The 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change famously does not name the controversial root cause of the very problem it is intended to solve: fossil fuels.
In the year of its 10th anniversary, Gillian Cooper, political director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (FFNPT), described the Paris accord as “our North Star” in efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“Unfortunately, as it is structured, it does not mention fossil fuels,” she added in an interview with Climate Home ahead of the mid-year UN climate talks in Bonn. “That is a massive omission because it is the root cause of over 80% of our emissions. So there is very little guidance as to how countries concretely will be able to transition from fossil fuels.”
Cooper argues that another international treaty is needed to provide that support to governments – a goal towards which her organisation has been working since 2020.
“The capacity of countries to transition from fossil fuels varies considerably across the globe and concrete solutions are needed to support an equitable, managed transition,” she said. “The treaty will provide greater guidance and support.”
Growing support for action on fossil fuels
In response to a call by Pacific Island nations back in 2015 for a moratorium on coal, the FFNPT initiative seeks to foster global cooperation to halt expansion of this planet-heating fuel, as well as oil and gas, and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. With 17 participating nations so far, it is in talks with more countries to sign up to the commitment.
Its members so far are Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Colombia, Micronesia, Fiji, Nauru, Niue, Pakistan, Palau, Marshall Islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.
Cooper noted that meetings will be held with some delegations during the Bonn climate talks, especially target countries in Africa and Asia considered key due to their dependence on fossil fuels. “We are fairly confident that we will have more countries by the time we get to COP30,” she added.
Brazil’s current push to approve new oil exploration projects in the Amazon basin, with licences set to be auctioned in mid-June, would make it difficult for President Lula da Silva’s government to join the FFNPT.
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But in its role as the COP30 Presidency, Brazil could create the political momentum needed to incorporate more ambitious language on fossil fuels in the final decisions stemming from November’s climate summit in Belem – something it has indicated it wants to do.
That aim is to drive forward the outcome of COP28 in 2023, in which countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems – but since then there has been little concrete progress within the UN climate process on how that could be done.
Resistance from major producers
A Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty could help sidestep the objections of major oil and gas-producing nations, experts told a symposium in Bonn organised by the initiative.
Peter Newell, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex, said it is expected that big fossil fuel producers like Saudi Arabia or Russia will resist – but that might change as the world moves towards cleaner energy.
“These countries usually produce for export to Europe or other countries. So, if demand falls, it will be easier to convince them to reduce production,” Newell told Climate Home.
Against the common narrative of “fossil fuels are key to energy security”, he encouraged people to ask whose energy is being secured, how, and at what cost? And in response to the argument that fossil fuels are needed for development, he questioned why in many developing countries that are rich in fossil fuels, there is still so much energy poverty.
Newell believes that there will come a time when, due to the worsening impacts of climate change, or as the initiative gains more members, even big oil and gas nations might want to join the FFNPT.
“The challenge will be to have enough countries that want a strong version of the treaty and not the weaker version that large producers may seek to push,” he said.
Another hurdle is fighting disinformation around the initiative’s aims. “Those countries considering endorsing will want answers to tough questions about why they should join,” noted Newell.
Complementary to UN processes
Meanwhile, discussions about what shape a treaty to phase out fossil fuels could take are gathering momentum. At a ministerial meeting in late 2024 at COP29 in Baku, the initiative’s member countries highlighted the importance of identifying a framework.
One path would be through existing UN processes, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) or the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). But there is a catch. “They are consensus-based decision-making forums,” said Cooper. “This dilutes the ambition that we are pursuing.”
And if an FFNPT were to be pursued via the UN General Assembly (UNGA), it would require a two-thirds majority of states to approve it – and likely take many years to advance.
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“The other pathway is a dedicated process outside the UN,” said Cooper, noting that this is what happened in the case of the Mine Ban Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. “A small group of progressive states can initiate a treaty process and start to change the norms and influence other multilateral spaces where climate change and fossil fuels can be discussed,” she added.
In that case, a connection with existing UN processes could be maintained, adopting a dual-track approach that is independent of the UN but still able to shape resolutions at the UNGA – for example, detailing countries’ needs in transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The analysis now being conducted by the FFNPT’s political and technical team will be presented to ministers of participating countries when they meet in Belem in November, so they can decide on a way forward. Building on this, the idea is to work on a diplomatic conference that would frame the issue and launch a mandate for the treaty.
Text or no text?
While initiative is called a “treaty”, it has yet to start work on a draft text. This is partly to avoid falling prey to the arguments, pressures and blocking that small details such as a comma or a verb can provoke, as often happens in the UN climate negotiations.
Whether a text will be developed will become clearer next year, but in the meantime, the initiative is researching and advising its member countries on areas of policy that are key to progressing their energy transition – work that could form the basis of a treaty, Cooper said.
Some of these levers were discussed at the FFNPT Research and Policy Symposium in Bonn ahead of the June negotiations. They include trade incentives and opportunities, legal and security aspects for actors involved in the transition, and financing mechanisms for a rapid and fair fossil fuel phase-out.
Funding a fossil fuel phase-out
“The [FFNPT] treaty has to recognize that many Global South countries are in what we call a climate debt trap,” said Jwala Rambarran, independent expert and senior policy advisor for the Vulnerable Twenty Group (V20) of nations.
“They require considerable investments to finance their climate resilience – and at the same time they have limited fiscal space simply because they are highly indebted. And part of that debt arises because they have to finance the response to a climate shock.”
The challenge for the treaty is to find ways to fund a just energy transition without worsening debt further and avoiding dependence on loans as the primary form of financing. From 2016 to 2022, 90% of financing provided by multilateral development banks was in the form of loans, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
“All of this is taking place within this global financial architecture that is 80 years old and was created when many of these countries did not even exist or they were part of colonial systems,” Rambarran said, pointing to the need for reform.
The idea of creating a new fund for the treaty emerged from ministerial discussions. A report by the OECD noted that as of 2022, more than 94 green climate funds had been set up, with 81 of them active, but their financial contribution accounted for less than 1% of global climate finance flows. So why create yet another?
That is being explored as part of the FFNPT discussions, said Rambarran, alongside issues such as: who would provide the money, who would be able to access the fund, would finance be provided as loans or grants, and would it be filled by donor countries or a tax on fossil fuels?
“I think it is good that the treaty is examining those questions and looking at the different types of mechanisms,” he added.
The post What could a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty look like? appeared first on Climate Home News.
What could a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty look like?
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
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