After two years of stonewalling, governments agreed at COP30 to hold a series of annual discussions about how their trade policies can enable emissions reductions while helping, rather than hindering, economic development. But analysts warn the process may not be able to achieve much in practice.
Since COP28 in Dubai in 2023, emerging economies including China, India and South Africa have been pushing – in the face of resistance from developed countries – to get the UN climate negotiations to discuss “unilateral trade measures”. These, they argue, include the European Union’s imminent tax on imports of certain high-emission products, known as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
The Brazilian presidency of COP30 bundled trade and other contentious issues such as finance and emissions-cutting together in the summit’s most high-profile outcome: the “Global Mutirão” decision of the Belém political package.
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Under that, governments agreed to hold dialogues on opportunities, challenges and barriers for international cooperation on trade and climate at the mid-year June talks in Bonn for the next three years as well as an additional “high-level event” in 2028, and then produce a report.
Besides governments, other relevant bodies will be asked to participate in the dialogues, including the International Trade Centre, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the World Trade Organization, the decision says.
On its own initiative, the Brazilian government has also launched what it calls an Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade, a three-year effort open to all countries that will bring together officials working on the two issues to consider how trade can support sustainable economic growth.
It is expected to develop ways for trade and climate policies to better intersect across key areas such as the energy transition, the fight against deforestation and carbon accounting
Mixed reactions to trade outcome
The formal move to broaden UN climate discussions on trade beyond their previous narrow placing under negotiations on climate response measures and just transition met with a mixed reaction.
One African negotiator, who is critical of the EU’s carbon border tax plan, told Climate Home News that while the UN dialogues are “a start, it is weak to not have a full COP item on it”. “What’s the point if it’s only at Bonn sessions and not going to COP?” they asked. “It’s like they want to kill it in a polite way.”
Aaron Cosbey, a climate and trade researcher at the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition, said the dialogues are “very unlikely to have any impact” because most trade-climate topics are “just too hot to handle”.
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But Li Shuo, head of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said he hoped the new discussions would help define a constructive role on the issue for the UN climate process, while Arunabha Ghosh, head of the Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water, said the dialogues represented “progress”.
Ellie Belton, E3G’s trade and climate lead, said referencing trade was a significant step towards addressing trade tensions in UN climate talks. Dialogues, she added, could “offer the space many countries have been calling for to continue collaborative discussions on both the opportunities and challenges, which should help to rebuild trust and unlock enduring solutions”.
The European Union agreed to these dialogues after references to unilateral trade measures – which the bloc regards as a loaded term targeting the CBAM – were downgraded. EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra had told a press conference at COP30 that “we’re not going to be lured into the suggestion that [the EU’s carbon border tax] is a unilateral trade measure, and in that realm we’re also not going to discuss it.”
The final COP30 deal just repeats a previous agreement that “measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade”.
Europe’s contentious carbon border tax
From January 1 2026, the EU will tax imported cement, steel, chemicals, aluminium, hydrogen and fertilisers at a rate depending on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during their production. The UK will introduce an almost identical policy a year later.
European countries argue that the new levy will level the playing field and ensure companies do not move their production out of the continent to countries with lower carbon taxes and weaker environmental regulations.
They have some international support, with Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu telling Democracy Now at COP30 that measures such as this are important because they pressure countries to reduce emissions, rather than just relying on voluntary action as much of the Paris Agreement does.
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Nonetheless, China, India, Russia, South Africa and others have argued that the European scheme is unfair, as developing countries cannot afford to clean up these industries on their territory or pay higher prices for green versions of the affected products.
The EU’s recent promise to offer “flexibilities” on the CBAM tax to the US also angered many developing countries, particularly as the bloc rejected calls to exempt the world’s least developed countries.
David Ryfisch, co-head of international climate policy at the Germanwatch advocacy group, praised the border tax for helping European industries decarbonise and pressuring governments outside Europe to improve their climate policies.
But, he said, the EU could have made the policy “more acceptable to other countries if it had consulted with them earlier and if the collected revenues were re-channelled to developing countries for them to accelerate decarbonisation domestically”.
Other issues that could be tackled by these UN climate dialogues and the Brazil-led forum include tariffs on green economy goods such as solar panels. The US has imposed tariffs on panels from China and some other parts of Asia. Meanwhile, other countries including India have introduced tariffs on solar panels in an attempt to encourage domestic manufacturing of clean energy equipment.
The post Trade breaks into agenda of UN climate talks – but will it have teeth? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Trade breaks into agenda of UN climate talks – but will it have teeth?
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The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.
For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.
The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.
This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.
This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.
The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.
Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.
In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.
(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high
Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.
Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.
As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.
This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).
At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)
The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly
The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.
However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.
Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.
Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.
Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.
But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.
As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.
It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.
The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).
Global temperature rise
The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.
We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface
temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.
While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.
We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.
This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.
Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system
While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.
Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.
For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.
Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.
Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).
Sea level rise and the energy imbalance
Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.
It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.
Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.
This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.
Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.
This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.
(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)
The bigger picture
Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.
A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.
These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.
This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.
However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.
Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.
This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.
The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.
Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.
The post Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming
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