Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, a global energy and technology company headquartered in London.
Set up in 2016, it now has 7.2 million customers across 18 countries, as well as a portfolio of £6bn worth of renewable energy assets. The group’s proprietary technology platform, Kraken, is now used to run more than 40m customer accounts across the globe.
The company’s energy supplier arm recently became the largest in Great Britain, surpassing legacy giant British Gas when it added 1.3 million customers after buying Shell Energy in late 2023.
Jackson is a “serial tech entrepreneur”, having built and sold a number of start-ups before Octopus Energy.
Carbon Brief sat down with him for an hour, to discuss the UK’s energy transition, the upcoming general election, misinformation in the media and much more.
- On the energy transition: “The reality is that it just boils down to electrification.”
- On technology neutrality: “This isn’t primary school, there are going to be winners and losers.”
- On Labour’s “zero-carbon power by 2030” pledge: “It’s totally achievable.”
- On using hydrogen for heating: “It’s like flushing our toilets with champagne. It might work, but it’s inordinately expensive and impractical.”
- On renewable forecasts being revised upwards: “It’s like Groundhog Day when you look at the revised [solar and wind] forecasts.”
- On misinformation in the media: “I think some of it is organised and some of it is cultural…EVs have taken 1.8m barrels of oil off the road per day. That’s enough that the global oil industry is suddenly seeing what used to look like a minor inconvenience in the future is suddenly a real and present danger.”
- On the psychology of climate change: “I think hope is as important, knowing there is a solution, is as important as knowing there’s a problem.”
- On stopping “burning stuff”: “Look at the cost curves for solar and wind and all the other technologies…Honestly, it’s going to be cheaper to stop burning stuff. That was an amazing moment, when I realised that we didn’t have to arrange the forces for saving the planet against the force of economics, because they actually lined up.”
- On the cost of renewables: “Our addiction to fossil fuel is so damaging, it even makes the solutions to fossil fuels more expensive.”
- On investment: “The demand for electricity is only going to go up. And when there’s demand for a product, you can invest in producing it.”
- On the demand flexibility service: “It’s just the equivalent of supermarkets pricing goods to clear, rather than letting them go off.”
- On concerns over digital exclusion: “People who try to hold new technology to the bar of universality are typically protecting some sort of legacy against the technology improvements that benefit consumers, and we should not have much patience for that.”
Carbon Brief: What do you think should be the key priorities when it comes to energy and climate policy for the next [UK] government over its first six months or so?
Greg Jackson: I think the energy transition used to sound like quite a complicated process. The reality is that it just boils down to electrification. We need to electrify everything we can and then be generating as much electricity as we can from renewable resources.
Now, underneath that, there may be a whole lot of policy priorities. But electrification has got to be the one word.
CB: So, when the next government comes in, whenever the election is, are there specific things you really need to see, or that you’d like to see, to really ramp up this decarbonisation process?
GJ: So, again, I’m going to talk about, for me [its] electrification. Because even when we talk about decarbonisation you’re kind of weighing up loads of different things. If we talk about electrification, primarily, then we can say, OK, what does that take?
And I think the first thing we need to do is recognise that, even today, the electricity markets we’ve got are not fit for purpose. We spend billions a year balancing and curtailing renewables – that’s turning windfarms off when it’s windy. And we need a market that means that, at the times when we’re generating a lot of electricity, it’s super cheap for people. And we need to do that on a regional basis, or even more locally than that.
So that, for example, if today we had regional pricing, every region would be cheaper than it is because we’ve been reducing waste. But, more than that, Scotland would be the cheapest electricity in Europe. These are important because as soon as people can see that renewables can lead to cheaper energy, we get public support for renewables – as we should – and it becomes a much more efficient system. We’re not putting a cost on everyone’s bills to pay for waste, which is what happens today.
I think, alongside market reform, you then get the right investment signals. So we are going to be investing in the places that need the infrastructure. And that’s not just generation, it can be things like batteries.
It’s kind of mad at the moment that a lot of people think we should put batteries next to windfarms. But, if you do that, then before anybody’s had a chance to make the most of cheap electricity, you’ve already eliminated the price signal. So the best places for batteries, for example, might be close to population centres.
Take somewhere like the southeast [of England], where, obviously, it’s hard to build new generation. But we can build infrastructure that will make electricity cheaper by, for example, deploying batteries in places that have got peak time constraints [to] enable us to reduce peak issues and benefit more from the times it’s off peak and we can store that electricity.
So I think market reform is absolutely number one. And that means the most dynamic pricing possible.
By the way, it doesn’t mean that consumers will necessarily face dynamic prices, just to be really clear. Companies will be able to wrap-up that dynamic pricing in any number of tariffs. So, for those who want it, you’ll still have flat tariffs – and they’ll probably be cheaper than they are today, because the system is more efficient. But, for those who can shift demand, or want more dynamic stuff, it will enable them to benefit by using electricity more efficiently and that makes for a more efficient system for everyone.
Obviously, we need reform of two sets of regulations. We critically need grid reform, so that you can actually connect stuff to the grid. We’ve spent years talking about this publicly because of the frustration that we’ve got enormous amounts of capital to build new generation. But you can’t. You literally have no way of connecting to the grid. I mean, there’s a project we’ve got to build a solar farm in County Durham, where I think there’s a 14-year wait to connect it.
CB: So is that just planning reform?
GJ: That is grid reform. So, basically in the UK – and, by the way, this applies in many other countries as well – you’ve got a national monopoly grid and you can only build new generation if you can connect it to the grid. You haven’t got any alternative. So, if the grid tells you you’re going have to wait 14 years, you’re going to wait 14 years.
And I contrast this with what has happened in gas. During the energy crisis, Germany alone built five liquified natural gas terminals in one year. Meanwhile, because of these grid connection issues, we can’t build new renewables. And I think that the reform for that is largely bureaucratic; the government and grid need to agree on a process to enable stuff to be connected faster.
The second thing, of course, is planning. And I think, at the moment, I mean, famously, England built two onshore wind turbines in the time that Ukraine during a war built hundreds, because you can’t get planning permission. And that doesn’t just apply for wind turbines, there’s a real challenge building the infrastructure to transmit electricity around the country.
And I think the reality with this is we need to find ways to enable communities to benefit when we build new infrastructure. Wherever you build it, you get NIMBYs [“not in my back yard”]. But we need to have IMBYs as well, people who will directly benefit and can see the direct benefit of building infrastructure. And so we need reform that enables us to deploy new electricity infrastructure, but in a way which embraces, to the maximum extent possible, local communities.
Between those two priorities – i.e. market reform, planning and grid reform – we can unleash the forces that actually will mean that throughout most of the country – everywhere, in fact – consumers will be benefiting from clean energy. And the moment people are benefiting – it’s like when the new iPhone launched. The sudden demand for data meant that the mobile networks just had to build masts, because it had to meet consumer demand. And we can do that with energy, with clean energy, which is the more we enable people to benefit, the more demand there will be for rapid transition. And that’s what we need.
CB: So, moving on to Labour’s now kind of quite high-profile pledge to get net-zero power by 2030…is that broadly achievable? Is that doable if what you laid out there gets implemented? Or are there extra things that, to hit that 2030 target, would need to happen?
GJ: It’s totally achievable. And, by the way, I mean, the government’s pledge [for 2035] is not that different, right? Everyone’s pledging net-zero carbon electricity by roughly then, I can’t remember all the details, but they’re all quite similar.
But the reality is, what it does need is commitment. I was recently at a meeting of governments. Lots of industries were lobbying governments to say: we need to be technology neutral, everyone’s got to be given a chance to be part of this future. Which is all lovely, but this isn’t primary school, there are going to be winners and losers. And we need the commitments from governments that enable investors to invest in the stuff that’s going to be part of the future.
So a really good example would be, there is still this kind of crazy suggestion that hydrogen might be used to heat homes. I mean, it might just be physically possible, but it’s like flushing our toilets with champagne. It might work, but it’s inordinately expensive and impractical. It’s just a delaying tactic from the companies who own the gas infrastructure.
Now, of course, a transition that means that the gas infrastructure, over time, won’t be so valuable, or may even become entirely redundant, is not the future that they [the gas industry] want. But it’s not like we’re still running stuff down the canals. The technology changes already made [mean] that renewable electricity is the cheapest form of power we’ve ever had and is getting cheaper every year. Of course, there are minor blips like recent inflation in offshore wind, but even that was driven by the inflation and interest rates, which largely came from our addiction to fossil fuels.
So, the path should be clear, and what we need from policymakers are those brave decisions that say: “Hey, look, there are going to be some losers in this process.” But…the quicker we’re clear about that, the more we can embrace, for example, the workers in those sectors and make sure that they’ve got a bright future, as we transition, and the more we can manage the transition in a way which will be good. Good for the people who were affected by it.
CB: Can the market do all of this? Or Labour’s talking of GB Energy, and you hear about nationalisation or quasi-nationalisation of the railways. What do you make of the ideas like GB Energy?
GJ: Yeah. I don’t think there’s any read-across from railways. It’s an entirely different sector. And the reality when you look at energy, I mean, first of all, GB Energy isn’t the sort of nationalised energy supplier, which is good, by the way. I mean, energy retail is one of the most competitive sectors in the UK. Margins are 2%, if energy companies are lucky.
The big problem in energy is the rest of the cost stack. It’s largely those kinds of very regulated, often monopoly parts of the system, which need reform. And so I think if GB Energy is about, for example, helping pioneer stuff that isn’t yet ready for market risk…I mean, take tidal as an example. Maybe we should have tidal power, maybe GB Energy would be a great way of kick-starting that, in the same way as government subsidies kick-started a lot of wind and solar. But, increasingly, we could run wind and solar on a merchant basis, i.e. an unsubsidised basis in many energy systems if you’ve had the market reform I talked about. So, if GB energy is helping kickstart stuff we need, that would be incredible.
If GB Energy helps get government backing for projects to enable them to, for example, overcome some of the planning and connections issues that I’ve described, that could be great. So it really depends on the role GB Energy is playing.
CB: Before we started speaking, I was looking at this Ladybird book from 1981, which I picked up from a charity shop, talking about energy conservation. Obviously, whatever that is, 40-odd years ago [and we’re now] talking about 2050 [for net-zero emissions]. What, in your view, does the UK energy system, EVs and all the rest of it look like then? What does the UK look like in 2050? And what does it need to look like?
GJ: So, first of all, I guess the question here is, if this [book] was roughly 30 years ago and 2050 is roughly 30 years away…how well did this predict where we are today? Or how dated does it look, right?
Look, I think a real challenge with targets like 2050 is that almost everyone who sets those targets will be retired by then. They’re not responsible for it. Indeed, almost everyone who’s working for them will be retired by then. It’s incredibly easy to set a target that you’re not going to be around for.
So, I’m much more of a believer in setting much shorter term targets. And given that we have the technologies we have available today, we can set really challenging targets. If you are talking about 2030, for example, net-zero electricity, that’s a much more tangible time. Because it tells us about the decisions we need to make right now.
I think one of the interesting things about predicting the future, is how wrong we get it, especially in sectors like energy, where you’ve got very powerful incumbents who have very strong views about what the future will be, but are often wrong. I mean, Kodak’s view of the future was wrong, Nokia’s view of the future was wrong, Blockbusters’ view. They were all wrong. But they didn’t get to lobby for their view of the future, they just had to compete. And the market and technology made the decision for them.
So I think if I look at energy, wind and solar, [they] have repeatedly beaten every target. They get cheaper, faster than anyone’s ever estimated. And it keeps on happening. It’s like Groundhog Day when you look at the revised forecasts, because every forecast that comes out, kind of looks back and goes: “Whoops, we underestimated how well solar would do or how well wind would do.” And then they make an estimate, and then they have to go and do the exact same process again because it keeps beating it.
It’s been the same, by the way, with batteries. Battery prices keep on plummeting way ahead of expectation. And EV adoption has kept on accelerating ahead of expectation. So, all the clean-energy technologies beat the forecasts.
By the way, the only ones that don’t are the dirty-energy technologies. No one forecast the horrific gas crisis we’ve just lived through. Nuclear keeps getting – and I’m not anti nuclear – but it keeps getting more expensive and slower than expected. And so I think the challenge with setting things like 2050 is, if we start building infrastructure based around our best guesses now, it’ll almost certainly under-deliver and it will cost too much. We’re far better off with the kind of things I talked about at the beginning, which were market reforms, so we can rapidly deploy the technologies we’ve already got.
An incredible thing that happens in technology is, each time you deploy something, it teaches you about what is possible. When the iPhone launched, no one foresaw that QR codes would get you out of a pandemic, or that Uber would change the global cab industry.
In the same way, for example, we are already discovering that if we give people, if we integrate our technologies directly with people’s electric cars, we can charge them at three or four times less than grid cost, because we’re able to grab the electricity when it’s most abundant. That means that, today, for some of our customers, they can drive electric cars for £2.30 for 100 miles, whereas with a diesel car it would be £18.
Now, no one forecast that kind of thing. It’s just what we discover, when we build out new technology. And that’s why, you know, I really believe we need the reforms to let us build the technology. And we will discover it gets cheaper, faster, easier and better for consumers, far more quickly than anyone realised.
CB: What do you make of the current mood in certain sections of the media, which is very negative, relentlessly attacking EVs, electrification, solar? What’s your view on that? It’s almost like organised misinformation, it sometimes feels like.
GJ: I think there are two layers to it. I think some of it is organised and some of it is cultural.
Let’s talk about the cultural first. Let’s look at EVs. EVs are not just an electric version of petrol cars, they are a fundamentally different creation. So, the assumption that, for example, the long-standing car makers, the manufacturers of Europe and elsewhere, were going to be able to just start making EVs, is kind of wrong. Right? They spent 100 years becoming unbelievably good at complex transmission and drive shafts and all of the engineering required to take what is actually a remarkably complex thing, a petrol or diesel engine, and turn it into a consumer device.
Meanwhile, for the last 20 years a bunch of Chinese companies that just set out to build EVs from the beginning, or Tesla, which has only ever done EVs, have re-engineered cars, built around the fundamentals of an EV, in which things like transmission becomes much simpler, but your ability to build really smart battery management, really smart software is actually a competitive edge.
Now, what we’re seeing at the moment is EVs emerging that traditional automakers find very, very difficult to compete with. And, so, their answer is: “Hang on, we can’t make money in EVs. Therefore, something’s wrong with EVs.” Because no company ever says there’s something wrong with us.
Now, that means that everyone in those companies, there’s huge numbers of people there, good people, but that are genuinely thinking EVs are too hard, they are too challenging, they’re not going to work. And they’re the people that have a 20-year relationship with motoring journalists. Their lobbyists have had the 20-year relationships with the political correspondents, their CEOs are the ones that have the relationships with the business journalists and with the editors. So, this isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just that those companies are facing existential threat from something that is really challenging for them. And that means that all the conversations these people have are about the problems with EVs, right?
Now, actually, I have lived with an EV for seven years. There are very, very few problems with an EV. And, you know, for example, the latest generation of EVs are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, as all the technology scales up. And we get these great cost curves as batteries come down. But those automakers are not seeing it, in fact, this is a threat to them.
So, I think the primary layer here is simply that the influential people in the motoring industry, simply don’t get EVs.
I think the second thing is, of course, there is a backlash from the fossil fuel industry, including some car companies, because, even today, I think EVs have taken 1.8m barrels of oil off the road per day. Right? That’s enough that the global oil industry is suddenly seeing what used to look like a minor inconvenience in the future is suddenly a real and present danger. Now, we saw the ability of the tobacco industry to lobby against tobacco restrictions. The oil industry is vastly more powerful than tobacco ever was. And so, on top of the sort of cultural thing that I’ve described, you have then got a genuine concern and lobbying efforts.
And I guess the last part of that is cultural wars. There are organisations who deny climate change, who are combining anti-climate change with anti-EV, with anti-renewables and a whole load of other social topics to try and create political divides. That’s why when I talk about the market reforms that will make, for example, clean energy cheaper, it’s so critical, because if we can show people this transition is good for them, we kind of undermine that attempt at a culture war.
I spend a lot of time talking to, for example, people on the political right, because they are free marketers. They believe in entrepreneurship, they believe in efficiency and talking to them about the way in which renewables and EVs can lead to a more efficient competitive world. Actually, we make the culture war go away and we talk about the economics instead. And then we can align people’s self-interest with that industry, with that of the climate.
CB: Talking about a culture war, we obviously got an election here in the UK looming, but we’ve obviously got a US election looming too and a very, very stark choice between a Biden versus Trump presidency. In that context, given what the Trump 1.0 presidency did, what do you make of the Paris Agreement? Obviously, Trump tried to pull, or did pull the US out of it and then Biden reinstated it. Do you think the Paris Agreement has achieved things to date? Is it the international framework system that we need, or not?
GJ: I’m generally impressed that most governments really do take the commitments they’ve made seriously. And, even, while on a political level, I’ll often hear these kind of culture-war discussions, underneath that, you see the real actions.
Now, the US has obviously swung massively because you had the Trump rowbacks, but then you had, under Biden, the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act], which, by the way, is a very bipartisan programme. I speak to people from the US administration and, just yesterday, [we talked] about the kind of risk of a rowback depending on what happens in November and their view is, of course, there is a very real risk.
But a lot of what the IRA has done has been in red [Republican] states. The Biden officials talk about touring America and meeting all these mayors, Republican mayors and governors in red states, who have seen the benefits of jobs and the industrial regeneration created by it. And so you hope that a lot of that will mean that the underlying programmes survive any political change.
I think in terms of the global picture, we’ve also got to be a bit honest about this. Paris was about 1.5C. I think last year we exceeded 1.5C. Now, climate comes and goes, it’s very important we all recognise that, but, we’ve got to accept that we’re facing an accelerating challenge and we’ve got all the tools to solve it.
I think the place that we really need political leadership now is to be able to look at industries and say: “Look, some industries are going to be the future. And their success is not only going to benefit the climate, it’s going to create more economic opportunity than we lose as we allow some industries to start declining.” And they’ve just got to be brave about this.
I saw that G7 has just agreed to phase-out coal by 2035. [Laughs] I mean, you can be proud to be British on this one, because this is our last coal year, and even then it’s miniscule. The idea that we somehow need these forms of energy for another 11 years is mad. And, so, I’m simultaneously pleased that governments really do take these commitments seriously. But I’m also worried that they fail to grasp the opportunity that a far more rapid change could deliver greater economic growth, greater outcomes for their citizens, than in their current shape.
CB: Obviously, looking at this [Ladybird] book, and looking back over previous decades, I’m interested in your own personal epiphany, if you like, on climate change. What was the thing, that moment…was it a book, TV programme, film, a lecture, a conversation with a colleague or family member, where the penny really dropped and you thought: “OK, climate change is a thing and it’s pretty damn serious”?
GJ: I was a child in the 70s and I joined Greenpeace when I was 15. And the thing that first got me into it was actually local air pollution more than climate. Because back then you could literally see the diesel fumes belching out the back of buses, out of car exhausts, often very visible, and you could really smell and feel it in the air. And I thought it was completely unacceptable, that one person’s choice to drive a car that did that created this huge negative impact on the people behind them.
And you remember that when leaded petrol was banned, which was done almost overnight, it was because of the impact on kids’ brains in dense urban areas with a lot of vehicles. It’s just unconscionable. And I think back then what you could see was that there were clean alternatives. This wasn’t about sackcloth and ashes. It wasn’t asking people to give up the huge benefits of industrial progress. It was just we needed ways to enable people to choose better solutions at the same or lower cost.
And so that was always my philosophy and I think, as I became more and more aware of climate change, exactly the same applied.
Now, I think the real two points of epiphany for me on climate were, first of all, realising there’s a solution. I think for a long time, you kind of feel like, how can we power our society without burning stuff? And then you look at the cost curves for solar and wind and all the other technologies. And, honestly, it’s going to be cheaper to stop burning stuff. That was an amazing moment, when I realised that we didn’t have to arrange the forces for saving the planet against the force of economics, because they actually lined up.
I think the second thing was Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Sequel. We’d actually started this company, we started the company in 2015-16. In 2018, it looked like we were doing quite well. And we went away for a couple of days for a management off-site. And, after a hard day slaving over clipboards or whatever you do, I arranged for everyone to watch a movie and they all came in and I think they thought that we’re going to get something fun. And when An Inconvenient Sequel opened up, all the people in the room, you could see their faces drop, because I was forcing them to watch something worthy.
But you know what, five minutes in, everyone’s WhatsApp messages start pinging, and it was like, “wow, we have to do more”. Because it was showing the very real effects of climate change, which, by the way, are only worse now. And then at the end of the movie it had hope, it ended with a deal on solar for India. And, of course, it was for dramatic effect, but the reality of this is that we do have hope.
After the movie finished, we all just sat down and said how can we accelerate the ability our company has to do something about this? And so, I think, hope is as important, knowing there is a solution, is as important as knowing there’s a problem.
CB: You have talked very confidently about the cost benefits of wind and solar and you mentioned earlier how, a couple of years ago, government auctions made offshore wind look incredibly appealing. And then we had a failed auction and now it looks like quite a different picture. Heat pump installations in the UK are still very slow, costs are high. The cost of electricity versus gas makes them probably cheaper to run, but not definitely. How would you respond to lots of people saying: “Is it actually cheaper? It’s going to be more expensive, we need to consider perhaps using boilers?” How do you respond to those very serious concerns?
GJ: The first thing we’re going to do is recognise that today’s markets don’t reflect the underlying physics and economics, which is why I talk about market reform all the time. The second thing we need to do is recognise that there’s always going be short-term blips, those auction failures were driven simply by short-term inflation and interest rates, both of which were largely the consequence of the gas crisis, i.e, our addiction to fossil fuel is so damaging, it even makes the solutions to fossil fuels more expensive.
And then we talk about things like adoption of heat pumps and so on. A year ago, two years ago, no one had heard of a heat pump. Now, the climate change denying parts of the media have made heat pumps famous. Thank you very much. We’ve got to remember that we’ve got long-term transitions and almost everything we talked about there are short-term issues.
So, if we break it down a bit, we can generate electricity from renewable sources in the UK, for between 4p and 8p a kilowatt hour (kWh). New generation in solar and wind can do that.
Consumers traditionally in the UK have paid 17p/kWh. During the energy crisis our bills were paid for by the government, but they went to 40p/kWh or 50p/kWh, right? I.e. the generating cost, the cost to generate electricity, is way below what people pay. We’ve just got a crazily inefficient system for getting it from generation to consumption. We need to fix that. Which is why that was literally the first set of policies that I talked to you about.
Just by way of example, electricity roughly trebles in price in the UK between the point it’s generated and the point you consume it. Milk, which is much harder to transmit, gets schlepped about in diesel lorries, it has to be bottled and pasteurised, is stored on refrigerated shelves in supermarkets with really expensive real estate. I think milk goes up by 50% between the farm and the point you buy it. Our electricity system is just fundamentally far too inefficient. And we have to fix that. And that’s the market reforms.
But then in terms of, for example, running costs of heat pumps…on a smart tariff they’re almost certainly cheaper for the vast majority of homes than a gas boiler to run. And that’s in today’s crazy world where all of the climate and social levies are sitting on electricity. If you take away that distortion, running heat pumps on electricity is dramatically cheaper than a gas boiler.
We’ve still got to make heat pumps cheaper to buy and install. That’s why, again, going back to first principles, I was inspired here by Michael Dell, of Dell Computers. When he was doing his MBA, he sat in his dorm room and he read an article that said that a $3,000 IBM PC only had $1,000 of components. But, you know, you had an inefficient supply chain, loads of wholesalers and, when you look at heat pumps, it’s just the same. So we’ve started making our own, so we can be a bit like Dell, by going direct to make them cheaper. And already we’re seeing a big cost benefit. But the more we invest, the more we scale up, the more we’ll see that, and other companies are doing the same.
So what we’ve got is a situation where we’re at the beginning of a technology change. And if you look at the first iPhones, they cost £435 and today you would feel like you’re holding a brick that barely performed. But they were enough to kick start the smartphone revolution and that’s just the process we’re going through with the heat pumps.
The UK has very specific needs for heating, not only do we have poorly insulated homes, but we’ve got a very temperate climate. We also heat our homes with wet radiators, whereas most countries that use heat pumps have used air to heat the home. And so we’ve needed to make heat pumps that are UK specific. All of this is happening at the moment and it just gives me huge optimism.
And if I compare this to the alternative, by the way – the idea of, for example, piping hydrogen into people’s homes – I don’t know where to start.
We can start with engineering. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe. When a rocket launch is delayed by a fuel leak, which they are, that’s hydrogen. Rocket scientists can’t keep it in a very closed and carefully designed system. You know, there are bits of our gas network that are unmapped, that are 100 years old, I think there are bits of the piping that have got wood in them! Anywhere you’ve got a leak, hydrogen can get out. And so, before you can pipe hydrogen [into homes], you’ve got to make sure that every single home, every single inch of every pipe in every home, every valve and every joint, every appliance is going to be able to keep the hydrogen in. And this is unbelievably complex.
I saw the other day a hydrogen cooking hob, with an invisible flame, literally invisible flame. I don’t know why you’d want one of those in your kitchen, so you’ve got an explosive leaky substance with an invisible flame, or you could have an electric induction hob for roughly the same amount. The same cost to run, wipe clean, totally safe, incredibly controllable and you don’t need all this stuff piped into your home.
And that’s just looking at the piping, nevermind where’s the hydrogen coming from! 97% of the hydrogen in the world at the moment is unabated carbon emitting hydrogen. And this is years after we were told we’d be starting to get green hydrogen available. And then, if you’re going to use hydrogen to heat a home, if it’s green hydrogen, you’ve got to create renewable electricity, you then use that to power electrolysers, you then have to compress the hydrogen, pump it into the home and burn it. End-to-end, 40% efficient at turning the electricity you started with into heat. And, meanwhile, the heat pump is end-to-end 250% to 400% efficient.
There we go. I’m very optimistic because all you ever have to do is go back to the physics of this stuff.
Oh sorry, the other thing you mentioned, you know…is electricity more expensive than gas? Well, of course electricity is about three times more expensive per unit, maybe four times with the distorting taxes that need to be taken away. But electricity is so much more efficient. An EV turns 80% of the energy and electricity into motion, a petrol engine is 25%. A heat pump, you get 300% efficiency efficiency, a gas boiler gives you 85%. So electricity is so much more efficient.
And then the real magic with electricity is that it’s fungible. If you’ve got an EV, it can store the electricity at the cheapest times, you can’t do that kind of thing with gas. In fact, increasingly, some EVs can put that energy back into your house at peak times, reducing your energy costs.
Fundamentally, I think there is one thing here which is that electricity puts consumers far more in control. If they choose to, they can get solar panels and largely eliminate their dependence on anyone else. But with fossil fuels, we’re totally dependent on the countries and, to a degree, corporations that provide that molecule. One reason they don’t want to let go is that control gives them power and it gives them money. And we saw that during the gas crisis.
Any comparison of gas costs versus electricity costs has to remember that, from time to time, we experience these fossil fuel crises, because we’re dependent on people in control. And during the worst of the gas crisis, the price of gas went up to 30-fold. There was a very real chance that Europe was not going to have enough gas. In fact, it is potentially the case that we were saved from a gas crisis by a mild winter.
So we should never allow anyone to get away with this idea that electricity is more expensive than gas, because they cherry-pick the times that gas is cheap and they forget about the times that gas or other fossil fuels brutalise our economies. I think it cost the UK £100bn, the government paid two-thirds of our energy bills during the crisis. That’s how bad fossil fuels are.
CB: You’ve talked already about market reform and how important you think it is. One of the key arguments from people who are in favour of this transition that the economy is going through, is that dramatic reform of the electricity markets puts at risk the investments we need to get 2030, 2035 or whatever our targets are, which currently relies on the system as it is today. How do you respond to that?
GJ: It’s just not true. Of course, investors quite rightly, when investors write a large cheque, they are making a huge commitment and they need to know it’s got a good chance of delivering a return. And, so, whenever investors have got comfortable with one way of doing things, they of course want to see that carry on.
But, first of all, there are plenty of other investors available. Whilst in electricity, investors have long had these kind of guaranteed returns through different mechanisms, oil and gas investors make their colossal investments against enormous technology risk, enormous political risk and enormous market risk. When they decide to start extracting or to buy the licences for an oil or gas field and then make a huge investment required to extract the stuff. And then huge investments in LNG tankers and terminals. They have no idea what the future price of oil or gas will be. And they can still make those investments. So you can make massive investments against degrees of uncertainty.
And what we’ve seen already in electricity in the past was, for example, when we moved to the CfD [contracts for difference] regime, from the RO [renewable obligations] or FiTs [feed in tariffs] or whatever. A lot of investors said: “Well, that will kill investment.” It all [still] happened.
Similarly, when we’ve seen, for example, a number of states in the US have introduced dynamic zonal pricing, the investments carried on unaffected. So, at the end of the day, people need electricity. In fact, the demand for electricity is only going to go up. And when there’s demand for a product, you can invest in producing it.
CB: One of the things that Octopus has been quite involved in is the demand flexibility service being run by the electricity system operator. And that’s obviously encouraging customers to cut their use at peak times. How much importance do you put on that kind of system as we transition to a net-zero power system?
GJ: First of all I’d say Octopus was pioneering that for four years before the ESO brilliantly introduced it. Because the sort of legacy energy system said: “Customers won’t do this stuff.” Everything we’d invested in, in trials and experiments with customers showed that they loved that.
It was brilliant the way the ESO introduced it. And Octopus Saving Sessions accounts for 50% of all of the participation. Because we’d nurtured relationships with customers.
These are not energy geeks, by the way. Energy geeks were already on dynamic tariffs and smart tariffs, which meant, actually, it was kind of hard for them to participate in the Saving Sessions, because they were already fully optimised. This was one and a half million for us, one and a half million ordinary households that finally had the opportunity to shop for bargain electricity the way that they already do with supermarkets.
And giving people the opportunity to cut costs, especially in a crisis, but also to have agency, to be able to make decisions, is so critically important. And I think that this isn’t about renewables, this is just about the way the energy system has treated customers as dumb offtakers, rather than them being the very reason we exist. And as soon as we truly embraced customers, we discover all these ways in which we simultaneously provide them with better service and better value through a more efficient system. It’s just the equivalent of supermarkets pricing goods to clear, rather than letting them go off.
I think the big challenge for the energy sector now – and there’s a real risk that legacy thinking kills this – but the real opportunity and challenge is to make this the norm. It shouldn’t be a weird add-on in one winter in a crisis. It’s like every day, there are a bunch of people, turning electric generation on and off. There’s a whole bunch of companies investing heavily in things like batteries. And the ability to shift demand around is just as big, a potential contributor to an efficient system. In fact, it’s better because you don’t have to buy any assets. And so I think we shouldn’t be thinking this has been an add-on system, it is the system.
It’s insanely popular, too, just be really clear. We got 100,000 customers asking for smart meters during that programme just to participate.
CB: The last question neatly segues into this. Technology is a key part of being able to do that, but also your broader pitch to customers. A big part of this transition to EVs requires integrating very well with your technology. But how do you deal with customers that aren’t up to date? Who don’t necessarily have smartphones, who aren’t digitally savvy? How do you ensure that they’re not left behind?
GJ: I tell you what, those customers were being brutalised in the old energy industry. If they’re calling a legacy energy company that has got a 45-minute wait on the phones and then you get through to someone and they can’t help you, because it’s got to be a different department, so they promise to call you back and they don’t call me back, and then they hand me through to another department, and you just do all of the security questions, just as they’re closing the line, that was the experience those people had in energy.
So the first thing is great technology enables you to provide everybody with a better service. Octopus’s magic is that when you phone us up, 95% of the time, the person you are speaking to can sort out your problem there and then, because of technology [which is known as Kraken]. Fewer things go wrong, because of technology.
Second thing is, I’m so sorry, I can’t remember the number, but, actually, there are relatively few people in the UK that don’t have access to a smartphone. And if we think about things like everything from universal credit to the ability to buy an enormous range of products and services, it requires a smartphone. And the most important thing is making sure that wherever someone has got the access, we enable them to become part of an efficient system.
For the very small number of people that don’t have those technologies, it’s very unlikely you’d have an EV and not have a smartphone. And so a lot of the technologies we really need to optimise to make the system efficient for everyone, like EVs, naturally you are going to find the people that have the kit.
So I think the most important thing is you look at everybody, regardless of where they are, but you don’t get held back by saying that everything’s universal, right? After all, Aldi and Lidl, great supermarkets, but we don’t prevent them from rolling out because some people might not be able to get there. In fact, the more they’ve rolled out, the more they’ve been able to become closer to being universally accessible anyway.
You know, things like when the iPhone launched it was £435 plus I think about minimum £35 a month. It was a super premium product. But, within five years, it paved the way to the $50 Android, $20 Android, the ubiquitous Android that has transformed not only the lives of people in wealthy countries, but many developing countries, too.
People who try to hold new technology to the bar of universality are typically protecting some sort of legacy against the technology improvements that benefit consumers and we should not have much patience for that.
For example, someone recently wrote to me because their 700-year old house had a heat pump that didn’t always work efficiently – by the way, I think it was badly installed and we can fix that – but there’s not that many 700-year old houses, and I’d love to serve them. But 20% of households don’t have gas in the UK, so heat pumps are held to this idea that they have got to work for everyone in all situations, which, by the way, they are better than gas because every house has got electricity and only 80% have got gas. So even when we talk about universality, we are usually using it for a false comparison anyway.
CB: Thank you.
GJ: Thank you.
The post The Carbon Brief Interview: Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The global goal to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 “will not be achieved” unless action by countries “accelerates rapidly”, says a draft UN report.
Countries are falling short on 22 of the 23 targets for 2030 they set under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the “Paris Agreement for nature”.
That is according to a draft version of a global report prepared by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), published on 26 July.
The report will be finalised ahead of the next nature summit, COP17, taking place in Armenia in October of this year.
The second draft of the global report has undergone “peer review”, but will still be subject to “technical edits” before being formally published ahead of COP17.
The final version will inform a global review of countries’ progress towards meeting the world’s 2030 nature goals, which will take place in Armenia.
Below, Carbon Brief explains why the report has been produced and what it says about countries’ progress in areas such as restoring ecosystems and raising funds for biodiversity.
Global report
In Montreal, Canada, in 2022, nearly every country in the world agreed to the GBF. The overall “mission” of the framework is to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Its “vision” is to bring the world into “harmony with nature” by 2050.
The GBF includes a list of 23 targets for 2030. They cover an expansive range of topics, from restoring ecosystems, to addressing pollution and providing developing nations with finance to help cover the costs of protecting nature.
As part of the GBF and its underlying documents, countries agreed to a schedule for monitoring their progress towards achieving the 2030 targets.
This included the preparation of a “global report” of progress coordinated by the CBD, which will inform a “global review” undertaken by countries at COP17.
The global report draws on countries’ national reports, which were due to be submitted to the UN in February of this year. It also draws on countries’ national nature plans, known as “national biodiversity strategies and action plans” (NBSAPS) and national targets, which were both due in 2024.
Not all countries have met the call to publish these documents and targets. According to the UN, 45% of countries published NBSAPs in time to be considered for the report, 83% had submitted at least one national target and 66% had produced their new national report.
The first draft of the global report was published on 29 June 2026. This draft was subject to a “peer review process”, which invited countries and observers, such as NGOs and businesses, to submit comments on all aspects of the report.
The second draft, which has been revised based on the peer review, was published on Sunday 26 July. (This was just ahead of COP17 preparatory talks being held in Nairobi from 27 July to 1 August.)
A final version of the global report will be formally published ahead of COP17, which will take place from 19-30 October.
Overall findings
The second draft of the global report says that the GBF has led to “unprecedented” interest in tackling biodiversity loss, but adds:
“However, unless collective implementation accelerates rapidly, the 2030 targets and mission will not be achieved.”
It says that countries have taken some action to address all 23 targets, but that “no target presents a fully positive picture”.
(The first draft has slightly softer language. It “concludes that the world is not yet on track to collectively meet the global ambitions that the parties to the convention set when they adopted the framework”.)
The report identifies “two distinct gaps in progress”, relating to ambition and implementation.
First, that the national targets and plans submitted by countries “do not yet fully reflect the scope and level of ambition” of the global targets in the GBF.
Second, countries are not taking sufficient action to achieve their targets, according to the report.
It adds that progress is “particularly lagging” for addressing the “indirect drivers of biodiversity loss”, such as harmful business practices and government subsidies promoting them.
In addition, countries are showing “consistent gaps” in making progress on taking action to protect “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
The report produces a “scorecard” assessing countries’ progress towards meeting each of the 23 targets of the GBF.
The scorecard includes an “overall score” of between 0 and 1 for each target. This is calculated by considering countries’ self-reported progress in their plans and targets, as well as an assessment of progress based on a set of agreed indicators.
The results are split into four categories: 0-0.25 is red, 0.25-0.5 is orange, 0.5-0.75 is yellow and 0.75-1 is green.
The report gives a “green” score for just one target, indicating overall positive progress. This is target 8, on “minimising” the impact of climate change on biodiversity, including through mitigation and adaptation.
Elsewhere, the draft says that countries have “reported gaps in the scale and timely provision” of “financial resources, capacity-building and development, technical and scientific cooperation, access to and transfer of technology, and knowledge sharing”. It adds:
“These barriers can result in uneven capacities and cause specific technical and financial constraints for all parties, but particularly for developing-country parties. It is likely these constraints are even more pressing for least developed countries and small island developing states.”
Protecting and restoring nature
Target 3 of the GBF is for countries to protect “30% of Earth’s land and sea for nature” by the end of the decade.
This commitment – referred to as “30 by 30” – is widely considered the flagship target of the agreement.
The report says that countries are making “progress in expanding and managing protected areas, especially for marine and coastal areas”. But it adds that “current ambition and implementation remain insufficient to fully achieve all aspects of the target”.
It continues that, according to countries’ available national targets, “monitoring and reporting of some elements of the target remains low”. This includes “those relating to equitable governance of protected areas” and “recognition of Indigenous and local territories”.
The report adds that countries “face significant challenges in implementation, particularly related to lack of finance and capacity”.
(An investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian in 2025 revealed that more than half of nations that have submitted UN biodiversity plans do not commit to “30 by 30” within their borders.)
Another conservation measure included in the GBF is target 2, which aims to ensure that at least 30% of land and sea areas are under restoration by 2030.
The report says that “restoration efforts are expanding”. However, it says that “current commitments to restore areas and implementation of those commitments remain below the level required” to achieve target 2.
It adds that countries’ national targets are “generally well aligned with target 2”, but that “addressing the effectiveness of restoration efforts is often absent”.
Moreover, the report adds that monitoring of progress is “constrained by inconsistent definitions and monitoring approaches for ecosystem degradation and restoration”.
Another “major barrier” is a lack of available finance for developing countries looking to restore ecosystems, it says.
Climate and biodiversity links
Target 8 of the GBF is the only one to specifically address climate change, one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss.
It says countries should “minimise the impact of climate change” on biodiversity through mitigation and adaptation, including “nature-based solutions” and “ecosystem-based approaches”.
Target 8 was the only one to achieve a “green” marking in the report’s scorecard of progress (see: Overall findings).
The report says that actions to make biodiversity more resilient against climate change are “progressing”. Yet “implementation remains constrained by data gaps, limited means of implementation and the need for stronger coherence between biodiversity, climate and disaster risk reduction planning”.
It continues that countries’ national targets “generally” show “good alignment” with target 8, across “all elements apart from efforts to minimise the impacts of ocean acidification”.
It adds that the deployment of nature-based solutions and ecosystem restoration is not yet at a “sufficient scale”.
Subsidies
Overall progress is “insufficient” on target 18, which calls on countries to identify subsidies and other incentives that are harmful for biodiversity by 2025, says the GBF report.
It also outlines that nations should “eliminate, phase out or reform” these subsidies in a “proportionate” way, reducing them by at least $500bn per year by 2030.
Countries should first target the “most harmful” incentives, while simultaneously scaling up positive incentives for nature, it adds.
The report finds that countries have made some progress in assessing, compiling inventories and commissioning studies on harmful subsidies.
But issues remain, such as incomplete data and the lack of agreed definitions on which subsidies are deemed “harmful”.
Several national reports also note “entrenched interests and political barriers to subsidy reform”, says the report.
Only one-quarter of countries’ national targets that are “highly aligned” with target 18 are “on track” to be met, it finds. Most show “insufficient progress”.
It notes that 38% of countries have addressed the 2025 aim to identify harmful subsidies in their national targets “to some extent”.
Countries’ national reports do not “provide a sufficient basis to determine” whether this goal was met, says the report, but available evidence “suggests” that it was not.
Recent analysis by Carbon Brief found that just 16% of the 134 national reports submitted so far appear to meet the aim.
The report outlines that half of countries have set national targets addressing plans to eliminate, phase out or reform harmful incentives. Almost 60% mention scaling up positive incentives, it adds.
Just 27%, however, address the issue of reducing subsidies by at least $500bn annually by 2030. Also, only 5% set quantitative national targets to reduce subsidies.
There are two headline “indicators” to measure progress on target 18. The first shows that 30% of countries have outlined information on their nature-positive incentives.
The second indicator shows that 22 countries submitted the value of their biodiversity-harmful subsidies, which amounted to a total of $268bn spent on harmful subsidies over 2022 to 2025 – averaging $67bn each year.
Carbon Brief’s analysis had identified an estimated $270bn each year, based on a wider list of submissions from 32 countries. (More countries submitted national reports since the CBD’s deadline to be included in the global report in February.)
All of these figures remain well below the estimated trillions of US dollars spent annually.
The report notes that different methodologies could lead to global subsidy estimate “inconsistencies”, meaning that reported values are likely “underestimates”.
The amount of positive incentives in place is also likely underestimated, it adds.
The report says that harmful subsidies may have declined by around 20% in recent years, based on figures consistently reported by a minority of countries over 2022-24.
Despite this, the total value of subsidies “remains higher than the resources that parties reported mobilising for biodiversity”. (See: Mobilising finance.)
Mobilising finance
Overall progress on raising biodiversity finance has been “insufficient”, according to the report.
Goal D of the GBF, shown below, states that countries must close a $700bn biodiversity gap by 2030 through ending harmful subsidies ($500bn per year) and mobilising resources from the global north to south ($200bn per year).
This target aims to raise “at least $200bn per year” by 2030 from “all sources”, including domestic, international, public and private funding.
In all, countries reported raising a cumulative total of $186.4bn over four years, according to the report.
While it adds that it “is still too early to conclude”, the report states that the total finance mobilised so far “falls far short” of what is needed to close the biodiversity finance gap.
Target 19, shown below, states that developed countries and others should boost finance for nature to “at least $20bn” per year by 2025 and “at least $30bn” by 2030. This falls to developed countries and others that “voluntarily assume” the obligation of contributing.
However, the report suggests that the milestone of raising “at least $20bn per year by 2025” was “likely not achieved”.
Between 2020 and 2023, reporting countries cumulatively raised just $17.7bn in international public funding for biodiversity, according to the report.
This amounts to an average of $4.4bn per year between 2020-23, with the total touching its highest at $5.2bn in 2023.
The report cautions that this figure “should be read as a minimum”, as it does not account for all potential flows of biodiversity finance.
Both estimates “fall below the $20bn milestone”, although the report adds that a “definitive assessment will only be possible” once data for 2024 and 2025 are included.
An earlier draft of the report included language noting that biodiversity-related “official development assistance” remains “well below the agreed 2025 milestone”. This was cut from the summary in this latest iteration of the report.
References to the OECD reporting a “shortfall in funding” and projecting “a decrease for 2024 and 2025” – suggesting the $20bn target was “unlikely to be met” – were also removed from the latest draft.
The chart below shows how international public funding for biodiversity has varied from 2020 to 2023, according to the report.
By comparison, domestic spending makes the largest cumulative contribution to biodiversity finance, at ($135.9bn) over the four years. However, spending has “declined” as a share of GDP. It also notes that spending varies “greatly”, from 0.1% to 2.7% of GDP.
According to the report, many countries highlighted that national budget allocations for biodiversity are “far too low” and that biodiversity “frequently loses out to competing development priorities”, including “defence, food security and infrastructure”.
At COP15 in Montreal, the EU and several other countries pushed for the inclusion of “all sources” of finance in the final text – including private finance and “innovative” schemes.
Private and “innovative” biodiversity finance – which spans a plethora of sources such biodiversity offsets and debt-for-nature swaps – was eventually included in target 19.
The report, however, notes that private finance “peaked in 2021 and fell afterwards” and “remains particularly undeveloped”, with a cumulative total of $32.7bn between 2020-23.
At the same time, the report notes that only 26% of all countries had reported data on private biodiversity finance, making it harder to assess funding declines in 2022 and 2023.
Genetic resources
The report finds there has been limited progress on sharing genetic biodiversity data.
”Digital sequence information” (DSI) refers to genetic data derived from biodiversity, which is often sourced from species in biodiversity-rich developing countries.
These countries have long called for an international mechanism to ensure that the benefits of DSI are shared fairly with the people living where the resources were “discovered”, including Indigenous communities.
At COP16, countries agreed to the first-ever global fund, called the Cali Fund, for companies profiting from genetic data to contribute to conservation goals on a voluntary basis.
However, experts have cautioned that much rests on whether countries develop strong national laws to support the COP16 agreement. This could include incentivising companies in their regions to contribute to the fund.
In the GBF, target 13 and goal C address elements of DSI, including the sharing of benefits from genetic resources and their digital derivatives.
According to the report, 79% of countries submitted national targets that address legal, policy and administrative measures to enable benefit-sharing from DSI. Some 71% included measures to facilitate access to genetic resources.
The report finds that the “strongest progress” has been in developing laws and policies, which are now at an intermediate stage.
The “most fundamental regulatory barrier”, according to many countries cited, is the lack of a “dedicated” national framework to enable access to genetic resources and share benefits with communities.
This would involve enacting laws compatible with the GBF, setting up digital registries to catalogue and trace genetic resources, as well as implementing tracking systems to monitor how they are used. It would also include a financial mechanism to pay communities for the use of their traditional knowledge.
Progress in monitoring monetary and non-monetary benefits from DSI is “much weaker” and is “particularly limited” for measures related to the Cali fund.
According to the report, most parties have “no monitoring systems [for evaluating benefits from genetic resources] in place, or [are] still developing them”. It says they add that the benefits from genetic resources are hard to track “across borders and along value chains through to the final product”.
For those that have tracked benefits, it says that countries reported a cumulative $6.9m in receipts from the use of genetic resources between 2022 and 2025. It adds that “several parties reported that they had received no monetary benefits” to date.
Countries also reported more than 960 non-monetary benefits, ranging from technical training to research participation. The report cautions that these “fluctuated over time rather than increasing consistently, and cannot be seen as indicative of global benefit-sharing”.
In December 2025, Carbon Brief reported that the Cali fund had received only one contribution of $1,000 as an “icebreaker”. No other major companies have stepped up to fill the fund.
Meanwhile, the report states that the formal protection of traditional knowledge held by Indigenous peoples and local communities remained “underdeveloped”.
It says that a “significant number” of countries raised concerns about gaps in recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights and dedicated registries to document their traditional knowledge.
The report says it is not yet possible to assess progress towards goal C:
“To date it is not possible to comment on whether benefits are being shared fairly and equitably nor on the role played by traditional knowledge and Indigenous peoples and local communities. Therefore, progress towards goal C cannot yet be assessed.”
Pollution
Target 7 of the GBF focuses on tackling pollution from pesticides, chemicals, plastic and other sources.
It calls for countries to reduce pollution risks and negative impacts “from all sources” to “levels that are not harmful” to biodiversity and ecosystems by 2030.
It also aims to reduce excess nutrients in the environment and overall risks from pesticides and hazardous chemicals by “at least half”.
The draft report finds that there is no significant change or insufficient progress on 60% of national targets categorised as being highly aligned with target 7. Only one-third of these national targets (35%) are on track to be achieved by 2030.
On average, it says countries have addressed around half of the various elements of target 7 “to some extent” in their national targets.
The most frequently-mentioned aspect of the target – addressed by 72% of countries – refers to reducing pollution from all sources by 2030.
One headline indicator related to target 7 focuses on the concentration of pesticides in the environment.
Just five countries out of 125 submitted estimates on this, according to the report. It says only one country has met the aim of halving the overall risk from pesticides on a national basis so far.
Measures to address plastic pollution are the most frequently reported actions by countries in relation to this target, including bans on single-use bags and straws.
A number of countries in Europe and Asia have also implemented measures to reduce nutrient losses from fertilisers and slurry.
A “major challenge” for countries in advancing pollution aims is “effectively and fairly considering and managing impacts on food security and livelihoods”, according to the report.
Several countries point to a lack of national funding to implement measures towards achieving this target.
Some developing countries also list poor wastewater-treatment infrastructure as a “persistent challenge” on this issue.
Invasive species
Invasive alien species refers to those that have moved to and become established in a region outside their natural habitat, as a result of human activities. This has negative impacts for local biodiversity and ecosystems.
Target 6 of the GBF calls for countries to, among other things, reduce the rates of introduction and establishment of invasive alien species by 50% by 2030.
The draft report says countries are “taking action” on this target, but progress is “difficult to assess”.
Two-thirds of national targets aligned with target 6 show “no significant progress or insufficient progress”, it finds. Fewer than one-third are on track to be achieved by 2030 and just 1% of these national targets have already been achieved.
But most countries have made progress in putting in place measures to manage invasive species – mostly focusing on reducing the introduction rate and impact of species.
Countries have addressed around half of the different elements of the invasive species target “to some extent” in their national targets, finds the report.
But fewer than one-third (30%) have set national targets that put a numeric goal on reducing invasive species.
Island biosecurity programmes and measures to intercept invasive species at country borders are among the actions countries have put in place to tackle the issue.
The report lists some barriers countries say stand in the way of achieving the target. These include a lack of baseline data from which to measure a 50% reduction rate, poor early-detection systems and a lack of funding for long-term reduction efforts.
Some countries also cite capacity and technical challenges in monitoring invasive species, according to the report.
They say many of these species “go unnoticed for years before impacts become apparent”, it adds, with countries arguing that setting a specific reduction target is “challenging”.
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The post World falling short on 22 of 23 nature targets for 2030, says draft UN report appeared first on Carbon Brief.
World falling short on 22 of 23 nature targets for 2030, says draft UN report
Rising temperatures are redistributing the risk of childhood malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in areas of “new risk” in the east and south of the continent, but also “relief hotspots” in western Africa.
This is according to a new study, published in Nature, which provides the “most comprehensive look to date at the impact of climate change on any infectious disease”.
The research finds that since the year 1900, climate change has resulted in one extra case of malaria for every 1,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa on average.
Over the 21st century, climate change is expected to drive down malaria rates across the continent on average, as temperatures rise above the optimum range for mosquitoes.
However, the authors emphasise that continent-wide averages hide more detailed local trends.
They find that cooler parts of Africa face an increase in malaria risk, as rising temperatures have made the regions more suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, while warmer regions see a suppression in malaria cases.
The lead author tells Carbon Brief that this is the first study to use “attribution” – a field of climate science which uses models to compare conditions in a world with global warming to one without – to assess the impact of climate change on malaria.
The study also reveals that climate change is not the main driver of shifting malaria risk in Africa, with public health measures and government policy making a more significant impact.
The “most important” message from the study, according to another expert, is that to eliminate malaria entirely, “effective surveillance, prevention and treatment remain substantially more influential – and more actionable – than climate change alone”.
Childhood malaria
Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 610,000 people died due to the disease in 2024.
The disease is transmitted to humans by bites from mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite. Malaria spreads most rapidly in warm, wet regions, where the parasite-carrying mosquitoes can live and breed.
However, malaria is preventable. A total of 42 countries – mainly in Europe and the Americas – have eliminated the disease entirely through a combination of measures including insecticide use, draining the swamplands that provide breeding habitats for mosquitoes and improving basic healthcare services .Global mortality from malaria declined by 90% over the 20th century.
Today, the vast majority of malaria cases are recorded in Africa, which was home to 95% of malaria cases and deaths in 2024. Children under the age of five make up three-quarters of all African malaria deaths.
The malaria-causing parasite can be detected using a blood test. Over the last century, scientists, government officials and healthcare professionals have collected thousands of blood samples from people across sub-Saharan Africa and tested for the presence of the malaria parasite.
In 2017, scientists brought together more than 50,000 samples collected from sub-Saharan Africa over 1900-2016. This data provides a “snapshot” of the amount of malaria in the population in any year in the last century the study explains.
Dr Colin Carlson is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale school of public health and lead author of the study. He tells Carbon Brief that malaria in Africa is “extraordinarily well documented”, as a result of academic interest and colonial rule in the continent.
The size and quality of the malaria dataset are “exceptionally rare”, Carlson says. He explains that the dataset stretches back to before the impacts of human-caused climate change were strongly felt, making it “extraordinarily” valuable for this analysis.
The chart below shows the percentage of children between two and 10 years old who tested positive for the malaria parasite over 1900-2016. Each dot indicates one blood test result and the pink vertical bars indicate periods of “successful malaria prevention intervention”, such as the 1955-69 global malaria eradication programme.
Attribution
The authors use the blood test survey data to develop a statistical model separating out the climatic, social and economic factors that affect malaria, such as temperature, rainfall, economic development, healthcare and population changes. This allows the authors to isolate the effects of the climate on malaria.
They find that malaria prevalence in children peaks when average monthly temperatures reach 24.9C, dropping off in warmer and cooler climates.
Mosquitoes also need stagnant or slow-moving water in which to lay their eggs. The authors find that periods of drought tend to decrease malaria prevalence one-to-two months later, whereas floods increase prevalence two-to-three months later. However, they conclude that rainfall is “less important than temperature” in predicting malaria rates.
They then combine the statistical models with climate models, to simulate childhood malaria rates in a range of past and future climates.
First, the authors simulate malaria rates in the present day, by running the models using the climate of 2000-14. They then carry out the same analysis, using the climate of a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change.
By comparing the two, the authors were able to attribute the impact of climate change on malaria rates across Africa.
The link between climate change and malaria in Africa is complex and “surprisingly contentious”, according to the authors. For example, they write that “malaria resurgence in the east African highlands became a particular point of contention, with over a dozen studies arguing for or against climate change as a substantial driver”.
It adds:
“Today, malaria experts generally agree that climate change has contributed to elevational shifts in malaria epidemics and the geographical ranges of mosquito vectors. However, the cumulative effect of climate change on the burden of malaria is still an open question.”
Lead author Carlson says this paper is “one of the first impact attributions on infectious disease” and the first attribution study on climate change and malaria. He adds:
“I think it’s the most clarity we’ve had on the malaria question.”
Dr Teresa Yamana, an associate research scientist at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study, praises its “rigorous” methodology. She tells Carbon Brief that the work “demonstrates the potential of climate attribution methods to quantify the impacts of climate change on infectious diseases”.
Warming world
The findings show that “climate change isn’t just making malaria worse or better – it’s moving it, says study author Prof Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley:
“Whether a place sees elevated malaria risks or reduced burdens under climate change depends on how hot it is today. We see relief in the hotspots and new risk nearly everywhere else.”
For example, in the Ethiopian highlands, low temperatures – which are unsuitable for mosquitoes to live and breed – have historically limited the spread of malaria. However, the region has seen childhood malaria rates increase by more than eight cases per 1,000 children since the year 1900 as rising temperatures have allowed the insects to expand their habitat.
The authors also found a similar increase in malaria prevalence in cooler southern African countries.
In contrast, global warming is pushing average temperatures above the ideal range for mosquitoes in many hotter parts of Africa, driving down malaria rates. The authors find that in western Africa, climate change has caused a reduction of four malaria cases per 1,000 children per year by 2014, reducing prevalence by 1-2%.
Overall, climate change has resulted in one extra case of malaria for every 1,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa since the year 1900, the study says.
The authors also run their models for three future climate scenarios: low (SSP1-2.6), intermediate (SSP2-4.5) and very-high (SSP5-8.5) emissions pathways. Comparing these to the present-day model results shows how climate change could affect malaria cases over the coming century.
They find that the trends observed so far will largely continue into the future – meaning climate change will lower the prevalence of malaria in warm regions and increase the prevalence in cool regions.
The study concludes that under the intermediate scenario, which is broadly in line with current climate policies, warming will drive down childhood malaria cases by about three cases per 1,000 children in central Africa and 16 cases per 1,000 children in west Africa by the end of the century.
By contrast, cases could increase by around 20% over the same period in regions such as the Rift Valley and coastal southern Africa – a rise of 30 cases per 1,000 children.
The maps below show changes in childhood malaria prevalence due to climate change in today’s climate (left) and the climate of 2096-2100 under the intermediate scenario (right).
Red indicates an increase in malaria prevalence and blue indicates a decrease. Greyer colours indicate greater uncertainty in the model results. White indicates regions where no data was collected.
Carlson tells Carbon Brief that this is “the first study to really confidently answer the highland East Africa debate”.
Eradicating malaria
Healthcare workers, governments and scientists have been working to eliminate malaria for decades.
On average, the authors find that climate change will reduce the prevalence of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, as temperatures rise above the optimum range for mosquitoes. This effect is more pronounced at higher warming levels.
Under the low emissions scenario, about 1 case per 1,000 children will be averted by the end of the century. Meanwhile under the highest emissions scenario, average prevalence falls by 20 cases per 1,000 children, marking a 9% reduction.
The graph below shows childhood malaria rates over 1990-2024 in the historical climate (blue) and in a world without climate change (grey). These estimates are shown relative to baseline prevalence across 1901-30.
After the year 2014, the plot shows projected future changes in malaria prevalence, relative to a 2015-20 baseline, in the low (purple), intermediate (pink) and high (green) scenarios.
Carlson emphasises that this does not mean that climate change is “good news” for healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. He explains that climate change will bring a wide range of negative health impacts that will strain healthcare systems, adding:
“A world that is too hot for malaria is not a good world for the health of children.”
He also notes that climate change is “not the primary driving factor of malaria dynamics”. For example, he notes that malaria prevalence fell over 2000-15, by about 16 percentage points, after the disease was identified as a “critical global target of the Millennium Development Goals”.
This reduction is 200 times greater than the increase seen so far because of climate change, Carlson says. He adds:
“It would not be tremendously hard both to keep malaria out of new places and to eliminate it where it is maybe going to get a little bit of an assist from climate change.”
Dr Adugna Woyessa is a senior researcher at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and was not involved in the study. He has previously carried out research on malaria in eastern Africa.
Woyessa praises the study, telling Carbon Brief that the research could bring about a “paradigm shift” in efforts to eliminate malaria. He argues that the study is a “tool for engaging giant development partners”, adding that “future work will be needed to situate these global trends in local contexts”.
Dr Janey Messina is an associate professor in the school of geography and the environment at the University of Oxford and was also not involved in the study. She praises the paper’s “strong” method.
However, she cautions that the findings “should not be interpreted as forecasts of total future malaria burden”, because they only model the impact of climate change on malaria, while excluding “social, demographic and public-health determinants”, such as inequality, migration, conflict and changing access to malaria interventions.
She adds:
“One of the paper’s most important messages is this: effective surveillance, prevention and treatment remain substantially more influential – and more actionable – than climate change alone.”
Carlson, C. et al. (2026) The past and future impact of climate change on childhood malaria in Africa, Nature, doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w
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The post Climate change is driving a ‘shift’ in childhood malaria risk across Africa appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change is driving a ‘shift’ in childhood malaria risk across Africa
China has released its “15th five-year plan for the development of renewable energy”, outlining key targets and policies for the sector in 2026-2030.
A key focus of the plan is boosting renewable generation and consumption as a share of China’s overall energy mix.
It calls for continued capacity additions of wind and solar – albeit at lower levels than previous years – as well as hydropower, biomass and other clean-energy sources.
Specifically, China will aim to install 3,500 gigawatts (GW) of renewables capacity by 2030, 2,800GW will be wind and solar.
The country had previously pledged to install 1,200GW of wind and solar by 2030, a goal that China met six years early.
Another major theme is the provision of wind and solar supply that is “dependable” and “grid-friendly”.
Setting a target for “dependable output” from wind and solar could help to entrench their role as a provider of “energy security”, according to analysts.
The government also aims to boost renewables consumption by developing non-power uses of renewable energy, in sectors such as steel and chemicals.
Below, Carbon Brief examines the key targets and policies outlined in the five-year plan and what they mean for China’s energy transition.
- Why are China’s five-year plans important?
- What overarching renewables targets are in the plan?
- Why does the plan focus on ‘firm capacity’ for renewables?
- What does the plan say about ‘distributed’ energy?
- What does the plan say about non-electricity use of renewables?
- What does the plan say about China’s cleantech dominance?
Why are China’s five-year plans important?
Five-year plans are key to China’s political system. An overarching plan, covering all socioeconomic issues of importance to policy leaders, is published at the beginning of each five-year cycle.
The plan for the 15th five-year period (2026-2030) was published in March 2026.
It includes what the government considers to be the most important targets and policy signals for climate and energy. For example, binding targets for carbon intensity, the share of non-fossil energy in total energy consumption and total energy production capacity.
Following this overarching document, five-year plans focused on specific sectors or themes are then published over the course of the five-year plan period.
This year, the government has already published several five-year plans related to energy and climate change. One covers the development of the “new-type” energy sector more broadly. Another wraps climate goals together with other environmental targets under the “Beautiful China” programme.
By contrast, the renewables five-year plan focuses specifically on the development of hydropower, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and wave energy.
It was published in late July by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s top economic planning agency, and the National Energy Administration (NEA).
It covers topics including capacity and generation targets, as well as efforts to increase integration and reliability of wind and solar. It also has policies to encourage “non-power use” of renewable energy and ways to strengthen innovation of clean-energy technologies.
What overarching renewables targets are in the plan?
China will aim to install 3,500 gigawatts (GW) of renewables capacity by 2030, according to the five-year plan.
Of this, 2,800GW will be wind and solar – a pledge reiterated from China’s action plan for peaking carbon emissions, which was released earlier this month.
The goal more than doubles a previous 2030 target for wind and solar to reach 1,200GW, which China met six years early.
As of June 2026, the country has installed just under 2,000GW of wind and solar capacity, as well as 454GW of hydropower. Biomass, geothermal and wave energy hold very small shares of the overall energy mix.
As such, China would need to build 160GW of wind and solar each year – and just under 220GW of renewable capacity in total – to meet the targets.
The country installed 277GW of new solar alone in 2024 – and 315GW in 2025.
A key part of meeting the targets will be the development of large-scale clean-energy bases in China’s northern regions. These will generate power to be exported elsewhere via ultra-high voltage lines. The plan also encourages greater “local consumption” and installations of distributed energy (see below).
The plan says that further research will be directed at increasing the renewable share of electricity generated by these large-scale energy bases to 100%.
A recent report by the thinktank Global Energy Monitor (GEM) finds that output from these bases “continues to be paired with coal-fired generation in the name of balancing and system flexibility”. It says that currently, coal generates 42% of the power transmitted to the rest of the country from these bases.
China will also add more hydropower, says the plan, with capacity rising from 448GW in 2025 to 570GW in 2030. Some 160GW of this will be pumped-storage hydropower.
Meanwhile, the plan sets a target for renewable power generation to reach 6,000 terawatt-hours (TWh), 4,000TWh of which would come from wind and solar.
This would be a 50% increase in five years as renewables generated just under 4,000TWh of electricity in 2025, according to the National Energy Administration.
By 2030, the plan says that total consumption of renewable energy will stand at 1.8bn tonnes of coal equivalent (Gtce).
This would be up from 1.2Gtce in 2025, which represented about one-fifth of China’s total energy consumption of 6.2Gtce that year.
The renewable targets in the plan are lower than those suggested in a recent study by high-profile Chinese scholars.
The study, from the department of energy and power engineering and the Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University in Beijing, assessed the “likelihood of China attaining its carbon peak” under different pathways.
It found that, in order to meet its climate commitments, China would need to either install more than 4,000GW of “non-fossil energy capacity” before 2030, or to “maintain a total energy consumption” below 6.5Gtce.
The table below outlines some of the key renewables targets for 2030, as specified in the plan.
| Key targets for 2030, adapted from 15th five-year plan for renewable energy | |||
| Type | 2025 | 2030 | Percentage change |
| Renewable energy use | 1.2Gtce | 1.8Gtce | 53% |
| Total renewables capacity | 2,340GW | 3,500GW | 50% |
| Wind and solar capacity | 1,840GW | More than 2,800GW | 52% |
| Of which: Solar thermal | 1.8GW | 15GW | 733% |
| Hydro capacity | 450GW | 570GW | 27% |
| Of which: Pumped storage hydropower | 66GW | 160GW | 142% |
| Wave energy | – | 0.4GW | – |
| Renewable generation | 4,000TWh | 6,000TWh | 50% |
| Of which: Wind and solar | 2,300TWh | 4,000TWh | 74% |
| Non-electricity use | 60Mtce | 150Mtce | 150% |
| Renewable hydrogen | 0.25Mt | 2Mt | 700% |
Why does the plan focus on ‘firm capacity’ for renewables?
As well as increasing the overall size of China’s renewable power supply, the country must also maintain an “uninterrupted and reliable power supply”, officials from the NDRC and NEA told state news agency Xinhua in coverage of the new plan.
To support this goal, the plan says that the development of renewables will “enter a new stage”. This will mean that “improving quality and serving as a reliable alternative” to fossil fuels will be as important as “expanding scale”.
The plan, therefore, proposes targets for the “firm capacity” from wind and solar (置信出力). This is the amount plants or grids can be relied on to produce during critical supply periods, in conjunction with on-site storage.
The target for wind is a firm capacity of at least 11% of total installed capacity by 2030, while the equivalent goal for solar is 6%.
Wind and solar will also be expected to supply more than 20% of total demand in peak periods during the summer and winter evenings, says the plan. It expects “reliable peak-shaving capacity from renewable sources” to reach more than 300GW.
The new targets are a “positive move”, says Yao Zhe, global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, as it “only applies during peak load and critical supply periods, when coal power is typically used to stabilise the power supply”.
She adds that this could, theoretically, “prevent the construction of new coal-fired power projects that are proposed and approved for the reason of meeting peak demand”.
The new metrics mark a change in focus, says Lyu Wenbin, director general of the Energy Research Institute – a state thinktank under the NDRC – in an “explanatory reading” posted on BJX News. He says it “marks a shift in renewable energy development from the mere pursuit of installed capacity to…also taking into account system support capabilities”.
The plan pledges to “accelerate the construction of grid-friendly wind and solar power stations”. It says this will enhance “reliable peak-load generation” and strengthen renewables’ ability to ensure “safe and stable operation” of the grid.
It says this will particularly be a focus in the energy-hungry east, central and south areas of China.
It sets out a slightly different focus for areas that already have a high share of renewables in their power mix, such as north-west China. Here, the aim will be to develop wind and solar parks that are “capable of providing voltage, frequency and inertia support”.
“This is a real challenge”, says James Norman, research analyst at GEM. He says these challenges are particularly acute in some circumstances:
“[For example], when the share of wind and solar is very high, relatively few synchronous generators (like coal) are online or large volumes of electricity are being transferred through high voltage DC lines.”
The plan mentions many technological solutions to address the problem, he tells Carbon Brief. However, he adds, there are no quantitative details for the issue. For example, he notes there is no target for “how many gigawatts of wind and solar must gain grid-forming capability”. This is in contrast to the goals for overall renewables capacity or generation.
Norman was a co-author on the recent GEM report, which identified further barriers to renewable uptake. It said these include transmission bottlenecks, alongside systemic features such as dispatching and power-contract mechanisms.
As a result, said the report, renewable power – especially solar – is increasingly being “curtailed”, particularly in north-western and northern provinces.
Yao also notes that the plan does not “spell out specific measures to address systemic constraints” around the electricity grid and the role of coal in the power sector.
“I interpret this as evidence that the vested interests are still strong in the policy debate,” she adds.
What does the plan say about ‘distributed’ energy?
Alongside gigawatt-scale clean-energy megabases, China also aims to expand construction of “distributed” energy. This means smaller-scale installations, such as rooftop solar.
More than 300GW of “distributed new energy” is to be added over 2026-30, some 60GW per year.
The plan aims for distributed new energy to be adopted in sectors such as industry, transport, buildings and agriculture.
Applications include the use of distributed solar and wind in industrial parks, coal mines and oilfields, as well as encouraging residents to install solar panels on buildings and developing rural clean-energy grids.
In some regions, distributed solar and wind is “likely to meet a large proportion of local demand”, says Prof Pan Jiahua at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). He tells Carbon Brief that micro- and mini-grids using such resources will be particularly important in central and coastal China.
The 60GW annual target for new distributed energy is not “overly ambitious”, says Isadora Wang, head of China at the thinktank Transition Asia. She tells Carbon Brief that distributed solar additions, alone, exceeded 100GW in both 2024 and 2025.
Cosimo Ries, analyst at the consultancy Trivium China, agrees that the target is reachable. The biggest question mark, he tells Carbon Brief, is whether it will continue to make sense for industry and utilities to build distributed power at the volumes seen during the 14th five-year plan period.
He adds that market conditions for distributed solar have deteriorated sharply over the past two years. He says a range of factors have hit investor confidence:
“[Distributed solar faces] growing exposure to market trading, worsening returns in spot markets, growing risks of curtailment and new policies limiting or forbidding the selling of power back to the grid.”
What does the plan say about non-electricity use of renewables?
The plan also sets goals for renewable energy’s role in “non-electricity use”.
This means using renewable energy for purposes other than generating electricity, through converting it to other forms, such as heat or mechanical energy.
The government is aiming for non-power use to nearly triple from 60m tonnes of coal equivalent (Mtce) in 2025 to 150Mtce in 2030.
Ries tells Carbon Brief that he thinks this target is “one of the main highlights” of the plan. However, he notes that limited available data means it is hard to assess the level of its ambition. He adds that, given the relative conservatism of China’s other recent clean-energy targets, this one may also be met relatively easily.
Key applications for non-power use of renewables include “green hydrogen, ammonia and methanol”, says the plan. It also points to using wind and solar for heat, as well as to biomass and geothermal for heating and cooling.
Green hydrogen, ammonia and methanol are the “centrepiece” of the non-power push, according to state-owned newspaper Economic Information Daily.
For hydrogen alone, China plans to scale up renewable hydrogen production to 2m tonnes in 2030, up from 250,000 tonnes in 2025.
Today, non-power use of renewables accounts for only around 1% of China’s total energy consumption, NEA and NDRC officials said in a Q&A. They added that there is “considerable room for growth” in sectors such as industry, transport and buildings.
Potential new applications include the use of wind and solar for heat. This could see the use of centralised wind and solar heating stations in the chemicals, textiles, pharmaceuticals, papermaking and food sectors.
New projects in the steel and cement sectors should use locally-generated wind and solar to power electric-arc furnaces and kilns, adds the plan.
Wang tells Carbon Brief that she believes the naming of individual sectors is a “clear indication” that they will be included in China’s renewable consumption quotas. These already cover aluminium and other heavy industry sectors.
She adds that power and heat demand from the named sectors may help absorb distributed renewable energy. It will also serve as a testing ground for matching demand with supply through increased grid flexibility and power price reforms.
To Ries, the growing focus on non-power use signals that China’s decarbonisation efforts are “now entering deeper waters”. That means regulators are turning from easier-to-abate sectors, such as aluminium, to more challenging industries, such as steel.
The plan could create a “second growth curve” for the new-energy industry, says He Zhao, in a commentary for China Power News Net. He, the vice-president of the China Electric Power Planning and Engineering Institute (EPPEI). says this might begin with non-power use, before shifting to fuel, feedstock and heat substitution.
What does the plan say about China’s cleantech dominance?
The next five years is a prime opportunity for China to “consolidate our leading position across the entire industrial chain” for clean-energy technologies, says the plan.
It adds that the government will “strengthen technological innovation” and accelerate the roll-out of new applications of artificial intelligence in China’s renewable-energy system.
A particular focus for new R&D will be “cutting-edge, original and disruptive technologies”. It also points to technologies that “enhance the reliability of renewable energy” as a substitute for fossil fuels.
The plan names technologies for further development. For wind power, these include “reliable and low-cost” blades, ultra-tall towers and new types of floating platforms. It also mentions the development of “high-altitude wind power”. For solar, it points to the development of perovskite and other “high efficiency” solar cells, as well as space-solar technologies.
The plan also pledges to develop a power market that supports the “full entry” of renewable-energy companies. It underscores that companies should plan for an increasingly market-based and competitive environment.
Meanwhile, the government will also deepen cooperation with other countries on clean energy and “advance” global climate cooperation, it says.
A priority will be “strengthening” international coordination on investment and development in “green energy projects”. Another is “actively promoting the free circulation of China’s high-quality green technologies and products in global markets”.
Chinese exports of clean-energy technologies have been surging, especially since the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
At the same time, Chinese investment in clean-energy projects in Belt and Road Initiative member states totalled $20bn in the first half of 2026. This is also driven by the crisis.
The US, EU and others have launched tariffs and pricing mechanisms to curb imports of Chinese cleantech. This has contributed to pushback from China, against what it and others refer to as “unilateral trade measures”.
China is transitioning from a “major energy nation” (能源大国) to an “energy powerhouse” (能源强国), writes the Energy Research Institute’s Lyu in his explanatory reading. He says this will enable China to increasingly shift to building “systemic” advantages in developing clean-energy technologies.
He continues that, from 2026-2030, China will “move to the very forefront of the global stage” on clean energy, “venturing into uncharted territory”. This will create both “major new challenges and significant opportunities” for the country, he adds.
The post Q&A: What does China’s 15th ‘five-year plan’ for renewables mean for climate change? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What does China’s 15th ‘five-year plan’ for renewables mean for climate change?
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