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Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn
Türkiye and Australia risk losing their credibility as hosts of this year’s COP31 UN climate summit if they keep betting on fossil fuels at home, climate policy experts have warned.
As governments are expected to continue fraught talks over how to advance the global transition away from oil, coal and gas in Antalya this November, both of the co-host countries are pursuing fossil fuel expansion at home, without a national timeline to phase out their use.
Türkiye has accelerated its rollout of wind and solar energy in recent years. But that progress has yet to make a dent in the country’s dependence on fossil fuels for power, as demand growth has outpaced the renewables build-out, new analysis by Climate Action Tracker (CAT) has found.
The share of electricity generated by burning coal and fossil gas – 56% in 2025 – has barely changed since 2019, and total fossil fuel use in the power sector, and the emissions it produces, are still rising, according to the report released on Friday.
The Turkish government has also signalled that fossil fuels will remain a central component of its energy mix and has outlined plans to expand the country’s burgeoning domestic gas production in the Black Sea.
‘Need to demonstrate seriousness’Australia, which will chair the Antalya negotiations, relies on fossil fuels for over 60% of its electricity, with coal alone still supplying 45%. According to experts, it lacks an ambitious plan to shift away from fossil fuels at home, relying heavily on carbon offsetting to reach its climate targets.
Australia is also the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter and has plans to expand its coal and gas production, which is backed by significant government subsidies. It recently upset climate groups by approving an extension of the Saraji open-cut coal mine in Queensland.
Türkiye says it has “final decision” at COP31 despite Australia running negotiations
Jennifer Morgan, a senior fellow with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and former climate envoy for Germany, said Türkiye and Australia need to demonstrate their seriousness about their COP presidency roles by leading by example on the energy transition.
“They have made progress in renewable energy,” she told reporters this week. “But I think their credibility – and their ability to therefore bring momentum and good outcomes to the COP – will depend on their taking further action at home.”
Türkiye’s electrification homeworkThe co-hosts’ fossil fuel policies are being scrutinised in the run-up to the annual UN climate summit, with much riding on the signal climate diplomacy sends on the energy transition.
Türkiye has so far stopped short of putting any overt political capital behind the fossil fuel transition itself. It has instead been rallying support for a new global electrification target of 35% by 2035, seen as the centrepiece of this year’s non-negotiated Action Agenda put forward by Ankara.
Electrification emerges as COP31 priority
COP31 president Murat Kurum said last week the push to electrify economies – through measures like electric vehicles and heat pumps – will “automatically” lead to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels.
Türkiye’s own energy plan projects the country’s electrification rate would fall short on the global target and only hit 25% by 2035, according to the CAT report, which called for a “substantial step-change” in electrification policies and the deployment of more renewable power and grid infrastructure.
Coal still dominantCAT’s analysts also warned that, without a parallel phase-out of fossil fuels, rising electricity demand risks being met in part by coal and gas, failing to deliver the emissions reductions the electrification target is meant to achieve.
Türkiye has had some success in its clean energy build-out: the share of electricity generation from wind and solar rose to 22% in 2025, up from 12% in 2020, according to the CAT report.
But coal’s role in Türkiye’s electricity mix has also grown, in both its share and absolute terms, over the past decade. And while reliance on fossil gas has declined overall, it still plays an important role in Ankara’s energy policy, which is pushing to boost domestic gas production in the Black Sea.
Pilot boats assist the Osman Gazi as it navigates the Bosphorus on its way to the Black Sea on May 29, 2025 in Istanbul, Turkey. The platform will dock at the Filyos Port in the Black Sea and will stay for a 20 year mission and will provide double the natural gas intake of Turkey to 20 million cubic meters per day. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Pilot boats assist the Osman Gazi as it navigates the Bosphorus on its way to the Black Sea on May 29, 2025 in Istanbul, Turkey. The platform will dock at the Filyos Port in the Black Sea and will stay for a 20 year mission and will provide double the natural gas intake of Turkey to 20 million cubic meters per day. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)Dr Niklas Höhne from the NewClimate Institute said the government could demonstrate leadership as COP31 president by building on its recent successes in increasing its renewable energy capacity and announcing targets and plans to phase out coal and gas ahead of the summit.
According to CAT, Türkiye should phase out coal by 2040 and fossil gas by 2045 at the latest to align its power sector with global efforts to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial times.
Türkiye quiet on fossil fuel roadmapÜmit Şahin, coordinator of climate change studies at the Istanbul Policy Center (IPM), said Türkiye’s strategy is to approach the fossil fuel debate exclusively from the “end-use point of view”.
“I don’t expect any push from the Turkish presidency to the producer countries in terms of fossil fuel production,” he told reporters.
Neither does Şahin believe the Turkish presidency will throw its political weight behind another big-ticket item for COP31: a new global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels.
Brazil took on the responsibility to voluntarily draft this document outside of the formal negotiations as a way to break the deadlock at last year’s UN summit in Belém when governments clashed over whether to develop one.
The outgoing COP30 presidency will deliver the roadmap in early November – but it will be up to Türkiye and Australia to guide countries towards a decision on how the blueprint will be taken forward, either inside or outside the negotiations.
Leadership neededAustralia’s Chris Bowen, COP31’s president of negotiations, promised to lobby producing countries to deliver a “meaningful step forward” on the fossil fuel transition in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year. But he has been quiet on the role Australia sees for the fossil fuel transition roadmap.
Natalie Jones, senior policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), said the COP31 co-presidents “must provide clear leadership” on this process.
“This roadmap cannot be left in a dusty drawer,” she told journalists. “Rather, it must be translated into action, with all countries identifying what elements they can adopt or develop in their own national roadmap.”
Like Türkiye, Australia has yet to produce a national blueprint for winding down coal, gas and oil. Rather than moving toward a phase-out, state and federal governments have kept expanding fossil fuel licensing over the past year, according to a new analysis published this month by Climate Analytics.
Under existing policy, both coal and gas are on track to remain in Australia’s power system as late as 2050 – a trajectory the report defines as incompatible with the 1.5C limit the country says it’s committed to.
No binding end dates for the NetherlandsAnalysts are watching out for national transition roadmaps as a bellwether for governments that claim to be leaders in the global shift away from fossil fuels.
The climate and environment ministers of Colombia and the Netherlands, which are co-hosting the Santa Marta conference, embrace on the podium during the high-level segment in Santa Marta, Colombia, April 28, 2026 (Photo: Colombia Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development) The climate and environment ministers of Colombia and the Netherlands, which are co-hosting the Santa Marta conference, embrace on the podium during the high-level segment in Santa Marta, Colombia, April 28, 2026 (Photo: Colombia Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development)The Netherlands, which co-hosted the first fossil fuel transition conference in Santa Marta this year, published its own domestic roadmap earlier this week. The document followed through on a pledge that “leadership on transitioning away from fossil fuels must be backed by concrete action, not just ambitious words”, said a spokesperson for Stientje van Veldhoven, the Dutch minister for climate policy.
But experts criticised the plan for failing to set a binding end date for the country’s fossil fuel production and use. While targeting a rapid increase in renewables capacity, the Dutch government only commits to phasing out oil, gas and coal “in the energy and feedstock system to eventually zero, and to minimise fossil use” by 2050.
Yvo de Boer, a former Dutch diplomat and executive secretary of the UN climate body, said the Dutch roadmap falls short of what’s needed to give industry the confidence to deploy capital in support of the energy transition with greater predictability.
“Ultimately, a roadmap without deadlines is nothing more than a footpath paved with good intentions,” he added, writing on LinkedIn.
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How clean energy can boost business for Africa’s food producers
Despite millions of dollars in grants and technical help for African businesses to power farming and other food production activities with renewable energy, most efforts remain stuck at the early stages because they struggle to find the investors, markets and expertise they need to grow.
This was the message from a coalition of global institutions working on energy, water and agriculture at this month’s Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Rwanda.
“Energy, agriculture, water and nutrition actors rarely design solutions together,” the Agri-Energy Coalition said in a Call to Action on powering food systems with clean energy.
Using more renewables – especially solar power – to drive food systems would reduce food losses, ensure year-round availability and affordability of healthy foods, and improve productivity, income and resilience among farmers, food processors and other small enterprises, the coalition added.
In an interview with Climate Home News at the forum, Olamide Niyi-Afuye, CEO of the Africa Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA) – a body representing private-sector developers of small-scale, off-grid electricity systems across the continent – said its members are starting to recognise this interdependence and are increasingly considering businesses that combine energy with agricultural activities.
This, Niyi-Afuye added, could lead to greater supply and use of clean power for key processes like irrigation, food processing and storage, creating new sources of revenue for both sectors.
CHN: Conversations at the Africa Food Systems Forum highlighted how organisations working in energy and agriculture often operate in silos. What has hampered their collaboration, and how has that affected Africa’s economic development?
A: Most mini-grid companies in Africa were primarily incentivised to achieve connections. If you look at some ongoing projects, you see a cost-per-connection model [of revenue]. When a subsidy is tied to achieving a connection, regardless of whether it is a productive connection, you might not notice the problem until five years down the line, when you realise the cash flows are not what you projected.
Despite African walkout, fractious land COP ends without drought deal
So now we’re in a “come-to-Jesus moment” as an industry, where we’re righting the wrongs and adjusting our business models to make sure companies do not go bust and there is some level of sustainability over the long term.
The saying is not wrong that we’ve been working in our own silos because we’ve focused on the smaller things instead of the helicopter view. There needs to be cross-pollination [between the energy and agriculture sectors] because, if we are thinking about industrialisation, energy is a key driver of industrialisation. We will not achieve that if we’re not in the room and part of those conversations.
CHN: Productive use of energy is intended to ensure electricity access goes beyond lighting homes to improving livelihoods, creating jobs and powering equipment. But what happens when farmers cannot afford the equipment they need to do that? How can energy, agriculture and equipment players work together to make the transition more accessible?
A: That’s why we’re having conversations with companies set up to de-risk the agriculture sector. By leveraging that connection, we’re able to aggregate potential energy needs and develop instruments that make equipment more affordable through bulk procurement.
We can have arrangements that make it easier for farmers and food producers to lease equipment and eventually own it over a period. There’s no real pressure to recover the capital very quickly because you’re looking at scale.
Rice farmer Danjuma Okuwa adjusts his newly installed electric rice milling machine at his compound in Rukubi, Nasarawa, Nigeria, September 27, 2022. (Thomson Reuters Foundation/Afolabi Sotunde) Rice farmer Danjuma Okuwa adjusts his newly installed electric rice milling machine at his compound in Rukubi, Nasarawa, Nigeria, September 27, 2022. (Thomson Reuters Foundation/Afolabi Sotunde)There is a whole lot across the agricultural value chain that needs energy, from farming and harvesting to food processing and value-addition. We need to understand the energy needs across the value chain and bring our members in to provide solutions.
Developers do not necessarily need to provide every productive-use solution themselves. They can partner with equipment suppliers, financiers, agribusinesses and other service providers to enable customers to use electricity productively. The objective is simple: do not just electrify communities; enable economic activity that uses that electricity.
CHN: When Africa’s industrialisation is discussed, you hear things like renewables cannot provide enough baseload, while some food processors are sceptical about switching to renewable energy because of these concerns about reliability. What is your response?
A: It’s not a controversial statement to say that a typical baseload is usually from the grid, and it’s usually from multiple sources including renewable energy. For large-scale operations, we can look at blending multiple sources of energy. But how do we solve the problem of a mid-sized farmer? We can solve it with a mini-grid using renewable energy.
Comment: Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
If you go to a small farmer in a rural area, they don’t care about what source of energy they’re getting. They just want something that can help them get from A to B. If you look at the direct energy needs of farmers and food processors, I’m sure 90 percent of their consumption can be solved by renewable energy. Let’s start with that problem first. Then, as they scale, they might need to ramp up, and we can start talking about a bigger baseload.
CHN: How much agricultural value is lost because farmers and food businesses lack reliable, affordable electricity?
A: If you look at, for example, the fact that we need to maybe plant tomatoes or strawberries in Jos before it gets to Lagos [Nigeria], which most likely is by road, I can assure you that a good chunk, if not stored properly, would be bad by then. So the fact that we do not have energy is in itself a lost opportunity to maximise the potential of the agriculture sector. So until we’ve solved the energy problem, we will not salvage waste – and for me that is a lost opportunity.
CHN: AGRA, an institution focused on scaling agricultural innovations to help smallholder farmers, estimates a massive shortfall between current investments in the continent’s food systems and what is actually needed to build a resilient, profitable agricultural economy – to the tune of $180 billion per year. Can integrating energy into food systems help bridge that gap?
A: Yes – if energy can help unlock the potential to earn more money, investors will follow the money. Investments go where there is certainty, and until there is certainty around cash flow and revenue, investment will be limited.
My vision is to see more Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) being signed between energy players and the agriculture sector. We can start by getting people into the room, understanding their pain points, crafting a framework and documentation that works for both parties, and then seeing deals happen.
This interview was shortened and edited for clarity.
The post How clean energy can boost business for Africa’s food producers appeared first on Climate Home News.
Human security relies on adapting to the world’s new climate reality
Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio is a senior advisor on adaptation and resilience with the United Nations Foundation and Mattias Söderberg is global climate lead at Danish NGO DanChurchAid.
Recent extreme events – from wildfires and heatwaves in Europe to flash flooding following a glacier collapse in Nepal – have shocked and devastated communities, bringing years of warnings about such climate impacts to the doorstep of communities around the world.
One thing is certain: the new climate reality is here – and the adaptation strategies designed for yesterday’s world are no longer sufficient.
Attribution science has since shown that the hotter and more frequent heatwaves we’re experiencing around the world would have been virtually impossible without today’s high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate shocks are now so severe that they reverberate through supply chains, food and water systems, financial markets and the movement of people.
They must be a catalyst for a new way of thinking about adaptation and resilience, and how we finance solutions that work. A failure to invest in adaptation in one region can create costs far beyond it, which is why the concept of shared resilience is critical for leaders to grasp.
Investment not charityAt the UN General Assembly (UNGA 81) this month, leaders have an opportunity to translate today’s urgency into concrete commitments on adaptation and loss and damage finance ahead of COP31.
Those commitments are needed to underpin global stability, shared prosperity and human security. Governments should use this moment to show what a new response looks like: finance that reaches communities faster, supports locally grounded solutions, strengthens national systems, and helps countries prepare before the next shock arrives.
If we want sustained economic growth, food and water security, and resilient and prosperous societies across every region, adaptation must be at the heart of today’s development and security agenda. It cannot be just a future planning consideration or a narrow issue for climate ministries. Adaptation is now everyone’s business – and it must be financed fast and fair.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly framed climate finance as an investment rather than charity, warning that “a world in climate chaos cannot be a world at peace” and describing human security as freedom from the chronic and sudden disruptions that climate change multiplies.
What’s more, adaptation delivers a real return-on-investment, with researchers estimating that every dollar invested produces $10 in benefits, saving lives, protecting livelihoods, and reducing the costs of future disasters.
Hitting adaptation limitsThe urgency to scale adaptation systematically is growing. The newly released “Limiting Overshoot” report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) confirms what scientists have long warned: exceeding global warming of 1.5C is now unavoidable under current policies. Yet, how high temperatures rise – and how long the world remains above the 1.5C threshold – will determine whether communities, economies and entire ecosystems can keep pace.
There are limits to adaptation. When we breach those limits, lives and livelihoods are lost, and people and ecosystems suffer greatly. We cannot simply build yesterday’s infrastructure a little stronger and assume it will be enough.
Nepal flood destruction shows “limits to adaptation”, scientists say
We need to fundamentally change the systems that determine how societies anticipate, absorb and recover from both immediate and evolving non-linear climate shocks. This includes transforming physical systems, such as infrastructure, and the governance systems that affect where and how we live to how we maintain our health and wellbeing.
Finance today is nowhere near the scale of the challenge.
The UNEP “Adaptation Gap Report 2025” estimates the shortfall in adaptation finance in developing countries at $284 billion–$339 billion a year – roughly 12 to 14 times current international public flows of around $26 billion. That gap is a development, economic and human security problem, especially for the most vulnerable populations who have contributed the least to causing the climate crisis.
Building resilience into financial systemsThere are already signs of what a more systemic adaptation response could look like. Communities around the world are delivering practical solutions at local level, even as adaptation finance remains notoriously, and appallingly, difficult to access. Cyclone-resistant homes, local forecasting capacities, drought-resistant crops, heat insurance for pregnant informal workers and mangrove restoration are rooted in local knowledge and lived experience, while delivering benefits far beyond the communities where they originate from.
But local innovation alone is not enough; the systems around it need to be resilient too.
Jamaica offers one example. The country has built a multi-layered disaster-risk financing framework, including a catastrophe bond and contingency funds, through sustained fiscal discipline and proactive investment. Its debt-to-GDP ratio fell from around 147% in 2012 to around 62% in 202-25. That groundwork matters when disaster strikes.
Hurricane Melissa’s destruction shows need for climate resilience push
Following Hurricane Melissa, Jamaica was able to secure billions of dollars in reconstruction financing from multilateral banks – finance that might otherwise have been much harder to access. The lesson is clear: resilience can be built into the financial architecture of a country before a crisis arrives. That is the shift we now need to make at scale.
The foundations already exist – in Kingston’s fiscal reforms, in early-warning systems from the Sahel to the Pacific, and in every community that adapted before disaster struck. What is still missing is the political will, and the finance, to take what works and put it to work everywhere, at the speed our world’s new climate reality demands.
To hear more on this issue from high-level officials and experts, sign up for this event during Climate Week NYC, at 8am EDT on September 24 (in person or online), moderated by Climate Home News Editor Megan Rowling: Adapting to the New Climate Reality: Why Accelerating Impacts Demand New Responses.
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Framing the climate science debate as a binary battle isn’t just wrong – it’s dangerous
Lidy Nacpil is the coordinator of Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD).
Recent reporting on international climate negotiations has highlighted a sharpening divide within civil society and multilateral diplomacy. A troubling, simplistic narrative has taken root: that the UN climate process is witnessing a binary struggle between defenders of science and those attacking it.
This framing is not only inaccurate; it is dangerous. Characterising a substantive methodological and political debate in these terms misdiagnoses the stakes and stirs conflict instead of clarity.
No one disputes that climate action must rest on science. Science tells us what has led us to the climate crisis – the accumulation of historical emissions – and how much carbon budget remains if we are to keep temperature rise below 1.5C. It tells us how much global emissions must drop, and how fast. Science is also essential in assessing each country’s historical contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Responsibility, however, must also be based on capacity. For those who generated the largest share of historical emissions, that capacity includes the enormous wealth and economic power accumulated through the same fossil-fuel-intensive development that generated those emissions.
As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
While principles that should guide human action aren’t scientific questions – they are matters of values – applying them to real-world problems requires scientific grounding. Equity recognises the scientifically established reality of differentiated responsibilities among countries and within societies. Putting equity into practice demands scientific rigour.
Scrutiny of IPCC modelsToday, critics are scrutinising the assumptions and frameworks behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), used to project future scenarios and map global mitigation pathways. These concerns centre squarely on equity and justice.
The economic, technological and policy assumptions used in IAM scenarios are normative choices rather than scientifically prescribed or neutral facts. These include choices about discount rates, economic growth, energy demand, technology costs, carbon prices, land availability and the regional location of mitigation. Many IAM scenarios reproduce existing global inequalities rather than transform them. Questions about transparency, representativeness and diversity in the scientific process are deeply urgent.
Most IAM scenarios are built primarily around global cost-effectiveness – directing emissions reductions to places where mitigation is modelled as cheapest rather than allocating effort according to historical responsibility, capacity and development needs.
The resulting pathways allow developed countries to retain disproportionately high levels of energy and fossil-fuel consumption while requiring developing countries to undertake substantial mitigation and carbon removal, including land-based measures that threaten food security and local development.
Northern models often assume uniform access to cheap financing. In reality, Global South economies face far higher capital costs, driving up the price tag of rapid infrastructure shifts.
Constraints on development spaceScenario constraints also limit the development space poorer nations need without guaranteeing adequate climate finance. When models treat profoundly unequal starting points as uniform baselines, policy pathways lock in global inequality under the banner of scientific objectivity.
Pointing out these structural flaws isn’t rejecting science. It is essential scientific scrutiny aimed at producing stronger, fairer, and more actionable results.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The fight is not about whether we want to keep temperature rise below 1.5C, but about how we get there. A pathway can be technically compatible with 1.5C or 2C while still being deeply unequal in who gets to consume energy, who must reduce emissions, and whose development is constrained. Temperature compatibility alone does not make a pathway fair.
Critiquing IAM scenarios from an equity perspective is neither an attack on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) nor an attack on science. Rigorously examining IPCC reports – their substance, assumptions, and processes – is an acknowledgement of the IPCC’s importance and entirely consistent with scientific method.
Tensions over AR7 timingThere is a separate but related tension over the cycle and timeline of the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report (AR7). Some governments and civil society voices advocate completing its Working Group reports in time to feed directly into the UN’s Second Global Stocktake in 2028.
The motivation makes sense: policymakers need timely science. But several developing-country negotiators and researchers have warned that meeting that deadline could severely disadvantage the Global South.
Funding gap threatens next round of IPCC climate science reports, chair warns
Global North authors and institutions remain disproportionately represented in the research underlying IAM assessments. Developing-country researchers often work with fewer institutional resources, smaller research budgets, and less administrative support. Accelerated publishing and assessment schedules can further limit their ability to generate, submit, and peer-review research in time for inclusion.
The AR7 timeline concerns boil down to inclusivity, representation, and equity. Requiring the IPCC to meet tight political calendars without ensuring meaningful support and participation for developing-country researchers risks reproducing the very inequalities being challenged.
Cooperation requires equityPolitical interests are indeed at work in UNFCCC negotiations and must be surfaced. Bad-faith actors seek to evade fossil-fuel phase-outs or shirk climate-finance obligations. Many developed country parties are guilty of both, including those who style themselves as “Friends of Science.”
We must not lump legitimate scientific critiques raised by several Global South researchers and many civil society organisations concerning representation, economic assumptions and fair-share accounting together with obstructionism. Doing so risks misrepresenting and delegitimising critical scientific work and Global South equity and justice perspectives.
The climate movement is strongest when it aligns rigorous science with global equity and justice. Achieving the Paris Agreement’s goals requires robust science that fully integrates the experiences, economic realities and academic contributions of the Global South. Effective climate action also requires international cooperation, and without equity, such cooperation cannot be sustained. We do not have to choose between science and equity. We need both.
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DR Congo’s power-hungry mining sector drives record solar surge
More than 300,000 solar panels and 120 battery containers are helping to power Africa’s largest copper mine with continuous clean energy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as miners turn to solar as an alternative to expensive diesel and energy imports.
The project at the Kamoa Copper mine in the south of the DRC, which became operational last month, is one of the largest solar and battery facilities generating baseload power on the continent.
The clean electricity is displacing millions of litres of polluting diesel and costs less than a fifth of the price of generator power per kilowatt hour, the mining company said.
The project is part of a massive solar deployment across the continent. Recent data from global energy think-tank Ember found record solar capacity of 17 GW will be installed in Africa this year – a 45% rise from 2025.
Installed by CrossBoundary Energy, a developer of distributed renewable energy systems, the solar-battery facility at the DRC mine is “proof of concept” that solar and battery systems can provide the reliable power at scale needed by remote industrial operations, Annebel Oosthuizen, managing director at Kamoa Copper, told Climate Home News in an interview.
“There’s always been this perception in the DRC that solar isn’t ideal because it is raining half of the year. But it’s perfectly ideal. We are seeing a lot of interest from other mines that are still depending on generators and power imports,” she said.
Mining drives solar and battery surgeLike Kamoa Copper, a growing number of miners in the DRC are looking to solar power to compensate for the country’s chronic energy deficit at a lower cost as global diesel prices hit record highs amid ongoing attacks on oil infrastructure in the Middle East.
As a result, the mining sector has become a key driver of the country’s growing clean energy demand and one of the biggest importers of large-scale solar equipment.
Ember found the DRC is set to install a record 1.7 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels this year – a 544% increase compared to 2025 and the equivalent of adding more than 60% of the country’s entire 2023 grid capacity.
The deployment of combined solar and battery storage solutions to deliver stable energy supplies to mines has also caused battery imports to surge. In dollar terms, the DRC’s imports of batteries from China far exceeded that of solar in the year to June 2026, according to Ember.
A crippling power deficitThe DRC holds significant energy resources and some of the world’s largest reserves of the minerals required to manufacture clean energy technologies. It is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, which is needed to make batteries, and Africa’s top producer of copper – a metal sought after for its electrical conductivity which is pivotal to the world’s electrification efforts.
Yet just 22.5% of the DRC’s population had access to electricity in 2024 – one of the lowest rates in the world, according to the World Bank. And as mining expands and more of the minerals extracted are being processed in the country, unreliable power supply has become a major constraint for the sector, which contributed to more than a quarter of the country’s GDP in 2024, excluding oil and gas.
The country has enormous hydropower potential, with the hydroelectric potential of the Congo River estimated at around 100 GW. But only a fraction is being harnessed.
Still, virtually all of the DRC’s grid-connected electricity is generated by hydropower by the state-owned utility, Société Nationale d’Électricité (SNEL).
The electricity then has to be transported more than 1,500 kilometres to reach the mining belt in the south – a challenge made more difficult by ageing grid infrastructure and limited transmission capability. SNEL did not respond to a request for comment.
“It is estimated that there’s around a 1 GW energy deficit for the DRC mining sector,” said Matt Tilleard, CEO of CrossBoundary Energy, which owns the solar and battery equipment at the Kamoa Copper mine and provides the power as a service.
“The interest in solar from the mining industry is not theoretical – it is already translating into large-scale solar and battery procurement for mining operations in the region,” he added.
Solar displaces gas, saves energy costsThe facility installed by CrossBoundary is part of a plan by Kamoa Copper to supply more of the electricity it needs with solar energy and batteries as its operations expand, a faster solution than relying on harder-to-build hydropower projects.
“Our processing capacity has increased drastically over the last couple of years. We’ve constructed the largest copper smelter in Africa and that is so power-intensive,” said managing director Oosthuizen.
A joint venture between Canadian firm Ivanhoe Mines, Chinese company Zijin Mining Group and the DRC government, the mine needs 235 megawatts (MW) of power, which is expected to nearly double to 450 MW in the next five years.
Kamoa Copper currently receives 100 MW from state utility SNEL – “and the rest we have to find a solution for”, said Oosthuizen.
Aerial view of a vast solar park and battery storage containers powering the Kamoa Copper mine in southern DRC (Photo: Kamoa Copper SA)Another 30 MW solar and battery baseload facility is expected to come into operation this month, enabling around 25% of the mine’s power needs to be generated by solar energy. An additional 60 MW of continuous solar power will be added by the end of 2027, and the company is exploring options for more solar capacity and two hydropower projects.
The operational 30 MW of clean electricity provided by CrossBoundary Energy will power pumps that prevent 400 million litres of water from flooding the underground mine every day.
In August alone, the facility has reduced the mine’s diesel consumption by around four million litres, generating an estimated $11 million dollars in savings at current diesel prices, Oosthuizen said.
The mine still relies on generators to meet a 20-40 MW deficit and to power the trucks used in the mine, which Oosthuizen said would be difficult to electrify in the next five years because the technology isn’t yet ready to operate in the mine’s tough and wet conditions.
Avoiding a two-speed transitionTo prevent a major imbalance between industrial players’ access to clean, reliable energy and the millions of Congolese who remain without power, the government requires private electricity producers to reserve at least 10% of their generated power for local communities living near rural production sites.
Delivering this, combined with rural electrification, mini-grid development and national grid expansion, is critical to prevent a two-speed energy transition that leaves people behind, said Catherine Mukobo, head of ACERD, the Congolese Association for Renewable and Decentralised Energies.
“Without implementing these policies, the DRC could get in a situation where mines have access to abundant modern energy while a large part of the population remains without electricity,” she said.
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The overlooked shortcut to meeting the world’s energy goals
In 2023, under the bright lights of the Expo City Dubai, almost 200 nations adopted an agreement to dramatically alter the world’s relationship with energy.
The deal at the COP28 climate summit promised to triple the amount of renewable electricity capacity to at least 11,000 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements from 2% to 4%. Taken together, these two commitments have the potential to usher in a new global economy that is cleaner and smarter.
Research suggests the world is on course to meet the renewable energy target, with an annual growth rate of nearly 30% between 2023 and 2025. The same cannot be said of energy efficiency, where growth fell to 1% in 2024, but has since climbed to 1.8%, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The IEA attributes this poor performance to a number of factors: strong growth in industrial energy demand, policy gaps, greater access to inefficient air conditioners, and an overall growth in energy demand which renewables have not been able to meet.
Air conditioning units lined up outside a building in Hong Kong. (Image: Unsplash) Air conditioning units lined up outside a building in Hong Kong. (Image: Unsplash)Global electricity demand is predicted to grow by 3.8% in 2027, up from 3% in 2025. According to researchers, this demand is primarily being driven by heavy industries – steel, chemicals, cement – which overwhelmingly still use fossil fuels to power their energy-intensive factories.
In addition, the explosive growth of AI has led to the development of new data centres which require huge amounts of electricity. Under conservative scenarios, data centres could double their electricity consumption by 2030, and those dedicated to servicing AI needs could see a 30% annual increase over the same period. The more these trends continue, the greater the cost of transitioning to cleaner, more efficient technologies.
Taking the right policy directionWhile both old and new technologies put added pressure on the electricity system, the targets set in recent years remain the same. This presents policymakers with a challenge and an opportunity.
Policy is often designed to be responsive to the world around it. When the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive was first adopted in 2012, the world was a very different place. That is why it has since been updated, twice, in 2018 and 2023.
Is electrification a no-brainer in the race to net-zero?
Mario Giordano, global head of public and government affairs at lighting multinational Signify, calls this piece of legislation “market transformational” as it created “long-term certainty through binding targets, energy saving obligations, and renovation requirements”. This, in turn, allowed businesses to plan investments and start to innovate with the stability the directive created.
The legislation has been credited with improving efficiency rates across the bloc. According to Eurostat, the EU used a record low amount of energy in 2024, 20% less than in 2006, an historic high point.
One of the next steps on that journey for Europe is the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive which seeks to upgrade old buildings and introduces a zero-emissions standard for new public ones.
“It is a huge opportunity to renovate the continent’s building stock, and lighting is everywhere,” said Giordano. “There will need to be a massive overhaul from conventional lighting to LEDs, targeting the worst-performing buildings,” he added. This bold legislative approach could provide a template for other countries to develop energy policies with maximum impact on efficiency rates.
How to get to 4%Jérôme Bilodeau, energy efficiency programme manager at the IEA, told Climate Home News “the world is not currently on track” to meet the COP28 efficiency goal but agreed it was achievable with the right policies in place.
“Nine out of 10 countries have achieved a rate of improvement of 4% at least one year over the past decade,” he said.
“There are many examples of effective energy efficiency policies across the world, and governments are introducing new ones regularly,” he added, pointing out that countries representing 85% of global energy demand had announced hundreds of new or updated policies in 2025 alone.
Signify: “We believe resilience is becoming more important to businesses right now”
In addition, the global energy crisis caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has turbocharged the policy environment with a suite of new policies from dozens of countries now in place to reduce energy demand.
The IEA recommends closing policy gaps and raising the ambition of existing ones to help achieve the 4% energy efficiency improvement target. These policy gaps can be quite straightforward to address – for example, creating efficiency standards for new buildings, something the IEA says is lacking in almost half of all countries. And as technologies improve, policies need to be updated.
“In some countries, a building that meets the local efficiency standard may in fact be using three times as much energy as one in another country with a similar climate but with higher efficiency standards,” Bilodeau added.
One integrated systemGiordano argues that a whole system view is needed: “Across different industries, there is a growing consensus that energy efficiency, electrification and renewable energy are not separate policy tracks, but one integrated system,” he said.
He believes that lighting can make a serious contribution to this system as a scalable and cost-effective efficiency measure. As lighting is a mature technology that is installed almost everywhere, from small buildings to city streets, it can be upgraded faster and provide immediate savings.
“You can reduce emissions, free up electricity for electrification purposes, and also save money that can be invested elsewhere,” he added.
Can the circular economy win over big business?
The latest figures show lighting accounts for around 8% of global electricity demand, and Signify estimates that switching to efficient LED technologies could save enough electricity to power up to 300 million heat pumps, or 400 million electric vehicles worldwide.
The focus on lighting would form part of a wider policy push to upgrade each country’s energy system where efficient appliances and processes are powered by renewables. And using energy more intelligently and flexibly, for example, by incentivising demand when renewable generation is higher, will greatly improve efficiency rates.
The English city of Liverpool is an example of one place seeking to use electricity in this way. A recent project, completed in 2026, saw the installation of ‘traffic adaptive lighting’ on key routes between a new football stadium and the city centre. The council can now respond to real-time fluctuations in demand, such as increased usage on match days, to meet people’s needs. This new approach could offer up to 30% in cost savings over the next decade, according to Signify.
Making energy work harderAn oft-repeated phrase in energy circles is that the greenest electron is the one you don’t use. The world is making steady progress on the challenge of transitioning away from fossil fuels. New wind and solar power installations continue to grow at record rates, with widespread coverage across continents. But in the headlong rush to build out capacity, governments and business may at the same time be taking a step backwards by paying insufficient attention to energy efficiency.
The positive work in renewables could easily be undone without a coordinated effort to make energy go further and work harder than it currently does. Experts in these circles agree that stronger, targeted policies are an important first step to achieving the world’s energy efficiency goals. But time is quickly running out to do so.
Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.
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Nepal flood destruction shows “limits to adaptation”, scientists say
There is very little authorities in Nepal could have done to prevent the deaths and devastation caused by the flash flood on its border with Tibet in late August, scientists with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group have said.
Launching a study that highlighted the role of climate change in causing the glacial rock and ice collapse that triggered the Himalayan flood, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto told reporters that “no amount of local adaptation can fully shield vulnerable people downstream from this scale of destruction”.
The findings released on Thursday are likely to strengthen Nepal’s case for emergency support from the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. Its board members met informally on Wednesday to discuss whether to grant the country a maximum of $20 million towards its estimated $4.8 billion cost of recovery and reconstruction, but no decision has yet been taken.
Nepal’s foreign minister Shisir Khanal told Climate Home News last week that the destructive flood was “exactly the kind of climate-driven catastrophe the Fund was created to address”.
Hard to predictThe WWA study found that rock-ice avalanches are very hard to predict and that moving people out of areas vulnerable to such floods is difficult as their livelihoods revolve around the rivers along which the floods travel.
The recent disaster began on the morning of August 26, when an avalanche started falling beneath a glacier. This caused huge amounts of rocks and glacier ice to fall over a kilometre to a valley floor, where they then picked up more rock and ice and became a flood of debris heading downhill and downstream along the border of Nepal and Tibet.
The torrent entered the narrow Lhende Khola gorge and crashed through the busy Gyirong port border crossing at 170 kilometres an hour. It continued many kilometres downstream before eventually turning from rock and ice to water and slowing down.
The flood swept through villages, roads, bridges and hydropower stations, killing over 1,300 people in Nepal with more than 5,000 still missing. The flood also killed at least 40 people in Chinese-run Tibet.
Those on higher ground away from the river mainly survived but the flood’s speed meant that many people received no warning to seek higher ground or shelter.
While Nepal has early warning systems for flooding caused by rain and glacial lake outbursts, the WWA study noted that rock-ice avalanches are complex and understudied, with methods to monitor them still being explored.
Co-author Walter Immerzeel, mountain hydrology professor at Utrecht University, told journalists that with current methods, the disaster could not have been predicted.
But, he said, in the future it may be possible to use remote sensing techniques to analyse glaciers and rocks to generate a warning before a collapse occurs.
A technique called radar interferometry can detect hotspots which should be monitored with field-based sensors and drones, he said, adding that early warning systems could be installed in these areas using seismometers, water-level measurements and CCTV.
Because doing this for thousands of glaciers across the Himalayas would be difficult, authorities could monitor only the rock and ice faces that are a danger to the river valleys with the most people and infrastructure in them, he added. But this would still require lots of investment together with international collaboration and coordination, he warned.
The study found that another potential adaptation strategy – restricting development in flood-prone river valleys – is socially, economically and politically difficult.
The scientists said habitable land is scarce in these steep river valleys and economic activities like transport and hydropower generation are dependent on the river itself.
Madhab Uprety, a Nepali scientist from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said that, while new development should assess the risks of floods, many existing communities and buildings are already at risk.
Loss and damageOtto said the flood should be discussed in the context of loss and damage as “there is no doubt that climate change is one of the drivers” and “it’s also one of the types of events that are absolutely outside of the limits we can possibly adapt to”.
As well as the deaths, a Nepali government’s assessment has found that a large amount of infrastructure was damaged, including more than 7,500 homes, 105 bridges, 48 public buildings, 47 cultural heritage assets, 18 schools, 13 hydropower facilities, seven health facilities, and numerous shops, hotels, restaurants, irrigation systems and farms. Over 30,000 people were affected.
Developing countries have called for the loss and damage fund’s board to hold an emergency meeting to discuss how to respond to Nepal’s request for funding. Instead of a full board meeting though, board members met only informally and online on Wednesday, Climate Home News understands. A source with knowledge of discussions said the informal nature of the meeting meant they were not able to take decisions or agree on next steps, which have been left up to the board’s co-chairs.
Speaking before that meeting started, Nepali climate negotiator Manjeet Dhakal said he had “heard of an extremely positive response” to Nepal’s request from board members. “Hopefully there will be something – a decision that the fund will do for exactly the reason that the fund was established,” he said.
Ajay Mathur, former Indian climate negotiator and now head of The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, told a separate press briefing on Wednesday that the Nepal flood disaster would push loss and damage higher up the agenda of international climate talks, particularly if the United Nations Secretary-General decides to champion the cause at the UN General Assembly in New York next week.
Murat Kurum, Turkish environment minister and president-designate of COP31, told Climate Home News last week that he would be “pleased” if the fund could support Nepal and that he will keep calling in every speech for countries to give money to the loss and damage fund.
Jennifer Morgan, former German climate envoy and now a senior fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, called for the loss and damage fund – which currently has around $630 million in contributions – to be topped up with new pledges from governments as well as solidarity levies on things like luxury air travel, super-rich individuals and fossil fuel firms’ windfall profits.
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International trade linked to 20% of global emissions – but imports ignored
A fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are linked to international trade in goods and services, a new tracker shows, spotlighting a little-studied issue that researchers say should be tackled by the UN climate process.
Currently, as part of the Paris Agreement, every country is responsible for counting and reducing the planet-heating emissions that are produced within its territory. Manufacturing countries, for example, may have high emissions even if what they make is exported for consumption elsewhere.
But new analysis from the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and climate consultancy Matière, based on the tracker’s data, shows that some countries have a high footprint of “imported emissions” from goods and services they ship in. These emissions are often ignored in the places where the products are consumed because they are not formally counted under greenhouse gas inventories.
In the European Union, for example, while domestic emissions have declined since 2015, imported emissions have remained unchanged, the analysis shows. In some countries, like Austria or Sweden, they are as high as the country’s entire annual carbon footprint.
Former EU lead climate negotiator Jacob Werksman said that under the Paris Agreement, these traded emissions are accounted for in the countries where they are originally produced, but importing countries can also take responsibility for their consumption.
“It starts with a wide recognition by many jurisdictions around the world that we need to know the carbon content of these products, and we then need to agree what is a fair, effective, transparent and relatively easy-to-implement way of measuring that carbon in traded products,” he told a launch event for the trade emissions tracker, which contains data for different countries, sectors and gases.
Trade and its role in addressing climate change has become a higher priority at UN climate talks after a push led by emerging economies including China, India and South Africa led to the first trade and climate change dialogue held this year at the mid-year session in Bonn.
At the upcoming COP31 UN summit in Antalya, some voluntary initiatives like the Brazil-led Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade are expected to continue, but the issue does not feature in Türkiye’s Action Agenda of climate initiatives and formal negotiations are not scheduled on the topic.
China: the world’s top emissions exporterAs a manufacturing powerhouse, China ranks first in the new tracker as the world’s top-emitting country, but the data shows that a large chunk of the country’s carbon emissions – an amount larger than Brazil’s entire annual carbon footprint – are linked to products that are exported and consumed abroad.
Russia, Brazil, the US and the EU rank as the top destinations for Chinese trade-related emissions, which are mostly linked to components for power generation, basic metals like copper and lead, and non-metallic minerals like graphite and phosphorus.
Yet China is also the world’s top emissions importer, related mostly to agricultural products, fossil fuels and minerals brought from the US, the EU, Japan and India, among others. The US ranks second by a close margin, with both countries importing about 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Richard Baron, ECF’s industrial policy and trade director, said Chinese clean energy products are key for reducing emissions around the world, adding that Europe is “not able to do without those technologies” for its energy transition.
“China has an emissions trading system that counts CO2 differently there. But if China and the EU were to agree on some kind of translation mechanism to say ‘this is how we measure it’, and companies can understand the protocol to navigate both markets, that would set the tone for a lot of other conversations,” he said at the platform’s launch event last week.
The analysis suggests that if the EU and China aligned their climate requirements for products, the resulting standards could influence trade flows representing about 7% of global emissions.
Baron said there’s “a plethora” of multilateral spaces to hold these discussions, including the climate and trade dialogue at the UN climate talks or the Climate Club at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which seeks to cut industrial emissions.
Trade breaks into agenda of UN climate talks – but will it have teeth?
Controversial trade measuresInstruments like the Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) – a recent piece of legislation that penalises emissions-heavy imported products – are one tool that could be used to address trade-related emissions, said Antoine Oger, executive director at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.
He said a significant portion of imported emissions in Europe are already covered by CBAM, as it includes sectors like cement, iron and steel, fertilisers and aluminium. This then allows the EU “to engage in constructive dialogue with our trade partners”, he added.
An employee of Dirostahl, a medium-size forging steel firm that produces large parts, works on a glowing steel element that has been heated in a classic natural gas-fired furnace to 1,200C in Remscheid, Germany, June 30, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen) An employee of Dirostahl, a medium-size forging steel firm that produces large parts, works on a glowing steel element that has been heated in a classic natural gas-fired furnace to 1,200C in Remscheid, Germany, June 30, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen)But across diplomatic summits, including at UN climate talks, emerging economies have pushed back heavily against the CBAM and other trade measures. The most recent BRICS declaration adopted on Saturday by 11 such countries – including China, India and Russia – condemns “protectionism under the guise of environmental objectives”.
The declaration calls for the “elimination of such unlawful measures”, which they argue have “far-reaching negative implications for the human rights, including the rights to development, health and food security” of vulnerable communities.
“The question of responsibility is a political question,” Oger said. “These emissions exist – they are emitted somewhere to make a product that will be consumed elsewhere. So you can debate responsibility but the idea is for the two parts to recognise there’s a problem.”
The aim, he added “is not to point fingers, but to accept this is a reality of our emissions profiles and ask what we can do about it”.
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Made in Nigeria: The race to build an African solar industry from scratch
In a bright, spacious factory on the outskirts of Lagos, young engineers in overalls work their way along the production line, carefully inspecting the shimmery blue solar cells that turn sunlight into electricity.
Quality checks completed, the finished solar panels are loaded onto forklifts and taken to a warehouse – ready for delivery to buyers across Nigeria and in neighbouring West African countries. Each panel is labelled “Made in Nigeria”.
But for Emmanuel Agbola, operations manager at Nigerian solar company LPV Technologies, the company’s mission goes beyond quality control and meeting customer orders.
“We are looking at addressing the immediate power needs of Nigeria,” Agbola told Climate Home News in a quiet room away from the steady hum of machinery on the factory floor, where production began last year.
That is no small task. About four out of 10 Nigerians – more than 85 million people – still lack reliable access to grid electricity, according to Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency.
An engineer works on a solar module inside LPV factory, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) An engineer works on a solar module inside LPV factory, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)LPV Technologies is among a handful of startups making headway on the nation’s bold ambitions to build a domestic solar panel manufacturing industry, as solar becomes the go-to choice for Nigerian businesses and households fed up with frequent blackouts.
Nigeria’s national grid has collapsed about 22 times during the last two years due to transmission constraints, gas shortages and ageing infrastructure.
That is exactly why local solar panel manufacturing matters, according to Agbola.
“One of our slogans is ‘Make the sun pay for your bills’,” he said.
Solar transforms life for homes and businessesNigeria has become one of Africa’s fastest-growing markets for increasingly affordable solar systems, which are providing more reliable and cheaper electricity for homes and workplaces than the fragile power grid.
Solar panels installed across rooftops of shops in Wuse Market, Abuja, July, 2026 (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Solar panels installed across rooftops of shops in Wuse Market, Abuja, July, 2026 (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)Nigeria’s rapid solar adoption is being met mostly by small-scale solar installations which have helped bring the country’s total cumulative solar capacity to about 6 gigawatts (GW), according to a report by research provider BloombergNEF.
But almost every panel installed on homes, factories and public buildings across the country is imported – the vast majority from China – something the government wants to change.
“We are preparing to produce in this country the solar technologies that the entire continent will use,” President Bola Tinubu told a group of Chinese investors in 2024.
“Nigeria is a huge market for solar panels. Africa is a major consumer of solar technologies. I do not see why these panels and batteries cannot be produced here,” he said.
Two years on, that ambition is starting to bear fruit.
Not far from LPV’s factory, in the Agege neighbourhood of Lagos, workers are putting the finishing touches to a new commercial-scale veterinary vaccine cold-storage facility.
Up on the roof, 100 of LPV’s “Made in Nigeria” solar panels have been fixed into position.
Once operational, the panels and attached battery storage will provide round-the-clock electricity for offices, laboratories and cold-storage rooms at the site, helping to keep millions of vaccine doses safely refrigerated even when the national grid fails.
“This will never go off – all year round,” said the civil engineer overseeing work at the site, pointing to the rooftop installation. “It’s off-grid – 24 hours, seven days; constant electricity to run these two cooling units.”
A worker looks over solar cells at the LPV factory in Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Government bets on local manufacturingThe Nigerian government wants solar power to play a central role in bridging the country’s electricity access gap, but it also wants the equipment that will drive that transition to be produced at home to create new jobs and reduce imports. That aligns with its wider Nigeria First industry policy.
Nigeria’s booming solar market is still overwhelmingly supplied by foreign-made panels.
Last year, it imported about 2.9 million panels worth more than 400 billion naira ($295 million). More than 70% of them came from China, making Nigeria Africa’s second-largest importer of Chinese panels after South Africa.
China dominates almost every stage of the global solar manufacturing supply chain and a series of government-led initiatives to kickstart local production have yet to make major headway.
More than a decade ago, the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure established the country’s first government-backed solar panel factory in Karshi, Abuja. While successive upgrades have increased its production capacity to about 50 MW annually, the facility still supplies only a fraction of Nigeria’s growing demand.
The government has since announced more ambitious projects, including a Renewable Energy Industrial Park in Nasarawa state, expected to manufacture solar cells, panels and batteries, and a solar module assembly plant under construction by the Energy Commission of Nigeria in Enugu. Neither project has yet begun commercial production.
Last year, the government also proposed restricting solar panel imports to encourage domestic manufacturing, though the idea was swiftly dropped.
Chinese imports dominate solar panel tradeThe scale of Nigeria’s challenge is obvious during a visit to Alaba International Market in Lagos, one of Africa’s largest electronics markets and a solar retail hub where thousands of panels change hands every week.
One recent morning in June, cart pushers could be seen weaving their way between crowds of shoppers and traffic jams, their trolleys stacked high with loads of freshly imported solar panels.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer and fossil fuel exports have been the cornerstone of the economy for decades. But in the bustling market, solar has become such a good business in recent years that traders call it “the new oil“.
Signs advertising solar energy solutions at Alaba International Market, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) A labourer pushes cart full of imported solar panels across a road in Alaba International Market, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Signs advertising solar energy solutions at Alaba International Market, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) A labourer pushes cart full of imported solar panels across a road in Alaba International Market, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)Even so, few said they had ever seen panels made in Nigeria.
“Every panel we get is imported,” said wholesaler Ndubuisi Nwobodo, adding that it was the first time he had heard of panels being produced domestically.
At one of the market’s largest solar warehouses, manager Chidiebere Ani watched as workers unloaded another container of supplies from China. He said 95% of the warehouse’s stock of panels came from China.
China controls more than 80% of global manufacturing capacity, according to the International Energy Agency, spanning every stage of the supply chain, from polysilicon and wafers to solar cells and finished modules.
window.addEventListener('message', function (e) { if (!e.data || e.data.type !== 'spoovio:height') return; document.querySelectorAll('iframe.spoovio-embed').forEach(function (f) { if (f.contentWindow === e.source) f.style.height = e.data.height + 'px'; }); });Meanwhile, production at the LPV factory in Lagos is running at about 180,000 panels per year, Agbola said.
“If we had 10 LPVs, we still won’t be able to meet [Nigeria’s] demand,” Agbola said.
Even then, Nigerian producers face a tough contest on price. Imported 550-watt panels retail for about 150,000 naira ($110), the same price that LPV Technologies charges wholesalers.
Policy uncertainty seen as hurdle to investmentNigeria has plentiful affordable labour and – with a population of roughly 240 million – room for market growth as the falling price of panels makes them accessible to more people.
Chinese firms increasingly see opportunities to build manufacturing partnerships with local businesses, said Susan Li, the founder of Chinese solar company Solar Run Energy.
“We have to grow the industry together,” she said, cautioning that foreign investment in the sector would hinge on stable government policies and a steady exchange rate.
Labourers unload a truck full of imported solar panels at Alaba International Market, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Labourers unload a truck full of imported solar panels at Alaba International Market, Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)Last year’s short-lived proposal to ban panel imports, which was scrapped a month after it was floated, highlighted such investment concerns, said Wangari Muchiri, founder of Kenya-based RE.Think Energy.
“[One minute] solar imports were banned, and then they were not banned,” Muchiri said.
“If investors come in and there is already a clear path such that everyone knows how tariffs and customs duties are handled, then businesses can plan for those costs,” she explained. “But when policies keep changing, the risk becomes much higher.”
Li said she believed that “as time goes by, [policies] will become more stable”.
Nigeria’s challenges to scale up productionWhile Nigeria is making its first panels, it does not yet have the industrial capacity to produce vital solar cell components such as polysilicon, wafers and ingots.
At LPV, Agbola said having to import the components – up to 17 of them – eats into the company’s profit margins.
“When we combine [the cost of importing components] with other fixed-cost elements and we want to do our pricing, it becomes a big challenge for us in the market,” he said.
Because cells are the main component in a solar panel, LPV’s senior brand and marketing manager Kabir Okehi said it would be “a huge relief” to produce them domestically and avoid the high shipping logistics costs associated with imports. It also takes imported solar cells between six weeks and two months to get to Nigeria.
Many of the materials used in solar manufacturing – including silica, aluminium and steel – are available in Nigeria, but the country still lacks the technical know-how to turn them into higher-value components, experts say.
“What is missing in our local production is knowledge transfer,” said Mustapha Abdullahi, director-general of the Energy Commission of Nigeria, a government body responsible for strategic national energy policy planning and coordination.
window.addEventListener('message', function (e) { if (!e.data || e.data.type !== 'spoovio:height') return; document.querySelectorAll('iframe.spoovio-embed').forEach(function (f) { if (f.contentWindow === e.source) f.style.height = e.data.height + 'px'; }); });He said Nigeria is still learning about the technologies needed to make solar cells domestically, with research institutes experimenting with materials such as graphene and production methods that could eventually support upstream manufacturing.
“We’re still in the pilot stages, doing reverse engineering to see how things are done,” he told Climate Home News.
Companies struggle to access startup capitalAnother major challenge for homegrown solar manufacturing is finance, Abdullahi said, adding that several Nigerian companies have expressed interest in manufacturing solar panels, but many struggle to secure the capital needed to establish production lines.
The government has tried to bridge that gap by connecting local companies with international financiers, while offering incentives to prospective investors, he said.
Last year, Nigeria announced a partnership with Chinese solar giant LONGi to establish a 1,000 MW manufacturing facility in the country. The agreement, Abdullahi said, is intended to accelerate technology transfer and help Nigeria expand domestic production far beyond its current assembly capacity of roughly 300 MW of solar panels annually.
That is equivalent to 545,000 panels – of about 550 watts each – per year.
A conveyor belt producing solar cells at the LPV factory in Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Solar cells on a production line at the LPV factory in Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) A conveyor belt producing solar cells at the LPV factory in Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Solar cells on a production line at the LPV factory in Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)Production will need to increase nearly ten-fold, Abdullahi estimated, to meet projected future demand.
As new investments and joint ventures start to yield results, that might be possible, he said.
“Nigeria can even be the solar panel hub globally, not just for Africa, and compete well even with China,” he added.
China as a partner, not a rivalBut Nigeria should not be aiming to compete with China, rather learning from it as it seeks to build up its solar industry ecosystem – from assembling imported components to eventually making more of them locally, said Godson Ikiebey, a renewable energy specialist at PwC Nigeria.
China did not become the world’s solar manufacturing giant overnight, Ikiebey said. It developed a long-term industrial strategy, invested heavily in manufacturing capacity and steadily climbed the value chain.
“For now, it’s good to have the ambition, but the ambition does not yet match the action,” Ikiebey added.
China dominates global solar manufacturing not simply because it produces panels cheaply, RE.Think Energy’s CEO Muchiri said, but because it controls technology, supply chains and economies of scale built over decades.
Rather than trying to recreate that system from scratch, Nigeria should join forces with Chinese companies to accelerate technology transfer while developing its own workforce and manufacturing base, she said.
Building an African solar industry should also extend beyond Nigeria, with different countries potentially specialising in different parts of the value chain, fostering regional trade. “This is going to be a big opportunity to look at a regional expansion rather than just one country,” she added.
Chidiebere Ani, Foresolar manager, shows solar panels in the warehouse near the Alaba International Market in Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Chidiebere Ani, Foresolar manager, shows solar panels in the warehouse near the Alaba International Market in Lagos (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)Bringing such plans to fruition will take time and the goals should be realistic, Chinese investor Li said.
Items such as frames and screws could eventually be produced in Nigeria, but more sophisticated components like solar cells would still need to be imported because their production requires highly automated factories and a stable electricity supply, she said.
“You grow step by step. If you look at the long term, if you grow the seed and water it today, you will get the harvest tomorrow,” Li said.
Clean energy jobs for the future workforceWhen President Tinubu described his government’s solar hub plans to Chinese investors, he touted the country’s large, young workforce.
“The labour is cheaper. Our youths are vibrant and skilled. Our people are brilliant and adapt to new technology,” he said.
LPV’s factory in Lagos offers a glimpse of that vision.
Ibeimo Biobele explains the module production process inside the LPV factory floor in Ikotun, Lagos, Nigeria (Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News) Ibeimo Biobele explains the module production process inside the LPV factory floor in Ikotun, Lagos, Nigeria (Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)A graduate in petroleum engineering, Ibeimo Biobele, 28, had no experience in solar manufacturing when she arrived at the factory a year ago as a member of the National Youth Service Corps – Nigeria’s mandatory one-year national service programme.
Like many university-leavers, Biobele faced an uncertain job market.
More than 93% of Nigerians work in the informal economy, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, meaning there are few skilled jobs for graduates like Biobele.
Today, she works on the production line assembling panels and hopes more such jobs will become available for young Nigerians in the years to come.
“If we had more factories like this, more young engineers would have opportunities after school,” she said.
This article was made possible with support from Surge Africa and One World Media.
Main image: A man carries a solar panel on his head while unloading a truck in Lagos, Nigeria (Photo: Mansur Ibrahim/Climate Home News)
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With multilateralism in crisis, what’s next for climate philanthropy?
Janet Fleischman is an independent consultant with extensive experience in research, policy advocacy, and narrative storytelling. Jyotsna Uppal is a historian and narrative strategist, who supports individuals and organisations in change processes.
Global climate progress sits at the centre of an acute crisis, as the multilateral order that structured international climate cooperation for three decades frays at the seams.
The Trump administration’s withdrawal from 66 United Nations and international organisations in early 2026, compounded by its exit from the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change itself, has launched a rupture in the governance architecture and the geopolitical consensus that made multilateral climate action conceivable.
Institutions have been stripped of authority, voluntary commitments left contingent on political will.
At this precarious moment, what can and should climate funders be doing?
We recently examined the state of environmental multilateralism through an extensive literature review and interviews with climate leaders from around the world – policymakers, UN officials, regional actors, philanthropic leaders and advocates.
Their perspectives reinforced a sobering finding: more consequential than any single country’s efforts to undermine the multilateral system is the deeper question of whether that system is still fit for purpose.
Climate philanthropy must do more than fill gaps left by retreating governments; it must ask harder questions about whether gap-filling is the right role at all – and prepare to catalyse the emergence of something new.
Change will not come without pain.
As Sarah Millar, programme director at the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group, an international philanthropic network and strategic regranter, told us: “What we’re trying to do here is fundamentally rewire the global economy… it’s everything everywhere, all at once. And that’s really hard to do.”
Filling the gaps or leading change?The multilateral climate system, for all its limitations, remains relatively intact. Countries other than the United States continue to submit national climate plans and participate in global negotiations. Yet participation is not the same as effectiveness – many commitments fall short of what’s needed.
Meanwhile, new regional, thematic and plurilateral coalitions are emerging; voluntary groupings of countries, cities, companies, and civil society organisations aligned around specific climate objectives are increasingly filling the action gap.
Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels
Climate philanthropy has often responded to these gaps by substituting for absent public finance. Arunabha Ghosh, the founder and former CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a climate think-tank based in New Delhi, explained: “Philanthropy is having to fill in the gap of public finance where development assistance is failing.” But this instinct deserves scrutiny.
A more fundamental question is whether gap-filling remains the right approach. Does philanthropy keep a failing system limping along, propping up dysfunction – or does it spur transformation and catalyse what comes next? There is no neutrality here – philanthropy cannot pretend its choices are inconsequential. The question is which position advances the transformation the moment requires.
Compounding these strategic questions is a more immediate threat. As formal multilateralism struggles, the civil society actors who might fill the gap face mounting restrictions – a closing of civic space evident not just in the US but in India, Israel, Russia, Turkey, and elsewhere. In the US, the Trump administration has stepped up attacks on philanthropies, threatening legal investigations and the withdrawal of foundations’ tax-exempt status.
A protester holds a placard describing the election of Donald Trump as a ‘climate disaster’ during a demonstration in London. (Photo: SOPA Images) A protester holds a placard describing the election of Donald Trump as a ‘climate disaster’ during a demonstration in London. (Photo: SOPA Images)For climate philanthropy specifically, there’s a particular risk: support for climate action is increasingly portrayed in some US conservative circles as anti-American.
Conservative actors who emphasise fossil fuels for manufacturing and energy security often equate backing renewables with pro-China stances, since China is the largest green technology manufacturer. Yet the economic evidence points the other way, with the clean energy transition already underway – and the perils of fossil fuel reliance further underscored by the war in Iran.
Winning back the narrativeUnderlying all these gaps is a failure of narrative. The story of climate progress – and there is real progress to tell – is not being written by governments.
As Christiana Figueres, an international leader on climate change and the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, put it this way: “The story of progress is being written by a plethora of other stakeholders – subnationals, finance corporations, NGOs – all of whom are doing their thing together. They’re writing an amazing story, and nobody’s writing it and nobody’s reading it and nobody’s taking note of it.”
This storytelling also needs to be more integrated: climate can’t remain a siloed concern but must be linked to health, education, gender equity and migration. Philanthropy can help make these linkages legible to policymakers and the public – expanding the coalition of actors who see climate as central to their own agendas.
UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot
Four directions stand out for catalytic philanthropic support in this fragmented landscape:
- Shift who gets supported, and convene diverse actors. New pathways are needed to support local communities, civil society coalitions, and subnational actors implementing national climate plans.
- Support compelling narratives and amplify affected voices. Listening to affected communities is critical to shaping a just transition that gives communities real agency over change.
- Engage the private sector differently. New financing instruments and blended finance opportunities require philanthropy to engage more strategically with private sector and corporate actors – not merely as funders but as partners to design how catalytic capital can flow.
- Take strategic risks. Philanthropy may need to fund approaches to implementation, finance, and technology that governments and financial institutions won’t support.
This is a precarious moment for multilateralism, civil society and the philanthropic organisations that sustain it.
But that complexity may also provide an opportunity. Philanthropy willing to ask harder questions, take greater risks, and invest in the connective tissue between issues may do more than keep a struggling system afloat.
To catalyse multilateral climate action, many philanthropies recognise that this is the time to deepen their reach. In the words of Ailun Yang, with the environment program at Bloomberg Philanthropies: “Our main way to engage in this is by supporting smart people and innovative ideas. Philanthropy doesn’t necessarily do these things ourselves, and that is really where our superpower is.”
This piece is adapted from a project conducted by Janet Fleischman and Jyotsna Uppal, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Environment Program; however, all the views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own.
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Türkiye says it has “final decision” at COP31 despite Australia running negotiations
Uncertainty persists over how COP31 will be managed, after Türkiye’s environment minister told journalists this week his country will have the final say at the UN climate conference despite a deal that gave Australia the role of chairing the negotiations in return for withdrawing its bid for the summit.
At COP30, the two governments resolved a deadlock by agreeing that Türkiye would host this year’s annual talks in the resort city of Antalya with its environment minister Murat Kurum serving as COP31 President, while his Australian counterpart Chris Bowen would act as COP31 President of Negotiations.
Previous COPs have occasionally been hosted by one country and presided over by another. For example, COP23 was held in Germany because of the remoteness and small size of Fiji, and COP25 took place in Spain after social unrest flared in Chile. But COP31 will be the first UN climate summit with the powers of the presidency split between two countries.
Under the unusual arrangement, Türkiye will lead on the Action Agenda, the non-negotiated part of COP which brings together businesses, citizens and local governments to step up climate action in different areas, from curbing methane emissions and protecting health to adaptation in fragile states.
In Brazil last year, when the deal was announced to end the long-running rivalry for COP31, Australia’s Chris Bowen said his role would give him the powers of the COP presidency to manage the official climate negotiations, prepare draft texts and issue any overarching “cover” decision.
But speaking to international media in the Turkish city of Trabzon on Thursday, comments from Kurum – made in Turkish and translated into English by an official translator – suggest that Türkiye sees itself as having ultimate control over the formal outcome of the talks.
Asked how the “co-presidency” would resolve any differences that emerge during the negotiations, he responded: “Türkiye and Australia are not co-presidents. Türkiye is the President of COP31 and Australia is the President of Negotiations. We are in consultation with Australia but the final decision lies with the presidency of COP31.”
“No issues” so farAn official document setting out the “modalities” of the partnership notes that the COP31 President will assign an Australian representative as the “President of Negotiations” and “Vice President of the COP”, to whom the functions of leading the COP31 negotiations are delegated for the duration of the conference and “who will have exclusive authority in relation to the negotiations”.
“If there is a difference of views between Türkiye and Australia, consultations will take place until the difference is resolved to mutual satisfaction,” the document adds.
Kurum said this week that the two countries are working in “good harmony and in shared perspectives. So far, we’ve had no issues. We don’t believe we will have. I mean if Türkiye and Australia cannot agree on something, it’s not realistic to expect 196 countries [at the COP] to agree on the same thing.”
Australia’s pavilion at COP30 is right next to Turkey’s – an interesting dynamic as the two battled it out to be the host of COP31 next year. (Photo: Megan Rowling) Australia’s pavilion at COP30 is right next to Turkey’s – an interesting dynamic as the two battled it out to be the host of COP31 next year. (Photo: Megan Rowling)Australia’s COP31 team pointed Climate Home News to a speech given by Bowen at the mid-year Bonn climate talks, in which he said: “Australia and Türkiye are working together seamlessly and with one goal.”
The oceans conference in Trabzon, organised by the COP31 presidency, issued a statement on Thursday saying that under Türkiye’s COP31 Presidency, and “in close cooperation” with Australia as President of Negotiations, “we aim to advance action on ocean and seas towards COP31 in Antalya, including through engagement with the Pacific at the Pre-COP”.
Electrification goal to reduce fossil fuelsOn other topics, Kurum told reporters that, while the COP31 Action Agenda does not feature any explicit initiatives on transitioning away from fossil fuels, its flagship goal to promote the electrification of economies – through measures like heat pumps and electric vehicles – would “lead to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels and contribute to the clean transition”.
“What we want is to decrease the emissions, and for that we need to use clean energy, and for that we need to make electrification more widespread. And if you do that, automatically [you will] reduce the use of fossil fuels,” he said on the sidelines of the Trabzon oceans conference. He added that COP31 would “build on” the COP28 agreement to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Asked by Climate Home News about a request by the government of Nepal for an emergency grant from the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage to help recovery from its recent devastating glacial flood, Kurum said he would be “pleased” if the fund supported the South Asian nation.
On August 31, Nepal’s finance and environment ministers asked the fund’s board to take a special decision to disburse post-disaster support for the first time, a call backed by developing-country board members. On September 9, the board’s co-chairs responded in a letter saying they were “engaging with the FRLD board to address your urgent request as rapidly as possible”.
Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats
Asked how he would respond to a UN scientific assessment this month that the world will exceed its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and must then work to bring it back down, Kurum said he accepted that the data shows that keeping to 1.5C is no longer possible. He added that limiting warming to “around 1.5C” would be a success.
Questioned by media as to how he would guarantee the right to protest at COP31, Kurum said his team will “try to meet” any request they receive from civil society.
With demonstrations temporarily banned, over 200 human rights and environmental activists were arrested before and during the NATO military alliance summit in Türkiye’s capital Ankara in January.
Kurum sought to reassure climate campaigners, however. “Don’t worry, thinking you will not be able to voice your opinions or really share your thoughts,” he said.
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Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats
In the wake of the recent flash flood that swept down from the Himalayas, Nepal is seeking immediate aid from a UN fund for climate loss and damage to help vulnerable families displaced by the disaster and rebuild destroyed schools and hospitals, the country’s foreign minister told Climate Home News.
“This is exactly the kind of climate-driven catastrophe the Fund was created to address,” Shisir Khanal said in an interview. He added that “stronger global solidarity and meaningful international support” are needed for countries like Nepal, which are facing increasingly severe climate-related disasters.
The floods were caused by a glacier collapsing and triggering a landslide that forced a torrent of water and debris to rush down the Bhote Koshi River valley, causing catastrophic impacts downstream. More than 1,300 people died and over 5,300 are still missing in the area.
Loss and damage fund urged to hold crisis meeting on Nepal
Khanal described the disaster as a “Himalayan tsunami”, telling Climate Home News that early assessments suggest the roads, bridges, hydropower stations, highways and settlements it wiped out could require billions of dollars to rebuild. Reconstruction estimates by the government range between $2.5 billion and $5 billion.
The minister of foreign affairs said Nepal would not be asking the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) “to write a single check for this total amount”, explaining that the government is finalising a post-disaster assessment “to guide our broader international donor appeals”.
Nepal disaster seen as test case for fledgling fundIn reality, if Nepal does receive rapid support from the FRLD, it is likely to be a fraction of the total bill because the fund has a cap of $20 million per project and has little more than $350 million available to hand out in its initial phase.
So far its board has not approved any projects as it is still working out how to allocate its scarce resources, nor does it have a process in place to respond to sudden climate disasters such as glacial lake outburst floods or powerful storms.
On August 31, Nepal’s government sent a direct appeal for emergency grant funding to the FRLD, emphasising that “a prompt response would… demonstrate that the fund can translate international solidarity into timely support for vulnerable countries and communities when it is most urgently needed”.
A couple of days later, eight developing-country board members – later joined by those from small island states – signed a letter, seen by Climate Home News, asking the fund’s board to hold an extraordinary meeting to respond to Nepal’s request.
The FRLD said in a statement that the devastating impacts on the ground “underscore both the urgency and scale of need and reaffirm the fundamental purpose for which the FRLD was established”.
It added that it is “committed to approaching Nepal’s request with the urgency, compassion, and careful consideration that these difficult circumstances require, while respecting the Fund’s governing instrument and established decision-making processes”. As of Wednesday, Climate Home News understands that discussions were still ongoing.
Designing infrastructure for extreme shocksKhanal pointed to “the unprecedented scale” of the huge flood which occurred within a matter of minutes and swept away river gauges meant to provide early warning in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, near the border with Tibet.
“You cannot easily ‘plan’ against a mountain collapsing,” he said. But the lesson, he added in written responses in English, is that “our historical baseline for infrastructure engineering is no longer sufficient”.
Building resilient infrastructure means that “hydropower projects, roads and early warning systems must be designed for extreme, unpredictable climate shocks”, he said. Another key element will be plans to better understand and protect ecosystems, he added.
The minister noted that Nepal, India and China share a common, interconnected Himalayan ecosystem and all three countries are affected by the impacts of climate change in the Himalayan mountain chain.
“Therefore, our call is for the three countries to work together to strengthen preparedness, resilience and regional cooperation,” he said.
New research from consultancy Systemiq, released on Wednesday, finds that Himalayan glaciers are losing mass 65% faster than a decade ago, and that only around 20 of the Himalaya’s estimated 40,000 glaciers are currently monitored. India alone has 56 glacial lakes rated very high risk, it warns.
The Rasuwagadhi flood destroyed a friendship bridge, a road, a hydropower substation, and swept away vehicles in Rasuwa, Nepal in July 2025. (Photo: Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect) The Rasuwagadhi flood destroyed a friendship bridge, a road, a hydropower substation, and swept away vehicles in Rasuwa, Nepal in July 2025. (Photo: Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect) Early cross-border efforts on information-sharingSince the same region of Nepal was hit by smaller-scale but still highly destructive flooding in 2024 and 2025, China and Nepal have stepped up efforts to cooperate in tackling glacier-related risks in the region.
In August 2025, Climate Home News reported that authorities in both countries had agreed to share cross-border information about the risks of glacial lake outburst floods across the Tibetan region, in a first step that could be expanded to the national level in an effort to reduce deaths and damage.
This May, a delegation from China’s Ministry of Water Resources and the Water Resources Department of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region held talks with Nepalese officials in charge of water and disaster management about establishing a joint disaster information mechanism.
Then in August, a team from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under the Chinese Academy of Sciences also visited Nepal for scientific research and exchange, sharing China’s experience in monitoring glacial lakes.
Nepal and China agree to cooperate on glacial lake flooding, as warming hikes threat
However, experts told Climate Home News that progress on putting in place concrete measures has been slow. Narendra Khanal, a professor in the department of geography at Tribhuvan University, blamed that partly on Nepal’s traditional administrative system and bureaucratic delays.
“We have to share information with them, and they have to share information with us,” he said. “In my understanding, the Chinese side is also facing difficulties in making this cooperation work.”
Mohan Bahadur Chand, a Himalayan glaciologist and assistant professor at Kathmandu University, said China has the technology and human resources to provide significant information to its neighbour downstream.
But, to make that work, “we have to build trust between the two countries”, which is currently lacking but could be developed, he said. “As scientists, we are already working with them personally. If we create a trusted environment, cooperation should not be difficult.”
Nepal lacks monitoring and warning technologyExperts said Nepal – one of the world’s least-developed countries – does not have the technology or resources to install the sophisticated monitoring and warning systems needed to protect its population from growing threats linked to accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas.
A senior meteorologist at the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home News that the government had not invested enough in rainfall and weather monitoring stations, especially above 3,500 metres, and therefore lacks reliable data about what is happening at high altitudes.
“The stations we have are operated by different organisations, but many of them are not functioning properly,” the official added.
Comment: The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice
This year, the UN’s Green Climate Fund released initial funding for a $50-million project to address the risks from four glacial lakes in other parts of Nepal, but has come under criticism for taking seven years to approve the proposal. The fund said this was due to efforts needed to strengthen and consult on the project, as well as administrative, institutional and COVID-related delays.
Foreign minister Khanal said Nepal was calling on the international community for support to tackle global warming impacts into the future.
“This disaster should not be viewed simply as a one-time event requiring one-time assistance,” he emphasised. “We need to recognise the longer-term consequences of rising temperatures and climate change, particularly for vulnerable communities and developing countries.”
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The world doesn’t need a Paris Agreement for plastics
Amy Youngman is a legal and policy specialist at the campaigning group Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).
The chair’s August Aid to Negotiations is being sold as a pragmatic way to rescue the global plastics treaty. However, the text is starting to resemble the architecture of a Paris Agreement-style framework: a patchwork of vague commitments, nationally determined action and reporting, with the hardest substantive decisions left to a future that, my experience following these negotiations tells me, would never arrive.
In March 2022, governments adopted UNEA Resolution 5/14 by consensus, launching negotiations for a legally binding international instrument to end plastic pollution. I joined the global plastics treaty process in Paris in 2023, where hopes of drafting a treaty capable of confronting one of the defining environmental and human health threats of our time were first derailed by procedural warfare.
Five months later, in Nairobi, I watched the chair close a meeting while delegates still negotiated -allegedly to catch a flight. In 2024 and 2025, in Ottawa, Busan and Geneva, the same small group of blocking states grew bolder, cloaking opposition in language about defending the vulnerable while subsidising a system that fuels the pollution crisis. Offended by ambition, ashamed of nothing.
A year after the last formal attempt to negotiate a treaty, we are tasked with protecting a fragile process. And despite long-standing support, including legal, policy and technical expertise from my own Environmental Investigation Agency, the chair has excluded observers from the rooms where the treaty’s fate is being decided.
In that orchestrated quiet, the loudest proposal emerged: the suggestion that the instrument be a “framework convention.” The new Aid, intended to shape the late-September Heads of Delegation meeting, never uses the word “framework”. It does not need to. It strips back substantive obligations and presupposes future action.
A framework is no match for this crisisFramework conventions outline broad principles and leave each country to develop its own plan, often delaying tough decisions to future negotiations that may never happen. This tactic is a political shell game: persuading states that want action now to give up meaningful, binding measures to reach agreement.
The Chair’s Aid arrives at a framework by subtraction rather than by proposal, which makes it harder to name and potentially easier to accept. Using the Aid, effectively the rejected text from Geneva, as a basis for the next informal meeting in Bangkok will be sold as a way to preserve a distressed UN system and reach consensus in a fractured geopolitical environment.
This is diplomacy drowning in wishful thinking that the countries fighting binding rules today will approve tougher ones tomorrow. Four years of negotiations and decades of climate diplomacy taught us that this is not a bridge to ambition – this is how ambition dies.
Modou Fall, 45, head of Senegal Propre (“Clean Senegal”) Association is covered with plastic cups and bags to raise awareness of the damage on the environment caused by waste as he cleans a beach during World Cleanup Day in Dakar, Senegal September 15, 2018. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra Modou Fall, 45, head of Senegal Propre (“Clean Senegal”) Association is covered with plastic cups and bags to raise awareness of the damage on the environment caused by waste as he cleans a beach during World Cleanup Day in Dakar, Senegal September 15, 2018. REUTERS/Zohra BensemraProduction is driven by global oil, gas and chemical markets, while products and waste travel across borders. No singular government can regulate its way out of a problem created and amplified by a globalised system.
Countries have tried, and production kept rising. Now there is plastic everywhere we look, and the cost falls hardest on the people least responsible.
That failure is why there was consensus to negotiate a treaty, because this crisis requires global action. The purpose was never to list national efforts and call that progress but to create common global rules to address pollution.
The most politically sensitive issues cannot simply be postponed. How much plastic is produced, which toxic chemicals are allowed in it, which throwaway products are banned, and how future decisions are made are precisely the issues that require global answers. An instrument that refuses to negotiate them will be easier to adopt but useless on arrival.
Learn from climate governanceSupporters of a framework approach may point to the ozone treaty as proof that it can work. But the Vienna Convention succeeded for one reason: governments quickly adopted binding upstream controls on ozone-depleting substances.
Climate offers the opposite warning: a framework followed by contested, delayed and insufficient measures, while emissions keep rising.
The new chair not only deleted a direct reference to “production and consumption” and bracketed similar preambular language copied from the original mandate. The article on reporting borrows language from the Paris Agreement. Another summer of record heat, fires and floods offers a glimpse of how well that model is working.
Nothing suggests that the states blocking binding rules today will suddenly accept them tomorrow, and the exponential rise in unchecked plastic production will not pause while governments wait for courage. Blockage is not being resolved, but just pushed forward.
A framework would lock in the wrong response: unlimited upstream growth with waste management attempting to handle it downstream. No waste system can keep pace with a material engineered for endless growth.
Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot
After four years of INC negotiations, governments know this. States must reject the false choice that the only path to agreement is an instrument too weak to solve the problem it was created to address. Compromise is part of diplomacy. Surrender is not.
And if the UN keeps pushing that choice, the countries prepared to act must be willing to pursue alternative pathways. Groups of willing governments have built effective agreements before, and existing environmental regimes can deliver new rules without inventing a new empty instrument.
This process was never meant to find a lowest common denominator. It was to create the rules necessary to change our direction. Bangkok in September will be where the second iteration of this text is shaped. If ambitious countries do not push back, the argument about a framework convention will already be lost by default.
Negotiations cannot end with governments accepting the crisis rather than solving it. The science is clear and the damage is accelerating. The world does not need another promise to act later. It needs the treaty governments promised to deliver in 2022.
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As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
With June’s UN climate talks inching towards gridlock, a group of diplomats calling themselves “Friends of Science” issued a stark warning: climate science was under attack in Bonn.
The coalition, spanning the world’s richest to its most vulnerable nations, pointed the finger primarily at those who think “science threatens their economic prospects” – a thinly-veiled reference to fossil fuel-dependent states accused of casting doubt on long-held scientific tenets in the UN climate process.
Fiji’s lead negotiator, Sivendra Michael, went still further. He denounced what he called “a very polluted narrative” taking hold outside the negotiating rooms and singled out ECO, a daily newsletter on the talks produced by Climate Action Network (CAN) International, for overlooking the issue.
“They are representing developing countries, but they are not representing us,” Michael said. His words hinted at how a rift between governments over the science of global warming has created tensions inside the climate movement.
Watchers of the UN climate talks have told Climate Home News there is growing unease over where the world’s most influential coalition of climate NGOs stands in an increasingly heated debate about how scientific messages produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are crafted and turned into global climate policy.
UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot
CAN’s international leadership has publicly backed a line of argument, championed by some big emerging economies including India, that questions how fair and equitable the models underpinning the work of the IPCC – the UN’s climate science body – are because they are dominated by research from the Global North.
But some climate activists, including from nations on the frontline of the climate crisis in the Pacific, are increasingly disappointed by CAN’s silence in a connected row over whether the IPCC’s forthcoming assessment report should be finished in time to inform the next UN scorecard of global climate action.
Over the last two years, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Kenya have pushed back against attempts by a large coalition of nations to align the IPCC’s AR7 report timeline with the second stocktake of national climate plans under the UN climate process. They claim this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and restrict their ability to provide scientific input into the process.
India flags bias in IPCC assumptionsCAN International Executive Director Tasneem Essop spoke at an online event last month in which panelists challenged the “Friends of Science” campaign launched at the Bonn talks.
During the webinar, an Indian scientist and government negotiator set out her view that the IPCC’s way of working and scientific assumptions perpetuate inequity between developed and developing countries – and yet its reports have come to be treated as “scripture” that cannot be questioned.
In her intervention, Essop did not comment directly on the Bonn science campaign nor on the IPCC timeline issue. But the participation of CAN’s leadership in an event where such criticism of the IPCC was aired has sparked concern in some parts of the NGO community.
“The way in which CAN International is playing into what could be the destruction of the IPCC inputs into the climate process is very concerning,” said Bill Hare, who was involved in CAN’s establishment nearly four decades ago and now runs think-tank Climate Analytics.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
He added that it was a mistake for CAN International to align itself with arguments made by India and Saudi Arabia, when those countries are blocking the conclusion of the IPCC’s next key report on cutting emissions in time for it to feed into the next global stocktake, which is due to conclude in 2028.
Like other insiders Climate Home News spoke to, the veteran Australian climate scientist fears these tensions could hamper CAN’s widely recognised power to influence the talks.
“The CAN International voice has been very, very important in the process. That voice doesn’t need to be diluted at this moment in history – that would be a really bad move,” Hare said.
Dialogue to reconcile differing viewsOver the last decade, CAN has been working to transform itself into an organisation that is more representative of, and responsive to, voices and needs in the Global South. In 2019, it appointed Essop – a South African expert on climate, energy, poverty and social justice – as executive director, shifting further away from its European and North American roots.
CAN International, which functions as the broader network’s secretariat, says it is discussing how to reconcile varying views on the IPCC and the science and equity question among its hundreds of member groups spread across 130 countries.
“We acknowledge that there are different perspectives within a global network of over 2,000 members on these issues,” CAN International’s Essop said in response to questions from Climate Home News. “Given this diversity, we have democratic processes to build internal agreements.”
“Science and equity are both fundamental principles for effective climate action and are firmly embedded in CAN’s work,” she added in a written statement. “Putting these principles into practice in a painfully unjust world is not always straightforward, which is why we need continued dialogue across the network.”
Calls for “fair share” approachThe webinar in late August – which aimed to untangle what organisers described as “a growing narrative” that “treats science and equity as opposing priorities” – opened with a presentation by Tejal Kanitkar, a prominent Indian climate scientist who also serves on her government’s delegations at the IPCC and UN climate talks.
Outlining the findings of a paper she co-authored, Kanitkar argued that the IPCC had used scenarios for future emission reduction trajectories based primarily on assumptions put forward by Global North researchers that are skewed against the world’s poorest nations. These, she noted, were then incorporated into the first UN review of global climate action in 2023 and turned into widely cited emissions-cutting targets for limiting warming to 1.5C – a goal the UN has now conceded will be breached, at least temporarily.
Tejal Kanitkar speaking at a meeting of the IPCC in March 2026. Photo: IPCC Secretariat | Melissa Walsh Tejal Kanitkar speaking at a meeting of the IPCC in March 2026. Photo: IPCC Secretariat | Melissa WalshKanitkar said the “Friends of Science” group included “some of the people who have over-consumed the carbon budget and now use science as a slogan”. When Climate Home News raised the participation of diplomats from vulnerable countries, she said they should be asked why they “accept outcomes that burden the poorest the most”.
Commenting on Kanitkar’s presentation, CAN’s Essop said everyone knows that “imbalances of power dictate who sits at the table, who designs the models and who determines the assumptions underlying them”.
Her wider intervention focused more generally on the need to ensure that emissions-reduction pathways follow an equitable approach and account for the “fair share” of action countries need to take based on their historical responsibilities for climate change.
IPCC working to update modelsHare later acknowledged that most of the IPCC models used for 1.5C scenarios fail to account for the higher cost of capital and transition financing faced by developing countries. But as this is a “well-known” limitation, the IPCC gives a nuanced reading of the scenarios, and the next generation of models it uses is expected to include more consideration of equity, he added.
Echoing this, a climate scientist from a developing country currently involved in the IPCC process, who did not want to be identified, told Climate Home News that economic models inevitably contain biases and IPCC authors are already working to identify and correct them.
Despite criticisms of how IPCC scientific reports have been produced, all governments must sign off on every line of a key “summary for policy-makers” at a dedicated meeting. In 2023, the approved summary included the emissions reduction figures in question that informed the UN’s first global stocktake.
Irrespective of this wider debate, Hare said the “Friends of Science” campaign, which he supports, is focused on the timing of the IPCC’s next assessment cycle rather than the equity of its models.
Unresolved row over IPCC report timelineA political battle over that time-frame has dragged on for more than two years at successive meetings of the science panel, with governments repeatedly failing to find a solution.
A large majority of nations have been pushing for a timeline that would ensure the next round of AR7 reports can feed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings that this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and have lobbied for a longer process.
Member of the “Friends of Science” campaign wears a pin in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth Member of the “Friends of Science” campaign wears a pin in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara WorthIn Bonn this summer, the coalition that wants to align AR7 with the 2028 stocktake – which includes diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama – vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”, including the IPCC assessment reports.
They pointed the finger at “the usual suspects” but stopped short of singling out any countries at the public press conference. Discussions in the previous week had seen Saudi Arabia and India play down the centrality of IPCC reports in the UN stocktake and oppose calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios to limit an overshoot of the 1.5C warming goal.
Bonn upset fuels further tensionA campaigner with knowledge of internal discussions told Climate Home News that many civil society groups from some of the world’s most vulnerable nations, including the Pacific islands, had expected CAN International to back calls in Bonn defending the centrality of the IPCC in UN climate policy-making.
Despite this, a day before the “Friends of Science” press conference, CAN published an ECO newsletter that did not mention the issue. Instead, it voiced surprise over the claims of an attack on science happening in the negotiations and accused some of the IPCC’s loudest-defending governments of hypocrisy for continuing to expand fossil fuels and not delivering “fair shares” of emissions cuts and finance to the developing world.
“We were really shocked we could not find a common position and then this jarring narrative was being pushed,” the campaigner added.
After divisions hardened in Bonn, Hare said his organisation was approached by “very upset” CAN members from various regions about the stance taken by the network’s international leadership on the issue.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
While Climate Home News understands that internal discussions have continued during the summer, including at a CAN leadership meeting in Nairobi in recent days, the campaigner said that CAN International’s endorsement of the recent webinar that directly challenged the “Friends of Science” coalition did not send a reassuring signal.
Some observers said they feared it would inflame tensions over how climate science is defined and utilised for policy purposes, with consequences reaching well beyond Bonn.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Essop said that “at a time when communities are experiencing the most horrific impacts of climate chaos, our collective energy must turn to solutions such as filling the Loss and Damage Fund, the phasing out of fossil fuels led by the Global North, and justice for people who are least responsible for this climate emergency”.
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China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.
Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.
Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.
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The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.
“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.
“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.
Electrifying industryCoal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.
A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.
Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.
An employee walks near fields of heliostat mirrors at the site of Dunhuang Shouhang 100MW Tower Solar Thermal Power Generation Project, during an organised media tour to Dunhuang Photovoltaic Industrial Park, in Gansu province, China (Photo: REUTERS/Tingshu Wang) An employee walks near fields of heliostat mirrors at the site of Dunhuang Shouhang 100MW Tower Solar Thermal Power Generation Project, during an organised media tour to Dunhuang Photovoltaic Industrial Park, in Gansu province, China (Photo: REUTERS/Tingshu Wang)In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.
Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.
“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.
“Growing by greening”China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.
Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.
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For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.
The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.
A livestreamer promotes coal during a livestreaming session for Huaze Coal Industry on the Douyin app (Photo:REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration) A livestreamer promotes coal during a livestreaming session for Huaze Coal Industry on the Douyin app (Photo:REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration)An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.
This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.
Stalling fossil fuel useAt the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.
China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.
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A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.
“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.
A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.
In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.
A lesson in sequencingChina’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.
“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.
For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.
“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.
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Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basisIn mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Burn company enumerator Teresia Wanjiru checks moisture on firewood at a client’s house using clean cookstoves in Kachoroba village of Kiambu county, Kenya, August 16, 2023. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi Burn company enumerator Teresia Wanjiru checks moisture on firewood at a client’s house using clean cookstoves in Kachoroba village of Kiambu county, Kenya, August 16, 2023. REUTERS/Monicah MwangiCookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations as optional aids for participants if they decided to prepare their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process
Getting the rules ‘right’In a statement to Climate Home News, the FCLP Secretariat said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The story was updated to clarify FCLP’s position and the attribution of its comments.
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London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal
A relatively ambitious deal to reduce the shipping industry’s 3% of global emissions now looks more likely after four days of closed-door talks in London, observers say.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO), which oversees the negotiations, said there had been “constructive discussions” and “genuine willingness within the group to make concrete further progress”.
Em Fenton, senior director at the NGO Opportunity Green who attended the talks last week, said they “demonstrated a strong spirit of solidarity in the face of blatant attempts to undermine the credibility, ambition and equity of a hard-fought multilateral agreement”.
After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on a “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF) – a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners aimed at incentivising them to use cleaner fuels, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.
But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention by US President Donald Trump and threats of US sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.
UCL analysis found that, of those who expressed a view at last week’s talks, 38 were in favour of an NZF-style solution while only 17 were against. Those opposed are “consistently composed of strongly fossil fuel-aligned governments”.
An observer of the talks, who did not want to be named, said the countries opposed include the US, Russia, India, Thailand, Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay, as well as eight oil-rich Gulf nations and shipowner-reliant Liberia and Panama. Governments that support an NZF-style deal include China, Brazil, Mexico, Türkiye, Canada, Australia, Chile, nine African nations, most European countries and small islands.
A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.
UCL’s analysis said it was “reassuring” that governments which had taken strong positions in the media against the NZF were being more compromising in the negotiations.
Tweaks are probableWhile there is majority support for the NZF, UCL said adopting it would be difficult politically. “The process from here could therefore be as much about producing what appears to be a new package, but one that broadly ends up with similar outcomes in relation to objectives,” UCL argued.
But tweaking the NZF, which resulted from years of negotiations, comes with risks, it warned. For example, changes could reduce the new system’s planned support for low-income countries, turning them against it. Fenton said compromising should not mean “abandoning the principle of justice in the maritime transition”.
UCL said the speed at which shipowners must reduce their ships’ emissions or face fees is likely to be reduced in the short-term but raised in the long-term to meet a goal of net zero emissions by mid-century.
This was a compromise put forward by NZF-supporter Brazil. However, an analysis by the the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) has found that this change would lead to more overall emissions than the original NZF trajectory.
UCL has warned it could incentivise liquefied natural gas as a shipping fuel over greener options, which include hydrogen-based methanol and ammonia.
Analysis by UCL and the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that, while a slower start to the NZF would reduce transport costs in the short term, it would increase them later due to the costs involved in switching the industry over from more polluting fuel to cleaner fuel.
NZF won’t meet emissions goalsIMarEst’s analysis finds that even in its current form – the most ambitious deal on the table – the NZF will not be sufficient for shipping to meet its emissions reduction goals.
It says that only a Pacific proposal to place a levy on ships’ total emissions – rather than just those above a certain level – would meet the industry’s targets to reduce emissions 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reach net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”. This is highly unlikely to be adopted.
Additional talks will be held from November 23-27 and from November 30-December 3 before a potentially final round of official negotiations begins on December 4.
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At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
At a key leaders’ summit in Palau, Pacific island nations burdened by worsening climate change impacts and costly fossil fuel imports called for November’s COP31 climate summit to deliver finance to help the region transition to renewable energy and build more resilient communities.
Heads of government from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – which includes COP31 co-president Australia – met in Palau’s capital Koror for a week-long summit, where they demanded access to climate finance, ocean action and a regional boost for renewables at COP31.
Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Jr. said during a plenary session that the Pacific must focus on delivering climate and ocean commitments. “It will require greater regional leadership, stronger regional coordination and, above all, unity of purpose,” he said.
The meeting, which ended last Friday, was marked by the absence of some leaders – among them the heads of state of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, which will host a preparatory session for COP31 in October (referred to as the pre-COP31). There were also tensions over Taiwan’s participation, with China objecting to its presence as an observer.
The forum’s final declaration, published after it ended and signed by all its members, reaffirms that climate change is the “single greatest threat to the security, livelihoods and wellbeing of Pacific peoples”, and notes “the importance of a focused, high-level declaration” at the pre-COP31 to build “political momentum towards COP31”.
Australia and Pacific islands have invited world leaders to attend the pre-COP31 gathering, which will be held in Fiji and Tuvalu from October 5 to 8. While usually a technical meeting for negotiators, the island nations aim to issue a political declaration at the gathering calling for strong outcomes in Türkiye.
Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate minister and COP31 president of negotiations, said in a speech during the Pacific forum that his country is “determined to use COP31 to progress the agenda to make it easier for countries to access the climate finance they need”.
“We won’t miss the opportunity to ensure COP31 is a Pacific COP. Not just because of the location of pre-COP but because of the agenda we are shaping through the Action Agenda at COP31,” he said.
The Action Agenda is a large portfolio of climate initiatives and coalitions uniting governments, businesses and civil society outside of the formal negotiations on everything from health to methane emissions.
Renewable energy investment planAnnounced a year ago, the island nations launched a $14-billion investment plan for a “100% Renewable Blue Pacific” at the forum in Palau. The plan lists strategic projects that would reduce the region’s high dependence on fossil fuel imports, whose soaring costs have become a major burden since the Iran war.
The projects include a $52-million programme managed by Australia to develop off-grid renewables in remote communities across the Pacific, as well as a $100-million blended finance fund aimed at supporting private-sector investments in wind and solar, among others.
Currently, some countries in the Pacific are spending up to a quarter of their GDP importing diesel to power electricity generation, according to a new report by the University of New South Wales in Australia. The investment plan launched at the forum aims to reduce these costs by adding 2.2 gigawatts of renewable generation and around 9 gigawatt hours of electricity storage.
To channel funds into the region, the plan also highlights the role of the recently established Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), a regional fund that seeks to swiftly disburse funds to climate-vulnerable communities at the local level. Bowen said he would promote the facility to world leaders attending COP31 and “ask for their support”.
Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese at the Pacific Islands Forum plenary in Palau. (Photo: PIF Secretariat) Call to transition away from fossil fuelsSeparately, the forum endorsed the Belau Declaration which emphasises the need to keep the 1.5C Paris Agreement temperature goal alive. A UN report last week showed that overshooting this limit is now inevitable, but deep emissions cuts could still bring global temperatures back down by the end of the century.
Pacific nations expect to rally support for this declaration at the pre-COP, with Fiji’s climate minister Lynda Tabuya saying in a statement: “Palau is where we build the political mandate. Pre-COP is where we take it to the world.”
The political declaration also says that countries must accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels “towards a renewable energy future”, and calls for greater recognition of the importance of ocean health in addressing climate change.
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As part of the forum’s outcomes in Palau, countries also noted Tuvalu’s efforts to host the second global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will gather government representatives in April next year to follow up on this year’s inaugural conference in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Speaking to journalists at the forum, Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu questioned Australia’s role in talks about phasing out fossil fuels at COP31, adding that “the very least a country like Australia should be doing is stopping future expansion, and it’s not doing that”. During the PIF, the country approved the extension of a major mine that digs and exports coal for steel-making, giving it permission to keep producing until 2055.
Rising seas trigger “development emergency”As leaders met in one of the world’s regions most threatened by sea-level rise, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a new report warning that rising seas are now “one of the most profound threats to populations around the world in developed and developing states alike”.
Presenting the report at UN headquarters in New York, Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development Navid Hanif said rising sea levels are not a “future risk any more” but an accelerating “development emergency” that could hinder progress in vulnerable regions like the Pacific and least developed countries.
The report warns that seas are rising “faster than at any point in recorded history”, with 2024 setting a new record of 5.9 millimetres. This has been driven by human-induced climate change mainly through a process known as thermal expansion – where rising heat causes the ocean to expand – as well as the melting of ice sheets.
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The report notes that about 1.2 billion people around the world are exposed to coastal flooding, and says some low-lying islands in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Fiji are already facing forced relocations. Globally, rising seas could cost more than $1 trillion every year by 2050, it adds.
“We cannot stop sea level rise this century but we can determine how much worse it becomes. About half a metre of sea level rise is already locked in in this century because of warming that has already occurred, but beyond that our choices matter enormously,” Hanif told journalists.
Bill Hare, CEO of think-tank Climate Analytics, said the report was a “wake-up call” to the leaders of high-emitting countries that their failure to cut carbon emissions is “creating major risks for the future alongside the impacts we can already observe around us”.
Guterres is set to host a high-level meeting on addressing the threat of sea level rise this month during the UN General Assembly, where countries are expected to adopt a declaration that calls for stronger action, expanded access to finance and “ongoing dialogue” to tackle the issue.
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Palestine: Israel’s bombing has left Gaza vulnerable to climate change
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza during the conflict that broke out in October 2023 has wrecked progress towards adapting the enclave to climate change and left two million Gazans vulnerable to heatwaves, drought and disease, the Palestinian Authority (PA) said in a new climate plan submitted to the United Nations.
Palestine’s third nationally determined contribution (NDC), uploaded to the UN climate body’s website this week, says that while “the aggression on the Gaza Strip did not make the climate worse”, “it removed the housing, water and sanitation systems, health facilities, energy networks, roads and livelihoods through which people absorb a climate they were already struggling with.”
The 91-page document lists the types of infrastructure it says Israel has destroyed and notes how the destruction will worsen the impacts of climate change. It says the bombing of hospitals and rising hunger have make it harder for Gazans to cope with the health impacts of climate-driven heatwaves and waterborne diseases.
On beaches of Gaza and Tel Aviv, two tales of one heatwave
The destruction of water tanks, boreholes and desalination plants, meanwhile, have left Gazans struggling with the effects of water shortages and drought, while mass unemployment reduces people’s ability to afford climate-driven price rises. The erasure of most of the Strip’s homes makes it more difficult for people to avoid the sun’s increasing heat, the NDC said.
Many Gazans are now living in the ruins of collapsed buildings or in makeshift shelters and tents that offer little or no protection from high temperatures.
A displaced Palestinian child fills water containers on July 2, 2026 in Gaza City, Gaza. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)Palestine’s previous goals to cut emissions and adapt to climate change in Gaza, expressed in its last NDC five years ago, were based on a pre-war baseline that “no longer describes anything that exists”, the NDC says. Progress made since 2021 has now been destroyed, it adds.
Green reconstruction of GazaInstead of continuing to aim for these adaptation and emissions-reduction goals, the PA is now calling for the green reconstruction of Gaza. It says buildings should be constructed again in an energy-efficient manner with solar panels and served with modern water, waste and transport systems.
While the PA, controlled by the Fatah political party, continues to claim legitimate control of Gaza, the strip was effectively governed by Fatah’s rival Hamas between 2007 and the recent war. Control is now split between Israel and the political wing of Islamist militant group Hamas, after a US-backed ceasefire took effect in October 2025, although a UN-backed committee plans to take over.
The United Nations, European Union and World Bank have jointly estimated that Gaza needs $71.4 billion of investment in the next two years to recover and build back. This process should be Palestinian-led, they said in April.
But US President Donald Trump has said the US should “take over” and “own” Gaza and redevelop it as the “Riviera of the Middle East”. Israel’s right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel should control the territory with civil administration managed by Palestinians favourable to Israel.
With occupation, targets conditionalIn the other part of Palestine, the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority carries out some government functions, but ultimate control rests with Israel, which has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
Because Israel controls planning in most of the West Bank, the NDC argues that the PA cannot pursue all the climate projects it wants. In addition, Israel restricts the movement of PA officials, making data collection difficult, and controls the West Bank’s electricity supply meaning that the PA cannot control whether it comes from dirty or clean sources of energy.
Given this situation, the NDC says that all of Palestine’s new climate targets are conditional but it will aim to reduce emissions 12.8% below a business-as-usual baseline by 2035 and 17.1% by 2040. If the Israeli occupation ends and Palestine regains full sovereignty over its land and resources, it will aim for reductions of 15.1% and 19.1% by 2035 and 2040 respectively under an “independence pathway”.
That could allow, for example, for greater electrification and reducing emissions per unit of growth, the document said.
To achieve the 2035 emissions-reduction target and adapt to the impacts of climate change, the PA says it needs $8.6 billion in total. This funding would be spent on measures like encouraging solar farms and rooftop solar and scaling up solar water heating to cover four-fifths of households. To complement the planned increase in solar power, the authority wants to modernise the electricity grid and install battery storage.
In the transport sector, it aims to promote the uptake of electric vehicles, develop bus rapid transit corridors and scrap old polluting trucks and buses. In Gaza in particular, it wants to deploy 66 electric buses when the conflict ends.
A bus rapid transit system in Sao Paulo (Flickr/EMBARQ BRASIL)To adapt to climate-driven drought, the NDC includes initiatives to reuse wastewater through treatment plants, build desalination plants in Gaza to remove salt from seawater, and promote irrigation for farmers.
The new climate plan was prepared by Palestine’s Environment Quality Authority, with support from the United Nations Development Programme and the governments of Britain and Spain.
The United Nations recognised Palestine’s statehood in 2012 and it joined the UN’s climate convention and signed the Paris climate agreement – which requires countries to submit more ambitious NDCs every five years – in 2016.
The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment. But in late 2024, then Israeli climate envoy Gideon Behar told Climate Home News that the war and the resulting environmental destruction in Gaza was the fault of Hamas.
The post Palestine: Israel’s bombing has left Gaza vulnerable to climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.
More support needed to power Africa’s food systems with renewables, experts say
As efforts to expand energy access across Africa grow, experts and policymakers have called this week for greater coordination and investment to power food production with renewables, arguing the sector has been treated separately from energy policy and therefore faces barriers in going green.
Hailemariam Desalegn, former prime minister of Ethiopia, said energy is critical across the food value chain – from irrigation and processing to cold storage and transport – and should therefore be considered a key pillar of strengthening food systems for the future.
“Energy is not separate from the nutrition challenge. Irrigation needs energy. Cold storage, transport, processing, as well as markets – all need reliable energy,” Desalegn told a panel at the 20th session of the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali. He said investments in sustainable energy systems could help reduce post-harvest losses and make nutritious food more accessible and affordable.
Africa loses up to 30% of its food before it reaches markets annually, largely due to poor roads, weak storage and inadequate cold chains, according to a 2025 report by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
Akinyi Walender, Africa director at development charity Practical Action, said poor energy supply in rural communities – where much of Africa’s food is produced – is also limiting productivity. Across the continent, about 600 million people currently live without access to electricity.
“The lack of energy access goes well beyond the inconvenience of not having lighting at home,” Walender said, adding that renewable energy has the potential to power local economies. “When people can access this sort of energy, it can raise rural incomes, improve food security, improve resilience, empower women and stimulate enterprise while creating jobs,” she added.
Breaking down silosUnlocking the potential of energy across food systems requires greater coordination, Walender argued, pointing to institutional fragmentation and isolated pilot projects as major barriers.
“Organisations working on agriculture and energy often operate according to different modalities and the interdependence between agricultural and energy markets is often overlooked,” Walender said, adding that finance institutions also tend to work in silos.
High level dialogue on climate resilience at the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, September, 2026.(Photo: AFS Forum)Dana Rysankova, global lead for energy access at the World Bank, told a separate event at the forum that the bank is working to break down those barriers through its newly established Productive Use of Energy (PUE) Centre of Excellence based in Nairobi, which has a mandate to foster collaboration and help develop and design programmes across different sectors.
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In June, the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank Group said that over 50 million people had been connected to electricity across 40 African countries under their Mission 300 initiative, which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030.
Rysankova said the programme has shown that energy access is just the foundation for linking with other sectors to deliver real economic transformation by boosting productivity and local incomes.
Mission 300 also aims to electrify schools and healthcare services, as well as bringing power to farmers so that they can use it for irrigation, cold storage and other agricultural activities, she added.
Bridging the finance and infrastructure gapExperts said bigger investments are needed in infrastructure and finance to turn energy access into increased productivity and economic value.
AGRA’s 2026 foresight report, launched at the forum, puts the annual agrifood financing gap at $180 billion, while estimating that closing Africa’s yearly $67 billion-$108 billion shortfall in infrastructure finance could halve post-harvest losses and increase farmer incomes by up to 40%.
However, the cost of transitioning to clean energy is still a major barrier for farmers and agribusinesses.
Delegates at the Africa Food Systems Forum, September, 2026 (Photo: AFS Forum) Delegates at the Africa Food Systems Forum, September, 2026 (Photo: AFS Forum)Atinuke Lebile, CEO of Nigerian food processing company Cato Foods, told Climate Home News she would like to switch to using renewables but has been held back by the upfront cost of setting up the systems the firm needs.
Rwandan farmer Gezel also said she would like to invest in a solar irrigation pump, but “it is so expensive”.
Practical Action’s Walender said the challenge is no longer whether solutions exist, but how financial support can reach the communities and businesses where it could have the greatest impact.
“Customers are dispersed and have low incomes. Markets are fragmented, and there are high upfront costs for much energy equipment,” Walender said, adding that financial institutions also often perceive agriculture as a high-risk sector.
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For food processing, the business case for using cleaner energy more efficiently is particularly strong, said Vivian Maduekeh of Partners in Food Solutions, which has worked with more than 2,000 companies across Africa.
Maduekeh said food processing firms account for between 42 and 70% of energy use across food systems, while energy represents 15-22% of their total production costs. African food businesses also use roughly twice as much energy per kilogramme of product as their global competitors, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
The problems they face in shifting to clean energy are “risk, perception of risk and the cost”, she explained, adding that financial mechanisms are needed to help businesses overcome those issues.
Maduekeh encouraged policymakers to consider measures like tax rebates on imported equipment and spending more on research and development to bring down the cost of productive-use technologies.
Making a range of affordable equipment available – such as smaller irrigation pumps – could also help make the transition more accessible, she said. The evidence in favour “is very clear”, she added. “We just need to package it and communicate it to the priorities of investors.”
The post More support needed to power Africa’s food systems with renewables, experts say appeared first on Climate Home News.
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