As world leaders gathered in Dubai at the start of COP28 last December, the United Arab Emirates dropped a surprise headline-grabbing announcement. The host nation of the UN talks promised to put $30 billion into a new climate fund aimed at speeding up the energy transition and building climate resilience, especially in the Global South.
ALTÉRRA was billed as the world’s largest private investment vehicle to “focus entirely on climate solutions”. COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber hailed its launch as “a defining moment” for creating a new era of international climate finance.
Yet four months later, one of the initial funds ALTÉRRA backed with a $300-million commitment agreed to buy a major fossil gas pipeline in North America, Climate Home has discovered.
In March, BlackRock’s “Global Infrastructure Fund IV” acquired half of the 475 km-long Portland Natural Gas Transmission System, with Morgan Stanley taking the rest in a deal worth $1.14 billion overall.
That acquisition would not have come as a surprise to the fund’s investors.
When US-based BlackRock pitched it to the State of Connecticut’s Investment Advisory Council back in 2022, the world’s biggest asset manager gave a flavour of where their money would likely end up. Its presentation – seen by Climate Home – featured a list of “indicative investments” including highly-polluting sectors such as gas power plants and transportation networks, liquefied natural gas (LNG), airports, terminals and shipping.
Climate Home does not know whether ALTÉRRA saw the same presentation, nor did the UAE firm respond directly to a question asking if it was aware before the COP28 announcement that the BlackRock fund might invest in those sectors.
An ALTÉRRA spokesperson told Climate Home its “investments seek to build the energy systems of tomorrow, while supporting the transition of existing energy infrastructure towards a just and managed clean energy ecosystem”.
In addition to the gas pipeline, BlackRock’s infrastructure fund has so far invested in carbon capture, waste management, utilities maintenance services, telecom infrastructure, data centres and the production of industrial gases, according to regulatory filings, a BlackRock job advertisement and press reports accessed by Climate Home.
A BlackRock spokesperson said its global infrastructure fund franchise “targets investments in solutions across the energy transition value chain, driven by the long-term trends of decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization to support the stability and affordability of energy supply around the world”.
Andreas Sieber, associate director of global policy and campaigns at climate advocacy group 350.org, said Climate Home’s findings “confirm our worst fears”. “The ALTÉRRA fund uses a masquerade of green progress while funnelling investment into fossil fuel pipelines and gas projects, which are the biggest causes of the climate crisis,” he told Climate Home.
Climate finance is a hot topic at UN negotiations, with countries expected to set a new global goal at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, this November, amid persistent calls for higher amounts to help poorer nations boost clean energy production.
The COP28 presidency said last year that ALTÉRRA would “drive forward international efforts to create a fairer climate finance system, with an emphasis on improving access to funding for the Global South”. Al-Jaber added that “its launch reflects… the UAE’s efforts to make climate finance available, accessible and affordable”.
But the sparse details provided at the time prompted climate justice activists to question the real impact it would have in countries that most need financial support to adopt clean energy and adapt to a warming world. Only about a sixth of the fund – $5 billion – was earmarked as “capital to incentivize investment into the Global South”.
Follow the money
ALTÉRRA is a so-called ‘fund of funds’. Instead of directly investing money in individual companies or assets, it puts its cash into a series of funds run by other investment firms. At COP28, it committed a total of $6.5 billion to funds managed by BlackRock, Brookfield and TPG, without setting out how the remaining $23.5 billion would be spent.
Since then, ALTÉRRA has not announced any further investments. Its chief executive, Majid Al Suwaidi, told Bloomberg this month that the fund is “actively planning the next phase of allocations”, without giving further details.
The launch of #ALTÉRRA marks the start of three unique alliances with global asset managers, @Brookfield, @BlackRock, and @tpg.
Together, we share the same vision, to bridge the climate investment gap and finance a new climate economy. pic.twitter.com/7yEXOyZqpK
— ALTÉRRA (@Alterrafund) December 1, 2023
Most of the funds picked by ALTÉRRA remain at an early stage and have yet to announce completed transactions or are still trying to raise more capital from investors. The most notable exception is BlackRock’s fourth Global Infrastructure Fund. By the time it won the $300-million commitment from ALTÉRRA in Dubai, the vehicle was ready to deploy its money.
ALTÉRRA told Climate Home its investment in the BlackRock vehicle is in line with its goals of getting climate finance “flowing quickly and at scale” and of partnering “with funds that invest in the energy transition and accelerate pathways to net-zero”.
Announcing its first $4.5-billion closing in October 2022, BlackRock said the fund would “continue to target investments in climate solutions, while also supporting the infrastructure needed to ensure a stable, affordable energy supply during the transition”.
In private conversations with potential investors, the asset manager spelled out more clearly what that meant.
Its presentation to the State of Connecticut in December 2022 showed that the fund would not only invest in things like renewable energy, electrification and battery storage, but also in fossil gas power plants and pipelines, LNG and transportation infrastructure like airports, shipping and terminals.
A slide from BlackRock’s presentation of the Global Infrastructure Fund IV to investors
In line with this strategy, BlackRock agreed a deal this March for its Global Infrastructure Fund IV to acquire half of the Portland Natural Gas Transmission System (PNGT), a fossil gas pipeline stretching from the Canadian border across New England in the United States to Maine and Massachusetts.
When it began operations in 1999, the pipeline helped shift New England’s power generation away from coal and oil, but it has also created a stronger dependency on fossil gas, leaving citizens vulnerable to price spikes. The region is now planning to accelerate the rollout of renewable energy sources.
The PNGT was not the first fossil fuel infrastructure the BlackRock team behind the Global Infrastructure Fund had snapped up. In a written testimony submitted this March to the State of New Hampshire, a senior executive listed a dozen oil and gas pipelines backed by earlier rounds of the fund. They included one operated by ADNOC, the UAE state-owned oil company whose CEO is Sultan Al-Jaber, COP28 president and chair of ALTÉRRA’s board.
Responding to Climate Home’s findings on where ALTÉRRA’s money is going, Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said it is “extremely concerning to see a fund hailed by a COP president as a solution to the climate crisis investing in fossil fuels”.
“This needs to be a wake-up call to the world that these funds created by COP hosts are little more than PR stunts designed to greenwash the activities of fossil fuel-producing nations,” he added.
Oil-backed carbon capture
BlackRock does not disclose the infrastructure fund’s complete portfolio, but it has invested another $550 million in Stratos, the world’s biggest direct air capture (DAC) project being developed in a joint venture with oil giant Occidental. The plant under construction in Texas promises to suck as much as 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually and bury it underground.
Its proponents see DAC as a key technology to balance out emissions in the race to achieve net zero by 2050, although so far it remains expensive and largely unproven at scale. Stratos won a grant from the US government to fast-track the construction of the facility, and it has struck deals to sell carbon offsets generated in future from the plant with corporate giants like Amazon.
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When the DAC partnership was announced last November, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said Stratos “represents an incredible investment opportunity for BlackRock’s clients… and underscores the critical role of American energy companies in climate technology innovation”.
But Stratos’ critics have questioned Occidental’s motivations and dismissed its DAC investments as a greenwashing ploy to keep pumping oil and slow down the transition away from fossil fuels.
“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time,” Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s chief executive, told the CERAWeek energy industry conference last year. “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
Call for safeguards
While BlackRock’s infrastructure fund deploys its cash largely in the Global North, ALTÉRRA’s promised investments in developing countries are still taking shape.
Brookfield in June launched a new “Catalytic Transition Fund” backed by ALTÉRRA with a $1-billion commitment. The fund’s stated focus is “directing capital into clean energy and transition assets in emerging economies”.
Climate Home asked ALTÉRRA if it had adopted any exclusion policies that would, for example, rule out investment in certain types of fossil fuels.
The UAE fund did not respond to the question, but a spokesperson said its investment approach is aligned with the goal “of accelerating the climate transition, with a focus on clean energy, industry decarbonization, sustainable living, and climate technologies”.
Climate activists protest against fossil fuels during COP28 in Dubai in December 2023. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya
350.org’s Sieber called on Al-Jaber – who was widely criticised by green groups for his dual role as president of COP28 and head of a fossil fuel corporation – to “act swiftly to enforce stringent safeguards” for ALTÉRRA’s investments.
“The UAE is on the brink of losing the little credibility it still has left in addressing the urgency of the climate emergency,” Sieber added. “The world, especially communities who are being hit the hardest by climate impacts every day, cannot afford to have one more cent invested in fossil fuels.”
The key question now is whether Azerbaijan – the host of COP29 and itself a substantial producer and exporter of oil and gas – will do things differently. Last week, it announced a new voluntary fund that it said will invest at least $1 billion for emissions reduction projects in developing countries. Baku is hoping to secure contributions for it from fossil-fuel producing nations and companies.
Power Shift Africa’s Adow said developing countries need state-backed climate finance from rich nations, negotiated through the UN climate process, and “not just cooked up in voluntary schemes”. That funding “can be used where the need is greatest, not just where it might make most money for some private profit-seeking businesses,” he added.
(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; fact-checking by Sebastián Rodríguez; editing by Megan Rowling and Sebastián Rodríguez)
The post UAE’s ALTÉRRA invests in fund backing fossil gas despite “climate solutions” pledge appeared first on Climate Home News.
UAE’s ALTÉRRA invests in fund backing fossil gas despite “climate solutions” pledge
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.