Emissions from land-use change – including deforestation, loss of peatland and forest degradation – have been falling over the course of the 21st century.
The latest Global Carbon Budget report, formally published in May in the journal Earth System Science Data, notes a “statistically significant decrease” in land-use change emissions since the late 1990s.
The 21st-century decline in land-use emissions has accelerated in recent years, with the report highlighting a “steep drop” after 2015.
Writing for Carbon Brief in November 2025, climate scientists Dr Zeke Hausfather and Prof Pierre Friedlingstein noted that land-use emissions in 2025 had decreased by “around 32% compared to their average in the 2000s”.
Via six charts, Carbon Brief explores how – and why – land-use emissions have fallen over the past quarter of a century as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to climb.
How have land-use emissions changed?
Deforestation, forest degradation, loss of peatlands and harvesting trees for wood all release carbon into the atmosphere.
Collectively, these emissions are known as land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) emissions, referred to here as land-use emissions.
Each year, global land-use emission trends are analysed in the Global Carbon Budget report. The report, produced by dozens of scientists, documents how human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are changing over time.
Key findings from the annual report are released each year in the autumn, before being published formally in an academic journal the following year following a peer-review process.
(For more on the findings of the 2025 report, read Carbon Brief’s summary.)
The latest edition of the Global Carbon Budget report notes that, in the four decades to 1999, net CO2 emissions from land-use change remained “relatively constant”, sitting at around 6.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) per year.
However, since the late 1990s, global land-use emissions have been falling.
The 2025 report estimates that land-use emissions over 2015-24 averaged at 5GtCO2 a year. This is around 23% lower than the average over 1995-2004 and 19% lower than 2005-14, it says.
In contrast, global emissions from fossil fuels and cement have increased every decade since 1959, rising from an average of 11GtCO2 in the 1960s to 35.9GtCO2 over 2015-24, it says.
“Preliminary data” included in the report suggests that land-use emissions in 2025 clocked in lower than their 2014-25 average, at 4.1GtCO2, as fossil-fuel and cement emissions reached a new high of 38.1GtCO2.
(For more on how land-use emissions are calculated, see: Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?)
The chart below shows how land-use emissions have been falling in the 21st century and have helped to temper the overall rise of human-caused emissions.
Why have land-use emissions fallen?
The Global Carbon Budget attributes falling land-use emissions since the late 1990s to decreasing emissions from deforestation, in particular “permanent deforestation”.
Permanent deforestation refers to the complete removal of trees for the conversion of forest to another land use, such as agriculture, mining or the construction of towns and cities. This sets it apart from other forms of deforestation, such as logging and rotational farming, where the canopy is removed on a more temporary basis.
The Global Carbon Budget also points to “increasing [CO2] removals” from forest regrowth as a reason for falling land-use emissions since the turn of the century.
(For more on the countries and policies that have driven these changes, see: Which countries are behind falling land-use emissions? and: Which countries are leading on forest regrowth?)
Looking at more recent trends, the report attributes a “steep drop” in land-use emissions in the decade since 2015 to the “combined effect” of a “peak” in peat fire emissions in 2015, as well as a “long-term decline” in deforestation emissions in many countries over 2010-20.
The chart below shows how deforestation and forest growth have been responsible for the bulk of change to land-use emissions over the 21st century.
Over 2015-24, the sequestration of CO2 through reforestation and afforestation efforts offset two-thirds of deforestation emissions, according to the Global Carbon Budget report.
Specifically, it notes that deforestation was responsible for an average of 6.96GtCO2 of emissions each year over 2015-24. Forest growth, on the other hand, removed 4.76GtCO2 a year.
Just under half – 2.2GtCO2 – of carbon removals over 2015-24 was from afforestation and reforestation efforts and the remaining 2.56GtCO2 were driven by forest regrowth from shifting cultivation cycles, it says.
Forest regrowth from shifting cultivation refers to the recovery of a forest after a plot has been farmed for a short period and then abandoned.
This is shown in the chart below below, which shows how carbon removals from forest regrowth have offset emissions from deforestation.
In the near-term, the Global Carbon Budget attributes its projection of a drop in land-use emissions between 2024 and 2025 to the “end of El Niño conditions”.
(The naturally occurring weather phenomenon typically leads to the drying out of peatlands in the tropics and causes more planned deforestation fires to burn out of control.)
Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, director of the Global Carbon Budget office and a professor at the University of Exeter, tells Carbon Brief there is “no indication” of what might happen in the future, but adds that land-use emissions trends over the 21st century are “going in the right direction”. He says:
“If you are optimistic, you hope the trend will not reverse and start increasing again. But we don’t know for sure. The assumption, given current land policies across the world, is that deforestation should continue to decline.”
Which countries are behind falling land-use emissions?
The countries that contributed the most to land-use emissions over 2015-24 were Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Indonesia, according to the Global Carbon Budget.
It notes that these three countries together contributed more than half – 57% – of global land-use emissions.
Over the first quarter of the 21st century, falling land-use emissions in Brazil and Indonesia have combined with increased afforestation and reforestation in China to drive down overall land-use emissions, according to the Global Carbon Budget.
This is illustrated in the chart below, which shows how China’s land-use emissions have dropped below zero, as Brazil and Indonesia’s emissions have declined.
Friedlingstein says that the decline in land-use emissions since the 2000s has been “primarily driven by a decline in deforestation in Brazil”.
He tells Carbon Brief that tree clearance in the South American country rose in the 1990s then started to fall after a peak in the 2000s:
“There was a bit of up and down – mainly due to politics and who was in charge in Brazil – [whether the president] was [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] or [Jair] Bolsonaro. But the long-term trend in Brazil is a decline in deforestation due to forest protection policies.”
These policies included a 2004 “action plan” for the prevention and control of deforestation in the Amazon, a 2006 soy moratorium, which banned the purchasing and financing of soya produced in deforested areas of the Amazon, as well as the expansion of protected areas across Brazil during the second half of the 2000s.
Prof Julia Pongratz, a professor of physical geography and land-use systems at the University of Munich and contributor to the Global Carbon Budget, says Brazil is the “single most important contributor to the early-2000s global land-use change emissions peak and subsequent decline”.
She says that the largest contributor to an “acceleration” in the decline of global land-use emissions in the past decade has been Indonesia, which she notes has “rewetted more peatland area since 2017 alone than Europe in its entire history”.
Around the world, peatlands are exploited and damaged by humans for a range of purposes, including converting the land for agriculture and peat extraction for horticulture and fuel. Peatland wetting refers to the process of restoring water levels in drained peatlands in order to return them to their natural, waterlogged conditions, which allows for peat formation and carbon storage.
Another reason for Indonesia’s downward trend in land-use emissions is that there have been fewer spikes in emissions caused by fires related to human land-use activities over the last decade, says Pongratz.
Emissions from ecosystem fires are not always counted towards national and regional land-use emissions budgets, which estimate the sum of human-caused emissions. Deforestation fires and those related to peatland drainage are included, whereas fires caused by droughts and heatwaves are not.
Pongratz says it is “hard to separate natural and land-use drivers completely”, given that deforestation and peatland fires often “get out of control and cause spikes in emissions” during dry El Niño conditions.
(For more on uncertainties in land-use emissions data, see: Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?)
Pongratz notes that international trade regulations that have helped to drive down land-use emissions in Brazil and Indonesia have had a lesser effect in the DRC, where the root drivers of deforestation are different:
“Emissions in the DRC have increased, then stayed high in the last two decades. This is partly related to population growth and expanding smallholder and subsistence farming.
“The picture is different in Brazil and Indonesia, which are much more driven by export; international regulations aiming at curbing deforestation thus have larger effects in these countries.”
Which countries are leading on forest regrowth?
Reforestation and afforestation schemes that draw down carbon from the atmosphere have helped to reduce the overall emissions from land-use change over the course of the 21st century.
As noted above, the 2025 Global Carbon Budget report highlights how the removal of carbon from forests offset two-thirds of deforestation emissions over 2015-24.
The report says that China, the EU and US account for the highest levels of carbon sequestration from reforestation and afforestation, collectively drawing 1.1GtCO2 per year over the 2015-24 period.
This, it says, is “partly related to expanding forest area as a consequence of the forest transition in the 19th and 20th centuries and subsequent regrowth of forest”.
The chart below, which draws from the latest edition of the “state of carbon dioxide removal” report, shows how carbon uptake by forests has increased over the last 20 years in a number of countries, most notably in China.
by country, 2005-24. Data from 3rd “state of carbon dioxide removal” report (2026). Chart by Carbon Brief.
In China, a raft of reforestation and improved land management policies were introduced in the 1990s which have led to the rehabilitation of tens of millions of hectares of forests. Research has shown the schemes have significantly increased the country’s uptake of carbon and switched its land from a carbon source to a carbon sink.
The Global Carbon Budget highlights that substantial carbon removal from reforestation and afforestation occurred in other regions, such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia. However, in these regions, emissions from deforestation and other land-use changes “dominate”, it says.
Why are estimates of land-use emissions uncertain?
Tallying the world’s emission from land-use change is complex.
The Global Carbon Budget estimates an uncertainty range of 2.6GtCO2 per year for its average annual global land-use emissions figure for 2015-24 – more than half the overall figure of 5GtCO2.
To calculate overall land-use emissions for the annual Global Carbon Budget report, researchers create an average from three land-use models: BLUE, OSCAR and LUCE.
These models combine satellite and statistical information on land cover and land-use changes from global and regional datasets.
Pongratz, who is involved in the LUCE model, explains that scientists can measure the exchange of CO2 between land and atmosphere, but are not able to determine whether CO2 is being released or sequestered from a managed area as a result of human activities or other climate or environmental factors. She continues:
“For this, you need to turn to modelling, where you can isolate drivers – and, again, models are uncertain and the land-use input imperfect. This is why we use all available model estimates – three at the moment.”
The Global Carbon Budget highlights that its three different models treat different components of the land-use emissions “budget” differently.
While models agree “relatively well” about emissions from permanent deforestation, they take different approaches in their approach to shifting cultivation patterns, which increases both emissions and removals, as well as wood harvesting, it says.
Moreover, it notes that land-use emissions and removals occur on different timelines. While carbon removals generated by forest growth and soil recovery are “slow”, there is an “instantaneous component” to emissions from deforestation, it says.
(For more on the challenges in analysing changes to the global carbon cycle, see Carbon Brief’s recent in-depth interview with Prof Philippe Ciais, one of the world’s leading experts on land-use emissions.)
The Global Carbon Budget notes that its confidence in its 2025 projection for overall land-use emissions remains “low” given that the figure is based on deforestation, degradation and peat fire emissions, which are “only a proxy” for land-use change.
The report notes that 2023 is the final year in which it calculates land-use emissions directly from land-use statistics across all three bookkeeping models. For more recent years, full statistics are not yet available across the models and scientists instead turn to short-term proxies.
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The post Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?
More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
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The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis
In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations, which participants were invited to consider and adapt in their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process.
Getting the rules ‘right’
In a statement to Climate Home News, Ghana, Paraguay and the UK – which are FCLP co-leads for its work on forest carbon credits – said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’
The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?
An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
A relatively ambitious deal to reduce the shipping industry’s 3% of global emissions now looks more likely after four days of closed-door talks in London, observers say.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO), which oversees the negotiations, said there had been “constructive discussions” and “genuine willingness within the group to make concrete further progress”.
Em Fenton, senior director at the NGO Opportunity Green who attended the talks last week, said they “demonstrated a strong spirit of solidarity in the face of blatant attempts to undermine the credibility, ambition and equity of a hard-fought multilateral agreement”.
After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on a “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF) – a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners aimed at incentivising them to use cleaner fuels, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.
But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention by US President Donald Trump and threats of US sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.
UCL analysis found that, of those who expressed a view at last week’s talks, 38 were in favour of an NZF-style solution while only 17 were against. Those opposed are “consistently composed of strongly fossil fuel-aligned governments”.
An observer of the talks, who did not want to be named, said the countries opposed include the US, Russia, India, Thailand, Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay, as well as eight oil-rich Gulf nations and shipowner-reliant Liberia and Panama. Governments that support an NZF-style deal include China, Brazil, Mexico, Türkiye, Canada, Australia, Chile, nine African nations, most European countries and small islands.
A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.
UCL’s analysis said it was “reassuring” that governments which had taken strong positions in the media against the NZF were being more compromising in the negotiations.
Tweaks are probable
While there is majority support for the NZF, UCL said adopting it would be difficult politically. “The process from here could therefore be as much about producing what appears to be a new package, but one that broadly ends up with similar outcomes in relation to objectives,” UCL argued.
But tweaking the NZF, which resulted from years of negotiations, comes with risks, it warned. For example, changes could reduce the new system’s planned support for low-income countries, turning them against it. Fenton said compromising should not mean “abandoning the principle of justice in the maritime transition”.
UCL said the speed at which shipowners must reduce their ships’ emissions or face fees is likely to be reduced in the short-term but raised in the long-term to meet a goal of net zero emissions by mid-century.
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This was a compromise put forward by NZF-supporter Brazil. However, an analysis by the the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) has found that this change would lead to more overall emissions than the original NZF trajectory.
UCL has warned it could incentivise liquefied natural gas as a shipping fuel over greener options, which include hydrogen-based methanol and ammonia.
Analysis by UCL and the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that, while a slower start to the NZF would reduce transport costs in the short term, it would increase them later due to the costs involved in switching the industry over from more polluting fuel to cleaner fuel.
NZF won’t meet emissions goals
IMarEst’s analysis finds that even in its current form – the most ambitious deal on the table – the NZF will not be sufficient for shipping to meet its emissions reduction goals.
It says that only a Pacific proposal to place a levy on ships’ total emissions – rather than just those above a certain level – would meet the industry’s targets to reduce emissions 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reach net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”. This is highly unlikely to be adopted.
Additional talks will be held from November 23-27 and from November 30-December 3 before a potentially final round of official negotiations begins on December 4.
The post London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate Change
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
At a key leaders’ summit in Palau, Pacific island nations burdened by worsening climate change impacts and costly fossil fuel imports called for November’s COP31 climate summit to deliver finance to help the region transition to renewable energy and build more resilient communities.
Heads of government from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – which includes COP31 co-president Australia – met in Palau’s capital Koror for a week-long summit, where they demanded access to climate finance, ocean action and a regional boost for renewables at COP31.
Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Jr. said during a plenary session that the Pacific must focus on delivering climate and ocean commitments. “It will require greater regional leadership, stronger regional coordination and, above all, unity of purpose,” he said.
The meeting, which ended last Friday, was marked by the absence of some leaders – among them the heads of state of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, which will host a preparatory session for COP31 in October (referred to as the pre-COP31). There were also tensions over Taiwan’s participation, with China objecting to its presence as an observer.
The forum’s final declaration, published after it ended and signed by all its members, reaffirms that climate change is the “single greatest threat to the security, livelihoods and wellbeing of Pacific peoples”, and notes “the importance of a focused, high-level declaration” at the pre-COP31 to build “political momentum towards COP31”.
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Australia and Pacific islands have invited world leaders to attend the pre-COP31 gathering, which will be held in Fiji and Tuvalu from October 5 to 8. While usually a technical meeting for negotiators, the island nations aim to issue a political declaration at the gathering calling for strong outcomes in Türkiye.
Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate minister and COP31 president of negotiations, said in a speech during the Pacific forum that his country is “determined to use COP31 to progress the agenda to make it easier for countries to access the climate finance they need”.
“We won’t miss the opportunity to ensure COP31 is a Pacific COP. Not just because of the location of pre-COP but because of the agenda we are shaping through the Action Agenda at COP31,” he said.
The Action Agenda is a large portfolio of climate initiatives and coalitions uniting governments, businesses and civil society outside of the formal negotiations on everything from health to methane emissions.
Renewable energy investment plan
Announced a year ago, the island nations launched a $14-billion investment plan for a “100% Renewable Blue Pacific” at the forum in Palau. The plan lists strategic projects that would reduce the region’s high dependence on fossil fuel imports, whose soaring costs have become a major burden since the Iran war.
The projects include a $52-million programme managed by Australia to develop off-grid renewables in remote communities across the Pacific, as well as a $100-million blended finance fund aimed at supporting private-sector investments in wind and solar, among others.
Currently, some countries in the Pacific are spending up to a quarter of their GDP importing diesel to power electricity generation, according to a new report by the University of New South Wales in Australia. The investment plan launched at the forum aims to reduce these costs by adding 2.2 gigawatts of renewable generation and around 9 gigawatt hours of electricity storage.
To channel funds into the region, the plan also highlights the role of the recently established Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), a regional fund that seeks to swiftly disburse funds to climate-vulnerable communities at the local level. Bowen said he would promote the facility to world leaders attending COP31 and “ask for their support”.
Call to transition away from fossil fuels
Separately, the forum endorsed the Belau Declaration which emphasises the need to keep the 1.5C Paris Agreement temperature goal alive. A UN report last week showed that overshooting this limit is now inevitable, but deep emissions cuts could still bring global temperatures back down by the end of the century.
Pacific nations expect to rally support for this declaration at the pre-COP, with Fiji’s climate minister Lynda Tabuya saying in a statement: “Palau is where we build the political mandate. Pre-COP is where we take it to the world.”
The political declaration also says that countries must accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels “towards a renewable energy future”, and calls for greater recognition of the importance of ocean health in addressing climate change.
UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot
As part of the forum’s outcomes in Palau, countries also noted Tuvalu’s efforts to host the second global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will gather government representatives in April next year to follow up on this year’s inaugural conference in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Speaking to journalists at the forum, Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu questioned Australia’s role in talks about phasing out fossil fuels at COP31, adding that “the very least a country like Australia should be doing is stopping future expansion, and it’s not doing that”. During the PIF, the country approved the extension of a major mine that digs and exports coal for steel-making, giving it permission to keep producing until 2055.
Rising seas trigger “development emergency”
As leaders met in one of the world’s regions most threatened by sea-level rise, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a new report warning that rising seas are now “one of the most profound threats to populations around the world in developed and developing states alike”.
Presenting the report at UN headquarters in New York, Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development Navid Hanif said rising sea levels are not a “future risk any more” but an accelerating “development emergency” that could hinder progress in vulnerable regions like the Pacific and least developed countries.
The report warns that seas are rising “faster than at any point in recorded history”, with 2024 setting a new record of 5.9 millimetres. This has been driven by human-induced climate change mainly through a process known as thermal expansion – where rising heat causes the ocean to expand – as well as the melting of ice sheets.
Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31
The report notes that about 1.2 billion people around the world are exposed to coastal flooding, and says some low-lying islands in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Fiji are already facing forced relocations. Globally, rising seas could cost more than $1 trillion every year by 2050, it adds.
“We cannot stop sea level rise this century but we can determine how much worse it becomes. About half a metre of sea level rise is already locked in in this century because of warming that has already occurred, but beyond that our choices matter enormously,” Hanif told journalists.
Bill Hare, CEO of think-tank Climate Analytics, said the report was a “wake-up call” to the leaders of high-emitting countries that their failure to cut carbon emissions is “creating major risks for the future alongside the impacts we can already observe around us”.
Guterres is set to host a high-level meeting on addressing the threat of sea level rise this month during the UN General Assembly, where countries are expected to adopt a declaration that calls for stronger action, expanded access to finance and “ongoing dialogue” to tackle the issue.
The post At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance appeared first on Climate Home News.
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
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