You are here
Climate Change News
Will new UK PM’s green measures at home cause climate finance pain overseas?
Britain’s new prime minister announced in his first week that he will cut the cost of public transport and electricity, making lower-emission technologies like bus travel, electric vehicles and heat pumps more affordable for voters. But some of the funding for those policies will come from the budget for international climate finance, the government has said, raising concerns about fairness.
Former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham took over from Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader and prime minister on Monday, appointing climate advocates Ed Miliband as foreign and development minister and Miatta Fahnbulleh as climate and energy minister.
On Tuesday, Burnham said his government would cut the value added tax (VAT) households and some small businesses pay on their electricity bills from 5% to zero from October 1, saving households £45 ($60) a year.
On Wednesday, he said the maximum fare bus companies in England can charge for a single journey will be reduced from £3 ($4) to £2 from January 1, 2027. The government said the subsidies to achieve this would be mostly funded by switching money set aside for overseas climate finance projects from grants to loans. It did not give further information in its announcement, while the UK’s transport minister told Sky News the plan was still being worked out.
Climate Home News has since learned that the money will come from a change in the form of a contribution to a new international fund to protect rainforests. The British government is expected soon to announce £400 million (about $533m) for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) that was launched by Brazil late last year.
The UK’s finance ministry had originally planned to provide this sum as a grant, but will now offer it as a loan instead. The TFFF plans to invest its seed capital in financial markets and then reimburse wealthy donor governments while paying forest countries to keep their trees standing.
The floated changes to the climate finance budget were immediately criticised by groups working on climate justice for developing countries, including Bond, the UK network for NGOs, which described the decision as “disappointing”.
“Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the answer and pitches marginalised communities in the UK against marginalised communities in lower-income and climate-vulnerable countries,” BOND CEO Romilly Greenhill said in a statement. “Climate finance must not worsen the debt burden of countries that are already suffering the worst – and most costly – impacts of a climate crisis they did not cause.”
Hunt for moneyBurnham promoted both policies as measures to combat the rising cost of living and “give people breathing space”, with climate campaigners and industry groups noting they are also likely to reduce the UK’s climate-heating emissions by encouraging bus travel and the use of electric vehicles and heating.
But the hurried policy announcements sparked thorny questions remain over how they will be paid for. The government said Tuesday’s VAT cut for electricity would be funded by scrapping the previous government’s digital ID programme, but Darren Jones, a former minister involved with that policy, said it had been “unfunded” – a statement that dominated media coverage.
A day later, the government said the new bus fare cap would cost £454 million ($606m). Transport minister Heidi Alexander told Sky News that £54 million would be taken from an under-spend in the budget of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and £400 million would come from changing unspecified international climate finance from grants to loans. The details “still need to be worked through”, she said, adding that the government “had wanted to make an announcement today”.
Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said “climate finance was never meant to be a pot of money that governments raid when they need to pay for domestic spending”.
Speaking on television, minister Alexander added, “We’re not wanting to fleece anyone here, and we actually want to maximise the development potential of this money that is available.”
Mohamed Adow speaking on the official final day of COP29. (Photo: UNFCCC/Kiara Worth)Aside from the controversy over their funding, the policies themselves were widely welcomed by climate campaigners. Jess Ralston, energy lead at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), said the tax cut on electricity bills “could help households to switch to electric heat pumps, protecting UK homes from becoming ever more exposed to the whims of Putin and Trump when turning on their gas boiler”.
The last few months have seen global momentum build behind electrification, spurred by the US-Iran war disrupting oil and gas supplies and driving up prices. The Turkish and Australian COP31 presidencies have announced a global target to boost electrification, backed by the European Union, Canada, Philippines, UK and others.
Campaigners call for lower power pricesWhile reaction to the VAT cut was supportive, some questioned whether £45 a year of savings per household is enough and called for more measures to cut electricity bills.
Friends of the Earth’s energy lead Imogen Dow said those on the lowest incomes should be given cheaper electricity through a “social tariff” and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think-tank – which is close to the Labour Party – said levies on energy bills should be shifted to general taxation.
Matthew Paterson, a politics professor at Manchester University, told Climate Home News that the most effective way to reduce electricity bills is to take on the UK’s private electricity companies, while consumer-oriented measures like the VAT cut are “tinkering around the edges”.
Jarrod Birch, head of policy and public affairs for the EV charging industry association Charge UK, said that while the policy would make home-charging cheaper, people who charge their vehicles at public points will still have to pay 20% VAT. The UK’s tax authority is fighting a court ruling that ordered it to reduce the tax motorists pay on public chargers to the current household rate of 5%.
Further measures will be the responsibility of Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Miatta Fahnbulleh, who is relatively new to politics after a career at left-wing, pro-climate think tanks the IPPR and the New Economics Foundation.
Fahnbulleh and Healey leave 10 Downing Street following Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first cabinet meeting, on July 21, 2026 in London, England. (Photo: Ben Montgomery/Getty Images)Michael Jacobs, political economy professor at Sheffield University and former adviser to UK Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, said Fahnbulleh would be a “climate advocate” who would continue the “progressive climate agenda” of her predecessor Ed Miliband.
“She’s a very creative policy wonk so I expect there to be lots of policy innovation under her,” he said, “I think she will be looking at new ways to encourage take-up of heat pumps and domestic batteries.”
Aid budget in Miliband’s handsDespite reports he could be made finance minister, Miliband has been appointed Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Miliband has attended many climate COP meetings over several decades, most recently representing the UK at COP29 and COP30, and has been targeted by the right-wing media for his support for climate action and opposition to new oil and gas drilling in the UK’s part of the North Sea.
In his new role, Miliband will be responsible for the UK’s overseas aid budget including its international climate finance, which the Starmer government had slashed to fund increases in defence spending.
UK cuts support for climate action abroad to fund military instead
Jacobs said he expected Miliband to prioritise climate and development in the UK’s foreign policy and to push Burnham and new finance minister John Healey to reverse Starmer’s aid cuts.
But there are fears Healey could try to cut the aid budget further to fund the military. Healey was a surprise pick for Chancellor of the Exchequer and grabbed headlines when he resigned as Starmer’s defence minister in June over what he saw as insufficient defence spending.
This article was updated after publication on July 24, clarifying how the UK plans to free up $400 million from its climate finance budget.
The post Will new UK PM’s green measures at home cause climate finance pain overseas? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Allegations of harms at China-backed transition minerals projects rise
Reports of human rights and environmental abuses linked to Chinese companies’ overseas investments in the mining and refining of minerals needed for the clean energy transition are on the rise, research by a monitoring group has found.
The number of recorded allegations of harm at projects tied to Chinese firms have increased every year since 2021, rising to 148 in 2025, according to the Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRC). On Wednesday it released new data showing that a total of 434 allegations of abuse were made against Chinese-backed projects over the five-year period in projects across the world.
The world’s top cleantech manufacturer, China is also the leading financier of critical minerals projects worldwide. The country has committed more than $120 billion in foreign direct investment into mineral mining and processing since 2023, Australian think-tank Climate Energy Finance recently found.
(function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})();“China plays a central role in global transition mineral supply chains, and as such has a unique opportunity to raise the bar on human rights and community engagement at every stage of mining,” said Michael Clements, BHRC’s executive director.
“While there have been encouraging developments, from stronger regulations to more company engagement, there remains a gap between human rights commitment and action,” he said.
The report comes as communities affected by Chinese-backed mineral projects have filed the first two cases to a Beijing-based mediation mechanism intended to bring willing Chinese companies to the discussion table with affected communities.
Allegations of harms on the riseBHRC’s latest analysis – including data for the period 2023-2025 – covered mining, smelting and refining projects for 11 minerals considered key to manufacturing clean energy technologies such as batteries, EVs and solar panels needed to move away from climate-heating fossil fuels.
The highest number of abuses was recorded in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of nickel, which is used to make EV batteries. After the Indonesian government banned exports of raw nickel, Chinese firms invested billions of dollars to develop a large-scale nickel smelting and processing industry in the Southeast Asian country, largely powered by coal.
(function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})();Other countries with a high number of recorded harms include the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Chinese firms dominate cobalt and copper production; Myanmar, where unregulated rare earths mining has caused widespread environmental destruction; Serbia, where Chinese-backed mining of some of Europe’s most significant copper and gold deposits is swallowing land and homes, and Zimbabwe, where Chinese investments have turned the nation into Africa’s top lithium producer.
Growing risks for people and natureAllegations tracked by BHRC included negative impacts on local livelihoods, health and land rights, workers’ health and safety and work-related deaths, as well as water pollution and environmental contamination. In addition, 18 people were attacked for raising concerns about Chinese transition mineral projects between 2023 and 2025.
The report shows that 10 Chinese companies, including Zijin Mining, Tsingshan Group and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, accounted for nearly two-thirds of all allegations recorded in the last five years. It found that some Chinese companies “still appear to turn a blind eye to these issues” but noted that several others have been more responsive to allegations of abuse. However, even among companies with human rights policies, implementation remains a challenge, BHRC warned.
Zijin Mining and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt repeatedly responded to the allegations of harm by saying they take environmental and social risks seriously and adhere to international standards. Tsingshan Group never responded to BHRC’s requests for comment.
Platform for dialogue between communities and Chinese firmsAt the same time, Chinese authorities have made “significant progress” on introducing a more specific framework for managing environmental and social risks in overseas investment, BHRC said.
This includes global consultation on a draft Sustainable Mining Code, adherence to UN guiding principles on business and human rights, and greater emphasis on oversight of companies operating overseas.
The China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals & Chemicals Importers & Exporters (CCCMC) set up a mediation and consultation mechanism intended to provide a platform for dialogue between affected communities or civil society groups that have raised concerns and Chinese companies.
More than three years since its launch, the mechanism has now received its first two complaints from local communities and many more are considering filing a case, Margaux Day, executive director at the nonprofit Accountability Counsel, told an event hosted by Climate Home News last month.
“This is incredibly exciting in that it fills a governance and accountability gap where often communities who are seeking to protect their rights and the environment can’t reach someone who will respond to them,” she told the panel discussion at London Climate Action Week.
Climate Home News understands that the complaints were filed by communities in Latin America and Southeast Asia over labour rights and resettlement issues. No information about the cases has yet been made public. The mechanism’s secretariat did not respond to Climate Home News’ questions.
The mechanism was set up after the Chinese regulator for banks and insurers called on investor-level institutions to establish complaints bodies to hear from communities outside of China. But whether the new initiative will prove effective in tackling grievances remains an open question.
“Real potential” for better mining practicesParticipation in the mechanism is voluntary for Chinese firms and it doesn’t have a fact-finding function, nor can it impose provisions for compensation or compliance with human rights standards.
But Day told Climate Home News that, if successful, it could bring companies to negotiate an outcome that is better for people and the planet and leads to more sustainable mining practice.
Chen Yu, an independent China advisor for campaign group Global Witness, agreed that the mechanism holds “real potential”.
“There exists nothing else at a similar level to promote dialogue between communities and Chinese mining companies in particular,” she said.
For companies, the mechanism opens “a channel for problem-solving and dialogue with communities”, she added, as “Chinese companies often remain cautious of approaching affected communities directly, afraid of making the problem bigger”.
However, Chen said the mechanism remains at an early stage of development, faces resourcing challenges and is not yet sufficiently understood by communities in mining areas or Chinese firms.
To help it address some of these challenges, the secretariat is currently seeking technical support from a range of organisations, including civil society groups. But, Chen said, “it will take time for the mechanism to show its value”.
The post Allegations of harms at China-backed transition minerals projects rise appeared first on Climate Home News.
Energy transition policymaking must evolve to fit an age of rupture
Andreas Sieber is head of political strategy at 350.org. Cat Abreu is director of the International Climate Politics Hub.
From the US abduction of Venezuela’s president at the start of this year to the Iran war which rumbles on, disruption is the new normal for global geopolitics, more often than not linked to conflict over supplies of oil and gas.
Events so far in 2026 – driven largely by the desire of the Trump administration to grab control of fossil fuels around the world – show that the climate community’s approach to energy diplomacy will have to evolve if we are to operate effectively and push for climate action in such a volatile landscape.
Today’s climate and energy governance must be able to cope with trade wars, genocide, fascism, spiralling inequality and challenges to multilateralism. The increasingly dominant paradigms of economic competitiveness, energy security and green industrialisation can help drive the transition but they also challenge our collective mission to deliver an equitable green shift.
US-China rivalry dominatesLonger-term geopolitical trends that are seeing power move from West to East and North to South have fuelled a US–China “superpower rivalry”, which is pulling the global economy apart and reining in trade.
A key question will be how the fracture “lines” are drawn: by the US and China, or also by other countries or blocs? Many governments will try to remain “in the middle” between the two giants to capture economic gains from both sides. Yet despite the language of “strategic autonomy”, Washington and Beijing may be in a position to force choices via market access, export controls and sanctions.
At first glance, this may not seem particularly relevant for climate and energy politics. But Huawei’s exclusion from 5G operations across the political West and India following the so-called Clean Network Campaign by the US government serves as a warning of what could happen to climate green tech.
And the recent debate to cut out Chinese inverters from European markets follows the same pattern – US security forces perceive a risk and start encouraging their allies to drop Chinese technology.
The new drivers: competition and securityDespite this fracturing geopolitical and economic context, energy transition is still happening. To ensure it is effective and equitable, we need to understand what is driving it and how to adapt climate politics so that it better responds to these drivers.
Put simply, China is supplying the world with low-cost renewables (roughly 60% of critical wind and 80% of solar components), batteries, EVs and other key elements. Other countries now also want their piece of the green tech pie and are forming industrial policies to get it.
It is this new competitiveness-driven logic that will shape the quest for decarbonisation, which has shifted from cooperating around the cost of tackling climate change to rivalry for the benefits of climate action.
Over 90% of new renewables projects are now cheaper than fossil alternatives. Gas-fired power is 3–4 times more expensive than solar and wind. In 2015, most decarbonisation policies were “traditional” emissions-cutting strategies like carbon pricing or net zero dates, whereas green industrial policies now underpin the majority.
Iran war could boost fossil fuel phase-out push, says Colombian minister
Meanwhile, security has become a central driver of energy politics. We are living through the second major fossil fuel crisis in just four years. Elevated oil and gas prices will impose up to $1 trillion in additional costs on the global economy by the end of the year if disruption continues in the Strait of Hormuz. Fossil fuel supply chains have exposed countries to conflict, coercion and brutal price shocks.
Fossil fuel volatility destabilises whole economies – higher fuel costs drive up food prices, increase political instability, and push millions into poverty and hunger. This incentivises governments to shield themselves from global shocks, especially in countries that are net fossil fuel importers and home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s population.
Yet security fears can cut both ways. The same instability that makes fossil fuel dependence untenable is also sharpening concern over China’s dominance of critical clean technologies and supply chains.
Equity, cooperation and the opportunity for changeDeveloping countries benefit from the rapid uptake of renewables enabled by low-cost Chinese technologies. But significant fiscal space and public investment is needed for the electricity grids and infrastructure required to fully unleash the energy transition, as well as for green industrialisation to diversify revenue streams.
Despite this, industrial-scale domestic production and ownership often remain out of reach for too many countries that lack the fiscal space to allow green supply chains to flourish and compete with their traditional industrial base. But more just and diversified green tech supply chains could be achieved with concomitant support.
Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?
For the first time in decades, the international order is being substantially reshaped. If within this context, decarbonisation is increasingly driven by green industrial policy, energy security and competitiveness, the climate policy community must better anticipate where these debates are moving. We must speak the same language, and enter the forums where decisions are made, including security, trade and bilateral or trilateral spaces.
We should build on an enlightened self interest recognising that cooperation remains essential and beneficial. This includes using the UN climate process differently: less as an ever-expanding negotiation machine, and more as a space for norm-setting, political alignment and deal-making. In an age of fragmentation, effective cooperation must not only be framed as necessary but thought of as a strategically compelling source of resilience and shared advantage.
The post Energy transition policymaking must evolve to fit an age of rupture appeared first on Climate Home News.
Extreme heat costing India’s poorest workers 2% of GDP, survey finds
Low-income Indian workers, many of them migrants from rural areas hit by climate change, are paying for worsening extreme heat through lost working days and health complications, with the cost equivalent to 2% of national GDP per year, new research shows.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a London-based think-tank, worked with local organisations to survey around 540 households of informal workers in three Indian cities: Ajmer, Delhi and Agra. Most had migrated from rural areas to find work in industries such as construction, brick-making, garment manufacturing and food packaging.
The survey found them struggling through long working days with little access to shade, cooling, rest or water, as well as few toilets for women. And even when they go home, many live in makeshift shelters or airless cramped rooms with barely a single fan, bringing almost no respite.
Outdoor workers are losing about 24 days of work a year due to heat, costing them nearly a tenth of their annual earnings, while indoor workers sacrifice roughly 15 days. On top of losing income, they are also bearing the cost of health problems like heat exhaustion, psychological stress and kidney damage brought on by repeated dehydration.
If the survey’s findings are extrapolated to a national level, the IIED researchers estimate that the decline in productivity and effects of kidney disease combined add up to lost wages of $78 billion each year.
Vishram Meena, 45, from Alwar in Rajasthan, has worked on construction sites in Ajmer for more than a decade, toiling for 10 to 12 hours a day carrying materials and mixing cement in the full sun.
In May 2024, on one of the hottest days, he collapsed after feeling dizzy and suffering a nosebleed. His wife and colleagues managed to get him to hospital where he was diagnosed with heat stroke. He has since returned to the same building work because the family needs the money.
“I went back because what else could I do? We are not machines. We are human beings. The heat is killing us slowly,” he was quoted as saying in a report on the survey’s findings.
“Victorian-era” conditionsRitu Bharadwaj, IIED’s director of climate resilience, finance and loss and damage, described some of the stories from workers about their experiences of extreme heat as “genuinely horrifying”.
Kusum, a tailor at a garment manufacturing and export unit in Kapashera, Delhi, recounted how the machines for ironing finished garments are in the same tiny room where workers are making the clothes, with steam and hot air building up through her shift.
Fans are too far apart to move the air and nothing has changed in over a decade, she said, adding that “in summer, the unit feels like a furnace”.
“These are Victorian-era working conditions and they’re completely unacceptable in the 21st century,” said Bharadwaj. She called for stepped-up social protection from the government to pay people for days they are unable work due to heat, as well as micro-insurance schemes with payouts triggered by temperature measurements.
This money would help families buy food and pay medical bills when their income dips if they fall ill or cannot work their usual hours due to soaring temperatures.
Climate change-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders
The aim of the IIED study, Bharadwaj added, is to get policy-makers’ attention by showing the scale of damage extreme heat is doing to India’s GDP in an economy whose growth relies on service-led industries. “If the workers within them start falling sick, you know it’s the economic growth which is going to get impacted,” she told a webinar to present the research.
“Whether [policymakers] care about the workers or not, at least they would care about the GDP, and therefore then invest in the care that is needed for them,” she explained.
Labour code leaves out heatHowever, Bharadwaj noted that a 2026 reform to India’s labour law bringing a range of regulations together in one code does not include heat-related protections for workers and only applies to businesses above a certain size. She urged the government to introduce a temperature threshold above which all workers would be able to stop their activities.
IIED and its partners have also carried out a similar study in Bangladesh which will be published later this month, showing that extreme heat is costing its workforce the equivalent of nearly 1.4% of GDP.
Shakirul Islam, chairperson of the Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP) in Bangladesh, said the government had introduced stricter safety policies for garment-making companies after the Rana Plaza complex collapsed in 2013. But, he said, these rules are rarely followed by manufacturers, especially at the level of smaller subcontractors.
The workers’ welfare centres that do exist are open mainly during work hours so they are difficult to visit. Some companies also make saline water available for heat stress, which is no good for those with high blood pressure, he noted.
For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity
Archana Shukla Mukherjee, CEO of India’s Change Alliance, which also partnered with IIED on the survey, said it was time to hold both the government and businesses accountable for finding solutions to the intensifying problem of extreme heat’s effects on workers.
She said that employee state insurance schemes should identify heat stroke as an occupational disease while companies along the whole supply chain should start putting in place heat protection measures, including for informal workers and migrants.
If the tools and mechanisms available to help workers do not reach the most vulnerable and marginalised people, “then I think we are not doing something right,” she said.
The post Extreme heat costing India’s poorest workers 2% of GDP, survey finds appeared first on Climate Home News.
Top maritime court rejects bid to halt UN deep-sea mining inquiry
A United Nations investigation into deep-sea mining firms will continue after the world’s top maritime court rejected their bid to suspend the inquiry triggered by a US-backed push to extract critical minerals from the ocean floor.
In two orders issued on Saturday, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) declined to halt an inquiry launched by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) into whether permit holders, including Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd (TOML) and Nauru Ocean Resources Inc (NORI), have breached their obligations under UN exploration contracts.
The two companies are subsidiaries of Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC), which earlier this year sought permits from the United States to commercially mine the deep seabed in an area already covered by its UN exploration licences, bypassing the ISA’s regulatory process.
The inquiry was opened after TMC’s move raised questions over whether its subsidiaries had complied with their contractual obligations to the ISA, which regulates mining in international waters under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. TOML and NORI sued the ISA last June for allegedly targeting them “in breach of due process” and without “good faith”.
While allowing the inquiry to proceed, the court ordered the ISA to ensure the companies receive due process. Judges said the regulator must explain the factual and legal basis of its inquiry, clarify the procedures being followed and provide TOML and NORI with a meaningful opportunity to respond.
The companies seek to mine an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which holds vast reserves of critical minerals like nickel, manganese and rare earths but is also home to a little-studied deep ocean ecosystem with thousands of unnamed species.
In response to the court’s ruling, the ISA welcomed the decision, saying the inquiry “remains in effect” and would continue “with due regard to all applicable legal requirements”.
Last week, during an annual meeting of its member governments, ISA secretary-general Leticia Carvalho said the resources in the ocean floor are “the common heritage of humankind” and upheld the agency’s role as “more important than ever”.
TMC also welcomed the court decision in a statement and claimed that judges ruled to “protect the rights of TMC subsidiaries”.
“Contractors like NORI and TOML, who have together spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the promise of a fair regulatory framework, should be informed of the factual and legal basis of any non-compliance inquiries, understand the procedure being applied, and receive a meaningful opportunity to respond,” said Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company.
Iridogorgia and bamboo coral pictured around the Johnston Atoll Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)Environmental groups said the ruling allows scrutiny of the companies’ actions to continue.
Louisa Casson, deep-sea mining campaigner with Greenpeace, said the “entire litigation has been an egregious waste of time and money”, which was part of the industry’s “textbook distraction tactic” meant to delay the consequences of the inquiry.
“If the inquiry confirms that TMC’s subsidiaries are breaching their contracts, governments must send the strongest possible signal that complicity in unlawful deep sea mining will not be tolerated,” she said.
While the investigation is ongoing, NORI’s contract is set to expire this week and is up for review. Governments asked the ISA to report back and make “make appropriate recommendations” by the next ISA assembly, its main decision-making body, set to take place next week from July 27-31.
The court ordered both the ISA and TMC to submit a report on how they have complied with the ruling by August 31, and called on both to “cooperate and refrain from any action that might lead to aggravating the dispute”.
The post Top maritime court rejects bid to halt UN deep-sea mining inquiry appeared first on Climate Home News.
Flood deaths in West African cities raise fraught issue of slum evictions
Scientists have found that the deadly floods across parts of West Africa in recent weeks were made more likely and intense by human-driven climate change, while the expansion of cities into flood-prone areas amplified the devastation, raising the thorny problem of how to better protect poorer urban communities.
A report from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group highlighted how the floods hit some of West Africa’s most densely populated coastal regions, where rapid urbanisation has pushed formal and informal settlements dangerously into floodplains, while converting land into farms has reduced drainage.
Since May, West African countries including Ghana, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria have experienced weeks of torrential rain and deadly flash floods. Homes have been submerged, thousands of people displaced and over 70 people killed.
WWA scientists said climate models showed that human-induced climate change increased the intensity of the rainfall, with what was once a rare amount of rain falling in just three days – a downpour that can now be expected every two to four years.
“The event is not rare already today and therefore the flood risk is certainly not going away but will increase in particular with additional pressures from growing populations and urbanisation,” said Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London.
Impact made worse by informal settlementsOn top of climate change, scientists said urbanisation, inadequate drainage, poor waste management and the expansion of informal settlements into floodplains have left millions more people exposed to flooding.
Informal settlements are neighbourhoods which develop without authorisation from government authorities. More commonly known as slums or shanty towns, they often lack land tenure and services like running water and electricity and tend to be home to poorer communities.
Across West Africa and much of the developing world, as people have moved from rural areas to cities in search of work, these settlements have expanded into wetlands, flood-retention areas and riverbanks. This has further heightened flood risks across West African cities.
Kiswendsida Guigma, technical advisor at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said West Africa’s coastal cities are being “squeezed between repeated flooding and rapid urban growth”, pushing infrastructure beyond its limits and making it harder for communities to recover.
Roussel Teguia, a post-doctoral research fellow at Canada’s Université Laval, said the recent floods have exposed longstanding failures in urban planning across West Africa’s fast-growing coastal cities where much of the region’s economy is concentrated.
Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks
Teguia said the floods are deadlier due to factors including rapid urbanisation in low-lying areas, lack of affordable housing alternatives and the long-standing marginalisation of poor communities. He also condemned the destruction of wetlands, mangroves and floodplains for roads and buildings when instead these natural bodies “should be treated as critical public safety infrastructure”.
“These floods should not be understood only as natural disasters,” he said. Residents of informal settlements must stop being treated as the problem, since they are often the first victims of “an urban model that exposes them to risk and then blames them for being exposed”, he added.
Short-sighted approach to relocationCote d’Ivoire’s capital Abidjan recorded 59 of the deaths, with about 20 dying in the densely-settled slope neighbourhood of Mossikro. Local media reported that authorities had previously relocated residents from this area due to fears about vulnerability to deadly landslides and flooding, but some people had returned to previously evacuated sites and died when the hillside collapsed due to the rain.
Local authorities have since started demolishing houses in the area, to the anger of many locals who say they were not consulted or warned about the demolitions, which are costing them their properties and livelihoods. “If you destroy this place, where am I supposed to go?” one unnamed resident told Al Jazeera.
The government says many of the structures were built illegally in flood and landslide-risk zones and it plans to move 3,000 people first and 2,000 more later. Municipal official Yue Hilaire told the TV channel the municipality has been trying to persuade them to leave for a long time. “Frankly we are tired,” he said. “The mayor instructed us to evict them because we don’t want to witness another tragedy every year.”
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
Guigma said that to avoid people returning, the government should ensure that “where people are relocated they also have relatively good economic opportunities for them to stay”.
Demolishing poor people’s homes without offering real alternatives is not prevention, Teguia argued, calling on governments to provide safe, serviced and affordable land close to jobs and transport, stop the occupation of wetlands and regulate powerful land owners and users.
Relocation programmes often fail because they are designed as land-clearing or security operations rather than social processes, he explained.
Governments must move from reactive crisis management measures to a long-term comprehensive approach to risk, Teguia said. Relocation policies need to be just, fairly compensated, include affected communities and encompass economic and social networks – otherwise they “simply move the vulnerability elsewhere”, he warned.
Finance gap limits flood responseThe WWA scientists said deadly floods will continue unless governments do more to reduce people’s exposure and vulnerability, calling for investments in safe and affordable housing, improved drainage and sanitation, stronger enforcement of building regulations, more effective early warning systems and greater involvement of at-risk communities in planning.
A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready?
Joyce Kimutai, research associate in extreme weather and climate change at Imperial College London, said the study is a clear example of “the need for international cooperation on climate justice”, adding that developed countries have a responsibility to help nations like Togo, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana to adapt to a worsening problem that, as low emitters of greenhouse gas, they did not cause.
But significant financial support for countries grappling with increasing climate disasters may still be some way off. Earlier this month, the UN’s fledgling Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) postponed approving its first round of projects after requests for support far exceeded the money available.
One of the roughly 180 submissions the fund received was a Nigerian recovery and resilience project to address flood losses and damage in Lagos which is prone to yearly flooding.
Otto of Imperial College London said such situations where the role of climate change is certain “should be the kinds of events where this fund should pay and help, but of course, that would require first money to be in the fund”.
Ghana and Togo have also identified increasingly frequent flooding as a major climate risk in their national adaptation plans, prioritising investments in drainage, resilient infrastructure, flood management, early warning systems and climate-resilient urban planning.
Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub
But while these adaptation plans acknowledge that delivering the proposed measures requires more international aid, wealthy nations are likely to have missed their 2025 goal of doubling adaptation finance for developing countries. Funding reached just over $30 billion in 2024, far below the target of $40 billion by 2025.
The WWA findings underscore the urgent need to speed up support for vulnerable communities who have done little to cause climate change, said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, adding that “all climate finance commitments must be delivered in full”.
The post Flood deaths in West African cities raise fraught issue of slum evictions appeared first on Climate Home News.
Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub
China and India have declined to back any of their old United Nations carbon credit projects seeking to sell offsets under the new UN market, driving a cull of nearly three-quarters of applicants, analysis of official data shows.
Only 415 out of more than 1,500 projects and programmes hoping to move from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to the new carbon market set up under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement won the approval of their host governments by the 30 June deadline – a crucial step in transitioning them.
The two Asian giants, home to two-thirds of all applicants, account for the bulk of the exclusions. Brazil, the other heavyweight of the CDM era, took the opposite path, approving nearly all of its projects in a last-minute rush that leaves it with the largest number of activities still in the running to sell credits under the new mechanism.
Carbon market watchers have long regarded the CDM, set up under the Kyoto Protocol which has now been largely replaced by the Paris Agreement, as largely discredited for failing to drive real emission cuts. They also warned that letting its projects live on could dent confidence in the mechanism’s successor.
If all projects seeking transition had been successful, they could have flooded the market with up to more than 900 million credits generated with largely outdated rules, according to UN estimates. One credit is equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) and 900 million tonnes is similar to Japan’s annual emissions.
‘New era’Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said the failure of most projects to clear the hurdle sent a significant signal that carbon trading had entered a new era. “The system is trying to remove some of the hot air that had inflated it in the past,” she told Climate Home News.
“The lack of transition is the biggest contribution that Article 6 has made to climate yet,” she added, arguing that leaving “zombie credits” in the market creates confusion, especially for buyers that might not realise these units have lost their value.
Among the schemes that failed to win government approval are nine programmes promoted by fossil fuel companies over a decade ago to subsidise the construction of gas plants in the Global South, which Climate Home News has previously reported on.
Fossil fuel firms seek UN carbon market cash for old gas plants
But one of them, supporting the Ressano Garcia gas plant in Mozambique, could still profit from the new market after the country’s government granted its approval on deadline day itself.
Brazil leads projects transitionEstablished in 1997 under the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM allowed rich countries to meet part of their climate obligations by financing emission-cutting projects in poorer ones. It drew widespread criticism over its patchy human rights record and for failing to deliver promised climate benefits. Backers of the Article 6.4 market say it is a higher-integrity successor.
CDM projects were given a route back into the new mechanism under certain conditions at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, when governments agreed the rules for the Paris Agreement market.
Project developers had until the end of 2023 to apply and host governments were originally given until the end of 2025 to grant approval. But, after requests from many developing countries for an extension, at COP30 in Belém countries agreed to push the deadline back six months to the end of June.
Brazil was the single largest beneficiary of the decision, with all of its 92 approvals coming during the extension window. Hydropower plants, landfill gas schemes and wind farms make up the bulk of the South American country’s surviving portfolio, and hydro is the single most common project type in the global transition pipeline.
Peru greenlit the move of nearly a dozen hydropower plants, Thailand backed a batch of biogas and waste-to-energy schemes, and Mexico squeezed all of its approvals – including a controversial industrial gas project – into the final week. African nations including Zambia, Malawi and Ethiopia backed programmes aiming to switch households to cleaner cooking stoves, which have the potential to generate millions of offsets and are set to be the biggest source of credits among the surviving projects.
Long way from selling creditsSecuring government support does not mean a scheme can now automatically sell credits under the Article 6 mechanism. Developers are required to submit additional documentation by the end of 2026 demonstrating that their programmes respect the mechanism’s stricter rules on environmental and social safeguards and on the risk of emission cuts being reversed. The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the mechanism’s regulator, has the final say on which projects are allowed into the market.
Those that make it through can sell credits for emission reductions achieved between 2021 and 2025 under the old CDM methodologies, with some adjustments aimed at preventing the creation of excess credits not backed by real emission cuts. For reductions achieved from 2026 onwards, projects will need to switch to new methodologies, which the regulator is currently developing.
So far, 30 programmes have completed the process, and only two cookstove projects in Myanmar have been formally approved to issue credits.
Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the activities in Myanmar over its ties to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and allegations of “massively” overstating its climate impact.
The company behind the scheme said its engagement with authorities “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta, while disputing the calculations underpinning the claim that too many credits had been issued.
The post Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub appeared first on Climate Home News.
Africa can lead the Age of Electrification
Mohamed Adow is the founder and director of Power Shift Africa.
At London Climate Action Week, electrification moved from the margins of climate policy to the centre of the road to COP31. The launch of the Electrify Now campaign gave fresh momentum to a target floated at the Bonn climate talks: by 2035, electricity should provide 35% of the world’s final energy consumption, up from just over 20% today.
That makes electrification one of the defining tests for this year’s climate summit in Türkiye. If COP31 is to be more than another exercise in negotiating text, it must show how the world can replace fossil fuels in transport, heating, industry and everyday life with clean electricity.
For Africa, this agenda presents both an extraordinary opportunity and an immense challenge.
For decades, the continent has been viewed primarily through the lens of energy poverty. More than 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. Yet that very deficit also means many African countries are not locked into ageing fossil-fuel infrastructure in the way industrialised economies are. They have the chance to build cleaner energy systems from the outset.
The case for electrification is compelling. Transport, industry and heating account for much of the world’s fossil-fuel consumption. Replacing combustion engines with electric vehicles, diesel generators with renewable power and fossil-fuel heating with electric alternatives is one of the fastest ways to cut emissions while improving energy security. Electric technologies are also far more efficient, and renewable electricity is now the cheapest source of new power across much of the world.
Africa also possesses one of the greatest renewable energy endowments on Earth. The continent possesses some of the world’s best solar resources. Vast wind corridors stretch across North, East and Southern Africa. Geothermal energy is already powering much of Kenya’s electricity system. Hydropower resources remain significant in several regions.
But potential is not the same as progress.
The biggest obstacle is not a lack of sunshine or wind. It is a shortage of investment.
Financial barriersAfrican countries pay some of the highest borrowing costs in the world despite contributing the least to climate change. Projects that would be commercially viable elsewhere become prohibitively expensive because of high interest rates and perceptions of financial risk. Until the cost of capital falls, many countries will struggle to build the renewable power stations, transmission lines and battery storage needed to electrify their economies.
The electricity itself is another challenge. It is difficult to persuade people to buy electric vehicles or industries to electrify production if power supplies remain unreliable. Many national grids require major investment to expand access, improve reliability and accommodate growing volumes of renewable energy. In rural areas, decentralised solar and battery systems will often provide the quickest route to universal electricity access, but they too require finance and supportive policy frameworks.
Industrial policy matters just as much.
Africa is rich in many of the minerals needed for batteries and clean technologies, yet too often it exports raw materials and imports finished products. If electrification simply creates new markets for imported batteries, electric vehicles and solar equipment, much of the economic opportunity will be lost. The transition should also become a strategy for building African manufacturing, creating skilled jobs and capturing more value from the continent’s own resources.
There are encouraging signs. Ethiopia has pushed aggressively to promote electric mobility while seeking to reduce its dependence on imported oil. Kenya has become a global leader in geothermal electricity and is seeing rapid growth in electric motorcycles. Morocco is building an industrial base around renewable energy and battery supply chains.
Electrification is happeningThese examples show that electrification is no longer a distant prospect. But they also remain outliers rather than the norm. For most African countries, unreliable grids, high borrowing costs and limited access to finance still stand in the way of a much broader transformation. That is precisely why the emerging electrification agenda matters.
If the world wants electricity to account for 35% of final energy demand by 2035, then success cannot be measured simply by announcing a global target. It must be measured by whether developing countries have the finance, technology and policy support to make that transition possible.
For Africa, electrification is not only about reducing emissions. It is about determining what kind of development path the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continent will follow.
More than a billion people live in Africa today. By mid-century, that number will be closer to 2.5 billion. This is a continent on the cusp of sweeping economic transformation, with cities expanding, industries growing and hundreds of millions of people rightly demanding the energy, mobility and prosperity long enjoyed elsewhere.
Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks
That development will require vast amounts of power. The question is whether it will be delivered through the old fossil-fuel model of imported oil, gas infrastructure and polluting combustion, or through clean electricity generated from Africa’s own renewable resources.
This matters for Africa. But it also matters for the world. A global transition to electrification cannot succeed if a continent of this scale is locked into a new generation of fossil-fuel dependence. Nor can it be just if Africa is told to decarbonise without being given the finance and technology to build something better.
The choice facing COP31 is therefore not simply whether electrification will happen. It is whether Africa is helped to become an electro-state continent, powering its development through clean electricity, or pushed by neglect into repeating the fossil-fuel pathway that has already destabilised the climate.
For the age of electrification to be a success, COP31 needs to ensure Africa is equipped to shape and accelerate it. If Africa is left behind, the global energy transition will fall behind with it.
The post Africa can lead the Age of Electrification appeared first on Climate Home News.
Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks
Climate and environment campaigners have urged the Kenyan government to halt plans for a proposed 700,000-barrel-per-day oil refinery backed by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, warning the project threatens one of East Africa’s most ecologically sensitive coastlines.
The refinery, which is planned to be situated in Lamu County on Kenya’s northern coast, will be East Africa’s largest refining project and is expected to take up to three years to build. Once finished, it would supply refined petroleum products to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, among others, helping to reduce the region’s dependence on imported fuels.
Campaigners are questioning the viability of such a large refinery at a time when renewable energy and electric transportation are expanding rapidly.
Mohamed Adow, director of a Kenya-based climate and energy think-tank Power Shift Africa, said the decision to give Dangote the green light for the refinery is “an extraordinary act of environmental recklessness and economic short-sightedness”, arguing it would tie Kenya to “yesterday’s energy system” just as global demand for petroleum products faces increasing uncertainty.
Campaigners argue the refinery risks coming online just as transport – the largest market for petrol and diesel – is beginning to electrify across the continent.
Kenya launched a National Electric Mobility Policy earlier this year to speed up the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) and reduce the country’s roughly $5 billion annual fuel import bill. Ethiopia has already banned imports of non-electric vehicles and now has more than 100,000 EVs on its roads, while Rwanda is expanding its electric mobility programme with plans to convert its fleet of around 100,000 motorcycles to electric.
Adow said the project risks billions of dollars in investment in infrastructure that could become obsolete as the world moves away from oil.
“Building a refinery today assumes decades of robust demand for fuels that much of the world is actively trying to phase out,” he said in a statement.
Lamu – the proposed site for the project – is home to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Lamu Old Town and an archipelago containing extensive mangrove forests, coral reefs and seagrass beds that support fisheries, tourism and coastal livelihoods.
Locating the refinery in Lamu would “place one of Africa’s largest fossil fuel developments in one of the continent’s most ecologically sensitive and culturally significant coastal regions,” Power Shift Africa said.
Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed
Sherelee Odayar, oil and gas campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, warned that a refinery of this scale could increase the risk of habitat destruction, marine pollution, oil spills and air pollution in one of East Africa’s most fragile coastal ecosystems.
She said the risks stem not only from the refinery itself – including storage tanks, pipelines and fuel handling facilities – but also from the large volumes of crude oil that would need to be shipped into Lamu and refined products exported by sea. Increased tanker traffic and fuel transfers, she said, would raise the likelihood of accidents in ecologically sensitive coastal waters.
Odayar added that Lamu’s low-lying, flood-prone coastline could compound those risks by damaging infrastructure and carrying contaminants from storage facilities into nearby fishing grounds and marine ecosystems.
“Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass beds are not expendable; they support fisheries, livelihoods and coastal protection,” Odayar added.
She said Kenyan authorities should suspend any approvals until an independent environmental and social impact assessment is completed, with genuine public participation and transparent scrutiny of the long-term economic, health and ecological risks.
“Any review must assess cumulative impacts on Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds and fishing livelihoods, alongside the wider economic risk of locking Kenya into costly fossil fuel infrastructure as the global energy transition accelerates”.
Dangote Group declined to answer questions from Climate Home News when contacted by phone.
Technological change threaten project’s futureThe Kenya refinery would replicate Dangote’s 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Lagos, currently Africa’s largest, which has plans to more than double capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028.
Adow of Power Shift Africa said projects like this represent “a breathtaking failure to recognise where the global economy is heading”, pointing out that the East African refinery risks arriving when Africa is experiencing an unprecedented clean energy boom.
Referencing Africa’s solar boom, global electric vehicles uptake and the International Energy Agency’s projection that global oil demand is set to enter a decline later this decade, the think-tank founder said African governments risk anchoring the continent’s future to an industry facing mounting economic uncertainty.
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
The organisation said the project faces a bigger threat aside from environmental opposition and that is technological change. “The danger is not simply that the refinery will pollute, it is that it will become obsolete long before it has paid for itself,” he added.
Kenyan President William Ruto said the project will create about 60,000 jobs for Kenyans and supply refined fuel to eight East and Central African countries.
GreenPeace Africa’s Odayar said the promise of ‘thousands of jobs’ cannot be used to hide the true cost of the investment which is that large fossil fuel projects often create temporary jobs while undermining existing livelihoods in fishing, tourism and small-scale local economies.
“The enormous capital required for a project of this scale could instead help accelerate Kenya’s renewable energy future through solar, wind, geothermal, storage and better energy access,” she added.
The post Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed
Lindsay Fenlock is a senior researcher in the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). Nikki Reisch is a human rights lawyer and social justice advocate who leads the Climate & Energy Program at CIEL.
Much has been written about when fossil fuel companies knew their products cause harm to the climate, public health, and the environment. Less attention has been paid to just how long governments have known, too, and what they did or failed to do with that knowledge. That information is not just a matter of historical record – it’s a matter of legal responsibility.
A year ago this month, the world’s highest court affirmed that countries have been under an obligation to curb climate change since they knew about the foreseeable risks it posed and to remedy its harms. This historic advisory opinion opened the door for States to be held accountable not only for failing to act on climate change, but also for making it worse by perpetuating its primary cause: fossil fuel production and use.
While the ruling is clear about the content of climate duties under international law, it is silent on when those duties first applied to specific countries or how long they have been breaching them. The earlier governments knew about the drivers and dangers of climate change, the longer they have been under an obligation to prevent it, and the greater their potential liability for the resulting harms.
Once they were informed of the risks fossil fuels posed to the climate, States had a duty to do everything in their power to prevent those risks from materializing – and at a minimum, to refrain from exacerbating them. But, as trends in fossil fuel dependence and climate destruction make clear, they did not.
Early knowledgeA new report from the Center for International Environmental Law shows that the governments of many major emitting countries have known since at least the 1960s that fossil fuel use was warming the planet and, if continued, could lead to dire impacts – including melting of the polar ice caps, catastrophic sea level rise, and extreme heat.
Yet some of the countries responsible for the largest cumulative shares of carbon emissions have claimed that global awareness of climate change emerged only in the late 1980s, around the time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established and negotiations of a climate convention began.
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
Why? Because admitting that they have known about the chief causes and foreseeable consequences of climate change for the better part of a century would mean they had a duty to prevent it that they’ve been flouting for decades.
Drawing on a wide range of publicly available government records and scientific studies, CIEL’s research exposes when knowledge of climate change made its way onto policymakers’ desks and into public discourse. The report synthesizes some of the groundbreaking research by scholars such as Naomi Oreskes on the history of American climate science, putting their findings into a legal context and broadening the discussion to other countries.
First findings in 19th centuryThe origins of the climate harms the world is experiencing today – more extreme storms, deadly heat waves, floods, and sea level rise – stem from around 1850, when industry began burning so much fossil fuel that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise.
Scientists figured out quite quickly that the release of these ancient carbon stores could warm Earth. The first paper that modeled the potential warming impact of fossil fuel use, for example, came out in 1896, while the first studies that confirmed global temperatures were rising came out before World War II.
Government records show international cooperation on climate change research picking up around 1957, when countries worldwide coordinated funding for thousands of research projects as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY).
The IGY spawned the world’s first program to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the 69 participating governments were apprised of the results. By this time, governmental scientific organizations in most of the world knew that continued fossil fuel use could heat the planet dramatically, with potentially significant adverse impacts. Many countries also became aware of industry research on climate change during this decade through their state-owned oil companies.
Big emitters knewIn the 1960s, the world’s top atmospheric scientists, chemists, and geophysicists concluded that fossil fuel emissions not only could warm the earth, but they were already doing so. They also concluded that continuing to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was likely to cause serious harm to food systems, ecosystems, human health, and communities, including through sea level rise and deadly extreme weather events. By the 1960s and 1970s, many governments had ample warning that continued reliance on fossil fuels could have profoundly dangerous global consequences.
Evidence indicates that this information reached public officials — in some cases at the highest echelons of government. In the United States – the largest historic emitter of carbon dioxide – White House officials exchanged memos over what to do about the “carbon dioxide problem” during the 1960s and a presidential report published in 1965 unequivocally attributed warming to fossil fuels and warned about catastrophic levels of temperature and sea level rise if trends continued.
Excerpt from a letter sent by US diplomat Daniel Moynihan to President Richard Nixon’s administration Excerpt from a letter sent by US diplomat Daniel Moynihan to President Richard Nixon’s administrationIn the United Kingdom, the greenhouse effect was first raised in a parliamentary debate in 1969, and in France, a state-owned oil company published a magazine article about the dangers of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1971, while the Canadian environment ministry regularly published articles about climate change in its employee magazine throughout the 1970s and 80s.
Even the most generous reading of this information shows that many of the world’s largest contributors to climate change, including the United States, Canada, Germany, and Australia, knew enough to change course over two decades before the first meeting of the IPCC in 1988, if not far earlier.
The story does not end there. As an illustrative compilation of publicly available, English-language evidence, CIEL’s report is not a complete survey of what all major emitters knew. And facts about what a given country knew are not, on their own, sufficient to secure accountability. But, together with evidence about how that knowledge was subsequently acted upon – or, as was often the case, denied, dismissed, and distorted – and about how climate impacts have unfolded, they solidify foundations for climate justice and repair.
The post Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN seabed regulator defends authority as mining firms seek to halt inquiry
The UN body that regulates mining in international waters has defended its authority over ocean governance after two subsidiaries of deep-sea mining firm The Metals Company (TMC) launched legal action to halt an investigation into their conduct.
Speaking at the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) annual meeting in Kingston on Monday, secretary-general Leticia Carvalho said the regulator’s role “matters more than ever” as governments grapple with growing pressure to exploit the deep seabed for minerals needed for the energy transition.
“The deep seabed belongs to no single country and no corporation; it belongs to all of us,” Carvalho said, describing its resources as “the common heritage of humankind”.
“If we lose sight of this,” she added, “we risk repeating on the ocean floor the same injustices and destruction we still strive to remedy on land.”
The conflict stems from TMC’s attempt to bypass the UN process by applying for US-sponsored ocean mining permits offered last year by the Trump administration. The Canadian firm aims to become the first company to mine the seabed for minerals like nickel, rare earths and manganese used in the production of both clean energy technologies and military equipment.
Several governments, including China, condemned the move as a “violation of international law”. In response, ISA member states agreed to open an inquiry into its licence-holders – among them two of TMC’s subsidiaries – to make sure they have complied with international law. If they are ultimately found to have breached those obligations, their exploration contracts could be revoked.
In June, the two TMC subsidiaries – Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd (TOML) and Nauru Ocean Resources Inc (NORI) – filed claims against the ISA at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), asking the court to suspend the inquiry while the case proceeds. The companies argue they are being targeted “without lawful procedural basis”, “in breach of due process”, and without “good faith”.
Environmental groups have accused The Metals Company of using legal tactics to block the investigation into its subsidiaries.
“We find ourselves in this Orwellian situation where these companies are trying to effectively get an injunction against the ISA from continuing its inquiry,” said Louisa Casson, who leads Greenpeace’s global campaign against deep-sea mining.
“The stakes are so high and that’s why we’re seeing this pretty extraordinary move to try to get an injunction against the ISA,” she added.
Mining the deep ocean floorThe ISA has been negotiating a mining code for the deep ocean floor for over 12 years without success. Nearly 40 governments, including the UK, France and Germany, have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining until there is sufficient scientific evidence that it can proceed without causing serious harm to marine ecosystems.
Rather than wait for the UN process, industry frontrunner, The Metals Company, decided to apply for US permits offered by the Trump administration last year. In May, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) certified TMC’s application to explore 120,000 square kilometers of sea floor.
The firm wants to mine an area in the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which holds critical minerals inside potato-sized rocks found in the deep ocean floor known as polymetallic nodules. The minerals like manganese, nickel and rare earths are used in clean energy technologies like batteries and wind turbines.
But the area is also a little-understood ecosystem inhabited by thousands of unnamed species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest environmental network, says mining this area would threaten the existence of over half of all molluscs reliant on deep-sea vents.
A field of manganese nodules in the ocean floor. (Photo: photo by NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research) Governments launch inquirySeeking to discourage companies from bypassing the UN process, the ISA’s member states unanimously agreed to open an inquiry into whether holders of its exploration licences complied with their contractual obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
“The stage we’re at now is countries grappling with what they can do about this. What tools do they have to constrain this pathway that would go against international law,” Casson said.
Both NORI and TOML continue to hold ISA exploration contracts in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. NORI’s license, however, expires later this month on July 21st and is up for review.
The inquiry is currently ongoing, but Casson said that if governments decide to cancel NORI’s license, other firms could apply for the ISA permit and compete for mining rights in the area.
“If that happens, it could really put into jeopardy TMC USA’s application (for US permits) because then suddenly that area could be open for a competing claim,” she explained. “At the moment, TMC is trying to kind of play both sides and shore up the area so that there will be no competition.”
Deep-sea mining firms push backThe cases before ITLOS are the first contentious disputes over deep-sea mining to reach the court designed for maritime disputes and the first brought directly by private contractors against the ISA. Among the companies’ legal advisers is former ISA secretary-general Michael Lodge.
Both NORI and TOML claimed that, unless the inquiry is suspended, there is a “real
and imminent risk of prejudice” that “may have significant legal and practical consequences” for
their activities.
The claim was backed by the Pacific island nation of Nauru, which has sponsored TMC’s push to mine the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and would benefit from the economic activity. The country raised “concerns on the adherence of due process with respect to the treatment of NORI”.
The mining companies allege that the ISA has singled them out among other applicants by requesting additional documentation, and that the UN auditors did not give them an opportunity to “meaningfully respond” to their concerns.
The ISA rejected those allegations as “wholly unsupported assertions”. It added that, given TMC’s application for US mining permits, it had done “what any reasonable regulator would do”: with the unanimous support of member states, it opened an inquiry simply to establish the facts.
A view of the International Seabed Authority council meeting in Kinston, Jamaica. (Photo: Andrés Felipe Carvajal Gómez/ ENB) Delay tacticsA decision from the maritime court is now expected by July 18, which has added to a “climate of significant regulatory uncertainty”, according to global law firm HSF Kramer.
As ISA countries meet in Kingston this week, the court’s president asked them “not to act in any way that could hinder any order” the court may make.
At the hearing representing the ISA, renowned human rights lawyer Philippe Sands said the deep-sea mining firms were engaging in “strategic litigation” meant to delay the inquiry and send the ISA into a years-long legal process.
“It’s a delaying tactic, and nothing would make them happier than for you to kick this into the long grass for two years while you sort out the merits. That is what they want this Tribunal, the Chamber, to do. You are being instrumentalized in this process,” Sands told the judges.
The post UN seabed regulator defends authority as mining firms seek to halt inquiry appeared first on Climate Home News.
A strong El Niño spells more climate pain for the Philippines
Suresanathan Murugesu is the country director of Action Against Hunger in the Philippines
The Philippines is caught in an extreme weather trap. Here, forecasts for a strong El Niño in the months ahead do not just indicate a period of drought – they also point to torrential rain and flooding.
It could hardly come at a worse time, threatening communities that are still struggling to recover from previous typhoons, such as last year’s Typhoon Tino, as well as two strong earthquakes – in Cebu in September 2025 and last month’s 7.8-magnitude quake in Mindanao.
Forecasts point to the arrival of one of the most intense El Niños in recent history this year and into 2027, with the United Nations warning that it could be the strongest in decades around the world.
The peak of the El Niño is expected towards the end of the year, but the weather phenomenon is already estimated to have caused agricultural losses of nearly €30 million (£25.9 million), potentially affecting the livelihoods of 4 million farmers.
On the climate frontlineFor many, El Niño is a figure in a report or a distant headline, but for those of us who live and work on the ground, it is a reality that is already hitting the most vulnerable families.
When I travel through the communities of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region – in the south – or speak with families on the island of Siargao or in the Zamboanga region, I do not see data or graphs.
I see a father looking at his cracked rice field, wondering how he will pay off the debts from a harvest that is already lost before it has even begun. I see a mother walking under a relentless sun because her village’s well has dried up, carrying the water that sustains the health of her children and her entire community.
And what we are seeing today – 26 provinces experiencing drought and millions of dollars in agricultural losses – is only the beginning.
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
Many Filipino families are still trying to rebuild and recover after last year’s typhoons and the two earthquakes. In Mindanao, where the recent magnitude 7.8 earthquake displaced more than 90,000 people and destroyed over 19,000 houses, uncertainty remains about when the people will be able to fully recover and return home.
Today, they are trying to protect the meagre possessions they have and, if they are lucky enough to have their home unscathed by typhoons and earthquakes, their homes from flooding; tomorrow, they will have to survive the hardship and impact of drought.
The effects of El Niño threaten to exacerbate their troubles.
Struggle for basic needsMany low-income Filipino families already face significant challenges to meet their basic needs.
In our daily visits, we see how life is becoming increasingly difficult for millions of people. Rising fuel and transport costs are driving up the price of basic foodstuffs, making them unaffordable for many families. At the same time, crop failures and income losses are leaving households without livelihoods, while disasters contribute to further suffering.
A farmer collects rice along the side of the road during a hot day in Candaba, Pampanga, Philippines, April 30, 2024. REUTERS/Eloisa Lopez A farmer collects rice along the side of the road during a hot day in Candaba, Pampanga, Philippines, April 30, 2024. REUTERS/Eloisa LopezBut we are not just talking about hunger. We are talking about health, safety and dignity. Water shortages are forcing many people to resort to unsafe sources, increasing the risk of disease. And, as is the case in so many crises, it is the most vulnerable who bear the heaviest burden: walking long distances every day to fetch water or food, enduring enormous physical strain and facing risks of violence and insecurity.
Building resilienceFaced with this reality, our response is based on a simple idea: to be there before the crisis reaches its most critical point. At Action Against Hunger, we work alongside communities to anticipate the situation, assessing the impact of the drought and activating early response mechanisms to protect their livelihoods and access to water.
We translate climate forecasts into concrete action plans: from support for farmers to programmes ensuring safe water. All of this is done in coordination with local authorities and international partners, because we know that what we do today will make the difference tomorrow.
A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready?
The hardest months are yet to come. But the question is not just what will happen, but what we are doing now to prevent it. How many tables will remain empty and how many children will see their health compromised will depend on our ability to act in time.
We cannot stop El Niño. But we can prevent it from becoming a crisis of human dignity. We cannot afford to look the other way whilst the earth cracks and opportunities disappear. Because behind every statistic, there is a family struggling to get by. And that is a reality we cannot ignore.
The post A strong El Niño spells more climate pain for the Philippines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
The board of the UN’s fledgling Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) has decided to consider its first package of projects for support at its next meeting in December, confounding expectations that it might back an initial set of four proposals this week.
The fund faces a substantial dilemma about how to select projects to receive its limited resources after its first call for proposals saw nearly 180 submissions requiring around $2.8 billion. It currently has only $250 million available to allocate, although the board agreed on Friday to release $100 million more in the face of overwhelming demand.
Much of the three-day board meeting in Manila was held behind closed doors, making it difficult for civil society experts present to know what was happening. Draft decisions were projected on a screen and finalised at the end of the meeting before being adopted on Friday.
During the closing session, government board members and observers alike expressed frustration at the huge gap between the growing needs of communities struggling with worsening climate change disasters and the paltry amounts on offer to help them recover.
At an initial pledging session at COP28 in 2023, wealthy governments offered around $820 million to the fund, of which only 55% has been delivered into its coffers.
“Every proposal represents real people,” who are expecting in good faith to receive resources from the fund, said Milagro Matus from Belize, calling for its ambition to be strengthened.
Mismatch between needs and contributionsSeveral other board members, especially from developing countries, as well as climate justice advocates expressed disappointment over the fact that the fund has so little to spend and called for efforts to increase contributions from rich nations.
The fund will consider how to mobilise more resources in the short term, as well as a longer-term replenishment process, at its December meeting.
Richard Sherman of South Africa, the board’s former co-chair and now a board member, had proposed a high-level pledging session for the FRLD to take place before the COP31 climate summit in November but this now seems unlikely to happen as it was not included in Friday’s decisions.
Adao Soares Barbosa of Timor-Leste said this week’s board meeting – its ninth – should show the world that more financial contributions are required as collective needs to tackle loss and damage are far higher.
Iran war fuel shocks threaten Africa’s clean cooking push, IEA says
He called for enough extra money to be found so that at least one project can be approved for each least-developed country and small island developing state, which have so far submitted 72 proposals between them. Half of the fund’s resources are meant to be reserved for those two groups of especially vulnerable nations.
Brandon Wu, ActionAid USA’s director of policy and campaigns, said the board’s decision not to opt for quick approval of the first four projects presented “is the most obvious example of how developed countries’ failure to adequately resource the FRLD is constraining a fund that was meant to be the central flagship institution responding to climate impacts across the Global South”.
More time to consider proposalsOther board members spoke about the uncomfortable situation the fund faces in having to select projects from such a huge number, introducing “unhelpful competition” into the process. Isaac Glassie-Ryan of the Cook Islands said he was concerned that the approval process pits “the vulnerable against the vulnerable” and argued that each project should have “a fair shot at equal treatment”.
The FRLD’s secretariat checks project documentation and ensures they qualify for funding, but it remains unclear exactly how projects will then be chosen for the board to approve and in what order. The next meeting has been postponed from October to mid-December to allow more time for a first set of proposals to be prepared for the board to examine.
The extent of FRLD resources available means that only around 15-20 projects are likely to be approved at that meeting, as there is a limit of $20 million per proposal.
Friday’s decision noted the “need for the fair and equal treatment of all funding requests” under review by the secretariat and requested that the initial set of projects backed by the FRLD should test diverse approaches and ways of providing its money.
Civil society frustrationAt the end of the Manila meeting, civil society observers said they were dissatisfied with both the slow speed of approvals and their exclusion from a large part of the discussions. Harjeet Singh, global convenor of the Fill the Fund campaign and founding director of India’s Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, called the meeting “deeply disappointing and frustrating”, saying it had been non-transparent and non-inclusive.
A number of board members supported that complaint, saying the issue needed to be addressed and a policy for civil society participation in board meetings agreed.
As blue economy gathers pace, communities must benefit from ocean boom, activists say
Board co-chair Camila Rodríguez Tavárez said the issue would be considered. She described the meeting as “productive” yet “challenging”, adding that a lot of progress had been made and the board had been able to arrive at “a balanced set of decisions”.
Singh nonetheless lamented that the FRLD has not yet “been able to provide a single penny to people who are suffering right now”.
The post Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources appeared first on Climate Home News.
Iran war fuel shocks threaten Africa’s clean cooking push, IEA says
Disruptions to global fuel markets caused by the war in Iran have hit Africa’s efforts to expand clean cooking with gas, prompting the International Energy Agency (IEA) – backed by the US, a major fossil gas exporter – to launch a programme aimed at strengthening security of supply.
Although a fossil fuel, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stoves are generally regarded as a cleaner and healthier alternative to using smoky wood or charcoal, which about 1 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa still rely on, according to IEA estimates. Cooking with these inefficient biofuels generates annual carbon emissions comparable to those from the aviation and shipping sectors combined.
Speaking on Thursday at a high-level online event on clean cooking in Africa, Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said LPG supply had been “disproportionately affected” by the Strait of Hormuz crisis.
“Our numbers show that 3.4 billion people around the world, most of them in Africa, have been negatively affected as a result of the LPG crisis,” Birol said.
With around 30% of global seaborne trade in LPG passing through the key shipping route off the coast of Iran, supply disruptions and price shocks led to fuel rationing and sharp price hikes in Asia and Africa this year, putting LPG beyond the reach of many households, according to an IEA progress report released at the event.
The report found that most emerging nations have thin fuel reserves to buffer the impacts of the crisis. “Many countries now have less than 15 days of fuel storage,” Birol said, adding that several countries, including Uganda and Bangladesh, had approached the IEA for support to deal with the crisis.
Prioritise LPG securityIn response, the agency is developing a new clean cooking security programme aimed at expanding LPG storage, strengthening supply chains, and improving cooperation between producing and consuming countries.
Birol said the IEA’s energy security strategy has spanned oil, natural gas and electricity, “but we think LPG security is also very important”. He added that the agency is working closely with LPG companies around the world to find ways to keep supplies stable.
Speaking at the event, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright highlighted the US’s position as the biggest producer and exporter of LPG, and said that expanding access to clean cooking fuels had become the Trump administration’s top international energy priority.
He called for greater collaboration to build global supply chains, including gas distribution networks, LPG storage capacity and, “most critically”, fuel delivery systems to reduce costs for the 2 billion people worldwide who still lack access to clean cooking.
The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice
Funding grows but still falls shortAlongside its new fuel security programme, the IEA announced $900 million in new commitments for clean cooking in Africa, adding to the $2.2 billion pledged at the inaugural Africa Clean Cooking Summit in Paris in 2024.
Around $750 million of those earlier commitments have already been deployed across 22 African countries, supporting projects ranging from LPG storage in Tanzania and electric cooking in Kenya to new stove factories in Nigeria and stove distribution in Senegal.
The IEA said clean cooking access in sub-Saharan Africa is now expanding three times faster than in 2010, reaching nearly 12 million people in 2024. But population growth continues to outpace progress, with the number of people still cooking with more polluting fuels rising by around 14 million last year.
Kenyan President William Ruto said financing remains the biggest hurdle, noting that Kenya alone requires around $1 billion to achieve its clean cooking goals.
“Closing the continent’s clean cooking access gap will require scaled-up investment, yet annual financing remains far below what is needed,” he said.
In 2024, the IEA said investments of $4 billion a year would be needed for the rest of this decade to close the clean cooking gap in Africa, but levels remain far below what is needed to provide universal access.
Paris summit unlocks cash for clean cooking in Africa, side-stepping concerns over gas
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre described clean cooking as “one of the most underfunded opportunities in global development and climate policy”, despite causing around 850,000 premature deaths across Africa every year, mostly among women and children.
He called on governments, international partners and the private sector to work together to ensure rapid progress on what he described as “one of the most cost-effective climate mitigation strategies available to us”, adding that “carbon finance, climate finance and development finance must align”.
Localising the supply chainClean cooking in Africa is not only about energy access, said Lerato Mataboge, the African Union (AU) Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, explaining that it has the power to reshape livelihoods and markets across the continent.
But this will only be possible if the clean cooking value chain is localised, she said, adding that the AU aims “to avoid Africa remaining a consumer and not a producer of transformation interventions that are required by our people”.
Mataboge said the recent LPG supply disruptions underscore the need for Africa to build more resilient clean cooking supply chains, warning that the roughly 13 million people who gained access to clean cooking annually in the past five years could revert to traditional fuels if LPG prices continue to surge.
She called for greater investment in manufacturing, distribution and infrastructure, saying Africa must “create local value chains” and strengthen private-sector participation.
Moving the value chain for clean cooking closer to the people that need it most and improving infrastructure, she said, would not only support a just energy transition but also “insulate communities from external shocks, thereby guaranteeing security of supply”.
The post Iran war fuel shocks threaten Africa’s clean cooking push, IEA says appeared first on Climate Home News.
The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice
Wamuyu Manyara is country director for Trócaire Malawi and Tarcizio Kalaundi is its climate resilience officer.
This week, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) faces a significant decision that will determine its ability to address the harms being done by climate change.
Discussions on the Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must get the scale and accessibility of the Fund right. Failure to do so would risk undermining its role to channel finance to countries experiencing loss and damage, and undermine obligations to climate justice and human rights.
This discussion could not come at a more pressing time. As loss and damage (L&D) continues to escalate globally, and as the world teeters perilously close to the Paris Agreement’s critical 1.5C warming limit, the FRLD also faces the very real danger of running out of funding in 2027.
As Nigeria rails at loss and damage “mirage”, fund boss assures money is coming
Experts calculate that in 2025, L&D finance needs for climate-vulnerable countries may have reached USD$937 billion. Last year’s major impacts included a series of extremely destructive cyclones that hit the Philippines, estimated to have caused over $5 billion in losses, while in Jamaica, the losses and damage caused by Hurricane Melissa were estimated at $12.2 billion.
The bill for just one of these disasters would exhaust the Fund’s existing resources many times over. While the costs and human rights violations rack up, almost four years after being agreed at COP27, the FRLD remains critically underfunded.
Pledges to the Fund ($822 million) are just a fraction of 1% of annual loss and damage needs, and only around half of those pledges ($448 million) have been paid into the Fund so far.
Meanwhile, those who have done nothing to cause the climate crisis are facing its worst – and intensifying – impacts and are being left to foot the bill for the damages already incurred, not to mention the severe non-economic costs to communities. It is therefore crucial that the FRLD’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy urgently brings in far more L&D finance.
Contributor conundrumMany developed states will claim that additional countries should provide L&D finance. This, however, is a distraction – particularly considering the deep abyss between the contributions of developed states that are obligated to pay and their fair share as calculated according to their wealth and historical emissions. Furthermore, some states and regions that are currently not obligated to contribute are already doing so.
Analysis reveals that, even in the highly inequitable scenario where all states including those who have contributed nothing to causing the climate crisis were to pay towards L&D finance, wealthy countries would still be responsible for the vast majority of L&D finance.
New loss and damage fund could run out of money next year
The Fund’s Resource Mobilisation Strategy must focus political discussions on the ability of rich and highly polluting states to raise public, grant-based L&D finance that is new and additional to existing climate finance obligations and overseas development assistance.
Developed states have the means to pay and the FRLD should introduce mandatory and progressive mechanisms to make the biggest polluters, including the ultra-rich and fossil fuel corporations, pay for their climate harms.
African impactsIncreasingly unpredictable seasons and more frequent and extreme events are driving food insecurity, malnutrition, displacement and other human rights risks in climate-vulnerable countries, and communities facing these escalating and compounding impacts must be centred in FRLD policies.
In Ethiopia, 2023 saw 24 million people affected by five back-to-back failed rains leading to severe food and water shortages, including a 90% crop loss in drought-affected areas. Eleven million people required food assistance, and over 500,000 people were displaced. Meanwhile, the 2023–24 floods and the 2024 Gofa landslide disrupted or destroyed health facilities, displaced thousands, and led to outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and measles.
Comment: Let’s tax luxury air travel to fund climate adaptation and loss and damage
Today, Somalia is facing one of its most severe drought emergencies in recent history driven by climate extremes. Malnutrition rates continue to exceed projections and previous devastating records, with 1.9 million children in Somalia acutely malnourished.
In Malawi, child stunting had significantly reduced, but climate impacts are now affecting children’s growth and development. Tropical Cyclone Freddy in 2023 was one of the worst on record, causing over 1,200 deaths, displacing half a million people, and causing damages exceeding $500 million. Recovery needs for four major disasters between 2015 and 2023 are estimated at $1.7 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of Malawi’s 2026-2027 budget.
Funding for communitiesAccess to community grants in the southern African country, however, has catalysed local responses to L&D that coordinate around immediate and long-term needs and restoring livelihoods.
Direct access to the FRLD for climate-vulnerable countries and communities, with community-centric planning, is essential to ensure that the Fund can respond to the needs of people experiencing the worst impacts of climate change, through prompt and flexible mechanisms that do not hinder recovery options.
Stepping up to fill the FRLD through an ambitious and needs-based Resource Mobilisation Strategy is the bare minimum that wealthy states can and must do. It is, after all, an obligation that flows from the international duties of cooperation and prevention of harm, and from the obligation to provide reparation when harm occurs. Failure to do so would further erode climate justice and human rights for communities on the frontline of loss and damage.
The post The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice appeared first on Climate Home News.
India looks to untapped graphite riches for slice of critical minerals boom
Tucked among forested slopes and pristine valleys in a corner of northeastern India, young villagers have been busy knocking on doors – hoping to convince sceptical elders that graphite mining would bring much-needed jobs to their distant region.
“The youth in our village migrate to cities for work. What’s better than to have jobs near home?” Gollo Doni, a farmer and secretary of the local youth association, told Climate Home News as he and other members in their 20s discussed the latest meetings between locals and representatives of Oil India Limited (OIL), a state company exploring graphite and vanadium reserves in Arunachal Pradesh.
The mining plans in the state, which is home to more than one-third of India’s graphite reserves and the subject of a sovereignty dispute with China, reflect a push by the Indian government to position itself as a leading producer of battery-grade graphite as the mass rollout of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and power storage drives demand for the mineral.
An average electric car contains about 60 kg of graphite anode materials, according to the International Energy Agency, and the graphite supply chain is heavily dominated by China, which produces about 80% of the world’s natural graphite and controls more than 90% of global refining.
As Western countries seek to reduce their dependency on China, India’s reserves of graphite and other minerals vital for the switch to clean energy have caught governments’ attention, with Germany signing a critical minerals partnership agreement in January.
Ambitious plansBut hurdles remain to India’s ambitious plans to ramp up critical minerals output, both to position itself as an alternative to China and to meet its own fast-growing needs.
India has a target for 30% of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, and demand for EV lithium batteries looks set to surge close to 35-fold between 2023 and 2035, according to S&P Global Mobility, driven by growth in two- and three-wheelers in the country of 1.4 billion people.
Although domestic manufacturing of EV batteries is expanding, the sector remains at an early stage and India depends heavily on imports from China, South Korea and Japan.
Gollo Doni (left) and other members of the All Pith-Seer Youth Welfare Association meet to discuss graphite exploration around Phop village in Arunachal Pradesh, India (Photo: Cheena Kapoor)At the same time, it wants to get graphite processing off the ground, aiming to turn its reserves of the mineral – which rank among the world’s 10 biggest – into higher value battery-grade supplies.
The energy transition has a rare earth problem: These startups are solving it
With exploration already underway, the next step should be starting discussions about developing processing facilities – including support from foreign partners, said Kaira Rakheja, South Asia energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
“These exploration and extraction projects have a long gestation period. So even if discussions on processing start now, it will still take a while,” she said, noting India’s simultaneous push to create “rare earth corridors” encompassing every step of production.
Hurdles aheadIndia’s graphite reserves are mainly of a lower grade, however, making processing for use in battery anodes more complex, while the country is a late entrant.
“We are not a big player in the market and have missed the bus,” said Aditya Ramji, director of the Global South Clean Transportation Centre at the University of California, Davis.
While exploration work is already underway at several sites in Arunachal Pradesh, and at some places in eastern and southern India, production will take at least two years to start, said Tana Tage, director at the Centre for the Earth Sciences and Himalayan Studies, OIL’s local partner and holder of a 10% stake in the Phop project.
Graphite powder, used for battery paste, is pictured in a Volkswagen pilot line for battery cell production in Salzgitter, Germany, May 18, 2022. German carmaker will launch its so called “Mission SalzGiga”, a plant for battery cell production, including battery recycling, on July 7, 2022. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer Graphite powder, used for battery paste, is pictured in a Volkswagen pilot line for battery cell production in Salzgitter, Germany, May 18, 2022. German carmaker will launch its so called “Mission SalzGiga”, a plant for battery cell production, including battery recycling, on July 7, 2022. REUTERS/Fabian BimmerA mine would create about 300 jobs and the project’s partners are discussing options for processing the site’s medium- to high-grade graphite locally, Tage added, despite voicing concern about a lack of technological know-how.
“India does not have the large-scale, advanced processing capabilities to achieve the ultra-high purity levels required for EV batteries and clean technologies,” he told Climate Home News.
Diversification driveDespite such challenges, industry experts say India could benefit from the push to find sources of battery graphite other than China.
“We can’t beat China in this space, but we can still create a space for ourselves in buying and selling, as everyone is looking for a space to diversify,” said Rishabh Jain, fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a New Delhi-based think-tank.
India’s government hopes the bilateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with Germany could help.
A graphite deposits visible on a hillside near the village of Phop, Arunachal Pradesh, India (Photo: Cheena Kapoor)As well as pledging cooperation on critical minerals exploration, the declaration envisions the exchange of know-how to add value through processing and recycling, facilitating investment and building the supply chain resilience of both countries. That could include identifying joint research projects and facilitating cooperation between industry players.
“India and Germany will work together to mutually strengthen supply chains in the field of critical minerals,” a spokesperson for the German government’s energy strategy said. “We will encourage companies to build strong ties in terms of knowledge sharing, offtake agreements and investments.”
Germany is already supporting several domestic projects focused on converting graphite into battery anode material – valuable experience that could potentially be shared with India, said Rakheja. In return for shared technical expertise, India offers a strong pool of workforce talent and a big market.
“This way, both partners can look beyond China,” she said.
India sets achievable green electricity and emissions intensity targets
The MoU, which is non-binding, is “a good start”, said Svenja Schöneich, a senior advisor at the NGO Germanwatch, adding that it was thin on details, including on how to add value to India’s critical mineral resources.
“The partnership document should figure out the problem of local value creation. It should also consider that it can’t really skip processing through China,” Schöneich said.
An official at India’s Mining Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Trade deals and tax breaksBeyond the five-year German accord, India has implemented numerous policy measures aimed at securing its own supplies of critical minerals and adding value to its mineral exports, for example by signing favourable trade deals. Last year, India’s graphite was granted zero-duty access to the US, just as the tariffs on Chinese graphite imports climbed to a high 160%.
When the government announced the national budget in February, it included a raft of financial measures aimed at kickstarting a plan to process minerals domestically – the details of which are expected to be announced in the coming months.
They included zero customs duty on critical mineral inputs and enhanced tax deductions for exploration, while the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme allocated the equivalent of $1.87 billion to build domestic battery cell manufacturing.
Before that can happen, progress on new mining – such as the Arunachal Pradesh graphite projects – is vital, Jain said.
“We are in 2026, and looking to move towards a cleaner world. This is the future,” he said.
The state government in Arunachal Pradesh agrees. It called last year for fast-tracked environmental permitting for graphite projects, new infrastructure around mine sites and reforms to avoid legal disputes that could hold the sector back.
Gollo Kami, 60, a cardamom farmer and a traditional hunter has lived all his life in Phop village. He worries about the impact of mining on the local environment (Photo: Cheena Kapoor)Back in the village of Phop, youth association secretary Doni said that while reluctant residents did not raise an objection to OIL’s preliminary exploration licence, he fears a bigger fight ahead.
Tage said up to 3,000 people could ultimately be displaced if the project proceeds, raising questions about whether economic benefits would outweigh the social and environmental costs.
“It has been difficult to make the elders agree to actual mining,” Doni said, as he and other young villagers sipped on sweet tea in a thatched mountain house. “We are trying to convince our elders that mining will not only bring resources for the nation, but bring us jobs here.”
This article was produced as part of the India-Germany Climate and Energy Journalism Programme organised by Clean Energy Wire, supported by Heinrich Böll Stiftung.
The post India looks to untapped graphite riches for slice of critical minerals boom appeared first on Climate Home News.
As blue economy gathers pace, communities must benefit from ocean boom, activists say
As governments and institutions pledged billions for offshore wind, cleaner shipping and marine protection at last month’s Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, countries are increasingly turning to the ocean as a source of jobs and climate action.
But civil society groups warn that the push to expand the “blue economy” may reproduce familiar inequalities unless coastal communities have a greater say in how projects are designed, financed and governed.
Neville van Rooy from The Green Connection in South Africa, which works with coastal communities who rely directly on the ocean for their livelihoods, said local people were frequently unaware of proposed developments until civil society groups alerted them.
“Communities need to be taken seriously,” van Rooy told delegates at the Mombasa conference held on the shores of the Indian Ocean.
“Just because they are often struggling does not mean they do not have a vision of development. Inclusivity needs to be at the centre and development pathways must build on communities’ own experience, including indigenous knowledge systems rooted in harmony with nature.”
Ocean investment flowing inThe value of the blue economy—the sustainable use and protection of marine resources—doubled from $1.3 trillion in 1995 to $2.6 trillion in 2020 and is projected to quadruple by 2050, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The scale of ambition in Mombasa was clear, with governments, institutions, companies and civil society groups announcing 320 commitments worth $6.4 billion.
The largest share went to sustainable blue economy projects, with 86 commitments worth $2.86 billion, followed by sustainable fisheries with $1.75 billion and ocean-climate action with $1.18 billion.
The pledges included support for ocean startups in Africa, coastal ecosystem restoration across the Indian Ocean, marine research and policy, recycling discarded fishing nets, sustainable livelihoods in Timor-Leste and planning tools for offshore wind.
Cynthia Barzuna, global deputy director of the Ocean Program at the World Resources Institute, said there are signs that blue finance and ocean planning are moving closer to coastal communities, particularly through the development of sustainable ocean plans.
In 2020, a group of 14 countries – co-led by Australia and Chile – pledged to manage their oceans sustainably, by jointly drawing up plans with coastal communities to shape how marine resources are managed and where investments should go.
“Once communities are involved in the planning, bring in their knowledge, and participate in designing, developing and implementing a sustainable ocean plan, it puts us on the right path,” Barzuna told Climate Home News on the sidelines of the conference.
Yet some of those countries – including Kenya, Australia and Mexico – have embarked on a new wave of offshore oil and gas projects, threatening key biodiversity hotspots, according to a recent report by a group of environmental NGOs.
When projects go wrongCivil society groups say lessons need to be learnt from failed blue economy projects too.
In Kenya, a proposed coal-fired power plant at Lamu Port – a fragile coastal ecosystem and a UNESCO World Heritage site – was challenged by residents and campaigners who cited little consultation and threats to fishing, tourism, culture and public health.
In 2019, Kenya’s National Environment Tribunal revoked its environmental licence, citing inadequate public participation and flaws in the environmental assessment – a decision later upheld by the courts.
“It is not enough to say that whatever you are doing is in the name of the communities, their livelihoods and whatever else you want to improve”, but that they should be directly involved in projects from the start, said Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan climate activist and Convenor of the Africa Movement of Movements.
He said another lesson learnt was that environmental impact assessments must not only be completed, but “must be done rigorously” and that the process has to be transparent so that people feel involved and that their views are being counted.
Blue transitionBlue carbon schemes can also attract finance, but campaigners said communities that have long protected mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes must be treated as rights-holders, not just beneficiaries. In some past projects, they said, communities were asked to provide labour, attend consultations or receive small payments, while outside developers retained control over carbon revenues and decisions over how ecosystems were managed.
Similarly, offshore wind and marine protected areas can bring climate and conservation gains, but if poorly planned, they can disrupt fishing grounds, marine species and small-scale fishers’ access to the sea, added campaigners.
Farida Aliwa, executive director of Natural Justice, said the answer was not to halt ocean-based development, but to put in place stronger safeguards before projects are approved, financed and expanded.
Aliwa said legal frameworks across Africa were evolving, with strategic litigation increasingly being used to hold governments accountable for environmental, climate and human rights impacts related to new projects.
But she warned that communities and coastal defenders still face shrinking civic space, and said any shift to renewable energy must be designed responsibly.
“As we work on alternatives, we need to ensure that renewable projects benefit communities,” she said.
The post As blue economy gathers pace, communities must benefit from ocean boom, activists say appeared first on Climate Home News.
AI governance debate silent on risks to nature, campaigners warn
As countries gathered in Geneva this week for the first UN dialogue on the governance of artificial intelligence, campaigners said the debate around the fast-evolving technology has overlooked the potential harm it could cause to nature and biodiversity.
Not only has nature been absent from discussions on the environmental impacts of AI data centres, which focus mainly on carbon emissions and water use, there has also been no consideration of how AI deployment by industry could gobble up more natural resources, activists warned.
Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said that while AI can help protect wildlife and forests, the broader boost it will give to economic growth poses a far bigger threat than expected benefits.
“We’ve seen over $250 billion of private capital go into AI in 2024 alone – and almost all of that is seeking an economic return, and the money follows commercial value,” he told journalists. “Extraction, industrial farming, resource logistics, and the engines that drive ever more consumption are all activities that contribute to biodiversity loss.”
The leading conservationist added that the policy documents produced by leading AI companies do not address the downstream effects of their technology for nature and biodiversity, focusing more on employment and other social issues.
Some have firms have put small sums towards projects that support conservation, he noted, but none are addressing the issue in a serious way or have included nature in the safety rules for their models.
“The living world that all of this rests upon – nature being the foundation of our economies, our societies, all life on earth – is not a primary concern in the governance of AI, as proposed by the corporates of AI,” O’Donnell said.
Positive uses steal the showLast month, UN chief António Guterres launched an initiative to hold major AI firms accountable for their exploding environmental impacts, including carbon emissions, the amount of water and land used for data centres, and the energy they consume.
The UN boss also wants big players to commit to power all data centres with renewable energy by 2030. On Monday in Geneva, in a wide-ranging speech, he again raised his proposed “AI Environmental Transparency Initiative”. But nature has not featured in his comments on the issue.
UN asks AI companies to reveal full environmental impacts
In addition, the preliminary report of the newly formed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI – which assesses the opportunities, risks and impacts of AI – mentions environmental concerns only briefly.
The report, which examines available scientific evidence and was presented to governments at the Geneva dialogue, does not highlight any threats to nature and biodiversity but cites a study showing how AI has been used to track and reduce conflict between humans and wildlife.
O’Donnell pointed to “some really important technological uses of AI for biodiversity” such as monitoring species, forest damage and tree cover and using camera traps to see what kind of wildlife migrates in a particular area. But, he added, these get a disproportionate amount of attention compared with the threat from more rapacious resource extraction which he perceives as far greater.
By making commercial operations cheaper, quicker and more efficient, and opening access to untapped areas of land and sea, AI could drive biodiversity loss through increased over-exploitation of fish, wildlife and timber, worsening pollution and spreading invasive species on faster trade networks, he added.
Indigenous concernsIndigenous peoples are also worried that their lands, critical mineral reserves and knowledge will be appropriated by AI and the accelerated economic development it fuels, said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a leading global environmental activist and Indigenous leader from Chad.
Ibrahim, who produced a report on Indigenous peoples and AI for the UN in April, told journalists that before Indigenous peoples share their know-how on managing forests and stewarding nature, companies and governments must put in place principles to ensure this can happen in a fair way that prevents it being abused by bad actors.
Warning against ‘consumer club’ as G7 forms critical minerals alliance
Her report also points to positive ways that AI can support Indigenous culture and rights, such as tackling their lack of access to digital tools, preserving their languages and knowledge and mapping their territories to detect threats and better protect biodiversity.
Efforts such as those by the UN to shape the future of AI governance should look not only at what AI can do, but also ask who benefits and how it safeguards the planet, Ibrahim said.
“If we answer those questions together with Indigenous peoples as equal partners, we can build AI that serves humanity, protects biodiversity and help restore the balance between peoples and planet in an equitable and just way,” she added.
Policy processes lag AI developmentBoth O’Donnell and Ibrahim said they would lobby countries, the UN and AI firms themselves to put nature and biodiversity on the political agenda, including at the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia in October.
O’Donnell told Climate Home News that when the Global Biodiversity Framework, the world’s main treaty to protect nature, was agreed in 2022, AI was still nascent but has since exploded in terms of investment and its influence on economies.
The vote that stopped a data center: US communities query resource-hungry AI
He pointed to the mismatch between the timeline of the UN’s efforts to develop governance guidelines and the speed with which AI is being developed in the real world.
“Nature can’t be sidelined in these discussions,” he said, calling for a faster and more comprehensive response from policymakers, business and the environmental community.
“We have a very short window to embed nature both into the governance constitutions of the companies themselves and into the formal regulatory [system] going forward,” he added.
The post AI governance debate silent on risks to nature, campaigners warn appeared first on Climate Home News.
Ugandan farmers launch UK court case against East African oil pipeline
Four Ugandan farmers filed a case with London’s High Court on Tuesday, aiming to stop the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from starting to operate by asking the court to apply Uganda’s laws against the project’s UK-registered company.
The controversial 1,443-kilometre (897-mile) pipeline, majority-owned by French energy company TotalEnergies, aims to carry crude from Ugandan fields for export through neighbouring Tanzania. About 80% has been built so far, according to its developers.
The pipeline’s first oil exports are expected as soon as October, according to its developers, and the campaign group Avaaz, which is backing the farmers’ crowdfunded lawsuit, called it “one final chance to stop one of the worst oil pipelines on the planet”.
The claim, filed by London law firm Leigh Day, argues that EACOP Ltd’s role in developing and operating the pipeline breaches Ugandan laws that protect citizens’ right to a clean and healthy environment.
One of the claimants, Racheal Tugume, told a press conference she had been displaced from her land due to the pipeline’s construction, which she said had damaged local rivers, wildlife and ecosystems that communities depend on for their livelihoods just as erratic weather linked to climate change takes an increasing toll.
“I am very happy that there are people in countries like the UK who are listening to us, who are behind us and who have come to support us,” Tugume said, adding that she hoped the case would bring justice to communities affected by the pipeline.
Ugandan law in UK courtWhile the pipeline is a joint venture led by TotalEnergies, with smaller stakes owned by Ugandan, Tanzanian and Chinese national oil firms, it is operated by EACOP Ltd, a company registered to an office in London’s Canary Wharf financial district.
EACOP Ltd did not respond to a request for comment.
The claim appears to be the first attempt to have Uganda’s climate and environmental protections enforced in a foreign court, partly reflecting concerns over whether cases challenging the multibillion-dollar pipeline would get a fair trial in Uganda.
Ugandans living near new oil pipeline let down by compensation programmes
Concerns about access to a fair hearing are among the issues the court will consider when deciding if it should take on the case, said Matthew Renshaw, partner at Leigh Day.
Renshaw said that precedents including the Nigerian oil pollution case against Shell have shown that claims against British-registered companies for harms overseas can be successfully fought in UK courts.
“We are proud to represent the four brave principled individuals,” Renshaw said.
Constitutional protectionsThe pipeline project has already been subject to repeated lawsuits in several countries, none of which have succeeded. A climate lawsuit filed in Uganda more than a decade ago by a group of young people has yet to conclude. Another at the East African Court of Justice, brought by campaign groups against Uganda and Tanzania, was rejected on procedural grounds last November.
A separate ongoing lawsuit in TotalEnergies’ home country of France – a refiled version of an earlier failed claim – cannot stop EACOP going ahead, but it does seek damages from TotalEnergies for affected communities.
With the newly launched case, Leigh Day’s legal adviser Marc Willers said the claim draws on specific Ugandan laws in a bid to stop EACOP’s operations.
Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls
These include the Ugandan constitution, a 2019 environmental law and the National Climate Change Act 2021, which gives Ugandans the right to bring a case before a court in circumstances where anyone or any entity threatens the country’s ability to mitigate climate change.
In response to the legal case in Britain, the African Energy Chamber – which represents and promotes the continent’s oil and gas industry – said Ugandans should decide the energy future of their country rather than the UK courts.
“This is colonialism 2.0,” said the chamber’s executive chairman NJ Ayuk. “For generations, Africa was told what resources it could exploit and how it should develop. Today, some of those same pressures are being repackaged through foreign-funded litigation and ideological campaigns that seek to dictate Africa’s energy choices from thousands of kilometres away.”
Stopping a “carbon bomb”The pipeline, which will link Uganda’s Lake Albert oil fields to Africa’s east coast in Tanzania, has already displaced thousands of people and cuts through the Lake Victoria basin, one of East Africa’s major freshwater systems and a critical water source for around 40 million people.
According to the BankTrack non-profit, when the pipeline is at peak production, it will carry 216,000 barrels of crude oil per day and release over 33 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year. Over its full lifetime of 25 years, it is estimated to release about 379 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain including construction, refining and product use.
A May 2026 report from Earth Insight also warns that the pipeline and related infrastructure could affect 158 wetlands in Uganda, 11 rivers, 44 protected areas and seven key biodiversity areas while disrupting about 2,000 square km of protected wildlife habitats.
This is why the primary focus of the UK court case is to stop the operation of the pipeline in its tracks, Leigh Day’s Willers said, calling it a “carbon bomb” that would worsen the world’s climate crisis.
Long wait for first hearingWhile the purpose of the case is to stop the pipeline from launching operations, Renshaw said it could take about 12 months before the case gets a first hearing and about 18 months before it goes to trial.
Billions unlocked as Green Climate Fund agrees to spend more and save less
The farmers are, however, seeking an injunction to stop EACOP Ltd from proceeding with operations. In the event that shipments begin, the lawsuit will still seek to stop the pipeline from then on, Renshaw said.
“We will be doing what we can to expedite matters but it is possible that EACOP will have started operating the pipeline before the claim is heard. If that is the case, the claim would intend to halt operations from that point. For example, the pipeline may operate for just one year rather than 30-plus, resulting in far less harm,” he said.
This story was updated after publication to include comment from the African Energy Chamber, an oil and gas lobby group.
The post Ugandan farmers launch UK court case against East African oil pipeline appeared first on Climate Home News.
A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready?
Shaun Martin is vice president for adaptation and resilience at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the United States.
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” A century later, H.G. Wells’s warning reads less like philosophy and more like a prediction for the near future.
Last week, the World Meteorological Organization forecast that a powerful El Niño – a naturally occurring climate pattern marked by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific – will develop in 2026, becoming potentially one of the strongest on record, capable of triggering floods, droughts and extreme heat across the globe.
This warning should make one thing crystal clear: we need to move faster to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.
Scientists warn El Niño could intensify climate extremes in 2026
What does it mean to take climate change adaptation seriously? It means recognising that building resilience to increasing hazards must inform planning and policy-making efforts that go beyond trying to reduce climate emissions.
Rising climate risks like extended heatwaves or massive bursts of rainfall should guide decisions about where homes are built, which crops are grown, and how natural resources are managed. We need to invest in systems that withstand and recover from climate-driven shocks rather than collapse under them.
Impacts arriving ahead of scheduleFor decades, climate action has been anchored in mitigation – reducing emissions to prevent future harm. That work remains essential. But it is operating on a slower timeline than the impacts we are now experiencing in real time and ahead of schedule. The strengthening 2026 El Niño makes that mismatch impossible to ignore.
In the first few months of 2026 more than 600 thousand square miles of forest land burned globally – the equivalent of 81 million football fields – the highest on record for this point in the year. Ocean surface temperatures are at historic highs, Arctic sea ice has hit record lows, and multiple regions have experienced extreme, out-of-season heat.
The strengthening of El Niño later this year could push these conditions even further, potentially making 2026 one of the hottest years ever recorded.
El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027
The climate today is fundamentally different than the one that shaped past El Niño events. Heatwaves run hotter. Droughts last longer. Rainfall increasingly comes in destructive bursts. Even historically cooler periods no longer offer relief.
El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña, now occurs in a warmer world with ocean temperatures during cooler La Niña phases exceeding those seen during past “super” El Niño events like 1998 and 2016. Yesterday’s extremes have become today’s baselines, and this new level of turbulence will test the limits of preparedness across the country.
Pragmatic preparations to build resilienceWhen it comes to policy-making, the focus should be on strengthening the health and resilience of communities facing growing climate risks. Across the United States, communities are already feeling the impacts of the quickly changing climate. Preparing for and withstanding what’s ahead is not ideological; it’s pragmatic.
WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in
Planning that prioritises resilience, modernises infrastructure and invests in adaptation helps safeguard food systems, protect homes and supply chains, and reinforce critical infrastructure. Keeping the strength and stability of local communities at the centre of decision-making is essential to building a more secure and resilient future.
Conservation organisations have long emphasised that adapting to climate change is not just about reacting to disasters, but about building resilience in ways that support people and nature. That means working with communities, governments and businesses to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards, strengthen local capacity, and deploy solutions that improve nature’s ability to protect us.
Adaptation rooted in natureIn coastal regions, for example, mangrove forests act as natural defences – absorbing storm surge, stabilising shorelines and protecting nearby communities.
In Mexico, World Wildlife Fund and its partners are using networks of sensors, drones and artificial intelligence to monitor mangrove health and weather in real time. The project analyses how these ecosystems respond to storms, heat and changing water conditions, helping communities and policymakers adapt their conservation strategies accordingly. It is a glimpse of what climate change adaptation looks like at its best: locally grounded, data-driven and rooted in nature.
Climate risk is not a single problem to solve but a system to manage. Addressing it requires rethinking and integrating conservation, economic development and disaster risk reduction into a single, yet multi-dimensional, agenda focused on resilience.
It will also expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, stress-test disaster response systems and challenge assumptions about what constitutes a “normal” climate year. And it will remind us that even the best forecasts cannot reduce impacts – only preparation can.
The problem is not that we have ignored climate change. It is that we have misjudged its timeline. These hazards are no longer a future risk to be avoided; they are a present reality to be managed. H.G. Wells’ warning remains. We need to adapt or perish, now as ever.
The post A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pages
The Fine Print I:
Disclaimer: The views expressed on this site are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) unless otherwise indicated and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s, nor should it be assumed that any of these authors automatically support the IWW or endorse any of its positions.
Further: the inclusion of a link on our site (other than the link to the main IWW site) does not imply endorsement by or an alliance with the IWW. These sites have been chosen by our members due to their perceived relevance to the IWW EUC and are included here for informational purposes only. If you have any suggestions or comments on any of the links included (or not included) above, please contact us.
The Fine Print II:
Fair Use Notice: The material on this site is provided for educational and informational purposes. It may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of scientific, environmental, economic, social justice and human rights issues etc.
It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have an interest in using the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. The information on this site does not constitute legal or technical advice.
This site is not the official webpage of the Industrial Workers of the World.