Ana Yang is Director of the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House.
In recent months, Brazil has been portrayed by the media, activists and other commentators as either angel or devil.
On the one hand, the country that houses 60% of the Amazon rainforest and an enormous wealth of biodiversity is touted as a climate champion, progressive host of the next UN climate talks, the potential saviour of multilateralism.
On the other, the fifth-largest and seventh-most populous country in the world is demonised as hypocritical for pursuing oil exploration and production, investing in agriculture as a key export industry, and – most recently – building a new road on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Belem, which will host the COP30 UN climate summit in November.
As a Brazilian working and living in London, this is a deeply familiar and frustrating story of a developing nation that cannot be trusted to act in its own interests on climate change, nor in those of the world. It is a story that holds low- and middle-income countries to different standards from rich ones, and denies them the same rights and routes to development.
Oil production supports development
Recent criticism of Brazil’s decision to join the oil producers club, OPEC+, and of President Lula’s support for a new oil project typify this gleeful tendency to attack pragmatic leadership and deny political complexity. Such criticism is not only condescending, but counterproductive and short-sighted.
By joining OPEC+ Brazil – with only 4% of global oil production and less than 2% of global trade oil – gets to be part of the club of countries that dictates oil prices. Crude oil is Brazil’s main export commodity, with China its main customer. Joining OPEC+ is a geopolitical move by a middle power designed to support commercial interests and trade diversification.
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Of course, rapid decarbonisation is imperative if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as per the Paris Agreement. But just as other countries scramble to balance climate goals against other policy objectives, including the opportunities of investment in fossil fuels, or provision of infrastructure, so too should Brazil be able to determine its own path to net zero.
Brazil, a country at the forefront of the climate crisis, whose wealth is concentrated in its abundant natural resources, knows full well the importance of a managed fossil-fuel phase-out. The climate transition and decarbonisation is owned at the highest political level. The country already generates over 90% of its electricity from renewable sources, and has per capita emissions well below the global average.
But President Lula was also elected on a promise of addressing the deep inequality, poverty, hunger and other challenges affecting the Brazilian population. Oil production and exploration contribute to the national coffers and help pay for the national health service, anti-poverty initiatives, and climate adaptation actions.
If we genuinely want to support and encourage progress, we cannot expect Brazil to forgo its biggest commodity overnight. Instead we need an approach which acknowledges that policy-making is a game of balancing competing demands.
No one-size-fits-all path to decarbonisation
Indeed, the truth is that, with three quarters of its emissions coming from deforestation and agriculture, Brazil’s decarbonisation challenge lies less in oil production and more in land use. To effect an equitable and low-carbon transition, the country will need to move away from a deforestation-based agriculture production model, cut methane from cattle herds and reduce reliance on fertiliser.
Its farmers – from large to micro producers – will need to shift to integrated land management approaches that enable the protection of nature. And the country will need to continue to expand renewable energy capabilities while ensuring benefits are shared with local communities, and invested in climate adaptation.
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As for the international community, supporting Brazil as COP30 host means being inclusive rather than prescriptive. It means engaging the COP30 Presidency on areas of mutual interest and bringing the private sector along. It means offering solutions for climate and nature finance, focusing on the link with inequality, and aligning net-zero target dates with Lula’s own plans. It also means rich countries keeping their promises on climate finance.
There are so many expectations around Brazil’s presidency of COP30, some unrealistic. But there are clear opportunities to make progress on climate finance, on emissions reduction targets and on nature. With the right sort of engagement from the international community and the private sector, Brazil will be able to start delivering on its climate promises, setting an example for others to follow.
At its best, COP30 could kick off a decade of action, where the economic opportunities of the energy transition are turned into reality, and the polarised narrative of growth vs. climate action is consigned to history.
To realise this potential, Brazil needs constructive partners who understand that decarbonisation is not a one-size-fits all policy. In a context of heightened geopolitical instability and competing fiscal pressures, collaboration between coalitions of the willing, characterised by mutual respect, must be at the heart of climate action in 2025 and beyond.
The post Why accusations of Brazilian hypocrisy on climate are ill-judged appeared first on Climate Home News.
Why accusations of Brazilian hypocrisy on climate are ill-judged
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
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 particu