair maritime transition, there is really only one choice: back the NZF and stand together in solidarity against those who would tear it apart,” Fenton added.
Five proposals on the table
Governments will discuss five different proposals submitted in advance of next week’s meeting. The most ambitious of these is from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which has proposed a levy on the entirety of a ship’s emissions rather than just those above a certain level, as the NZF envisions.
That had been the original demand of Pacific nations before the NZF was provisionally adopted in April 2025. At the time, Tuvalu’s transport minister Simon Kofe described the NZF as disappointing and not ambitious enough.
For this reason, six Pacific countries abstained in the vote on the NZF. While they supported the original plan for its adoption in October 2025, they have used the delay to push again for more ambition.
John Kautoke, advisor to a group of Pacific nations called 6PAC+, told Climate Home News that the NZF “cannot diminish its already inadequate ambition. If anything, the NZF must increase in ambition if we are going to renegotiate its parameters.”
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Analysis by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) suggests that, of the five proposals, only Tuvalu’s would meet the 2030 and 2040 emissions reduction targets for global shipping that were agreed by governments in 2023. Those were for cuts of 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reaching net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”.
Despite this, the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa have formally proposed that governments adopt the NZF, which won support in a 63-13 vote among governments at the April 2025 talks. Trump’s US walked out halfway through.
According to IMarEst’s analysis, while the NZF proposal will not be enough to meet the industry’s targets, it will reduce emissions more cheaply than the Pacific proposal.
A proposal by Brazil – which fought hard for the NZF last October – suggests tweaking the framework to make meeting targets easier in the short term and harder in the long term.
While this compromise will make it more appealing to the owners of polluting ships and countries that support them, IMarEst estimates it would lead to higher cumulative emissions than either the NZF or Pacific proposals.
The NZF stipulates that fees for high-polluting shipowners should be be put into a Net Zero Fund and used to promote clean shipping fuels and a fairer transition. The Brazilian proposal would delay raising and spending these funds by two years, from 2029 to 2031.
Liberia’s proposal weakens emissions cuts
The US and Saudi Arabia are likely to swing behind a new proposal from Liberia, whose government makes millions of dollars a year selling the right for shipowners to register their vessels in the small West African nation via a US-based company.
This proposal would weaken the emissions reduction targets. IMarEst says it would cut the industry’s emissions at most by a half by 2050, falling far short of the target agreed in 2023 for international shipping to reach net zero “close to 2050”.
It would also replace the NZF’s fees for missing targets with a carbon trading system. As a result, there would be no Net Zero Fund and therefore less money available to incentivise green fuels and make the transition more equitable for poorer nations.
Pacific advisor Kautoke said that, as well as preventing shipping from reaching zero emissions by 2050, Liberia’s proposal would mean the Pacific “will not receive any support to deal with the disproportionately negative impacts created by the cost of the transition”.
“We get a double blow if we adopt the Liberian proposal,” he warned. “We get all the cost of a transition without any support, and we have an industry that continues to burn fossil fuels to an unforeseen point.”
Japanese proposal favours shipowners
Japan has submitted a late proposal to amend the NZF so that shipowners have more control over how the fees they would pay for emitting above a set threshold are spent.
University College London professor Tristan Smith has argued that this change means there will be no central mechanism to incentivise investments in clean fuels. He wrote on LinkedIn that under the system put forward by Japan, shipowners would be able to select which green projects their fees would go to. They could choose their own or those of a sister company or other shipowners, rather than funding broader just transition projects that would benefit marine workers or developing countries hit by rising shipping costs.
Despite its flaws, Smith added that Japan’s proposal “could still get taken seriously by some, given how appealing it may seem to shipowners who have consistently demanded control of revenues, and given how the US and other member states have pushed back against the IMO Net Zero Fund and [greenhouse gas] pricing.”
Tacit or explicit approval?
Next week, governments are expected to make statements saying which proposals – or which aspects of proposals – they prefer. Another set of talks will be held from November 23-27 before a potentially final round from November 30-December 4.
A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted at those talks 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.
The US and its allies are also trying to change the rules to make the next stage more difficult. Decisions that have been adopted at IMO meetings usually take effect automatically unless a certain number of countries object within a certain time period decided by governments, a system known as tacit approval.
But the US wants that to require explicit approval instead, so that any new emissions standard would not come into force unless enough governments – representing a certain percentage of the world’s shipping fleet – actively indicate support for it.
Critics say this change would give a small number of countries with large shipping registries the power to block implementation. Liberia has the world’s biggest shipping registry, run by an American company, followed by Panama and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Liberia and Panama have supported the US at the talks on the Net Zero Framework. The Marshall Islands has long been one of the most vocal supporters of climate action in shipping but, with its officials and shipping registry income vulnerable to US retaliation, did not sign on to the recent Pacific proposal vowing to strengthen the NZF if it is re-opened.
Brazilian negotiator Adriana de Medeiros Gabinio warned in April that the NZF’s opponents are trying to change the rules by which it comes into force as a “safety net to block” it.
The post Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks
SYDNEY, Wednesday 26 August 2026 — New 2026 Sustainability Reports released by supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths this week demonstrate the retailers are failing on their commitments to end deforestation in their supply chains.
Adele Chasson, Nature Policy Lead at Greenpeace Australia Pacific said:
“These so-called sustainability reports are revealing. Despite their public commitments in 2024 and 2025, neither Coles nor Woolworths have taken deforestation-linked beef off their shelves. Meanwhile, bulldozers continue to tear up forests and bushland, pushing wildlife closer to extinction and causing mass toxic runoff to flow into the Great Barrier Reef. Millions of native animals like koalas are losing their homes to beef pastures each year, while the big supermarkets put off action.
“Australians would be shocked to know that beef on the shelves of our biggest supermarkets could be pushing threatened species to the brink of extinction. Collectively Coles and Woolworths have made more than $2 billion in profits in the last year, profiting from the destruction of wildlife and precious Australian nature. Coles and Woolworths owe it to shoppers to deliver on their promises and end deforestation in their supply chains now.
“As big beef buyers, Coles and Woolworths have an essential role to play in keeping Australia’s unique forests standing. They can help stop the Great Barrier Reef from being poisoned by runoff and protect iconic forest wildlife by taking deforestation off their shelves. It’s time these big companies put their money where their mouths are and follow through on their promise of sourcing and supplying deforestation-free beef.”
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