As negotiations over the new climate finance goal get into high gear, divisions are sharpening over who should be required to cough up the money needed to help less developed countries shift to clean energy and build resilience to climate change.
For German Foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, all “those who can” and “in particular the strongest polluters of today” should step up, alongside industrialised nations. “Strong economies share strong responsibilities”, she said in a nod to G20 countries on Thursday at the Petersberg Climate Dialogues in Berlin, the unofficial curtain raiser for climate diplomacy.
Baerbock’s views are widely shared by other rich countries, but they face stiff opposition from the upper-middle income nations referenced in her remarks.
Those governments argue that the Paris Agreement puts the responsibility of fulfilling climate finance obligations squarely on the shoulders of developed countries and want to keep it that way.
Negotiators from China and Saudi Arabia spelled that out once again this week in Cartagena, Colombia, during this year’s first round of technical discussions that should pave the way to an agreement over the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) at COP29 in Azerbaijan.
“We will not entertain a renegotiation of the contributors and the recipients of NCQG”, said Chao Feng, China’s finance negotiator, on Wednesday. His words were repeated shortly afterward by Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad Ayoub.
More money for more action
The climate finance goal is the most important decision expected to be taken at this year’s climate summit.
Experts believe an ambitious deal can play a crucial role in getting developing countries, especially the poorest ones, to commit to stronger action as they draft their new national climate plans due out in 2025. Without clear signals on the amount and quality of money on the table, the fear is that governments will lower their bar and put the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C beyond reach.
After over two years of discussions and with time shrinking, negotiators remain at odds over the most fundamental elements of the goal: how large the sum should be, what it needs to pay for, over how many years, and the best way to monitor the money.
At 4-day summit in Cartagena ending this Friday, negotiators are attempting to iron out some of those knots and sketch out the first outline of a deal.
In laying out his vision for the summit, the COP29 incoming president, Mukhtar Babayev, acknowledged in Berlin that finance is “one of the most challenging topics of climate diplomacy” and that there are “strong and well-founded views on all sides”.
“We are listening to all parties to understand their concerns and help them refine potential landing zones based on a shared vision of success so that we can deliver a fair and ambitious new goal”, he added.
For Marc Weissgerber, executive director at E3G, Babayev`s speech outlined “important elements of a multifaceted solution to the finance challenges, but what is needed are clearly defined diplomatic pathways”.
“It needs to be seen how Azerbaijan can contribute – as a bridge builder – to this essential challenge”, he added.
Moving past $100bn
Talks have also been strained by eroding trust following the developed countries’ failure to honor a pledge made nearly 15 years ago and mobilise $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020. They now “look likely” to have belatedly met the goal in 2022, according to an assessment by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) based on preliminary data that is not publicly available.
Germany’s Baerbock said on Thursday that industrialised countries need to “continue to live up” to their responsibilities and jointly fulfil their $100 billion payment”. But, to go beyond that mark, she urged “those who can” to join their efforts.
Baerbock argued that the world has changed since the signing of the UNFCCC framework in 1992 when developed countries that provide international climate finance made up 80% of the global economy.
Most developing countries strongly oppose any changes or reinterpretation of the treaty that would lead to a reclassification of a country’s status.
E3G’s Weissgerber said the question of more committed financial resources is linked with the development of ambitious climate plans. “Both sides must compromise”, he added. “The existing donor base needs to show that it can be trusted to honour its financial commitments, while at the same time, large emitters such as China and the Gulf States should send a clear signal of ambitious reduction efforts”.
Source of finance
Developing countries – excluding China – need an estimated $2.4 trillion a year to meet their climate and development needs. But, Baerbock pointed out in Berlin, those sums cannot come only out of government budgets already facing constraints.
So called ‘innovative sources of finance’ are among the most talked-about options to unlock additional funds. Things like wealth taxes or shipping levies have been rising up the political agenda this year, but still face either strong opposition or a lack of agreement over how the money should be used.
Much hope is also pinned on wide-ranging reforms of multilateral development banks to channel more money into climate action for the most vulnerable.
COP29’s Babayev said those institutions “have a special role” to play, but he expressed disappointment at the pace of change seen during last week’s Spring Meetings of the World Bank. “While we heard a great deal of concern and worry, we did not yet see adequate and sufficient action”, he said. “That must change”.
The post Tensions over who is going to pay for new climate finance goal rise to the surface appeared first on Climate Home News.
Tensions over who is going to pay for new climate finance goal rise to the surface
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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