The UN Environment Assembly on Friday approved its first-ever resolution to address the environmental aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but it did not include a provision to monitor AI systems across their lifecycle. Experts say this approach is essential to understand AI’s water, power and critical minerals consumption.
The resolution proposed by Kenya aims to harness “the opportunities and benefits of artificial intelligence systems in support of the environment and by minimizing its environmental impacts”.
It also requests the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to produce a report on the “environmental benefits, risks and impacts of artificial intelligence”.
As negotiations progressed over the week in Nairobi, the draft resolution on AI had called for UNEP’s executive director to explore environmental benefits, risks and impacts of artificial intelligence “systems across their lifecycle”.
However, while governments including Kenya, Norway, Colombia and the European Union supported such wording, annotated draft texts showed that Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates wanted it to be deleted.
When the final resolution was gavelled on Friday, all trace of the AI lifecycle had been removed from the text. References to AI’s water and energy consumption – which featured in previous draft texts – were also removed.
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“We cannot talk about sustainable AI without addressing the full lifecycle, from the traceability of critical minerals, to the water used in data centres, to how much renewable energy is being redirected from developing countries to power AI systems in wealthier regions,” said Faith Munyalo, Kenya’s contact point on AI.
Munyalo said that while the adoption of the resolution is an important first step, UNEA must now move forward in future negotiations to address the “blind spots” and deliver stronger language and clearer commitments on lifecycle accountability.
“Sustainability must be built into AI from extraction to disposal, otherwise we risk repeating the same patterns of inequity seen in earlier technological transitions,” she told Climate Home News.
No direct finance expected
As the negotiations reached mid-way point on Wednesday, the AI resolution was on the brink of collapse, essentially over finance, which Saudi Arabia and Iran insisted should primarily flow from developed to developing countries while the UK and the EU argued funding should come from all sources.
Finally, countries landed on a compromise that avoids any obligation for wealthy nations to directly finance AI capacity in the Global South. All countries instead are encouraged to “enhance partnerships” that can mobilise funding, alongside “increased investment, including from the private sector and philanthropy” in AI that supports sustainable development.
AI is finding greater uses in environmental circles, and in developing countries it is already being deployed, boosting funding needs. For example, Sierra Leone in its new NDC climate plan needs almost $7 million, including from donor countries, to build an AI-based climate and weather forecasting system to improve resilience. Also, in Kenya, AI is helping conservationists monitor forest degradation, launch reforestation and predict carbon storage capacity in new forest areas.
Kenya’s Munyalo said most data centres are concentrated in developed countries while Africa lacks the expertise and finance to develop its own AI data systems. A lack of direct funding promises puts the burden back on developing countries and could undermine environmental projects like these, she added.
AI good or bad for energy transition?
Somya Joshi, research director at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), said AI has critical impacts both for climate and biodiversity and needs to be designed in ways that don’t “replicate the same mistakes we made before with extractive technology transitions”.
The debate going forward will need to be informed by science and the environmental impacts along the entire AI value chain, she said, including for water, electricity, critical minerals and rare earths to make semi-conductor chips, as well as pollution and what happens to AI systems at the end of their life.
Joshi said there is a need to prevent growing power demand from AI to reinforce dependency on fossil fuels, which would undermine the clean energy transition.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres earlier this year made a call for Big Tech to power all data centres with 100% renewables by 2030.
Data centres accounted for about 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2024. But this figure is set to more than double by 2030 as tech giants continue to build out the infrastructure needed to support their power-hungry AI technologies.
While renewable energy sources – combined with batteries – are expected to supply half of the additional electricity, increased demand from data centres will be a “significant” driver of growth for fossil gas and coal-fired generation until the end of this decade, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Geopolitics limit Nairobi results
The resolution on AI was largely seen by observers as a win for the UNEA, which played out in a tense political environment that limited steps forward on a range of key environmental issues.
The US rejected the outcomes, decrying what it called “climate change theatre”, in line with the denial of climate science by the administration of President Donald Trump and his efforts to thwart climate action.
Behind the scenes, oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Türkiye – host of the COP31 climate talks next year – pushed to water down wording on climate change including the science of melting glaciers.
This rejection of well-established evidence elicited strong criticism from small island nations Fiji and Barbados, as well as the European Union and Australia, in the final session of the conference. Speaking at the closing plenary, the EU delegate said the bloc had arrived at UNEA-7 with high hopes for the environment and multilateralism but have to come to terms with the fact that the Assembly could only achieve good results in some resolutions “and less in others”.
There was also disappointment over a weak resolution on mining and transition minerals, which agreed only on further talks around international co-operation instead of setting up an expert group to identify new instruments to make supply chains greener and more transparent as proposed by Colombia and Oman.
However, fears that some member states would use UNEA as an opportunity to reopen the mandate to negotiate a global treaty on plastic pollution did not come to pass, according to Andrés del Castillo, Senior Attortney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).
Talks on a new pact were suspended in August as they were unable to reach agreement with fossil fuel-producing countries blocking proposed caps on plastic production – a major market for petrochemicals. They will resume in February with the election of a new chair.
Del Castillo pointed to the ministerial declaration adopted in Nairobi on Friday, which reaffirms countries’ “shared commitment to engaging constructively and actively, with a sense of urgency and solidarity, to conclude the [plastics] negotiations”.
The post UN adopts first-ever resolution on AI and environment, but omits lifecycle appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN adopts first-ever resolution on AI and environment, but omits lifecycle
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
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Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.
The earliest online use of the £957bn figure found by Carbon Brief is a 12 January 2026 article in the Spectator, by retired engineer and self-described “accidental energy analyst” David Turver.
A day later, Turver repeated the mistaken number in a report for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. His report cites figure 5.3 of the CCC’s 2020 advice.
However, as set out above, the CCC spreadsheet containing the data for figure 5.3 only adds up to £478bn, half the figure claimed by Turver.
It appears that Turver accidentally added up all of the numbers in the CCC spreadsheet, without noting that it already included a line for the annual total. This results in double-counting the cost.
(Turver’s report also triggered a slew of inaccurate headlines stating that net-zero would cost £7.6tn – or even £9tn. These figures, which came from Turver’s report, were based, among other things, on the implicit assumption that fossil fuels and the cars, boilers and power plants that use them are all free.)
After Turver’s report and article in January 2026, the erroneous £957bn figure was repeated in March by the Great British Think Tank. The organisation has the tagline “data, not vibes” and says of its work: “Every figure [is] sourced from official public bodies.”
The £957bn figure then appeared in the Conservative “Right Way” document in October 2026.
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