You are here
Climate Change News
Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap
This is the first in a series of monthly columns from Climate Home News Editor Megan Rowling. They are exclusively available to Pro subscribers.
The deadly flash flood that thundered down Nepal’s Bhote Koshi valley a month ago may have been hard to predict given the complexity of monitoring glacial slopes in the high mountains. But it should come as a surprise to no one that such a disaster could happen in a world set to barrel past the 1.5C warming limit governments agreed to in 2015.
I say this with confidence because even before the ink was dry on the Paris Agreement, former colleagues and I were writing extensively about the dangers posed by accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas. I went back to look at what we covered, often working with local journalists in Pakistan, India and Nepal. It was substantial.
Comment: The response to Nepal’s disaster is a test for global climate institutions
In one story from a conference on climate change and geology, Bill McGuire, a professor who then led the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London, was quoted as saying: “The most likely thing we are going to see soon is an increased level in giant landslides in mountainous terrains, huge collapses, millions of cubic metres of rock.”
That is precisely what unleashed Nepal’s most recent disaster, some 13 years later.
Other articles zoomed in on internationally funded programmes to prevent glacial lake outburst floods; studies warning of the rising risks to downstream communities; and cross-border efforts (or lack of them) to set up monitoring systems. But information has not led to sufficient action.
Falling behind intensifying impactsReporting on climate-related disasters over the past 20 years (it was way back then that UN aid chief John Holmes started referring to extreme weather as the “new normal”) has been a pretty frustrating beat, as things have gotten dramatically worse.
There’s no question that our understanding of the risks has grown hugely – alongside our knowledge of how to protect people and infrastructure in the face of fast-growing threats.
Yet governments and businesses have dragged their feet on adaptation policies and practical measures, even when confronted with the numbers showing it’s far cheaper to prevent and prepare than to clean up and rebuild after a flood or a storm. This intransigence has left a yawning chasm in the world’s ability to deal with climate change-driven impacts.
Let’s call it the adaptation accountability gap.
These days we see the effects all around us – in hospital emergency rooms where workers and older people struggle with heat exhaustion; in campsites and hotels abandoned by holidaymakers fleeing forest fires; in flooded streets piled high with mud, broken furniture and twisted cars.
The only bright side to the growing climate chaos we’re experiencing is that it’s become practically impossible for politicians and corporate bosses to ignore the evidence – and the rising cost to their balance sheets. Voters who can no longer afford to shoulder the economic and social burden of this damage need to let their leaders know time’s up.
1.5C overshoot means adapting differentlyLast week, during Climate Week NYC, I moderated an event packed with experts who work on adapting to climate change – from Nepal to Brazil, from Sierra Leone to the Marshall Islands, and from communities to the top of governments and UN agencies. They spoke of tree-planting to stabilise slopes, heat insurance for informal workers, a climate risk guide for midwives, drought-resistant seeds and solar panels to irrigate farmland along the Nile.
Amid the diversity of experiences and approaches, there were two common threads: first, as underlined by the UN Environment Programme’s new report on overshooting 1.5C, we may have missed the boat to catch up on adaptation as we know it.
With global warming continuing apace, we’ll need to come up with new “transformational” strategies if the coral reefs, ice sheets, oceans and other natural systems on which we rely cross tipping points and unleash cascading consequences. Nepal’s flash flood is being flagged as an example of the kind of disaster that requires a major change in how we think about adaptation.
Second, the investment required to adapt to intensifying climate shocks and stresses can no longer be seen as something to be squeezed out of shrinking foreign aid budgets. There are a growing number of tried-and-tested funds and mechanisms for channelling finance at the local, national and global levels – these must be filled, replenished and used without delay.
Businesses need to get stuck in too, not least to safeguard their assets, operations and profits – but also because in some sectors like agriculture or water there are opportunities for a return. Despite this, there are many activities governments will have no choice but to pay for, such as moving people out of the path of rising seas.
Finance not flowing where neededMikko Ollikainen, who heads up the UN’s pioneering Adaptation Fund for developing countries, told the event the fund has a portfolio of projects worth $1.6 billion but a pipeline waiting to be financed to the tune of $1.8 billion. Yet, in recent years, as needs balloon, donor nations have failed to meet its annual fundraising target of $300 million at COP climate summits.
The chair of the UN climate body for implementation, Julia Gardiner, said she expects to see more pressure on governments at November’s COP31 summit in Türkiye to show how they will meet a goal to triple adaptation finance by 2035 and fill the under-resourced coffers of the fledgling Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD).
Prakriti Dhakal, personal under-secretary to Nepal’s prime minister, speaks at an event on adaptation held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and moderated by Climate Home News, on September 24, 2026 in New York. (Photo@ Photo: Corinna Schutte / United Nations Foundation) Prakriti Dhakal, personal under-secretary to Nepal’s prime minister, speaks at an event on adaptation held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and moderated by Climate Home News, on September 24, 2026 in New York. (Photo@ Photo: Corinna Schutte / United Nations Foundation)Nepal, meanwhile, is still waiting for a formal response to its request to the FRLD for urgent support to tackle the aftermath of the flood. Manjeet Dhakal, a Nepali scientist who advises least-developed countries in the UN climate process, said the disaster – which killed over 1,450 people and left nearly 6,000 missing – cannot be treated as just the latest climate crisis that grabs the headlines before it’s replaced by another.
That was backed up by Prakriti Dhakal, personal under-secretary to Nepal’s prime minister, who has been working closely on the emergency response. She said she had received many condolences and warm words of support during her meetings in New York.
But, she asked, “when you go home, will you continue having that sympathy for us that translates into something rational, something long-term, to strengthen the communities in Nepal?” A fitting response would be for governments to get behind a new Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism, proposed by Nepal’s leader at the UN last week, as one way to start closing the adaptation accountability gap.
The post Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap appeared first on Climate Home News.
Brazil confident new rainforest fund will reach $10bn donor milestone
Brazil’s environment minister says he is “very optimistic” that the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new rainforest fund to channel private and public finance to developing nations – can meet a key $10 billion funding target this year, and is not at risk from his country’s elections next month.
The TFFF, launched by Brazil at COP30 in the Amazon last November and co-led by Norway, is intended as an alternative to traditional grant-based forest finance. The fund aims to raise $125bn in public and private capital, invest it in bond markets, and then pay countries that keep their forests standing from the annual returns. Donor contributions needed to get it going have tailed off after an initial burst.
Speaking to Climate Home News on the sidelines of Climate Week in New York, Brazilian environment minister João Paulo Capobianco pointed out that in less than a year since its official launch, the TFFF has already secured $7.3bn from governments.
“How many other initiatives can say that?” he asked. “Of course, if you have $7 billion, it’s easier for more countries to consider their own contribution. And not just countries – non-governmental organisations also. We are expecting even more support.”
As its initial target, the TFFF aims to raise $10bn in seed capital from governments by the end of 2026, and still needs to fill a gap of $2.7bn. Its backers say that for each dollar in public funding, they can secure $4 from the private sector. Critics say the $10bn goal barely covers the fund’s expenses and would not allow it to make any significant payments to forest countries.
Because setting up its financial architecture, raising the starting capital and making the first investments will take time, experts say the TFFF is unlikely to generate any payments for developing countries before 2028.
Seeking new pledgesCapobianco told Climate Home News that Brazil is still in talks with potential new contributors to the fund, among them China, Korea and Japan, and said he hoped to see more pledges announced at the upcoming biodiversity and climate COPs in October and November. The Netherlands is expected to up its first small contribution and Canada may also come in, according to other sources close to the TFFF.
Because the fund was not created as part of the UN climate talks and is hosted by the World Bank, developing countries can contribute without taking on wider donor responsibilities for climate finance. Brazil and Indonesia – both large emerging rainforest nations – have each pledged $1bn to the TFFF.
Earlier in September, the UK became the latest country to pledge funding – promising a loan of £400 million (about $540 million). Capobianco welcomed the contribution and noted that Britain has also said it will keep “under review” the possibility of putting in more.
Currently the largest donor is Norway, which announced a $3bn pledge last year at COP30 in Belém. However, that pledge came with conditions, among them that the fund must reach $10bn in sponsor capital by 2026, and that Norway’s contribution can’t make up more than 20% of that total. Over the longer term, this means the fund must raise $15bn from governments to unlock Norway’s full investment.
Comment: UK’s budget juggling trick with rainforest loan for bus-fare cap needs transparency
Speaking at a forest finance event in New York, Norway’s environment minister Sigrun Aasland said the country’s pledge was made not “only out of solidarity but because of shared interests”, adding that protecting rainforests is critical for climate and biodiversity goals as well as for national security.
“Tropical deforestation matters to people in the Amazon and in the Congo. But let’s not forget that it also matters to global food production and to the cost of living in Oslo or in London,” she said.
At the event, Guyana’s minister of natural resources Vickram Bharrat said the TFFF is “one in a menu of options” to finance forest protection in developing countries. He added that to boost its capital “maybe we should put some amount of pressure on oil companies to contribute to the fund”.
Upcoming election “not a risk”Brazil, which has been pivotal to getting the fund off the ground, is now heading into a national election that could see the country swing back to an anti-climate stance if right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro beats current left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Capobianco, however, said the election result does not pose a risk to the TFFF.
“It’s a global initiative, not a Brazilian initiative. We proposed the first idea, but nowadays it’s a global initiative,” he said. “We believe the investor countries and the tropical countries together have the possibility to continue this process.”
In Brazil, the first round of voting is scheduled for Sunday, October 4. If no candidate wins more than 50% of valid votes, a run-off ballot will take place on October 25.
COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans
In July, the TFFF board adopted a charter, which outlines the instrument’s objectives and values, including that 20% of the payments made to tropical countries will go directly to Indigenous people and local communities.
The charter also says the TFFF board may comprise up to 12 member countries during the initial phase. Currently, seven seats are filled by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Germany, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Indonesia.
The board has also formally incorporated the Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF) – the TFFF’s investment arm that will trade bonds in financial markets – hosted in Luxembourg.
The post Brazil confident new rainforest fund will reach $10bn donor milestone appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 must aim higher to cut emissions from the use of materials
Patrick Schröder is a senior research fellow at Chatham House’s Environment and Society Centre.
A climate summit serious about implementation cannot afford to leave major emissions reductions off the table. Yet, that is the risk COP31 faces unless it makes reducing raw material use central to the way countries decarbonise their economies.
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last week, COP31 host Türkiye laid out proposals to accelerate emissions cuts in the next decade. Its plans include global goals to increase the share of recycled products in material use to at least 15% (up from 6.9% in 2025) and halve waste generation by 2035.
COP31 offers an opportunity to connect efforts to improve material circularity with stronger national climate commitments and mitigation pathways. But these targets could be a lot more ambitious.
The case for circularityThe Paris Agreement cannot be delivered through cleaner electricity alone. We must also reduce the emissions that are embedded in the way we extract resources, manufacture products, build infrastructure and dispose of waste.
Circularity principles are pivotal to credible mitigation pathways: designing technologies and products to last, repairing and reusing them, and reducing demand for virgin resources.
The scale of the opportunity is striking. A recent European Environment Agency review found that adopting such principles could deliver average global emissions reductions potential of 52% in the waste sector against a business-as-usual scenario, 48% in construction and buildings, 28% in transport and mobility, 26% in industry and 24% in agriculture.
These figures make a compelling case for raising circularity ambitions across the economy, offering the promise of far more than better recycling bins.
In fact, recycling minerals used in cleantech equipment, for example, illustrate the extent of the emissions savings available. The carbon footprint of minerals and metals recovered from secondary sources is up to 80% lower than those produced from new mining and processing, according to the International Energy Agency.
A major EU-funded project estimates that recovered materials could substitute up to 56% of Europe’s primary critical raw material requirements by 2050, provided they achieve the necessary quality. The main takeaway goes beyond Europe: yesterday’s products can become tomorrow’s strategic resources while mitigating climate change.
In this light, a target to increase the share of recovered material use to 15% isn’t enough.
The evidence-based Circularity Gap Report found a 17% target by 2032 is possible and could unlock additional emissions reductions amounting to several gigatonnes of CO2.
Reducing material demandA higher circularity metric is only part of the answer, however. An economy can increase its recycling rate at the same time as extracting more primary materials if total material demand keeps growing.
The tougher issue governments need to address is identifying what reductions in primary material use are needed.
The Circularity Gap Report uses an indicative benchmark of eight tonnes of virgin materials consumed per person annually. This is already being translated into policy: Germany’s 2024 circular economy strategy aims to reduce primary resource consumption, with the German Federal Environment Agency identifying six to eight tonnes per person as an ambitious target.
An engineer walks past a pump at the battery recycling pilot plant installed in the Eramet Research & Innovation center in Trappes, near Paris, France (Photo: REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes)Reducing primary material demand will require a closer integration of energy and resource policies. Efficient EVs charged with solar power can complement better public transport and walkable cities, while batteries designed to be repaired and reused for stationary energy storage before being recycled will reduce the materials footprint of transport and clean energy services.
Coordinated infrastructure development and urban planning can prevent unnecessary overbuild, while renovating existing building stock reduces demand for new steel, cement and aluminium, which are emissions-intensive to produce. Connecting industrial waste heat to district heating networks can further reduce energy demand and emissions.
What governments should agree at COP31COP31 can translate this approach into three concrete commitments.
First, governments should agree a stronger circularity ambition, supported by material-footprint indicators and milestones. The presidency should seek recognition of these priorities in negotiated outcomes, alongside concrete delivery partnerships under its COP31 Action Agenda.
Second, countries should include quantified circular economy measures in their updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and implementation plans. Such measures should include reuse, material efficiency and circularity targets, as well as transparent estimates of emissions savings that avoid double counting across sectors. By the end of 2025, countries had developed 101 national circular economy roadmaps and action plans, yet these often remained disconnected from their NDCs.
Third, climate finance should support the delivery of circular solutions such as material recovery at scale, investments into circular critical mineral value chains beyond mining, developing a circular plastics economy, and designing buildings and cities that support material reuse. Developing countries need technology, affordable finance and support to deliver these ambitions, including for the informal workers whose livelihoods depend on recovering and recycling materials.
The test for COP31 is to reach an agreement that can start the transformation of our production and consumption systems and how they are financed.
A headline circularity target will achieve little without policies that address absolute resource demand and deliver measurable emissions cuts. But COP31 offers an opportunity to make circularity a central element of climate policy, with targets strong enough to matter and institutions equipped to deliver them.
The post COP31 must aim higher to cut emissions from the use of materials appeared first on Climate Home News.
As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers
Kaveh Zahedi is Assistant Director-General and Director of the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
An exceptional El Niño is building. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says it has intensified to very strong levels and is likely to last at least through February 2027. If its current trajectory holds, it could become stronger than anything seen since WMO monitoring began four decades ago.
That is bad news for agriculture. El Niño – a naturally occurring weather phenomenon – can scramble rainfall patterns across the world, bringing drought to some regions and floods to others. And this time it is unfolding against the backdrop of a significantly hotter climate, with farmers already contending with unreliable growing seasons, extreme heat and less predictable rainfall because of global warming.
El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027
We are seeing the consequences already. In Sri Lanka, drought linked to El Niño has dried wells and reservoirs and cut into crops and farmer incomes. Indonesia is experiencing its worst wildfire season in 11 years, with prolonged drought and extreme heat exacerbated by El Niño. And in Peru, authorities are preparing for the opposite extreme: intense rains, flooding and landslides which the national civil-defence agency says could affect around 1.2 million people.
These impacts will multiply as El Niño intensifies.
And yet, just as the risks to food production are rising, the money available to help farmers withstand them is shrinking.
10% funding decline in 2024A forthcoming analysis from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that climate-related development finance for agrifood systems is moving in the wrong direction. In 2024, the latest year for which data is available, it fell by 10 percent compared with a 2 percent overall decline. The sectors that put food on our tables — crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries — received just 5 percent.
Yet this is precisely the moment when climate investment in agriculture needs to grow, not shrink. It can help communities adapt, build resilience and protect food security, while unlocking larger flows of public and private finance. Agriculture feeds us, supports the livelihoods of well over a billion people, and is often the first sector hit by drought, floods and extreme heat. Cutting that investment now is a false economy.
One failed harvest can plant the seed for the next crisis, forcing farmers to eat the seed they have saved for planting, sell livestock or tools, or take on debt. It can also deepen food insecurity, disrupt supply chains and drive up prices, showing up months later in supermarket aisles far away.
Comment: A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready?
The Central American Dry Corridor, stretching through much of the region, shows both how exposed farmers are, and what investment can do. Based on an analysis of 41 years of satellite observations, FAO finds that some crop and pasture areas there face more than a 50 percent chance of agricultural drought over the coming months.
About half of Central America’s 1.9 million producers of maize, beans and other basic grains live in the Dry Corridor. Many grow food both for sale and for their own families. When a harvest fails, they lose both income and dinner.
El Salvador project conserves water and soilIn El Salvador, which lies within the Dry Corridor, more than 50,000 farmers have adopted practices to better withstand drought and increasingly unreliable rainfall through RECLIMA, a project financed by the Green Climate Fund and implemented by FAO in partnership with the government of El Salvador. It has substantial national co-financing, including from the country’s Environmental Investment Fund.
El Niño can intensify El Salvador’s annual mid-season dry spell, known as the canícula, turning it into a longer, harsher drought just as maize needs water most.
RECLIMA promoters carry out the construction of hillside ditches to optimise water infiltration and minimise the loss of fertile topsoil, thereby strengthening the climate resilience of their local livelihoods in Santiago de María, Usulután North, El Salvador, June 4, 2025. (Photo: © FAO / Mario Araujo) RECLIMA promoters carry out the construction of hillside ditches to optimise water infiltration and minimise the loss of fertile topsoil, thereby strengthening the climate resilience of their local livelihoods in Santiago de María, Usulután North, El Salvador, June 4, 2025. (Photo: © FAO / Mario Araujo)For María Cristina Corvera de López, a second-generation farmer in rural Nahualapa, adapting means changing how every drop of rain is captured and used. She plants trees alongside her crops to provide shade and minimise evaporation and uses simple irrigation channels and a homemade drip system to conserve water. Instead of burning stalks, leaves and husks after harvest, as generations before her did, she turns them into mulch to hold moisture in the soil.
“The effects of climate change are a constant challenge,” she says. But the new techniques have made her farm more resilient to El Niño as well. Where she once harvested about 50 bags of maize per acre, she now gets around 80, even during droughts. It’s enough to feed her family and sell the surplus.
Managing risk now cuts future costsTogether, these adaptations can mean the difference between losing a crop and getting through a dry season with enough food, seed and income to plant again. They are also the result of climate finance invested before disaster strikes.
RECLIMA shows what that kind of adaptation investment can buy. Adaptation accounted for 45 percent of climate-related development finance to agrifood systems in 2024, and multilateral development banks are directing more agricultural finance towards resilience. That shift reflects a growing recognition that adaptation is a form of risk management, not just a development cost.
We need much more of it. The same investments that help farmers withstand El Niño also enable them to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future. Cutting investment in the people who produce our food just as climate risks intensify does not save money. It simply pushes a much larger bill into the next harvest, the next food crisis, and the next El Niño.
The post As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 attendees told not to interfere in Türkiye’s “internal affairs”
Participants at COP31 in Antalya will have a “duty” not to interfere in Türkiye’s internal affairs under the country’s hosting deal with the UN, reviving a clause dropped for last year’s climate summit in Brazil that human rights groups warn could put activists at risk.
Türkiye has faced growing criticism from human rights groups over the jailing of opposition figures, journalists and activists and imposed a blanket protest ban around July’s summit of the NATO military alliance in Ankara.
The contested provision is included in the binding agreement between the UN climate secretariat and the Turkish government that sets out responsibilities over logistical arrangements and details participants’ rights and obligations.
The document, signed in June but only made public on Wednesday, gives accredited COP31 attendees immunity from legal action over what they say, write or do in connection with the conference. Climate Home News understands that this safeguard can be applied to what takes place both inside and, in certain circumstances, outside of the UN-controlled COP “Blue Zone”. For the first time, this protection explicitly continues after the summit ends.
Turkish riot police arrested protesters during the anti NATO protest on July 7, 2026 in Ankara, Turkey. (Photo by Sedat Suna/Getty Images)But participants enjoying these “privileges and immunities” also have a duty to respect Türkiye’s laws and regulations and not to interfere in its internal affairs, the agreement states. Rights groups fear its wide-ranging formulation could be used to discourage criticism of the host government.
Climate Home News understands that whether an action is covered by the immunity or infringes on the host’s internal affairs would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with close coordination between the country’s authorities and the UN climate change body.
A separate provision states that immunity shall be waived where the UN believes it would “impede the course of justice”.
‘Chilling effect’Those same provisions featured in the host country agreements for COP28 in the United Arab Emirates and COP29 in Azerbaijan, both regarded as authoritarian regimes, before being dropped for COP30 in Brazil.
Ann Harrison, climate justice policy advisor at Amnesty International, said it is “extremely disappointing” that the COP31 agreement re-introduced clauses that could “hinder the ability of human rights defenders and civil society organisations to conduct their work safely”.
COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment
She added the provisions could have a “wider chilling effect” on rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, given concerns over the human rights situation in Türkiye, including laws that “have shrunk civic space” and their “abusive” implementation by authorities.
The UN climate change body declined to comment.
Rights groups have documented blanket protest bans, unlawful use of force by the police and prosecutions of journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers across Türkiye in the last year.
Arrests and protest bansLast July, environmental activist Esra Işık was sentenced to more than two years for “resisting” a public official over what Amnesty International described as a peaceful protest against an urgent expropriation order linked to the expansion of coal mining in south-western Türkiye. She is appealing the conviction.
Ahead of a summit of the NATO alliance in the capital Ankara in July, authorities put in place a 13-day blanket ban on demonstrations, citing “national security”, and arrested over 200 people. Human Rights Watch said the crackdown showed Türkiye’s “ruthless intolerance of freedom of speech and assembly”.
Earlier this month, Turkish police detained dozens of people as part of what rights groups described as the government’s widening crackdown on LGBTQ+ activists and venues.
Questioned by media as to how he would guarantee the right to protest at COP31, Kurum said earlier in September that his team would “try to meet” any request they receive from civil society and give them “a free space to express themselves”.
“Don’t worry, thinking you will not be able to voice your opinions or really share your thoughts,” he said in an attempt to reassure campaigners, adding that he had put former deputy environment minister Mehmet Birpinar in charge of liaising with civil society.
Civic space neededCamilla Pollera, human rights and climate change campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said meaningful participation at COP31 is fundamental to the legitimacy of climate action.
“At a climate summit, civil society participation necessarily includes being present, speaking out, scrutinising governments’ decisions and climate policies, and advocating for communities most vulnerable to climate change,” she added.
Thousands march in a COP30 protest calling for climate justice and protection of the Amazon among other things in Belem, Brazil on November 15, 2025. (Photo: Mariel Lozada/Climate Home News)At last year’s COP30 summit, thousands of Indigenous people and climate activists peacefully marched through the Amazonian city of Belém in the first major demonstration outside the UN venue in four years. Smaller-scale demonstrations were largely confined to the “Blue Zone” at COP27 in Egypt, COP28 in the UAE and COP29 in Azerbaijan.
In two other separate incidents in Belém, members of the Munduruku tribe blocked access to the conference centre for hours, demanding an end to development projects in their ancestral land, and protesters stormed through the venue clashing with UN security officials.
The COP31 hosting agreement keeps some of the safeguards previously hailed by civil society groups. The government and the UN secretariat commit to upholding “the fundamental human rights” of all participants in the agreement’s preamble.
Under the deal, Türkiye also needs to ensure that security personnel follow “the highest ethical and professional standards and are expected to behave with integrity and respect”.
The post COP31 attendees told not to interfere in Türkiye’s “internal affairs” appeared first on Climate Home News.
Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood
As rising seas submerge growing swathes of land, countries that lose territory should still keep their national boundaries, sovereign rights and UN membership, according to a political declaration adopted at the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday.
The declaration, which was championed by climate-vulnerable small island states, affirms “the presumption in favour of continued statehood” in the face of sea level rise fuelled by climate change, and urges countries to work together to assist communities affected by encroaching oceans.
Speaking at a high-level UN meeting to address the existential threats posed by sea level rise, Cabo Verde’s Prime Minister Francisco Carvalho, one of the initiative’s co-facilitators along with Australia, said the adoption of the text by consensus sends “a message of hope”.
“This declaration has a very special meaning. For us, sea level rise is neither a distant threat nor a theoretical concern,” he said, adding that rising seas put at risk key infrastructure, water resources and economic growth in small island states.
In the Pacific, sea levels have risen at twice the global rate, dramatically increasing coastal flooding events from two to 20 a year in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and from zero to 102 events per year in American Samoa, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Surangel Whipps Jr., president of the Pacific island of Palau, said the summit in New York represents a “moment of international solidarity”, and highlighted that small island states will remain permanent members of the UN.
Declaration recognises statehoodAn advisory opinion by the world’s top maritime court, the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), first upheld in 2024 that countries do not have to shrink their maritime borders even if they lose land territory due to sea level rise. This was reiterated by the International Court of Justice in last year’s landmark ruling on the climate obligations of states.
The new declaration endorsed by all governments at the UN General Assembly stresses that sea level rise “is not a distant scenario but a real and lived experience for many”, and notes that international law must be implemented in global responses to rising seas.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the “milestone must now be translated into action”, adding that the declaration should encourage an “ongoing dialogue” at the “highest possible level” leading to practical outcomes. Pacific islands have proposed an international treaty on sea level rise that would provide more legal certainty.
“Those on the frontlines must be front and centre on every decision. We cannot allow countries and cultures to vanish beneath the waves,” he said. “The SOS has gone out. The world must answer.”
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
Goodwin Friday, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, said measures to protect vulnerable states will require adequate finance. “Investing in resilience now is more cost-effective than paying the far greater price for loss and damage later,” he added.
Championed by Australia’s COP31 co-presidency, Pacific islands have sought to put adaptation to sea level rise and ocean conservation at the top of the political agenda by inviting world leaders to attend the pre-COP31 summit co-hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu in October.
Tuvalu will also host the second global fossil fuel phase-out summit in April 2027, after around 60 governments met this year in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss ending their dependence on coal, oil and gas.
“Our coastlines, our reefs and our communities are living with the consequences of fossil fuel dependence every day, and our people have earned the right to help shape the way forward,” Lynda Tabuya, Fiji’s climate minister, said in a statement announcing details of the conference.
Secretary-General António Guterres attending the meeting on addressing the existential threats posed by sea level rise. (Photo: UN Photo/Manuel Elías) Ocean monitoring gets a boost in New YorkAmid record-breaking marine heat and seas rising at unprecedented speed, governments in New York announced new commitments to protect the world’s ocean, as efforts to bolster marine ecosystems and coastal communities rise up the political agenda.
On Wednesday, the EU and Canada announced more funding for a new Europe-led ocean monitoring system called OceanEye, launched in the aftermath of a failed attempt by the Trump administration to dismantle the largest existing network of deep-sea observatories.
During an event at UN headquarters in New York, EU President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced around $163 million in new funding for the initiative, with the EU pledging €92 million ($105m) on top of existing seed funding and Canada pledging C$82 million (US$58m) over five years.
According to an EU statement, while OceanEye will collaborate with the Global Ocean Observing System, that network “remains vulnerable to financial shortfalls and geopolitical disruptions”. A group of 30 countries from Europe, Africa and the Americas joined an international initiative in support of OceanEye, including large coastal nations like Brazil, Namibia and Mexico.
Von der Leyen said OceanEye “can make us the leading ocean data provider in a matter of years”, including by launching new satellites and installing new observatories in the deep ocean. “From outer space to the deepest ocean, our funding helps us keep watch beneath the waves,” she added.
Carney said the initiative would help protect Canada’s Arctic region with real-time monitoring operating year-round. “We can’t protect what we can’t see,” he said, also highlighting that Canada had expanded conservation of its ocean territory from 1% a decade ago to 15% now.
In New York, a group of 19 countries said they are either developing or implementing plans to sustainably manage all of their ocean territory, with 12 new nations joining the initiative. In a joint communiqué, they called on more countries to sign up ahead of COP31.
Warnings of El Niño-fuelled extreme heatScientists and world leaders have raised the alarm over this year’s record-breaking marine temperatures, which have persisted above historical peaks for more than 100 days as the naturally occurring El Niño phenomenon intensifies in the Pacific.
Extreme ocean heat could become a threat to coastal ecosystems and communities, experts fear. Water temperatures 1.5C above normal levels have also rapidly fuelled a strong hurricane in the Pacific in recent days.
Despite scientific calls for additional ocean conservation efforts, a report launched this week in New York warned that efforts to protect ocean ecosystems are lagging behind, with only 10% of the global ocean covered by conservation areas and just 3.5% designated as “effectively protected”.
The post Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood appeared first on Climate Home News.
Push for cooking to be part of COP31’s electrification agenda
President William Ruto of Kenya has called for COP31’s electrification agenda – a flagship initiative to accelerate the electrification of the global economy – to include a push for electric cookers to replace polluting firewood and charcoal.
The Turkish and Australian co-hosts of the November summit want governments to sign up to a pledge to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35% globally by 2035 and 50% by 2050. It is currently around 23%.
“We should arrive at COP31 with clean cooking firmly embedded in that electrification and efficiency agenda,” Ruto said during an event on clean cooking organised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the governments of Kenya, Norway and the US at the ongoing UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.
“The kitchen is where the energy transition enters daily lives for nearly one billion people,” the Kenyan president said. He added that schools, hospitals and prisons – as well as homes – need to switch to clean cooking fuels.
COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment
Ruto said that – as well as the climate, health and gender equality benefits of clean cooking – electric cooking can make investment in electricity generation and networks more profitable and ensure households get more value from electricity connections.
LPG or electricity?According to the IEA, about 6% of sub-Saharan African households – overwhelmingly in southern Africa – used electricity to cook in 2024 – while just under a fifth used liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).
Despite being a fossil fuel and worse for indoor air quality than electric cookers, LPG is widely regarded as a clean-cooking fuel as the damage it does to the climate and to health is far less than the firewood and charcoal on which most sub-Saharan Africans rely on.
A new IEA report on electrification found that electric cookstoves are 10% cheaper over their lifetimes than LPG stoves. But they are more expensive upfront so restricted access to finance holds back their adoption, as do power cuts, a lack of access to electricity and cultural preferences.
At the event in New York, some speakers promoted electric cookers while others stressed “technology neutrality”, implying that LPG should be used where appropriate.
People gather near a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder distribution agency as they wait for a supply to be delivered on March 19, 2026 in Lucknow, India (Photo: Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images)UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte was more in the former camp, saying that “clean cooking must be fit for the modern age of energy transitions and the age of electricity” and “genuinely clean and future-facing”, adding that countries can “ride the trends of electrification” to roll out clean cooking.
As disruptions to oil and gas supply chains push up the cost of cooking gas, Kyte asked: “Why should households and governments be locked into solutions that are simply going to be a victim to fossil fuel and price volatility”.
Alexander De Croo, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, said that renewable energy offers the best potential to achieve clean cooking because decentralised clean power can get to everywhere on the African continent.
Echoing Kyte, he added that “[renewables] detaches you from the volatility of fossil fuel that you see today, very often”, adding that it poses a very low level of risk compared with other energy systems and is one of the easiest ways of reducing emissions throughout the world.
But Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said that country realities are different and so the pathways to achieving clean cooking will require different combinations of LPG, electricity, bioenergy and other solutions.
Technology neutralityWith half of the about two billion people lacking access to clean cooking globally living in Africa, the African Union’s commissioner for infrastructure and energy Lerato Mataboge said the continent prioritises “technology neutrality” and does not have a preference for electricity or LPG if either would help achieve clean cooking.
She said national circumstances of African countries must be respected, adding that the continent needs a range of affordable, reliable and safe cooking solutions as well as approaches that allow countries to select technologies that are “appropriate to their resources, infrastructure and household needs”.
She added that financing decisions should not exclude viable solutions “solely because of the energy source from whence they come”. Whatever clean-cooking technology is used, she said that “affordability must extend beyond the purchase of a stove. We must ask if a household can afford the next cylinder refill or the next electricity payment”, she said.
Dola Oluteye, senior fellow in energy and transport policy at the UCL Energy Institute, agreed, telling Climate Home News that – while electric cooking is viable in parts of Africa where reliable electricity, affordable appliances and suitable infrastructure already exist – those conditions remain out of reach for much of the continent.
She warned that making electric cooking the only measure of a clean cooking transition could slow progress in countries where other technologies offer a more immediate solution. “My concern is a purity trap,” Oluteye said.
She pointed to an IEA scenario forecasting that, with clean cooking rolled out quickly, over 60% of people gaining access to clean cooking in Africa from 2024 to 2040 would do so through LPG, compared with 17% through electricity. Bioethanol and biogas combined would account for 11% while advanced biomass cookstoves make up 10%.
Burn Clean-stoves client Loise Wanjiku cooks inside her house at Kachoroba village in Kiambu County, Kenya, August 16, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi)“The intermediate solutions cannot be abandoned while the grid catches up,” she said, but added that if handled well, cooking could be “one of the best things that could happen to African electrification”, providing the predictable demand that gives utilities a reason to invest in electricity networks and reliability.
Amina Mohammed, UN deputy secretary-general and former Nigerian environment minister, warned at the New York event against repeating the experience of programmes that supplied cooking technologies without adequately considering whether they actually worked for the women expected to use them.
Speaking after Birol, Ruto, US energy secretary Chris Wright and Norwegian international development minister Åsmund Aukrust, Mohammed joked that she was responding to “four men for whom this is a big women’s problem”.
After Birol said that the IEA had been working on the issue for 25 years, Mohammed said the fact that the problem had not been solved in that time was “probably an indictment of the international community on what is supposed to be a huge problem for women and a billion of them”.
The post Push for cooking to be part of COP31’s electrification agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.
Germany unveils plan to end use of fossil fuels in energy sector by 2045
Germany wants to stop using fossil fuels in its energy sector by 2045 at the latest, with plans for how to do that set out in the country’s transition roadmap published on Wednesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
The blueprint focuses on electrifying transport, home heating and industry, while gradually replacing fossil fuel power generation with renewables. Renewables supplied about 55% of Germany’s electricity last year and the government wants that to reach at least 80% by 2030.
All coal-fired power stations – which generated almost a quarter of Germany’s electricity in 2025 – must close by 2038 at the latest. That deadline has been set in German law since 2020, but the roadmap says the government is exploring the possibility of bringing the end date forward to 2035.
New gas-fired plants that receive state funding must be “hydrogen-ready” and run on climate-neutral fuels by 2045. The roadmap does not specify what those fuels are but they generally include biofuels and green hydrogen.
At the same time, Berlin wants to install 2,000 more wind turbines and reduce the need for power plants by boosting the use of batteries.
UN SUMMIT LIVE: UN chief says world has tools to end the fossil fuel age
Speaking at the UN chief’s climate summit in New York, environment minister Carsten Schneider said the plan will allow Germany to lower its imports of fossil fuels and reduce its dependence on “supply chains vulnerable to geopolitical crisis” – and called on more countries to do the same.
“It is important to ensure that transitioning away from fossil fuels remains high up on the international agenda,” he said, adding that Germany would seek to “improve the overall framework” for mobilising more funds to help developing countries phase out fossil fuels.
“We want to enable countries to chart their own course towards energy security and prosperity,” he said.
On Tuesday, addressing the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged all countries to submit national roadmaps to end the production and consumption of fossil fuels with “clear timelines and protection for affected workers and communities”.
A group of around 80 countries led a failed push at last year’s COP30 in Belém to create a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels. While the initiative was not adopted at the summit, some countries like France and the Netherlands opted to move forward with their own national plans.
Subsidies for EVs and heat pumpsTo cut reliance on petrol for transport, the German government says it will make available 2.8 billion euros to subsidise the cost of buying electric vehicles for lower and middle income households.
Official projections suggest that by 2035, every new car sold in Germany will be electric, according to the document. Freight, shipping and aviation are expected to shift to a mix of electric vehicles, “sustainable” biofuels and hydrogen-based fuels.
For homes, the roadmap relies mainly on replacing gas and oil boilers with heat pumps, backed by state subsidies. Anyone who installs a new gas or oil heating system will have to use a rising share of “climate-neutral fuels” from 2029, reaching 60% by 2040. A proposed quota would require fuel suppliers to switch entirely to climate-neutral heating fuels from 2045.
Industry is expected to decarbonise by switching to electricity and hydrogen, becoming more energy efficient, and capturing carbon where emissions are hard to avoid.
UN backs push to upgrade grids slowing clean power uptake in Africa and SE Asia
Schneider said the roadmap is not just a climate strategy, but also an economic policy strategy. “The money we currently spend on importing oil and gas will increasingly flow into local value creation,” he added in a written statement. “Moving away from fossil fuels combines independence, affordability and climate protection”.
In 2024, Germany spent about 76 billion euros on importing fossil fuels. Around two-thirds of that went on oil and petroleum products, and the rest on gas and coal.
Campaigners call for faster phase-outReactions to the roadmap from analysts and campaigners were mixed – both praising the country’s initiative for launching its plan voluntarily but also calling for an even faster fossil fuel phase-out.
Jennifer Morgan, former German climate envoy, said the roadmap is a “welcome step” but to truly deliver, the strategy should be backed by “a faster, more deliberate and just phase-out, paired with the rollout of green electrification”.
Laurie Van Der Burg, public finance lead at campaign group Oil Change International, said Germany deserves credit for publishing the roadmap, but its efforts are “not commensurate with the reality of the crisis, or its responsibility as a wealthy, historic emitter”. She urged the country to end its financing for fossil fuels, strengthen the roadmap and redirect public money toward renewable energy.
Germany is the third European country to publish a national fossil fuel transition roadmap following France and the Netherlands. France has set end dates for coal (2030), oil (2045) and gas (2050), though its plan mostly brings together existing policies. The Dutch government has not set a binding end date for the country’s fossil fuel production and use, indicating only that it should be “minimised” by 2050.
Linda Kalcher, executive director at think-tank Strategic Perspectives, said the targets in the three national roadmaps still fall short of what is needed to achieve energy security, but they still send a powerful message to fossil fuel exporters. “A huge share of the European market is planning for a future in which demand for coal, oil and gas declines,” she added.
The post Germany unveils plan to end use of fossil fuels in energy sector by 2045 appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN Climate Summit: UN chief says world has tools to end fossil fuel age
UN chief António Guterres urged countries to break their dependency on fossil fuels at a climate summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, where host nations Türkiye and Australia set the tone for COP31 and vulnerable countries called for more and faster finance to boost resilience in a warming world.
As the world faces extreme climate impacts turbocharged by a “super El Niño” event and fossil fuel prices soar amid conflict in the Middle East, Guterres said reliance on fossil fuels “wreaks havoc”, and urged governments to boost their renewable energy capacity as a way out.
“Doubling down on oil and gas will only lock in vulnerability for decades. Fortunately, we have a way out. Because the crisis is accelerating – but so are the solutions,” he said.
Reiterating a point made in his farewell speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Guterres urged all countries to submit “credible” national roadmaps to end their production and consumption of coal, oil and gas – “with clear timelines”.
“The G20, responsible for 80 percent of global emissions, must lead. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities must apply. But all countries must raise their ambition,” he added.
Germany plans to end use of fossil fuels in energy sector by 2045
At last year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, a group of some 80 governments led a failed push to develop a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels. Brazil instead will draft a voluntary report to be presented this year ahead of COP31, incorporating views from a range of countries and organisations.
Governments first agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems at COP28 in Dubai in 2023, but have since been unable to agree at UN climate talks on how to move forward with that commitment, as efforts to do so have been effectively blocked by large fossil fuel-producing countries.
The UN chief urged the world to match the accelerating climate crisis “with accelerating action”, by matching the revolution in clean energy with a revolution in finance and rising impacts with rising protection.
“I ask you all to deliver – then over-deliver,” he said. “We are the first generation with the tools to end the fossil fuel age – and the last who can avert climate catastrophe.”
Nepal flood a warning of global impacts to come, says ministerAfter being hit by devastating flash floods last month in its Himalayan region that left around 1,500 people dead and 6,000 missing, Nepal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Shisir Khanal warned the catastrophe is “not merely a local tragedy but a warning to the world of what might be coming next”.
“The crisis has dragged vulnerable communities back into poverty,” Khanal said, adding that the crisis has “shattered the dream of many who saw hope in our steady development path”.
Preliminary assessments estimate that losses could reach up to $5 billion – equivalent to 15% of the country’s GDP or a third of its annual budget. “This is not merely a humanitarian emergency, it’s a development emergency dismantling years of progress,” said Khanal.
He called on the international community to “act not only differently but decisively” by delivering on an existing commitment to double adaptation finance and capitalising the new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage Fund, which currently has only several hundred million dollars to disburse to countries hit hard by climate impacts.
Vulnerable countries, he said, need “scaled-up, front-loaded and accessible climate finance that reaches communities before disaster strikes, not after devastation has already occurred”. For countries like Nepal, “adaptation is not optional; it is a lifeline,” he added.
Comment: The response to Nepal’s disaster is a test for global climate institutions
Khanal also urged countries to double down on efforts to keep the 1.5C global warming goal within reach. “This is a matter of survival for mountain and coastal communities,” he said, calling for universal access to early warning systems, affordable technologies tailored to mountain ecosystems, climate information services and resilient infrastructure.
Sharing a stage with Khanal, the prime minister of Pacific island state Tuvalu, Feleti Teo, said the Nepal flash flood is a testament that the “devastating and indiscriminate” impacts from climate change are no longer a matter for forecasts. “They are happening now and no one country will be spared,” he said.
“The process and modality of access to climate financing must be simple and easily accessible. – particularly for small administrations like Tuvalu. We do not have the luxury of capacity and time to navigate through complex and convoluted procedures,” he added.
Türkiye’s president says countries can’t all move at the same paceTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan urged countries to deliver an “implementation COP” in Antalya, noting that the “devastating floods in Nepal already demonstrate we no longer have time to lose”.
However, he stressed that developing countries cannot be rushed into taking measures outside of their capacity, adding that “in Antalya, we must bring ambition closer to capacity and targets closer to implementation”.
It is “not realistic to expect all countries to move forward all at the same pace”, he added, emphasising that “any proposal that fails to reconcile climate objectives with social and economic realities will be doomed to fail”.
The Turkish COP31 co-presidency has prioritised a voluntary target to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35% by 2035, up from the current level of 23%. Erdoğan also flagged a proposed target to reduce global waste, which is being championed by his wife.
IEA head: Strait of Hormuz pushing countries towards clean energyAs governments prepare for COP31 – where one of the flagship targets will be to boost electricity’s share of global energy consumption to 35% by 2035 – International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Fatih Birol said the Middle East conflict presents an opportunity not seen in years.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, due to tensions between the US and Iran, has led countries to reassess their energy sources and partners, Birol said. Their response, he added, has been in “a big chunk if not all” cases to pick clean energy as the most secure, affordable and green option.
“In the energy world, we have three choices in front of us: shall I choose the most secure option, the most economic energy option or the cleanest? We have to make choices and tradeoffs. When I look at the world today, for the first time in years, all three objectives hit very close to each other,” he said.
An aerial view shows the largest solar plant in Bangladesh, built on a 350-acre site. The plant began to supply electricity from 25 December 2021. The photo was taken from Borodurgapur village of Mongla upazila in Bagerhat October 26, 2023. (Photo: Mushfiqul Alam/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect) An aerial view shows the largest solar plant in Bangladesh, built on a 350-acre site. The plant began to supply electricity from 25 December 2021. The photo was taken from Borodurgapur village of Mongla upazila in Bagerhat October 26, 2023. (Photo: Mushfiqul Alam/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect)The IEA chief said an electrification target at COP31, proposed by Turkiye, would send “a very strong and unmistakable signal to investors, financiers, utilities, governments and beyond”.
“This, in turn, will not only make the world much more secure, and offer a more affordable option to consumers, but at the same time it will bring emissions down, which would be a major outcome and major good news,” he said.
UN backs push to upgrade grids slowing clean power uptake in Africa and SE Asia
His words were borne out by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, who said the closure of the Strait of Hormuz had made the bloc bitterly aware of the effects and the additional costs of its dependence on imported fossil fuels.
She added that Europe has assets in the form of electricity produced from home-grown renewables and nuclear. “This clean electricity gives us independence, energy security, and it is affordable,” she said. Europe already gets 70% of its electricity from clean energies, “but more has to be done”, she added, including better integrating clean power into the energy system.
Europe needs to boost clean energy storage and flexibility, and accelerate grid connections, in order to reach its goal of doubling the share of electricity by 2040, Von der Leyen said.
“With this, Europe could cut its fossil fuel import bill by 260 billion euros a year and invest it in the clean transition,” she added.
Ursula von Der Leyen, President of the European Commission, addresses the High-level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition at the United Nations in New York, September 23, 2026 (UN Photo/Laura Jarriel) Ursula von Der Leyen, President of the European Commission, addresses the High-level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition at the United Nations in New York, September 23, 2026 (UN Photo/Laura Jarriel) Australian PM promotes Pacific climate resilienceAnthony Albanese, Australia’s Prime Minister, whose country is co-hosting the COP31 climate summit in Türkiye, offered firm support to the Pacific region which will host pre-COP discussions next month in Fiji. He called on countries to contribute to the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), a regional climate financing mechanism intended to provide money for community climate action.
Australia has contributed $100 million towards the fund’s goal of reaching a capitalisation of $1.5 billion. So far the PRF has raised $180 million against an interim goal of $500 million by COP31.
“It is a fact that those countries which are least responsible for the rise in emissions and the change in temperatures, such as our Pacific Island family, are those who are most affected by climate change,” he said.
He noted that for island nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, “it is literally an existential threat”. “So we must act, and we must act as a matter of urgency,” he added.
Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr. told the summit that the PRF will allow finance “to go directly to the communities that need it the most”, adding that “speed and agility are essential” for Pacific islands to adapt to extreme climate impacts. The low-lying Marshall Islands, for example, said it had taken 10 years to plan, fund and build a sea wall to protect its people from rising waters – time it does not have.
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
Albanese added that Australia is seeking a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for 2029-30, and if elected, aims to “elevate the importance of climate security, particularly in the Pacific, but more broadly as well”.
He stressed that while the cost of not acting would be “too high”, there are also economic – as well as environmental – benefits from tackling global warming.
“The truth is that it makes good macroeconomic policy to shift to a renewable-led clean energy revolution,” he said, adding that it also helps families. Some 540,000 Australian households have taken up subsidies to install solar panels with battery storage in the past year, he noted, slashing the cost of their power.
UN launches country platforms to support mineral-rich nationsMore than two years after a UN panel of experts called for justice and equity to underpin the development of the mineral supply chains needed for the energy transition, the UN is starting to follow up with concrete action.
On Wednesday, UN chief António Guterres announced that six countries – Guinea, Indonesia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe – will be the first to receive dedicated support to turn their mineral wealth into engines for sustainable industrialisation, job creation and revenue generation so that it “drives local development, with added value remaining there”.
The country support mechanism, launched at the UN Climate Summit, will identify what individual recipient countries need to improve mineral governance, boost value addition and protect environmental and human rights and respond with coordinated technical assistance and capacity building from across the UN system.
Zambia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mulambo Haimbe said the initiative will support the country’s ambition “not simply to produce more, but to create greater value at home through investment, value addition, industrialisation and jobs”.
Booming demand for minerals such as copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earths that are needed to build the equipment the world needs to move away from fossil fuels offer real development opportunities for the countries that hold them. But communities living near extraction sites often shoulder most of the costs while seeing few of the benefits.
The UN panel’s recommendations set out a vision for more just and sustainable mineral value chains. But implementation has been slow to follow.
China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain
China’s deputy UN representative Sun Lei told the climate summit on Wednesday that critical minerals governance is a key issue for the country, which holds a firm grip on the mining and processing of most critical minerals. Last year at COP30 in Belém, China was one of the countries that blocked a mention of the social and environmental risk linked to energy transition minerals.
“All states must strengthen cooperation to build a governance system on critical minerals that is fair, reasonable, open, inclusive, clean and openly beneficial with win-win results,” he said.
Suneeta Kaimal, president and CEO of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, welcomed the announcement of the country platforms, adding that to succeed must be driven by local concerns.
The new support mechanism “could enable countries to lead on the design of strategies, safeguards and policies that will allow them to shift from rule-takers to rule-shapers and unlock prosperity for all their people”, she said.
UK minister defends climate multilateralismAfter hosting a meeting of foreign ministers on Wednesday to discuss climate change as an issue of national security, Britain’s foreign minister Ed Miliband put up a spirited defence of global efforts to tackle climate change and slammed what he called “the defeatists”.
Those, he said, are people who maintain that climate negotiations have been going on for 30-40 years, and nothing has changed, so there’s no point in continuing. “The defeatists, I think, actually are now a bigger problem than the deniers and the delayers” and they should be told they are “wrong”, Miliband said.
He noted that at the time of the failed Copenhagen COP in 2009 the world was headed for warming of 4C or more, while now the prediction has been reduced to around 2.5C. This, while still “very bad”, is proof that multilateralism has worked, he said.
“At a time when it is more under question than it has been for generations, I actually think that the climate efforts that we are making together and the will that I see from countries across the world to tackle this problem should give us confidence and optimism about the future,” he argued.
The post UN Climate Summit: UN chief says world has tools to end fossil fuel age appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN backs push to upgrade grids slowing clean power uptake in Africa and SE Asia
The UN has rallied behind plans to accelerate investment in electricity infrastructure in Africa and Southeast Asia, boosting efforts to tackle one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the shift to clean energy.
UN boss António Guterres launched the Global Grids Accelerator on the sidelines of the UN Climate Summit in New York on Wednesday. The initiative aims to turn government plans to expand and modernise grids into investment-ready projects and bring together the expertise, finance and support needed to build them.
Guterres said the accelerator will help countries build “the arteries of the energy transition” to expand energy access, strengthen energy security and power growth in developing countries.
The initiative will not create a new financing institution, the UN said, and no additional funding to boost grid upgrades was announced. Instead, it will act as a broker by bringing together UN agencies, development banks, investors and utilities around grid priorities identified by governments.
Renewable energy deployment is happening at record speed but the infrastructure required to move clean electricity from where it is generated to consumers is not keeping pace. As a result, record amounts of green electricity that cannot be absorbed by the grid are being wasted.
In addition, more than 2,500 GW of renewable projects – nearly twice the electricity generation capacity of the US – are currently stuck in queues worldwide, waiting to connect to the grid, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Grid bottlenecksTo meet global climate goals and cut emissions from fossil fuels, electricity demand needs to grow orders of magnitude faster in the next decade than it did in the last. The COP31 presidency has called on governments to endorse a pledge to raise electricity’s share of final energy consumption from 23% today to 35% by 2035.
Grids are essential to support this surge in electricity demand as sectors such as transport, heating and cooling electrify.
The lack of adequate infrastructure to transport electricity can have a major negative impact on economic development by delaying new power generation, slowing down efforts to expand access to electricity and hampering industrial growth.
In contrast, strong grids can help countries connect their renewable energy potential to surging power demand, strengthen energy security and support new industries and job creation.
Electricity pylons in Kibuye, Rwanda (Photo by Luke Dray/Getty Images)Meeting national climate goals requires adding or refurbishing more than 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040 – equivalent to roughly the size of today’s entire global network, according to the IEA. Technologies can also help increase the capacity of existing grid infrastructure. The watchdog estimates that annual grid investments need to increase by around 50% by 2030 to meet growing electricity demand.
The IEA has warned that the mismatch between the time it takes to build new power grids – 5 to 15 years – and the much faster buildout of renewable projects, EV charging infrastructure or data centres, makes upgrading grids an urgent task to prevent slowing down the energy transition.
Matching expertise and finance to projectsAt COP29 in 2024, more than 60 countries committed to collectively build more than 25 million kilometres of additional grid infrastructure by 2030.
But a key barrier is turning long-term and often complex plans to overhaul electricity infrastructure into viable projects that can be matched to funding.
The accelerator aims to bring together expertise from across the UN system to support countries navigate this fragmented landscape and access the financing they need.
In Africa, the accelerator will focus on delivering national priorities to expand grid infrastructure and regional interconnections to expand access to reliable and affordable electricity. It will build on existing initiatives such as Mission 300, which aims to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.
In Southeast Asia, the accelerator will support initiatives such as the ASEAN Power Grid, which aims to connect different countries’ electricity networks and enable cross-border power trading to meet growing power demand and boost energy security.
Across the region, inadequate grids are threatening billions of dollars in clean energy investment. The lack of grid capacity is part of the reason about 50% to 60% of renewable energy projects in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia were cancelled or stalled between 2021 and 2025.
Alexander De Croo, the administrator of UNDP, said making grids projects investable must be a priority, noting that grids require a big upfront investment but deliver “a stable return over the long-term”.
The post UN backs push to upgrade grids slowing clean power uptake in Africa and SE Asia appeared first on Climate Home News.
Despite “real progress”, third of countries still lack early warning systems
A United Nations initiative to ensure everyone on earth is protected by a multi-hazard early warning system (MHEWS) “has made real progress” but “too many people are still left exposed,” according to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
Since Guterres launched the Early Warning Systems for All goal in 2022, the number of countries reporting that they have an MHEWS has increased from 113 to 136, the UN announced on Wednesday. Around 60 nations are still not covered 15 months ahead of the UN’s 2027 deadline.
“We must close the remaining gaps, reach every country, and ensure that by the end of 2027, every person on earth is protected”, outgoing UN chief Guterres said.
The UN said the largest gaps in coverage are mainly among the world’s least developed countries, small island developing states and fragile and conflict-affected nations. These countries are also among those hardest hit by climate change.
Guterres said that early warning systems “save lives, protect livelihoods and shield communities from disaster”, highlighting the Colombian Red Cross’s response to drought in June as an example.
At an event on the initiative in New York on Monday, Huw Beynon from the UN Disaster Risk Reduction Office said that the systems had helped during floods in Kenya last year and when recent cyclones hit Madagascar.
Jagan Chapagain, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said in a statement that “reaching more people with early warnings is a success worth celebrating”.
Simple warnings not enoughThe Early Warning Systems for All initiative supports about 160 countries and 31 countries have developed national roadmaps to install early warning systems. But Beynon said that, while most countries have a MHEWS, most also report limited capacity. “So you might have a warning disseminated but it’s not leading to the right action,” he said.
Speaking alongside Beynon, Nepali climate negotiator Manjeet Dhakal gave a recent example of this. He said Nepali authorities had sent text messages to 600,000 people – including him – who were in, or had recently been in, an area where flooding was likely.
Residents walk along a muddy road following flash floods on August 27, 2026 in Trishuli, Nepal. (Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)The flood, caused by a glacial rock-ice collapse, swept through the valley at huge speed, with a wave at least 30 metres above the river, killing thousands. But the messages did not “articulate the magnitude of this disaster”, he said, adding “these are humans who have to craft that message and that scale of disaster has never [previously] occurred”. The Straits Times has reported that these messages did not say how fast or big the flood would be and were sent too late for many.
When heavy rainfall led to floods in the Spanish city of Valencia in 2024, some text messages with warnings were only sent out after flooding had started and did not give residents clear instructions of how to act, such as moving to higher floors and not driving. Many Valencians drowned in their cars or in the underground garages of their apartment blocks, according to official reports.
Remaining barriersRohini Kohli, the UN Development Programme’s head of climate adaptation policy, told Monday’s New York event that a challenge for MHEWS in developing countries is a lack of foundational data.
This can include equipment to measure physical factors like rainfall, river levels and soil moisture or human factors like where peoples homes or power lines are located. The UN’s Systematic Observations Financing Facility is trying to bridge this “critical gap”, she said.
Another barrier, Kohli said, is that acting on early warnings is often the responsibility of local rather than national authorities and they need the capacity to respond in the right way. “Like most adaptation, local leadership has to be at the centre for design and delivery,” she said.
The IFRC’s Chapagain said that as “warnings alone are not enough”, authorities should “invest in trusted local actors so that communities can turn information into action and become agents of their own resilience, not simply recipients of alerts. Early action is what makes early warnings work.”
Kohli added that a lack of finance was also a problem for developing countries. She cited the UN’s adaptation gap report, which found that developing countries will need well over $300 billion a year by 2035 to adapt to climate change while they are currently receiving less than a tenth of that figure.
In 2022, the World Meteorological Organisation estimated that meeting the early warning systems for all goal would require a total of $1.5 billion.
The post Despite “real progress”, third of countries still lack early warning systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
The response to Nepal’s disaster is a test for global climate institutions
Dharam R Uprety is head of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.
The climate crisis didn’t just knock at our doorstep. It has smashed through homes, demolished critical roads, and caused untold grief for millions of Nepali people. It has now been nearly a month since a wall of ice, rock, and water tore through the Bhote Koshi river system. The death toll has risen to nearly 1,500 people with 5,800 more still missing.
Nepal needs sustained assistance from the international community.
We are staring at a reconstruction bill of at least $5 billion, as we laid out in our letter to the co-chairs of the Board of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage on September 1. This constitutes a tenth of our entire economy, and we cannot afford to be saddled with greater loans. We asked the Board to treat the Bhote Koshi disaster as the special case that it is: sudden, unprecedented and exceptional.
The Loss and Damage fund currently holds $820 million in pledges, yet not a single dollar has yet been disbursed for the nearly $3 billion in requests. Its next scheduled meeting is not until December, in Manila. Nepal cannot wait that long, and neither can the next country this happens to.
As loss and damage fund stalls, Nepal crowdfunds flood relief
The tragedy must also serve as a wake up call for immediate climate action. A new study from the World Weather Attribution has found that global warming was a likely contributing factor for the avalanche.
Bandaid solutions are no longer enough; the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels and accelerate investment in clean sources of energy.
Disproportionate impactThe Nepal government has set an ambitious target to replace petrol/diesel vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs) by 2031. The country also already gets most of its electricity from clean sources, with plans for further expansion within the next decade. Our forest cover has grown to 46 percent.
Nepal contributes less than 0.1 percent of the planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Major polluters need to step up their efforts, so that countries like mine stop bearing a disproportionate impact.
Global emissions are still rising, while countries such as the US, the UK, Australia and several others have drastically reduced the foreign aid that they provide to the rest of the world. And at the same time, they are continuing to increase their fossil fuel production. That is not only unjust, it is also unsustainable for a planet that is already showing us how little room for error remains.
What happened in Bhote Koshi is not unique to the Hindu Kush Himalaya. In May 2025, a nearly identical disaster buried the Swiss village of Blatten, when a rock and ice avalanche tore off the Birch Glacier above it. A study published this month found the avalanche needed almost no friction to travel as far and as fast as it did, a sign of just how destabilised that mountainside had become.
In the Arctic, researchers reported this week that thawing permafrost on the Norwegian island of Jan Mayen turned an ordinary magnitude 6.5 earthquake into the island’s first major glacier rock avalanche in 40 years, the kind of tremor that would once have caused only minor disruption.
From the Alps to the Arctic to the Himalaya, the same warming is loosening the ice and rock that used to hold these mountains together. The next Bhote Koshi could strike anywhere that grip is failing.
Growing focus on mountains in UN climate processThis is not the first time we have tried to get the world’s attention on the mountain ecosystem. At COP30 in Belem last November, Nepal led the push to put mountains on the global climate agenda for the first time, through our Sagarmatha to Belém initiative.
That effort got mountain ecosystems written into the COP30 cover decision and the Global Goal on Adaptation, marking the strongest visibility mountain issues have ever received at the UN climate process. We also secured the first Annual Dialogue on Mountains and Climate Change, which was held at the UN climate talks in June this year at Bonn.
We used COP30 as a platform to warn that retreating glaciers and destabilised mountain systems were not a distant risk. Ten months later, that warning became the Bhote Koshi disaster.
The UN General Assembly and upcoming UN climate talks in Antalya will be two fora for world leaders to show solidarity and more importantly, show how they intend to walk the talk.
Nepal flood destruction shows “limits to adaptation”, scientists say
In the near-term, the Loss and Damage board has been requested to hold an emergency meeting to consider Nepal’s difficult situation. Several nations have generously stepped up to offer physical relief and direct aid. This is greatly welcome. Our needs, unfortunately, far exceed that.
Every impacted village needs a chance to rebuild, children need to see their schools back in operation, and the roads that are the lifeline of communities require urgent reconstruction. Some things may have been lost permanently, but through investment in monitoring and early warning systems, the government of Nepal can try to ensure a future event does not unfold yet another unimaginable tragedy.
This was not just someone else’s disaster that affected the people of Dhading, Rasuwa, and Nuwakot. It is a shared emergency, across Nepal and the world over as more and more communities become victims to a crisis they did not create. This is why, even as we cope with relief and rescue efforts, we are taking the time to present data and share our needs around this climate injustice.
The post The response to Nepal’s disaster is a test for global climate institutions appeared first on Climate Home News.
Women are on deck – it’s time they steered
Susana Malcorra is president and founder of GWL Voices and former foreign minister of Argentina. Mary Robinson is a GWL Voices member, former UN human rights commissioner and former Irish president.
Earth has just had the hottest August since records began. Wildfires tore through Europe, North America and Asia, killing dozens, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes, and burning more than a million acres of land.
In Nepal, flash floods triggered by a glacial lake outburst killed more than a thousand people and left thousands missing – a disaster Nepal’s foreign minister said reflected the disproportionate share of climate consequences borne by countries like his. Just recently, the UN Environment Programme confirmed what scientists have long warned: the world is now on track to breach 1.5C of warming, likely within the next few years.
As the climate crisis intensifies, one question is central: who is at the helm?
GWL Voices’ report, published this summer, shows that women are very much on deck in climate and environmental governance, but they are not steering the ship.
Of all climate COP Presidents since the annual conferences began over thirty years ago, three-quarters have been men. This matters because COP Presidents are among the most visible and influential roles in global climate governance. The climate COPs, however, are not the worst offenders. Another of the UN’s three environmental “sister conventions,” the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), has had a woman preside over its COP only three out of 17 times since 1997.
Structural inequality cascades downWomen’s underrepresentation is not a harmless coincidence. It’s a pattern that cascades down to other critical roles, including country delegates, heads of delegations, national focal points, and COP bureau members.
It is a structural inequality that limits the diversity of perspectives, priorities and decisions brought to bear on the environmental emergencies we face, and it is unfolding against a backdrop UN Women itself describes as one of “escalating conflicts, attacks on women’s rights, and environmental degradation.”
GWL Voices’ Spotlight on Women in Global Climate and Environmental Leadership shows that progress beyond the COPs is slow and sparse. While the Green Climate Fund has approached gender parity in its top leadership role over time, the IPCC, which is the body charged with compiling and communicating climate science to the world, has never appointed a woman to its top position of Chair in nearly four decades.
Gender focal points mainly womenParity in environmental governance at the multilateral level remains extremely rare. There is, however, one role where women are, for once, not under- but substantially over-represented: when the task at hand is gender equality itself. Ninety percent of countries’ gender focal points under the biodiversity and climate conventions are women.
Relegating women to so-called “women’s issues” within climate and environmental governance is a particularly stark example of horizontal segregation, a pattern that repeats well beyond the multilateral level.
According to the Women in Politics Map 2026, prepared by UN Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the largest share of women cabinet ministers worldwide sit in Women and Gender Equality ministries (90%) and family and children affairs (73%), while they remain sidelined in strategic areas including economic affairs (18%), foreign affairs (29%) and energy (12%).
‘Hectic’ in high heels? Women still face gender hurdles at UN climate talks
The danger of this segregation is that women’s rights come to be seen as women’s responsibility alone, which does nothing to advance equality, since the problem affects us all and requires everyone’s active engagement to solve.
Conversations about gender and climate too often focus on women’s vulnerability to climate impacts. That angle reflects a real problem, but it hides a second one: access to decision-making. Women are not simply “victims” of the climate and nature crisis, they are among its most experienced responders, its most consistent advocates, and, when given the chance, its most effective leaders.
Studies show women leaders’ impactWhat if women had an equal seat at the decision-making table? Would environmental governance be more effective? The evidence says it would. Research by Norgaard and York (2005), Mavisakalyan and Tarverdi (2018), and Fredriksson and Wang (2011) finds that women leaders are more likely to support environmental protection, ratify environmental treaties, and adopt stricter climate policies.
Following last year’s COP30 – where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted a landmark, nine-year plan to mainstream gender equality across climate governance and implementation – GWL Voices called for the same principles: gender parity across all climate bodies, Indigenous women’s voices embedded in policy design, gender-responsive climate finance with transparent tracking, and real accountability for women-led initiatives. Its 2026 report is the evidence for why implementation of the Belém Gender Action Plan cannot wait any longer.
Why women’s leadership is central to unlocking the global phaseout of fossil fuels
As the world convenes for Climate Week NYC, weeks before the UN chooses its next Secretary-General, and less than two months before COP31, we raise our voices for this message to reach those who hold power.
Let’s start seeing the climate crisis as a governance crisis, one with an outrageous blindspot for women’s leadership, ingenuity and readiness to decide. We invite every government, institution or boardroom, and every person to read the spotlight report in full, identify the pattern in the ranks of their own organisations, and use whatever power they hold to break it.
Because when it comes to the climate crisis, women’s hands are already on deck; it’s time we let them steer.
The post Women are on deck – it’s time they steered appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief urges countries to adopt fossil fuel transition plans with timelines
The head of the United Nations has called on all countries to deliver plans for phasing out their production and consumption of fossil fuels, as rising oil prices and climate shocks threaten energy and human security.
In his farewell speech to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Tuesday, outgoing UN Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time urged “every government to adopt a national plan to transition away from fossil fuels” aligned with limiting warming to 1.5C. The plans, he said, should include “clear timelines and protection for affected workers and communities”.
“We know fossil fuel interests won’t step aside on their own. For decades, Big Oil has treated the atmosphere as an open sewer – and cashed in on the consequences,” Guterres told diplomats in his speech opening the leaders’ segment of the assembly, also calling out the industry’s windfall profits after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
At last year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, a group of about 80 governments led a failed push to develop a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels. Brazil instead proposed to draft a voluntary report that will be presented this year ahead of COP31 after countries and organisations submitted their views to the process.
Governments first agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems at COP28 in Dubai in 2023, but have since failed to agree at UN climate talks on how to move forward with that commitment, as efforts to do so have been effectively blocked by large fossil fuel-producing countries.
France, Netherlands issue plansA few countries have moved forward with their own transition plans. France launched the first one at an international conference on the issue in April and the Netherlands followed suit this month. Not being major fossil fuel producers, both European nations aim to end their coal, oil and gas consumption by 2050, although the Dutch plan was criticised for not setting specific phase-out dates for the dirty fuels.
Adão Soares Barbosa, climate ambassador from Timor-Leste and chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group in the UN climate negotiations, told a press briefing on Tuesday that last year’s discussions on shifting away from fossil fuels need to continue at COP31, adding that developed countries should lead the way with transition plans and curb their use of fossil fuels.
“We are expecting that we can make a request to major-emitting countries to limit emissions from this sector,” he said. “For LDCs, we’ll also try to reduce fossil fuel use, but it will depend on national circumstances.”
Samoa’s lead negotiator Anna Rasmussen said small island states have outlined their energy transition plans in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – countries’ plans for meeting the Paris Agreement goals – but added “we’re still waiting” for climate finance to help implement those plans.
Despite the global push to clean up the energy mix, countries leading climate talks are themselves also expanding fossil fuel production. COP31 co-presidents Australia and Türkiye have both recently given the green light to mine and drill more coal, oil and gas, and still depend on fossil fuels for 60% and 56% of their electricity production respectively.
Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn
COP30 host nation Brazil has also persisted with its plans to explore potential new oil reserves near the mouth of the Amazon River – a region known as the Equatorial Margin.
These are moving ahead despite President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announcing last year at the Belém climate summit that the country would develop its own fossil fuel phase-out plan. This is still under development with little information about its progress and may be hampered by elections next month.
“We have achieved our self sufficiency in oil and will continue to explore the potential of new reserves, such as those in the Equatorial Margin,” Lula said in his speech to the UNGA on Tuesday. “But we will not abandon the environmental agenda,” he insisted. “We will move forward with the roadmap for the decarbonisation of the Brazilian economy.”
Transition far cheaper than status quoSpeaking at the main Climate Week NYC venue, Mads Christensen, executive director of Greenpeace International, said given the fast-shifting cost dynamics for both fossil fuels and renewables, countries should revise their existing energy plans because they are now out of date.
Gas power generation now costs around 150 euros per megawatt compared with around 50 euros for solar with battery storage – making the latter two-thirds cheaper.
“If these plans were updated, I think we would have a much faster transition because it simply makes good financial sense,” he said.
A technician walks next to solar panels that partially provide electrical power to the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan) A technician walks next to solar panels that partially provide electrical power to the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan)Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, told Climate Home News that the Santa Marta process for transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF), launched at April’s conference, could help countries discuss, design and develop their national roadmaps, as well as mobilise the international cooperation required to actually deliver them.
“Many countries want not only national roadmaps but a global roadmap off the highway to hell,” she added. “A global plan is necessary to ensure the rules aren’t rigged against those who want to do the right thing and so all countries can make credible commitments.”
The second TAFF conference will be held in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu next spring, co-chaired by Ireland. In New York, Tuvalu’s climate minister Maina Vakafua Talia called for stepped-up efforts to tackle the fossil fuel use that is threatening his country’s “demise” by driving global warming.
“The world is running out of time, and so I ask every government to come to… Tuvalu with solutions – real solutions, not false solutions – for us to ensure that we have a pathway and a way forward,” he urged.
The post UN chief urges countries to adopt fossil fuel transition plans with timelines appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment
COP31’s flagship initiative to accelerate the electrification of the world’s economy has been criticised for failing to include a commitment to produce the power from clean energy.
Governments that sign the voluntary pledge at this year’s UN climate summit will commit to increasing electricity’s share of total energy consumption to 35% globally by 2035 in line “with pathways consistent with keeping 1.5C alive”, the text unveiled by the Turkish presidency on Tuesday says.
While the document says that the electrification goal is “complementary to efforts to expand renewable energy and improve energy efficiency”, governments are not explicitly asked to commit to producing the extra power with clean sources and driving down greenhouse gas emissions.
The text instead says the “use of clean electricity” will vary according to national circumstances. Fossil fuels are not mentioned by name, although the pledge cites the COP28 Global Stocktake decision, which called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels” in energy systems.
COP31 president Murat Kurum said earlier this month that the push to make electrification more “widespread” – through measures like the rollout of electric vehicles and heat pumps – will “automatically” lead to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels.
But many campaigners disagree, criticising the proposed pledge for failing to give an explicit signal on the fossil fuel transition.
Lack of clarity on energy sources“Let’s not let electrification become the Trojan horse of our times, used to hide new fossil fuel consumption rather than promote renewable energy,” Claire Smith from civil society umbrella group Beyond Fossil Fuels said in reaction to the pledge’s publication.
She added that the commitment will only help address the climate crisis if electrification is powered by a flexible energy system where solar and wind are complemented by enhanced grids and storage.
The pledge’s text says that the electricity goal should be supported by “diverse and sustainable energy sources”, but it stops short of explaining what these sources are.
Alden Meyer, an international climate policy expert and senior associate at think-tank E3G, said the details of the pledge matter to how effective it will be in helping bring planet-heating emissions down.
“It has to be clean, and we haven’t got enough clarity on a guarantee that it will be a decarbonisation move,” he told Climate Home News.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
According to an annual electricity review from energy think-tank Ember, in 2025 renewables edged ahead of coal power for the first time in 100 years. Continued growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global electricity generation to just under 34%, compared with coal at 33%, it said.
Janet Milongo, energy Transition lead at CAN International, said success cannot be measured simply by how much of the world’s final energy consumption becomes electric.
“We must ask what generates that electricity, who has access to it, who owns the infrastructure, and whether it is helping communities transition away from fossil fuels,” she added.
Electrification alone can’t meet climate goalsAnalysis published by the IEA on Tuesday, alongside the pledge, found that it would already be cost-effective to raise electricity’s share of global energy use from 23% today to around 33% with existing technologies, putting the COP31 goal “within striking distance”. Based on current policies, however, the share reaches only about 30% by 2035.
Hitting the 35% target would cut fossil fuel importers’ import bills by around $400 billion a year by 2035, the IEA said. At the higher prices caused by the conflict in the Middle East, that saving rises to more than $500 billion.
Speaking at New York Climate Week on Tuesday, IEA executive director Fatih Birol said the agency’s figures show that in 2026, about 80% of all new power plants built will run on renewables, with a few percentage points coming from nuclear power and the rest from fossils fuels. “So therefore, electrification itself will lead reduction of the [greenhouse gas] emissions,” he added.
IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol speaks at Climate Week NYC on September 22, 2026 (Photo: Megan Rowling / Climate Home News) IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol speaks at Climate Week NYC on September 22, 2026 (Photo: Megan Rowling / Climate Home News)However, the IEA warned in its new report that electrification “by itself is not enough” to meet the world’s climate targets. It noted that, if “low-emission” sources of power continue to simply grow in line with current policy scenarios, that would be only just enough to cover the extra demand from electrification, driving a modest decline in emissions.
Matt Webb, associate director of global clean power diplomacy at E3G, said the pledge is a “welcome signal of leadership” and can help COP31 be a “critical moment” for countries to double down on the energy commitments made at COP28.
But to secure the full benefits of electrification, he added, it is essential that we “urgently clean up” by speeding up the rollout of renewables and developing credible national plans to transition away from fossil fuels.
The post COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment appeared first on Climate Home News.
As loss and damage fund stalls, Nepal crowdfunds flood relief
People around the world have donated almost $90 million to a government-led campaign to help Nepal recover from its recent devastating Himalayan flood, according to a Nepali climate negotiator, even as the UN chief slammed the tiny amount of money in a new fund to deal with such disasters.
Individuals and companies from Nepal and abroad have chipped in from $5 to “many millions” of dollars to the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund, Manjeet Dhakal, an advisor to the poorest countries at UN climate talks, told an event on Monday focused on early warning systems.
The prompt and substantial response from the public contrasts with the slower, more limited support that is potentially on offer from the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), set up by governments to compensate developing countries for climate disasters.
Comment: Human security relies on adapting to the world’s new climate reality
Over three weeks have passed since Nepal’s finance and environment ministers asked the FRLD board to take an urgent decision to allocate funding to help Nepal protect people and restore essential services in the wake of the disaster, which caused around 1,450 deaths and left more than 5,000 people missing.
“Time is of the essence,” the ministers wrote in an appeal to the FRLD on August 31, which was swiftly followed by a letter from a group of developing-country board members urging the FRLD board’s co-chairs to organise an extraordinary meeting to come up with a response.
Loss and damage fund hesitatesYet, despite informal online meetings, the co-chairs have yet to convene a meeting with the power to allocate funds. The board’s next scheduled meeting begins on December 15.
Dhakal said on Monday that the request has “received some positive response, but still there is some discussion ongoing about how to respond to that”.
“If they can’t respond in a timely manner, then is [the fund] fit for purpose in terms of disasters that the world would be facing in the coming years? The scale and intensity of these disasters is increasing,” he said.
With just $820 million pledged to it by rich countries and not all of that yet delivered, the FRLD has earmarked just $350 million to spend in its initial phase and without further contributions could run out of money next year.
Because of these limited funds, and a huge number of requests for funding totalling nearly $3 billion, the FRLD has said it will only give out a maximum of $20 million to each project for now. It has yet to approve funding for any projects.
Dhakal recently told The Nation magazine that this amount was just a “symbolic gesture”. Nepal’s government has estimated the costs of recovery and reconstruction at $4.8 billion, with homes, roads, bridges, hospitals and hydropower stations in the affected area needing to be repaired and rebuilt.
“Ridiculously small” fundingIn a speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, the body’s outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres criticised the “ridiculously small” level of funds made available by wealthy governments to the FRLD. Developed countries should “make the loss and damage fund work at scale”, he said.
Secretary-General António Guterres speaks at UNGA (Photo: UN Photo/ Loey Felipe)The Portuguese diplomat told world leaders that when he travelled to Nepal three years ago, he had “sounded the alarm on accelerating glacier melt, warning that the rooftops of the world are caving in”.
“Some dismissed it all as overstating dangers, but as tragic events have shown, impacts are arriving sooner, hitting harder, and spreading further than many anticipated,” he said.
A recent study by scientists with the World Weather Attribution group found that climate change contributed to the rock-ice avalanche which sparked a huge flash flood along a river valley on the Nepal-Tibet border.
Speaking at a separate event in New York on Monday, leading climate scientist Johan Rockström highlighted those findings on the role of global warming in the Himalayan disaster.
“This will be potentially the first poster-child case of a loss and damage invoice, because here we have a proven case of a catastrophe which would not have occurred if it hadn’t been for human-caused climate change,” he said.
The post As loss and damage fund stalls, Nepal crowdfunds flood relief appeared first on Climate Home News.
After Hormuz, Nepal and wildfires, people want action to make polluters pay
Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org; Mads Christensen is executive director of Greenpeace International; and Amitabh Behar is executive director of Oxfam International.
On Monday, global petitions with a collective total of more than 2 million signatures were presented to the United Nations, calling on governments to introduce binding mechanisms to make fossil-fuel companies and the super-rich contribute to the costs of the damage they have created.
The petition signatures were received by Selwin Hart, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Action, in New York during the UN General Assembly, sending a clear message to governments: there is no more room for excuses.
If governments are serious about resilience, energy security and protecting people from an increasingly unstable world, they must make the companies profiting from the fossil-fuel economy pay their fair share. Because the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels.
For more than six months, the Strait of Hormuz, the channel through which a fifth of the world’s oil once flowed without a second thought, has been closed, contested or effectively unusable. Tankers sit at anchor. Insurance premiums have gone through the roof. Petrol pumps from Los Angeles to Lagos have felt the tremor. It has taken a war to remind the world just how much of our daily lives still rests on a single, fragile artery of fossil fuels.
At the other end of the same emergency, a glacier came down on the Nepal–China border in the last week of August. A wall of ice, rock and water tore through the Bhote Koshi and Langtang valleys. It has been described as one of the deadliest disasters in the region’s modern history, unfolding in a landscape where the world’s glaciers are retreating and destabilising at a pace scientists have been warning about for years.
And this came only weeks after hundreds of thousands of people were displaced — not by ice, but by fire. Europe has experienced its worst wildfire season in more than a decade. Homes have been lost across Spain, Portugal, France, Greece and the UK. Firefighters and civilians have been killed battling the blazes, while damage and reconstruction costs continue to reach extraordinary levels.
These are not separate crises. They are different expressions of a world becoming more volatile, while the fossil-fuel economy continues to generate enormous profits for those at the top and pushes the costs onto everyone else.
Communities absorbing costBecause the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels. One thread runs through all of these events: a global economy still organised around the profits of a fossil fuel industry that has known, for decades, exactly what it was doing to the planet.
At a moment when governments are gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly to talk about security, resilience and economic competitiveness, it is worth spelling out what “security” – or the lack of it, driven by our economy’s dependence on oil – actually means this year for ordinary people around the world: 35,000 excess deaths in Europe due to heat; the highest food prices in three and a half years; $700 billion in economic losses, threatening countless jobs and livelihoods, from a war and a closed oil chokepoint whose consequences are nowhere near over.
Meanwhile the companies that extracted, refined, shipped and sold the fuel behind all of this continue to report extraordinary profits. Households are paying more for energy. Governments are spending billions on disaster response, on reconstruction, on emergency deployments of firefighters and aid. Communities are absorbing the cost of a system they didn’t design and don’t control. We pay. They profit.
This is not a coincidence, and it is not inevitable. It is a political choice, repeated year after year, to let the companies most responsible for the climate crisis hoard the wealth they generate while the rest of us carry the risk.
Taxes and fines neededThat is why, together with communities and campaigners in dozens of countries have spent the last three years building the case for a simple, overdue idea: polluters should pay for the damage they have caused. Not through voluntary pledges or distant net-zero promises, but through binding mechanisms, climate damages taxes, surtaxes on fossil fuel profits, and fines ring-fenced for recovery and adaptation that put real money where the harm actually is. This is how we take the profit out of destruction and protect the generations to come.
The response has told us we are not alone in thinking this. Our petitions calling on governments to make polluters pay have now gathered a collective total of over 2 million signatures from people across every region of the world.
The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream
That is not a fringe demand. It is what happens when people watch a choke-point war spike their fuel bill, watch a glacier take a thousand lives, watch their own summer holidays rearranged by fire. They draw the obvious conclusion: the people who caused this should be paying for it – not profiting from it.
We hear the objection already forming: that this is not the moment, with wars underway and economies fragmenting, to burden industry further. We would say the opposite is true. If governments can mobilise trillions for war, for bailouts and for new fossil fuel infrastructure, they can mobilise the political will to tax the companies that caused this crisis.
Money for clean energy and resilienceThat money can go straight to the people paying for it, through cheaper, cleaner, more secure energy, and through funding for communities on the frontline of floods, fires and glacial collapse. There isn’t an excuse left. There is only a choice about where power and money go next. Every dollar we don’t spend now on adaptation, resilience and cutting emissions, we burn many times over later: on disasters we could have prevented and economies we scramble to fix too late.
This year’s UNGA should be the moment that choice gets made in public. Governments arriving in New York will talk about resilience, about energy security, about protecting their citizens from an unstable world. Let them explain on the record why a fossil fuel industry that has spent decades profiting from that instability should not be the one paying to fix it so wrecking the planet no longer pays off.
The fires, floods and storms won’t just go away. The system that keeps producing these disasters, and keeps paying the same companies for the privilege, will not change itself unless political leaders step up. It is on all of us to make sure they hear, as loudly as possible, that the time for excuses has run out.
The post After Hormuz, Nepal and wildfires, people want action to make polluters pay appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda
Governments need to start addressing climate change impacts and nature loss as a threat to national security and manage shocks before they hit rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, Britain’s foreign minister and other leaders told the opening of Climate Week NYC on Monday.
Ed Miliband – who was until July the UK’s energy minister – said the growing urgency and severity of extreme weather and related disasters require a shift in thinking, calling on governments to put the issues “front and centre”.
“Climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers – the security community, not just the activist community, the generals, not just the green campaigner,” he told an audience of policy and business leaders.
There is a need to assess risk differently, he added, by embedding climate and nature in national security systems, threat assessments and contingency planning. He also urged countries to pool information because climate shocks can travel fast through supply chains as well as influencing financial markets and migration patterns.
The framing of climate change as a threat to countries’ security and stability is not new, but it has gained greater emphasis as the impacts of global warming are biting harder in places like Europe, which is struggling with more intense heatwaves, drought and forest fires.
In mid-August, Miliband said in a social media post, reflecting on the UK’s hot and dry summer, that he would convene foreign ministers attending the UN General Assembly in late September to discuss how to respond to “this new national security threat” and build a coalition for action. But he did not give further details of that initiative on Monday.
Australia calls for unified responseOther leaders in New York also reflected on the growing threat to their societies and economies from climate change impacts and exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his country “understands the dangers of global warming and the urgency of climate action as well as any nation”.
“We have seen it up close – from increasingly intense bushfires and floods, to the damage warming oceans are wreaking on our vulnerable coastlines,” he said in a speech, adding that with a record-breaking El Nino forecast, Australia and Pacific nations are preparing for a potential summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.
With scientific forecasts of worsening impacts now coming to pass, “this means the global community cannot afford to be frozen in time as the world warms around us”, he added. People cannot be left to cope alone, he said, emphasising that as leaders, “we need to come together, to meet the problem head on”.
Australia will lead the negotiations at the upcoming COP31 climate summit, and has brought the existential threat to Pacific countries from sea level rise into the diplomatic limelight. The pre-COP gathering next month will be hosted in Fiji, with a visit by leaders to Tuvalu.
Speaking to Climate Home News in New York, Panama’s environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro said the small Central American country faces hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from drought in the Panama Canal due to El Niño.
The Panama Canal Authority estimates income could be reduced by between $225 million and $400 million due to slower maritime traffic passing through the strait.
“What a great irony,” Navarro said. “Panama being a small, carbon-negative country pays the price for the big carbon-emitting countries.”
UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband speaking at New York Climate Week. (Photo: The Climate Group) Climate investment “critical” to stabilityAmina J. Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said there was a need for countries to stick with multilateral approaches to problems including climate change, despite the difficult geopolitical times the world is going through. She added, however, that it “does require your voices. It won’t happen by itself. We have to lean into it.”
The rest of the high-level UNGA week in New York will show the extent to which multilateral efforts to resolve the world’s problems – from climate change to poverty – have top-level support as leaders give their speeches, including the Brazilian and US presidents on Tuesday.
Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and geopolitics with think-tank E3G, said the statements by Miliband and other leaders at Climate Week NYC had underlined the political and government case to integrate climate considerations into security thinking and institutions at the highest level.
“In a world of escalating climate impacts and the record El Niño expected to heighten risks worldwide alongside energy volatility and geopolitical tensions, investing in global climate resilience and the clean energy transition are critical to credible strategies to enhance stability and national security,” she added in a statement.
Suneeta Kaimal from the Natural Resource Governance Initiative (NRGI) said that, while in previous years governments heavily focused their speeches on climate action, this year’s focus on energy security does not change the underlying challenge.
“The fact that the framing has changed from energy transition to energy security doesn’t change the reality that this transition needs to occur in energy systems. It’s just a different framework. It’s a more transactional framework, but it all points to the need for resilience,” she said.
Speaking at the opening session of Climate Week, Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described how her country had reacted to the spiralling costs it faced from the 1970s oil price crisis by investing in a large-scale district heating system fuelled instead by its abundant geothermal energy.
“Resilience wasn’t built while the crisis was happening. It was built in the years after – deliberately, patiently, as a national mission – so that the next shock wouldn’t hit as hard, if at all,” she said.
New COP goal on electrificationSpeaking at a separate event on Monday, UN climate chief Simon Stiell pointed to a new voluntary target expected to be adopted at COP31 for 35% of global energy use to come from electricity by 2035 as a strategy that can help cushion countries, families and businesses from fossil fuel supply shocks and rising costs.
At the United Nations, the Turkish COP presidency gave more details of the electrification goal it first announced at the Bonn climate talks in June, including sharing with governments a final text of the pledge it wants them to get behind.
The pledge sets out a global ambition to advance electrification, highlighting the importance of supporting developing countries to identify their grid investment needs and access finance for electrification.
“It is a development strategy, an industrial strategy, a health strategy, and a security strategy,” Stiell said.
The post Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’
Artificial intelligence (AI) is set for a bigger role at this year’s UN climate summit, as Türkiye’s COP31 presidency seeks backing for a new pledge on the technology’s energy use.
In a statement on Monday, the COP31 hosts said they will launch the Antalya Pledge on AI, which they billed as a “political” commitment on how AI is “designed, procured, powered, deployed, measured and managed” in support of climate action.
“We must openly discuss AI’s growing energy consumption and it is time for governments to start setting the terms,” COP31 president Murat Kurum said in an emailed statement. “We expect companies to be transparent about their energy use and to power their operations with clean energy”.
No further details about the pledge have been made available so far, including whether it will include a clean energy commitment or whether governments and companies will be invited to sign on. The COP31 presidency said it would share a draft before the summit opens in Antalya in early November.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell went further in a New York speech on Monday, warning that AI leaders are “on thin ice when it comes to license to operate, and sinking deep underwater when it comes to public support”.
“Energy-guzzling artificial intelligence is driving up planet-heating pollution from coal, oil and gas, while ratcheting up energy costs for households and businesses,” he said, adding that data centre projects are being put on hold due to public opposition from New York to Texas.
Growing energy use and emissionsConcerns about the environmental impacts of AI infrastructure and its impact on rising electricity prices have led to a growing backlash in some communities, especially in the US.
Big Tech’s breakneck race to develop new AI models and build out the energy-hungry infrastructure supporting them has stoked fears over the technology’s growing climate impact.
Greenhouse gas emissions generated by data centres through their electricity use are set to more than double between 2024 and 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Data centres, which underpin various technologies including AI, are expected to consume more power than all but five countries by the end of the decade.
The AI race is also driving a surge in new fossil gas investment in the United States, where Big Tech giants including Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta have struck up major deals with fossil fuel operators to power their infrastructure.
In China, the other major global AI force, coal provides around 70% of the electricity powering the country’s data centers, according to an IEA report published last year.
More space for AI at COPs?Despite AI’s rapidly growing relevance for the world’s ability to limit global warming, high-level discussions on the climate impact of the technology have been largely absent at UN climate summits.
While the pledge is still being developed and scarce details have been made public so far, the Antalya initiative, alongside sharper rhetoric from Stiell, suggests that might be changing.
Climate Home News understands that the UN climate change body is encouraging AI companies to be present at COPs as the climate summits set the global direction for energy policy and tech firms now have a major stake in it.
Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched an initiative aimed at holding AI companies accountable for their environmental impacts and repeated a call for all big AI companies to commit to powering every data centre with renewable energy by 2030.
Align AI with scienceStiell said that tech titans need to start showing why the benefits of AI outweigh its “skyrocketing costs”, by setting credible climate targets, coming clean about their energy use and powering data centres with renewable energy.
AI proponents claim that, despite its growing energy use, the technology’s widespread application would bring net benefits in the fight against climate change by driving massive energy efficiency gains and optimising renewable energy integration. The IEA estimates that existing AI applications could cut emissions by more than data centres add.
Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn
But critics argue that it is wrong to compare theoretical gains with real-world emission growth and any gains are outweighed by the widespread adoption of AI tools by fossil fuel companies to extract planet-heating oil and gas faster and more cheaply.
Stiell said the tech industry needs to “respect science and start aligning with global climate efforts – urgently”.
Alongside the AI pledge, the COP31 presidency has also announced it will launch an ‘AI for Clean Technologies’ Initiative, which will develop a portfolio of AI-enabled clean-technology pilots in priority sectors, including smart energy and green industry.
This programme aims to demonstrate the responsible use of AI in practice, the COP31 presidency promised.
The post COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’ appeared first on Climate Home News.
Why the global electrification agenda misses the point on Africa’s energy crisis
Dola Oluteye, PhD, is a senior fellow in energy and transport policy at the UCL Energy Institute and founder of The Professional African Network Advisory Initiative.
At the June 2026 UN Climate Meetings in Bonn, the incoming Turkish COP31 Presidency introduced a headline target for the Action Agenda: raising electricity’s share of global final energy consumption from around 20% today to 35% by 2035.
Backed by the international Electrify Now campaign – also launched in June by the European Commission and governments across five continents, including Ethiopia – the aim is to replace fossil fuels with clean energy by shifting the way we travel and transport goods and commodities, cook and warm our homes and offices, and power our industries.
On paper, this is a welcome signal. Yet, as world leaders line up behind global goals in the lead-up to COP31, African nations face a fundamental question: whose energy transition are we talking about? For the roughly 600 million people living without electricity on the continent, international climate targets often sound less like a lifeline and more like a conversation happening on another planet.
For developed countries, electrification is largely a replacement exercise – swapping petrol and diesel vehicles for electric ones, and gas boilers for heat pumps powered by existing, stable grids.
But across sub-Saharan Africa, the challenge is vastly different. The region accounts for 85% of the global population without electricity, up from 50% in 2010. Here, electrification is not a technology swap; it is the foundational building block of human dignity, economic sovereignty, energy access and modern development.
Electricity connections must deliver real developmentHalf of the number of people without electricity access in Africa live in three countries – Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – while 900 million other Africans lack clean cooking solutions.
The proposed global electrification goal must not treat a continent with nearly half of its population without electricity the same way it treats mature Western economies.
To regard electrification merely as a tool for decarbonisation misses the core reality of our continent. Africa is not just transitioning an existing energy system; we are building one from the ground up in many places.
If a global electrification target of 35% by 2035 is to mean anything for Africa, it must be rooted in African realities. That begins with acknowledging that expanding power connections alone is insufficient.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Energy poverty does not end when a power line crosses a village; it ends when electricity is reliable, affordable and powered by clean sources that spur productive economic activities. Connecting households to a micro-grid they cannot pay to use does not deliver development.
Electrification can also help solve the critical issue of super pollutants in countries like Nigeria, notably the production of methane and black carbon, by replacing combustion-based systems with cleaner, electric alternatives.
Breaking from past extractive modelsEqually critical is how the electricity is generated. Within some African policy circles, electrification has occasionally been viewed with scepticism – seen as a possible Trojan Horse to justify expensive nuclear projects or to expand long-term fossil gas lock-ins.
We must be clear: expanding electricity demand while increasing reliance on volatile fossil fuels or unviable, high-cost infrastructure is a false solution.
True electrification must be paired directly with the massive development of Africa’s unparalleled renewable energy resources.
Africa holds 60% of the world’s best solar resources, alongside immense hydro, wind and geothermal potential. Tying the global electrification push to renewable energy capacity and local battery storage is the only pathway that protects African economies from international fuel price shocks while keeping our climate commitments intact.
Global climate negotiations such as those ongoing at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) offer another building block for Africa’s green energy future.
International trade linked to 20% of global emissions – but imports ignored
Adopting a shipping carbon price at the IMO this year, through the Net-Zero Framework, would create a climate fund worth $12 billion a year. This finance could be used not only towards the electrification of Africa’s ships and ports, but also for building broader renewable energy production on the continent.
Furthermore, global initiatives must break from past extractive models. Africa cannot remain merely a site for extracting critical minerals – such as lithium, cobalt, and copper – to feed green supply chains elsewhere, only to import expensive finished technologies.
An authentic, inclusive campaign must support the development of local industry, mineral value addition and job creation on the continent.
Africa’s COP31 agenda should centre clean electrificationTo achieve this, international campaigns like Electrify Now must deepen their partnership with Global South institutions. Western-centric messaging encouraging people to buy electric vehicles and install heat pumps at home must be paired with calls for robust transmission grids, decentralised mini-grids, industrial energy security and affordable clean cooking.
For this to happen, it would be great to see more African governments, businesses and civil society organisations join the Electrify Now campaign, where they can advocate for the challenges and opportunities on our continent.
Ethiopia is a great example, where a government policy to ban the importation of petrol and diesel cars has led to the country becoming a continental leader in the uptake of electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has seen the cost of electricity come down significantly and accounts for more than half of Ethiopia’s renewable energy generation capacity.
Türkiye says it has “final decision” at COP31 despite Australia running negotiations
The road to COP31 offers Africa a pivotal opportunity to place clean electrification at the very centre of its economic and climate agenda.
By taking ownership of this narrative, African leaders can insist that global targets deliver capital, technology sharing and infrastructure investments tailored to local needs.
Electrification is not a luxury or a secondary climate goal. Powered by renewable energy – the African sun and wind – it can be the engine of our green industrial transition. It is important for global climate architecture and Western governments to be aligned with that reality.
The post Why the global electrification agenda misses the point on Africa’s energy crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pages
The Fine Print I:
Disclaimer: The views expressed on this site are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) unless otherwise indicated and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s, nor should it be assumed that any of these authors automatically support the IWW or endorse any of its positions.
Further: the inclusion of a link on our site (other than the link to the main IWW site) does not imply endorsement by or an alliance with the IWW. These sites have been chosen by our members due to their perceived relevance to the IWW EUC and are included here for informational purposes only. If you have any suggestions or comments on any of the links included (or not included) above, please contact us.
The Fine Print II:
Fair Use Notice: The material on this site is provided for educational and informational purposes. It may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of scientific, environmental, economic, social justice and human rights issues etc.
It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have an interest in using the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. The information on this site does not constitute legal or technical advice.
This site is not the official webpage of the Industrial Workers of the World.