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.
Failure of Busan talks exposes fossil fuel barrier to UN plastics pact
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.
Global North countries must step up on protecting their own forests
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.
COP29: Five most dramatic moments from the UN climate summit in Baku
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.
Call for climate reparations at the ICJ even more urgent after COP29 falls short
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
Climate Change
Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges
The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.
The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.
Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges
Amid reports that the government could weaken the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) targets, Carbon Brief analysis reveals the nation’s EV drivers are saving more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared with running a petrol car.
Battery EVs (BEVs) are roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars, making them far cheaper to run – particularly since the Iran crisis caused a spike in fossil-fuel prices.
The savings from driving BEVs are also more than three times higher than for “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs), which evidence shows are mostly driven with their combustion engines.
In total, the more than 2m BEVs, 1m PHEVs and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are saving drivers around £3bn a year, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, as illustrated in the figure below.
In addition, these EVs are avoiding the need for nearly 2.5bn litres of fuel and cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 7m tonnes each year.
Despite recent news that EVs are now cheaper to buy than petrol cars, as well as having far lower running costs, BBC News says the government is “set to water down” its EV sales targets.
The broadcaster explains that the current goal, under the UK’s “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) mandate, is for 80% of new car sales to be BEVs by 2030.
It says that the government is set to consult on weakening this to between 50% and 70%, following “lobbying” by carmakers and trade unions.
According to the Sunday Times, prime minister Keir Starmer “is understood to have overruled the energy secretary [Ed Miliband] after sustained pressure from industry, the Unite union and Peter Kyle, the business secretary”.
The car industry has consistently claimed there is insufficient demand for BEVs to meet the targets under the ZEV mandate, yet the government says manufacturers have “over-complied” to date. Independent analysts say the industry is on track to continue beating the ZEV mandate goals.
The industry has been able to beat its targets by using a wide range of “flexibilities”, which were introduced after a previous round of lobbying. These allow carmarkers to meet part of their EV targets by selling more efficient combustion cars, such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
The ZEV mandate is the single-largest part of the government’s plans to meet its legally binding climate goals over the next decade.
The advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) previously warned that the extra flexibilities would result in a larger number of hybrids being sold, at the expense of battery EVs.
When it consulted on the ZEV mandate in 2023, the then-Conservative government noted that PHEVs do not deliver the cost and CO2 savings they are advertised with.
It pointed to “dramatic” differences between the performance of PHEVs in test cycles and what they deliver under real-world conditions.
In practice, less than a third of miles driven in PHEVs are fuelled by electricity, with petrol making up the rest. As a result, cost and CO2 savings from BEVs are three times larger than for PHEVs.
The post Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total
Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the first carbon credits approved under a new UN mechanism, alleging the project is linked to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and has “massively” overstated its climate impact.
The programme, which aims to cut emissions by distributing efficient cookstoves across Myanmar, received approval to issue around 650,000 carbon credits from the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February, in a landmark moment for the Paris Agreement’s carbon market. Only two projects have been given the green light by the mechanism’s regulator so far.
But two reports published last week, led by the Global Forest Coalition and Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch, raised serious concerns about the project’s implementation in conflict zones where civilians have faced airstrikes and mass displacement as well as its emission-reduction calculations.
Project continued after military coup
Myanmar has been ravaged by a brutal civil war since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government in a coup d’état in February 2021. The military regime has attacked civilian populations, persecuted ethnic minorities and committed widespread sexual violence, among other serious human rights violations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said in April.
The cookstove programme started in 2018 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – as a partnership between Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) and the Climate Change Center (CCC), a South Korean NGO, with investment from private South Korean firms.
-
European, island states seek clear future for global roadmap to cut fossil fuels
Some European, small island and other nations argue the forthcoming roadmap should be part of UN climate talks, while Russia has resisted this idea
The project continued operating after the coup. For most of the period between 2021 and 2022 in which the issued credits were generated, MONREC was led by Colonel Khin Maung Yi, who was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for supporting the military regime, the Global Forest Coalition report said.
CCC acknowledged engaging with government authorities after the coup but said this “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta. The South Korean NGO added that abandoning the programme when political circumstances changed “would not necessarily have been the most responsible outcome for the households involved”.
Conflict prevents on the ground verification
The Global Forest Coalition report raised particular concerns about the project’s implementation in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, including Sagaing Region, an anti-junta resistance stronghold that has been most heavily affected by the conflict and routinely targeted by airstrikes and violent attacks. The region accounts for more than a third of Myanmar’s 3.8 million internally displaced people.
The NGOs said that, in addition to ethical concerns about carbon credits being produced by the military government in an area actively affected by its attacks, this raises questions over the ability to effectively verify the climate integrity of the projects.
Before carbon credits are issued, external auditors need to validate the claims made by project developers and confirm that the emission reductions claimed are correct. This process usually includes site visits to a representative sample of households to check how the improved cookstoves are being used.
But, because of the “volatile political situation” in Myanmar, the auditing team was not able to leave the capital Yangon and could only speak to project participants remotely via Zoom, project documents show.
“Due to ongoing armed conflict on the ground, the data currently used to justify carbon credit issuance in Sagaing by the Burmese military junta is unverifiable and highly likely fraudulent,” said Zaw Tuseng, founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute, which contributed to the report, in a written statement. “This demands an immediate suspension of credit transfers until a neutral, conflict-sensitive audit can be conducted.”
“Exceptional circumstances”
CCC told Climate Home News that, although it recognises that on-site verification is “generally preferable, particularly in complex operating environments”, the decision to opt for remote controls was not taken “as a discretionary shortcut, but as an approved alternative under exceptional circumstances”.
The South Korean NGO added that it reviewed the feasibility of the project at community level “on an ongoing basis” and it “did not identify conflict-related incidents that directly affected project implementation activities in participating communities during the monitoring period”.
A spokesperson for the UN climate change body told Climate Home News that, when site access is not possible, the UN carbon credit mechanism allows for “alternative verification approaches while still maintaining conservative assumptions and environmental integrity safeguards”. “These provisions ensure that crediting can only proceed where evidence is reliable,” they added.
Contested methodology
Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods, both reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. But several cookstove offsetting projects have faced criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions.
The project in Myanmar uses a contested methodology developed under the earlier Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it found it “insufficiently rigorous”.
EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says
After transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project was required to apply “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, which resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued, according to the UN climate change body.
“The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism, said in February.
Too many credits issued
But Carbon Market Watch claimed in a second report last week that, despite the adjustment, the project is still likely to issue seven times more credits than its real climate impact justifies, comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.
The biggest driver of the credit inflation, the group said, is the failure to account for “stacking” – the widespread practice of households using multiple stoves at the same time, including more polluting ones the project does not monitor.
Peer-reviewed science considers a stacking rate of 68% a conservative assumption, but the methodology used by the Myanmar programme makes no allowance for it at all, the report said.
CCC disputed those findings. In a written response to Climate Home News, it said the project was developed under methodologies approved within the UN climate framework and that external recalculations by researchers are not “determinative of the level of crediting achieved”.
The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.
Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its own national climate plan under the Paris Agreement.
“Over-crediting, at any magnitude, cannot be compatible with the climate ambition of a world striving to limit global warming to 1.5ºC,” said Isa Mulder, an expert at Carbon Market Watch.
The post UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns
-
Climate Change10 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases10 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy8 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Greenhouse Gases11 months ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测