Three years after the first deal was signed with South Africa, top officials from the UK and Germany have disclosed that they are hesitant to pursue additional Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) – an initiative launched at COP26 in 2021 to help developing countries leap frog fossil fuels, especially coal, to renewables.
So far the multi-billion-dollar deals – which involve a package of government and private investment – have been launched for South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal, backed by several European countries, the European Union, the United States and Canada.
At a briefing with journalists at the COP29 climate talks in Baku last month, Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, said his country and the other developed nations involved are “reluctant” to enter into more JETPs, emphasising that the current priority is to “make the existing JETPs work”.
Flasbarth said wealthy donor nations and multilateral development banks are working on what he described as a “country-led platform” approach for additional countries, which will incorporate a range of lessons from the JETPs.
These lessons, according to UK Special Representative on Climate Rachel Kyte, include establishing “country ownership” as “a key element”, offering support based on a country’s progress in its transition, and addressing “sensitivities around different stakeholders” on the ground.
Kyte said there is no other way to do a clean energy transition except to put in place ambitious plans that are managed by the developing country in question with support from international partners.
Evolution of JETPs
With discussion surrounding the future of JETPs, links to similar initiatives with different names are being identified. Kyte said momentum is picking up around country platforms, whereby recipient governments present a “tailored, focused programme” with financing needs and projects that fit priorities defined by them.
At COP29, for example, the government of Lesotho, Standard Chartered and Standard Bank announced a “country platform” to support the southern African nation’s ambitions to provide clean, affordable power for its people and the wider region.
The agreement – entitled “His Majesty King Letsie III Just Energy Transition Fund” – will finance the build-out of renewable energy to meet domestic demand in Lesotho and surplus generation for export to neighbouring South Africa.
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John Murton, a former British diplomat who was heavily involved in negotiating the initial JETPs, now advises Standard Chartered on sustainability. On LinkedIn, he said that through Lesotho’s new platform, partners can cooperate to identify barriers to private investment, support long-term policy and regulatory reform in the country, and discuss where lending on easy terms can be used most effectively.
This is not the first initiative that looks similar to a JETP. In October, Colombia – which could have been a country of interest for a JETP coal-to-clean deal – launched a $40-billion investment plan for its green energy transition and nature protection, targeting a shift away from fossil fuel production. Environment minister Susana Muhamad said it would mirror the JETPs.
Flasbarth also noted that Germany is cooperating with India on renewable energy and urban development to aid the South Asian country’s energy transition. But he said in a separate interview with Clean Energy Wire at COP29 that a JETP is no longer on the cards with India.
One key reason, according to analysts, is that India – the world’s most populous country with growing energy needs – is not interested in a deal, like the other JETPs, that would focus on phasing out coal, given that its coal production is projected to keep rising this decade, and it prefers to seek financing for clean energy expansion.
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Laura Sabogal Reyes, a senior policy advisor on development finance with E3G, said country platforms are “the evolution of JETPs”. But unlike their predecessors, they are unlikely to kick off with big top-line financing numbers, instead taking a “more mature” bottom-up approach that is less “flashy”, she said.
The idea, she added, is to meet countries where they are now on what they want to prioritise, their pipeline of projects, and their needs for technical support and policy reform, with donors coming in to contribute on that basis.
Slow progress
Sabogal Reyes said many expectations and promises behind the JETP concept “were not fully realised” within the expected time-frame, casting doubt on whether the initiative – which was praised as the “end of coal” by the UK government in Glasgow – will continue.
The next step for JETPs is to “deliver [the promises] to the best way possible”, while taking into consideration “the good, the bad and the ugly” from the process and using that to develop new country platforms, she added.
Thandolwethu Lukuko, Climate Action Network’s director for South Africa, said the initial JETP pledges had been made with no established pipeline of projects, meaning that when an investment plan was later presented by the government receiving the money “it was then the partners saying, ‘well, we might not want to finance this’.” That led to negotiations that have lengthened the process, he added.
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Wale Shonibare, director for energy financial solutions, policy and regulation at the African Development Bank, said future country partnerships would need to evolve in response to the delays affecting the JETPs and the emphasis on debt in their financing mix which has prioritised soft loans over pure grants – something South Africa had not expected at the beginning.
Of the $8.5 billion originally pledged to South Africa, less than 3% was due to be delivered in the form of grants.
“It’s not just about what the donors are willing to give; it’s also about what the countries are willing to accept,” Shonibare said.
Since the launch of the deal, just one coal-fired plant – Komati – has been decommissioned and repurposed to produce renewable energy, a development made possible through World Bank support rather than under the JETP. The initiative, meanwhile, has provoked a backlash from the country’s labour union which called for its suspension.
A November update on the JETP, issued by the British government, said that, based on energy security considerations, power utility Eskom had decided to delay the planned decommissioning of three coal-fired power stations until 2030, and to front-load renewables repowering and community development at those sites ahead of the coal plant closures.
In Indonesia, there has been divergence with donors on financing terms and coal plants, with little progress recorded in retiring fossil fuel power stations. The Indonesian government also criticised the deal’s financing terms, as only 0.8% of the total was offered as grants.
Last month at the G20 summit in Brazil, President Prabowo Subianto announced that Indonesia will phase out coal-fired and all other fossil-fuel power plants by 2040 – but did not specify whether this would be part of the country’s JETP deal.
In Vietnam, the JETP has been criticised for a lack of transparency by a government partner organisation. The share of loans versus grants has been another bone of contention, with only 2% of the financial package offered as grants.
Senegal’s deal, announced in 2023, is still in the development stage, but Aida Diop, senior programme officer with the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), told Climate Home its successful implementation will depend on inclusive and transparent governance. Of the €2.5 billion ($2.6 billion) pledged, only about 6.6% is in grants. This, alongside delays in disbursing funds and the absence of a clear investment plan to date, “risks increasing public debt and slowing progress on renewable energy”, Diop said.
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A further problem with the JETPs has been scepticism over whether they are pursuing the people-centred approach that is regarded as fundamental to just transition. South Africa’s investment plan, for example, prioritised three sectors – electricity, new energy vehicles (NEVs) and green hydrogen – while skills development ranked low.
A 2023 investigation by Climate Home and Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism found that people in coal-reliant communities feared they would be unemployable in the near future as mines and power plants are decommissioned, and planned training programmes to reskill coal workers had yet to be rolled out at the local level.
Learning lessons
At COP29, Germany and Britain’s senior officials agreed there are lessons to be learned from how the JETPs have unfolded so far but said the experience has been a success nonetheless.
Flasbarth said South Africa’s JETP has “had its ups and downs, but in total it is a success story”. Kyte agreed, saying she would not claim the initiative is “going as fast as everybody would like it to” but that the original idea behind the JETPs remains important – and is one that the UK is pursuing as a priority.
Addressing concerns over slow progress, the UK climate envoy – who has worked on energy access for many years – also said unlocking certain financial flows first requires reforms including to markets, policy and regulation – which take time. These reforms need to happen alongside investment to build out the grid for renewable power supplies, before any coal decommissioning can take place, Kyte added.
In the case of South Africa, Flasbarth said public funding from donors had helped the South African government reform the regulatory framework for its electricity sector, which had created “legal certainty, transparency and lowered the risk for investing”. That, in turn, has opened up opportunities for the private sector to invest in expanding renewables.
On the funding instruments used in the JETPs, Kyte said multiple sources of finance had been brought together, depending on countries’ differing needs – and of the $9.3 billion committed to South Africa, “over $700 million of that was grants”, in addition to concessional loans and investments. Flasbarth said Germany’s €1.8 billion ($1.9bn) share of that JETP had included “a substantial amount of grants, coming to roughly 20%”, while the rest was highly concessional loans from the KfW Development Bank.
Kyte added that there is a need to double down on the JETPs to deliver them effectively, and also to draw lessons from the model so that other countries that want something similar – no matter what formal label is attached to it – can build on that experience.
(Reporting by Vivian Chime; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)
The post Why rich countries are “reluctant” on additional JETP coal-to-clean deals appeared first on Climate Home News.
Why rich countries are “reluctant” on additional JETP coal-to-clean deals
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
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New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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