Climate negotiators in Bonn have been tasked with taking a “deep dive” into how a roadmap to boost climate finance for developing countries should look, so that it can be finalised at COP30 in Brazil – but a series of consultations last week revealed that governments have yet to align on its contents.
At the start of the mid-year talks, UN climate chief Simon Stiell advised governments that the roadmap for mobilising $1.3 trillion a year by 2035 should not be “just a report, but a how-to guide with clear next steps on dramatically scaling up climate finance and investment”.
That will mean reconciling widely divergent views among countries about what sources of finance the roadmap should draw on – and what form the money should come in. Some delegates in Bonn have also complained that the process for compiling the roadmap is unclear.
The “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T” was launched as part of the new climate finance goal (the NCQG) agreed at COP29, with a commitment for donors to raise $300 million annually – largely from the public purse – at its core.
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Sandra Guzmán, director general of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean (GFLAC), told Climate Home the roadmap “emerged as a way to reduce the gap” between the $300 billion developed countries have committed to mobilise by 2035 and the far higher amount developing countries were asking for, of $1 trillion-$1.3 trillion.
“It was also a kind of exit plan to prevent the NCQG discussion from moving to Belém,” she noted.
The two COP presidency teams charged with drafting the roadmap – Azerbaijan and Brazil – last week listened to the needs and concerns of governments in Bonn in the first formal consultations on the roadmap since COP29 in Baku.
Differing needs and expectations
One main unresolved rift is that developing countries wanted the $1.3 trillion to consist of public money from rich nations – but according to the text agreed in Baku, all sources of finance are possible with no percentage distribution between them specified, Guzmán said.
Rebecca Thissen, global advocacy lead at Climate Action Network International, told Climate Home the broad scope of proposals on the roadmap from countries in Bonn shows “it’s clear we don’t have a common understanding of what it is and what we´re going to do with it.”
In general, developing countries have requested that the $1.3 trillion should consist of new money that is not re-labelled from other budgets, with public grant money as the bulk of it, excluding loans and other forms of debt.
India, for its part, has said that global tax levies and approaches to raise money from specific sectors should be excluded, even though a recent survey by Greenpeace and Oxfam shows that 80% of respondents in India agreed that oil, gas, coal corporations should be taxed for the environmental damage they have caused.
During last week’s discussions, a delegate from the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC), said: “The engagement of private sector and philanthropic institutions must complement and not replace the obligations of developed countries.”
In contrast, the European Union’s representative argued: “We should really focus on scaling up private finance and catalysing investments that drive climate action.” They also called on other countries to join the pool of donors mobilising money – referring indirectly to China and Gulf nations.
From the 116 submissions on the roadmap received ahead of the Bonn talks, only 20 were from governments, with the rest from civil society including NGOs, research organisations and business.
At a consultation for these non-government groups, Avinash Persaud, special adviser on climate change to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, presented a plan to achieve the $1.3 trillion goal. Under it, multilateral banks would buy existing private-sector loans to renewable energy projects in poor countries, with commercial lenders then using the proceeds for more clean energy investment.
Guzmán said the private sector should play a bigger role but it is still unclear how the roadmap would avoid perpetuating the existing model of largely debt-based climate finance, nor who would benefit – as countries like Brazil and Tuvalu do not have the same needs.
Whose roadmap?
The two COP presidencies are tasked with preparing the roadmap, whose form is still being decided but needs to present ideas for how the $1.3 trillion can be raised.
COP30 CEO Ana Toni told Climate Home it will include recommendations on how to move forward. “It will be what the two COP Presidents – considering what they listened to – feel is needed to mobilise $1.3 trillion,” Toni said in an interview in Bonn.
A first draft of the report is expected to be presented for comment in September, with the final version published in October.
Toni added that she expects many of the recommendations to be for “players” outside the UN climate process. For example, “the reform of the multilateral banks is not something that we can do within the [UN climate] convention, but if it’s mentioned in the report, it will be an important message for those actors,” she said.
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In Bonn, some officials said it was unclear how the consultations on the roadmap outside the UN climate process would be brought together with those happening inside. In particular, they pointed to a “circle of finance ministers” convened by Brazil to contribute to the roadmap, saying there was confusion about its role.
Toni said the circle is not part of “the official track of the roadmap”. “It’s our [Brazil’s] initiative led by finance minister Fernando Haddad to hear from finance ministers what they feel should be a roadmap to mobilise $1.3 trillion,” she explained.
There have also been concerns about inclusivity. The circle originally covered 24 countries and has since been expanded to 32 members, including the European Union, Canada, the UK and China. One of the selection criteria is to involve countries that have hosted COPs since the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Toni clarified this to Climate Home, saying that any country that wants to participate would be welcome, adding “it’s not a closed shop”. During the Bonn talks, the Marshall Islands and Tanzania asked to join the circle.
Toni said the finance ministers’ circle – due to meet again at a development finance conference in Spain next week – would produce a report that will feed into the roadmap. Civil society consultations have so far been limited to webinars.
Life beyond COP30
Thissen of CAN International said it would be good to connect the climate finance conversation with the wider international finance architecture – but without “forgetting what you have to move forward here, at the COPs”.
She added that developing countries remain concerned there is ambiguity over whether rich nations will be held responsible for ensuring the NCQG finance goal is delivered, which is why they want formal UN discussions to be launched on that specifically.
Another big question for the roadmap at COP30 in Belém is how it will be treated as part of the UN climate process going forward. Countries could formally “note” or “welcome” the final document – as they have done with key climate science reports – or they could include it in the negotiations as a new agenda item or under other discussions such as on long-term finance.
“If the [roadmap] doesn’t include elements that have a scope beyond COP30, it will be an absolutely wasted year,” Guzmán said, warning against a report that fails to meet neither immediate nor future needs. “That’s the greatest risk: to have a document that could die at COP30.”
The post UN expects climate finance roadmap to offer “clear next steps” appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN expects climate finance roadmap to offer “clear next steps”
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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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