- What timeline options were delegates debating?
- How did the timeline discussions unfold?
- What were the main points of disagreement?
- Why is the IPCC in a ‘serious funding crisis’?
- How have scientists reacted?
- What other issues remain unresolved?
- How are the IPCC AR7 reports progressing?
- How might the IPCC use AI and enhance gender inclusivity?
The world should question its skyrocketing demand for energy-transition minerals and the roll-out of ineffective climate measures that damage people and the planet, the UN’s special rapporteur on climate change and human rights has warned.
“The need for critical minerals in terms of climate action is an assumption that we need to challenge,” Elisa Morgera told an online event hosted by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) on Wednesday.
This should include asking “how do we take into account over-consumption by the super-rich, which we know are contributing to climate change in ways that are non-comparable to the vast majority of the world’s population,” she said.
Morgera called for “a step back… to ensure that any decisions around critical minerals are taken with a full understanding of the potential impacts on the environment and on everyone’s human rights”. That should also entail “prior, comprehensive and independent assessments of the need for critical minerals and whether there are alternatives to extraction”, she added.
The acceleration of clean energy technology deployment has spurred a global race for the metals and minerals that are needed to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles. Many of them – from copper to lithium and nickel – are sourced from the Global South using extractive models that have harmed the environment and local communities.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has projected that demand for these minerals could triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040 as the green transition accelerates, which would require vast investments in new mining developments.
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But mining comes with unavoidable environmental and social trade-offs, which need to be fully understood, Morgera told the panel of critical mineral experts.
She argued for moving away from the “inaccurate idea” that there is “conflict” between urgently addressing climate change and protecting the human rights of Indigenous peoples on whose territories critical minerals are often extracted. This is about “everyone’s human right to a healthy environment,” she added.
Those working on the issue should “ask critical questions at the outset about who’s going to benefit from a proposed development and what assumptions are framing that understanding of benefits”, she said.
Morgera, an Italian professor of global environmental law at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, previously worked on the links between human rights and healthy oceans. She took on the role of UN special rapporteur last year.
Land-grabbing on the rise
Across the world, communities in mineral-producing countries – from Indonesia, to Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo – have reported environmental destruction and human rights abuses linked to the mining of transition minerals.
Ketakandriana Rafitoson, director of Publish What You Pay, an NGO that advocates for financial transparency in the extractive industry, told the event that besides the environmental, food and water impacts faced by some communities in mineral-producing countries, land grabbing is becoming a bigger issue.
“Territorial rights violations is something which is growing, and it is often linked to the fact that Indigenous peoples and local communities voices, including the right to say no to mining, are not always taken into account or heard,” she said.
Last year, the UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Minerals outlined seven principles for developing critical mineral supply chains with justice, equity and human rights at their core.
The panel called for “balancing consumption with sustainable supply, especially in high-income countries” to reduce environmental impacts. It cited innovation and product design, such as reducing the size of electric vehicle batteries, material efficiency gains and building circular supply chains, as ways to reduce demand.
Recycling and fairer use
Recycling minerals could reduce the need for new mining projects and help mitigate the environmental and social impacts of mining. But the use of recycled materials has so far failed to keep pace with rising material consumption, according to the IEA.
Meanwhile, global resource extraction is accelerating. Resource use is projected to grow 60% by 2060, which the UN says could derail efforts to achieve global climate, biodiversity and pollution targets, as well as human well-being and economic prosperity.
High-income countries use six times more materials and are responsible for ten times more climate impacts per capita than low-income ones, according to the UN’s Global Resource Outlook report. It called for reducing the resource intensity of the wealthiest economies to allow poorer nations to use more resources, where they are most needed.
Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains
The UN, meanwhile, is digging deeper into the issues surrounding critical minerals.
Special rapporteur Morgera is seeking inputs on the positive and negative human rights impacts of the full life-cycle of renewable energy, including the extraction and re-use of critical minerals, and will present a report at the UN in October.
This is “a really important opportunity for us to fully explore and understand the trade-offs and where we have foreseeable negative impacts on the environment and human rights that we can and must prevent,” she said.
(Reporting by Chloé Farand; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post We must challenge rising demand for transition minerals, says UN rapporteur appeared first on Climate Home News.
We must challenge rising demand for transition minerals, says UN rapporteur
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Three countries have been named by the Paris Agreement’s compliance committee for failing to submit a nationally determined contribution (NDC) and repeatedly snubbing offers of help with their climate plans.
After months of internal debate over whether to identify serial non-responders, the Paris Agreement’s Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC) named the three countries which have failed to engage with it over their NDCs on Friday.
It named Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and North Korea in a footnote of its annual report, adding that it decided to name them “with a view to facilitating engagement”, adding that representatives of the three nations had been invited to its meeting in early 2027 “with the purpose of identifying any challenges and constraints”.
“The Committee noted the importance of Parties engaging with the Committee in a timely manner, while noting that some delays may be due to the national capabilities and circumstances of the Parties”, the report said.
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Many governments have still not submitted a nationally determined contribution to the UN, breaching a key requirement of the Paris Agreement
In July, PAICC said 12 countries had ignored its repeated attempts to discuss why they had not published an NDC as required every five years under the 2015 Paris accord.
Members of the committee had been divided over whether to name them, but at a September meeting decided to do so in their annual report to the annual climate COP summit.
By the time the report was published on Friday, only Congo, Senegal and North Korea “had not communicated an NDC or submitted a [Biennial Transparency Report] and had not yet responded to any of the Committee’s notifications, despite several reminders issued by the Committee in this regard”.
Rainforest and renewable energy ambitions
The silence from Congo and Senegal is notable because the former is home to much of the Congo Basin rainforest while the latter has sought billions of dollars in climate finance to support its renewable energy ambitions.
After Brazil, Congo has more rainforest than any country in the world. This forest, and the country’s peatlands, absorb huge amounts of greenhouse gas but are fast being lost to expanding farmland, charcoal production, logging and mining.
Senegal signed a Just Energy Transition Partnership with Canada and wealthy European nations in 2023, to help it meet its renewable energy targets under the-then government of Macky Sall. It was chair of the Least Developed Countries group between January 2022 and December 2023.
Tejas Rao, who is researching the PAICC as part of a doctoral thesis at Cambridge University, said the governments of the three countries should engage with the committee.
“Engagement costs these governments very little and the committee has shown it will listen,” he said.
“Silence leaves the committee with no basis to help, and it leaves the [governments] exposed to the narrative that they are simply disengaged,” he told Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement requirement
The 2015 Paris Agreement requires all parties to publish an NDC every five years outlining their emissions reduction targets, with each plan meant to be more ambitious than the country’s last NDC.
The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in February 2025. While most countries missed this deadline, all but around 30 – mostly small emitters but including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have now submitted them.
Over the year, the PAICC – which is made up of government climate officials from developed and developing countries – has been communicating with governments that have not submitted NDCs and trying to overcome barriers to them doing so.
Some nations have cited exceptional circumstances as the reason for not submitting an NDC, a process that requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC, seen by Climate Home News, said that the country’s civil war had led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.
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The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement and so do not have active NDCs, nor does Taiwan, which is not a UN member state.
Rao said that because the PAICC is “facilitative and non-punitive”, naming the countries “is meant to open a door, not close one – the invited consultation is the point”.
“In recent months, governments that explained their constraints, whether capacity, finance or domestic process, have been met with follow-up and support rather than sanction, and the number of silent governments has fallen sharply,” Rao said.
The post Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs appeared first on Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs
Countries have failed – for the sixth time running – to agree on the timeline for publishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) next set of influential reports.
The IPCC’s 65th session (IPCC-65) was seen by many to be the final opportunity for countries to agree on a schedule where its seventh assessment report (AR7) would be published in time for the UN’s second “global stocktake” of climate action.
Before last week’s meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, IPCC chair Prof Sir Jim Skea had warned that releasing the reports in time for the stocktake in 2028 would depend on a timelines being agreed by the end of 2026.
But the week-long meeting descended into fraught disagreements between governments, resulting in Skea “suspending” the talks on Friday evening with no decision made.
Countries were also unable to agree on the IPCC’s budget for the rest of the AR7 cycle, leaving the body with a “serious funding crisis”.
The IPCC has pledged to reconvene the meeting at the “earliest opportunity”; however, it has not yet given an indication of when this will be.
In his concluding remarks, Skea described the Addis Ababa summit as a “profound disappointment” and “among the most difficult IPCC meetings”, according to reporting from the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).
Some countries have reacted with dismay to the breakdown of negotiations, warning that a failure to have the IPCC’s latest assessments on climate adaptation and mitigation ready for the UN stocktaking exercise would undermine global climate action.
A climate envoy from a Pacific island state said it was a “travesty that a handful of countries continue to delay the IPCC’s reports – the science we need back home to help us save lives and livelihoods”.
Below, Carbon Brief explores the key developments, debates and disagreements at the IPCC meeting.