The Nakaiy system divides the year into 27 distinct periods, each named after a star or constellation in the night sky.

Any one period in the calendar tells you about expected weather and tidal patterns, navigational routes, and fishing conditions. The Nakaiy was created through centuries of careful observation and local knowledge, passed down through families as an essential tool for survival.

But things are now changing. The climate crisis is leading to more extreme weather events across the Indian Ocean island nation and upending the Nakaiy calendar.

“When you go and speak to communities and ask them what kind of impacts they are facing, a lot of elders will tell you that the weather, it doesn’t follow the calendar anymore,” explained Aishath Reesha Suhail, a programme officer in the Maldives’ Ministry of Tourism and Environment.

As the effects of climate change worsen, it is a real prospect that the Nakaiy may be abandoned by local people, representing a major cultural loss to the Maldives.

‘Systemic and growing threat’

With extreme weather becoming the norm, communities are observing a domino effect of consequences in their everyday lives. The slow onset of heritage loss is now being seen across continents, but notably among small islands in remote parts of the ocean.

“Climate change represents a systemic and growing threat to cultural heritage worldwide,” a UNESCO spokesperson told Climate Home, adding that the World Heritage Committee has identified climate change as “one of the most significant long-term risks affecting properties across all regions.”

UNESCO, the UN body for education, science and culture, defines the loss of cultural heritage as “the erosion of traditional knowledge systems, craftsmanship, social practices and identity, particularly where communities are displaced or livelihoods disrupted”. A clear example is historical sites and even entire islands washed into the ocean as a result of rising sea levels and coastal erosion. 

The Maldives is dealing with such a situation now. The Koagannu Cemetery is a 900-year-old resting place, located on the country’s southernmost atoll, a mere 50 metres from the shoreline. The monument’s intricate coral gravestones are being actively threatened by the encroaching Indian Ocean. 

The government and local community have responded to this challenge with emergency protection measures. Sandbags and concrete structures have been installed along the coastline, complemented by large numbers of palm trees to create a seawall. A wider solution is ‘beach nourishment’, a common practice in the Maldives where sand from elsewhere is brought in to replace what has been lost through erosion. Taken together, these solutions have so far protected the cemetery.

Pacific islands push back against growing climate threats

Among the many issues climate change creates, cultural heritage is not always front of mind. In the Maldives, one of the main barriers people face is awareness. “Most of what we are dealing with relates to the erosion of our islands along with areas such as fisheries… but we are quite limited in our capacity to do something about it,“ Suhail said.

“We don’t understand the full breadth of the issue at present because we haven’t been able to do extensive research on the matter,” she added. However, assessing the extent of the damage – and how to respond effectively – is a key priority for the government, outlined in its latest climate plan, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution, and as part of its National Adaptation Plan process.

Fishing is at the core of the country’s culture and identity, employing thousands of people. Most dishes include fish – “we have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Suhail noted – but the climate crisis and overfishing are shifting how and when communities can fish. Tuna makes up 98% of all fish caught in the Maldives, but warmer ocean temperatures are changing migratory patterns, pushing the species into deeper, colder waters.

As a critical economic and cultural resource, the government has outlined a range of solutions to protect the fisheries sector in its first Biennial Transparency Report to the UN. These include using real-time tracking data to improve the efficiency of fishing operations; investing in canneries to increase fish storage; and diversifying away from tuna through marine farming.

Culture and nature go hand-in-hand

The same pattern is playing out elsewhere.

Palau and the Maldives are not close to one another. The two states are separated by around 4,000 miles and sit in different corners of the ocean. But both are experiencing very similar climate challenges, based on their position as a set of scattered, low-lying islands surrounded by an imposing body of blue water.

In the same way as the Maldives, Palau’s cultural heritage is closely tied to “land, coastlines and traditional food systems,” according to Toni Soalablai, at the Palau Office of Climate Change.

“Many of the places that hold stories, history and identity of our communities are located along the coast and are increasingly exposed to erosion and sea level rise,” she said.

One of these places is Ngerutechei village, reportedly the oldest in Palau, and home to ancient stone paths and carvings. The village provides a glimpse into the past social values and culture of the people in this western Pacific nation.

How Vanuatu is facing up to rising climate risks

As part of the development of Palau’s National Adaptation Plan, the government has worked with local leaders to identify similar sites of cultural significance. The plan encourages communities to use their own knowledge to create protective measures for these sites.

Climate change is also prompting communities to take up traditional land and food practices again. These include cultivating taro, a stable food source that has historically supported water, soil and food security on the islands. 

“These systems developed over generations in response to local environmental conditions, so strengthening them today is both a climate adaptation measure and a way of maintaining cultural knowledge that might otherwise fade,” said Soalablai.

Cultural practices in Palau have developed alongside the natural ecosystems that people rely on to survive. It is within this context that researchers believe adaptation policies should be created. Recognising this relationship “can strengthen both community identity and environmental resilience at the same time”, according to Soalablai.

Heritage on the global stage

The issue of cultural loss has not gone unnoticed in international climate negotiations. 

Small island states such as the Maldives have used their role at the UN to push for greater awareness and action, with some key successes.

In 2015, the Paris Agreement established a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) which recognised that countries needed to do something about climate change now and not later. However, it took six years before a framework and a set of adaptation targets were agreed at the UN climate summit in Glasgow to pursue this goal. 

From this came the establishment of seven overall themes – from poverty eradication to access to health – to guide adaptation action and a set of around 60 indicators to measure progress against the targets.

World leaders invited to see Pacific climate destruction before COP31

Emilie Beauchamp, an adaptation specialist at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), said that “cultural heritage was highlighted as one of the global priorities [of the GGA Framework] and is one of the seven themes, so it is considered very important by the international community.”

The much-debated set of indicators, only finalised in Belém at last year’s COP30, include five related to cultural heritage with a focus on preserving cultural practices and important sites that are “guided by traditional knowledge, Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge and local knowledge systems”. A spokesperson for UNESCO said the inclusion of heritage indicators “marks an important recognition that climate impacts extend beyond economic losses”. 

While critics said the set of final indicators was rushed through by the Brazilian presidency, they now serve as guidance for national governments that wish to implement plans to protect their common heritage. The missing piece of the puzzle remains how to finance these plans – something notably absent from the Belém text, which made clear that the adaptation indicators “do not create new financial obligations or commitments, nor liability or compensation”.

The lack of financial commitments proved disappointing for many small states grappling with how to prevent their cultural history from being entirely forgotten, especially at a time when adaptation finance remains below requirements. A recent UNEP report found that developing nations would need an estimated US$310 billion per year in 2035 to adapt to climate change, while current public financing was around $26 billion.

At these low levels “only a small percentage of what the framework outlines could be implemented,” according to Beauchamp.

The challenge of cultural heritage

When looking at low-lying islands on a map, they can appear as specks of land amid a vast ocean. Many of the stories from these remote places go unnoticed. But the specks represent millennia of human culture that is slowly being lost to the ocean.

While the international community has now recognised the problem and solutions exist, the recurring issue of scarce finance may prevent governments from taking sustained action. Island communities have already been forced to move home as sea levels rise, leaving behind their cultural connections to a place.

The value of any cultural asset, or of human heritage, can be judged by how it is engaged with over generations. Without human intervention, many historical sites, language, cuisine and other local customs would become a forgotten part of history. The rapid onset of climate change brings the role of cultural heritage into sharp relief, challenging communities to decide in real time what they value, what deserves saving, and how to achieve that.

Stories of cultural loss are not confined to small islands but it is here where the challenge is presenting most acutely. The experiences of these vulnerable nations in protecting their heritage will provide the litmus test for effective adaptation responses elsewhere.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

(Main image: The Isdhoo Havitha is an ancient Buddhist monastery in the Maldives, located moments from the shoreline. Photo: Ashwa Faheem) 

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July and August typically bring high levels of rainfall across the country, and while flooding isn’t uncommon, the extent and severity could be readily predicted.

These patterns have now changed. In 2022, extreme rainfall swept through Pakistan and huge swathes of the country were under water. Sindh province experienced levels of rain 508% above average for the time of year. 

Extreme weather in Pakistan is becoming the norm. The past 15 years have brought widespread flooding, loss of life and billions in financial costs. A post-disaster report, produced by the Pakistan Government, stated that the 2022 floods were “a wake-up call for systemic changes to address the underlying vulnerabilities to natural hazards”, citing the country’s lack of climate-resilient infrastructure. 

But heavy rainfall is only one of the water-related issues that Pakistan faces. In a country with huge geographical diversity, from sweltering deserts to freezing mountain tops, the water stresses are equally as varied. In many regions the key concern is a lack of reliable, clean water that can be used to grow crops and feed families.

We must invest in early warning systems to tackle crises like Kenya’s drought

The risks of the Indus

The Indus River plays a critical role in Pakistan. This major artery travels almost the entire length of the country, an estimated 2,000 km, from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. It is a crucial economic lever, supporting nearly 90% of Pakistan’s food production and 25% of its overall GDP. What happens to this river – both human and natural impacts – has huge consequences for the rest of the country.

The government and civil society agree that urgent action is required to protect Pakistan’s fragile water resources. A new adaptation project – SAFER Pakistan – is seeking to address these concerns with solutions that can be used to solve similar climate-related issues elsewhere.

The US$10 million project is led by ICIMOD, an intergovernmental research centre, alongside UNICEF, and financed by the Adaptation Fund. The intention is to tackle six key issues that people face in the Indus Basin: cryosphere risks, drying springs, groundwater, pollution, unsustainable water use, and community resilience.

In practice this means exploring different solutions that put communities in control of their own adaptive capacity. One solution under development is the use of community early warning systems.

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A warning sign

According to researchers, early warning systems “aim to empower affected communities against hazards and help them to sufficiently prepare before disasters strike.” 

The northern provinces of Pakistan – Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – are the main focus for testing these systems. In this mountainous region the Indus is fed by thousands of glaciers which sustain water flow during the dry season. At the same time, increased temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns are changing how these glaciers behave, leading to avalanches, increased snowmelt, and landslides.

As glaciers start to melt due to climate change, they can form large lakes high up on the mountain that can pose a serious threat to the communities living below. When these natural dams fail, huge quantities of water come careening down the mountain, a phenomenon called glacial lake outburst flood.

The SAFER project is exploring how to use local knowledge and observations of the mountain to ensure people know how and when to evacuate when these outbursts occur. This human intelligence will be combined with data from remote sensors to save lives and livelihoods. In total, over 435,000 people will be impacted by the project.

“Early warning systems often serve as the backbone of a multi-faceted response to reduce climate disaster risk,” commented Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund. “But local information is often just as valuable as the real-time data you receive from sensors or satellites,” he added.

Climate disasters challenge right to safe and adequate housing

Shaping an effective response

Community early warning systems – together with other preventive adaptation measures – are proving a popular solution to extreme weather events. 

A separate adaptation project in the mountains of Central Asia is grappling with the same problem of glacial flooding. In this case, with US$6.5 million in funding from the Adaptation Fund, UNESCO has been implementing early warning systems across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for the past five years, with considerable success.

Diana Aripkhanova, a project officer at UNESCO, and based in Kazakhstan, told Climate Home that glacier lake outburst floods “represent an increasing climate-related hazard across the high mountain regions of Central Asia”.

“These events can trigger destructive floods and debris flows that affect downstream communities, infrastructure, and livelihoods,” she added.

The project utilises real-time data drawn from weather monitoring stations with community preparedness to shape a fast and effective response to life-threatening flooding. This includes training people on evacuation routes, safe locations and simulation drills. In addition, the project has tried preventative measures such as planting hundreds of trees in valleys prone to landslides to provide greater stabilisation.

In total, four early warning systems have been installed across the four countries involved in the project covering seven high-risk areas. As a result, UNESCO estimates these systems are protecting over 100,000 people.

“Early warning systems are a key risk reduction measure, allowing communities to evacuate in time and reduce potential loss of life and damage to assets,” added Aripkhanova.

Community participation

The active role of each community is built into these interventions. Ensuring local people are core contributors is seen as crucial to building long-term climate resilience.

These communities are witnessing the threats from climate change materialise on a yearly basis, and researchers are now tapping into that understanding when implementing adaptation projects. 

After the 2022 floods, Pakistan’s development minister, Ahsan Iqbal, wrote that “there is an opportunity to do things differently” and that “enhancing Pakistan’s resilience to shocks and stresses amidst climate change, especially for the poorest…is essential for the country’s future.”

The climate shocks remain as strong as ever, but using the right tools and simple solutions can soften the blow when they occur.

Adam Wentworth is a freelancer writer based in Brighton, UK

The post Early warning systems are saving lives in Central Asia appeared first on Climate Home News.

The COP30 decision also confirmed that Just Transition must take a whole-of-society and whole-of-economy approach – covering mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and finance – a broad scope that observers said marked a significant step forward for the process. 

Delegates described the outcome in the city of Belém as a rare convergence of political will, technical facilitation and years of groundwork by civil society and governments.

For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity

The decision also places stronger emphasis on the social and economic foundations of transition than many observers had expected. The text links Just Transition explicitly to poverty eradication and decent work, and recognises the need for just energy transitions as part of implementing the Global Stocktake – including the transition away from fossil fuels.

Finance provisions were also firmer than in previous drafts, with governments agreeing that support for Just Transition should prioritise grants and non-debt-creating instruments, a framing long pushed by developing countries and civil society.

Civil society kept the issue alive

The Work Programme on Just Transition, launched in 2022, remained low-profile across several COP cycles. Unions, youth networks, feminist groups, social movements and environmental organisations continued refining proposals and pushing negotiators even when political attention was limited – while activists also took to the streets across the world calling for a Just Transition. 

As momentum built toward COP30, these groups began referring to their proposal as the Belém Action Mechanism – the “BAM” – signalling the level of institutional ambition they believed the process required. Alongside this sustained organising, unions stressed that Just Transition had to move beyond principles and into practice. 

Key governments shifted earlier than expected

As colourful activists danced and chanted “We want the BAM!” in the COP30 conference centre, a key moment arrived on day two, when the G77+China group of developing countries came out early and clearly signalled its support for establishing a Just Transition mechanism. This leadership was widely described as the turning point that made an ambitious outcome possible.

The EU followed at the end of the first week, tabling a “bridging proposal” in the form of a Just Transition Action Plan. From that point, civil society campaigns intensified across the Global North, aimed at shifting governments that had so far resisted any new institutional arrangements.

COP30: Spain’s unions say just transition means renewing communities beyond jobs

The UK – initially identified by observers as the main hold-out – faced sustained campaigning, including an NGO sign-on letter and direct engagement with ministers. The political shift became visible inside the talks when Ed Miliband signalled support for the EU plan during the High-Level Ministerial Roundtable.

That shift extended beyond the UK. Canada, previously quiet on new institutional arrangements, began describing itself as “open to options” after targeted domestic media coverage. Australian civil society leveraged the country’s COP31 bid to draw attention to the need for coordination institutions, while NGOs in Belém maintained pressure on Swiss negotiators.

The push for the mechanism reached the highest level of the UN system. After a meeting with civil society, UN Secretary-General António Guterres added his voice of support for the mechanism and urged COP30 to operationalise a Just Transition aligned with 1.5°C.  

Facilitators and ministers closed the gaps

Last year at COP29 in Baku, the Just Transition track ended without an outcome partly because no ministers were mandated to land one. Belém took a different approach: Mexico’s Alicia Bárcena and Poland’s Krzysztof Bolesta were appointed as ministerial leads and played a central role in balancing strong rights language with the institutional detail.

Technical co-facilitators Joseph Teo of Singapore and Federica Fricano of Italy were credited with producing a clear, workable draft that helped bridge divides. Delegates said its readability – unusual for UNFCCC text – helped maintain trust. UNFCCC secretariat staff supported the process with rapid revision work through the second week. 

Brazil’s presidency and the significance of place

Brazil made Just Transition one of its three priorities, ensuring the track remained visible amid wider disputes.

The signal came early: at Climate Action Network’s Annual Strategy Meeting in Rio de Janeiro in February, attended by more than 170 climate justice activists, COP30 President Ambassador André Correa do Lago and COP30 CEO Ana Toni told participants that Just Transition would be a “vital” issue for COP30. The presidency also guided parties toward addressing the issue of “institutional arrangements” during the Pre-COP.

“Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30

Belém’s context also mattered. The region is a long-standing focal point for debates over livelihoods, extractivism and environmental protection, grounding negotiations in lived realities.

A symbol of this was the People’s March on the streets of Belém, with over 50,000 people participating, and thousands more across the world. The message of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon was clear: a Just Transition cannot be designed about them or around them – it must be shaped with them, and how transition minerals are managed is central to this. 

What the decision changes

The final text sets out principles for rights-based, inclusive transitions and establishes a global mechanism to support countries in implementing these principles – elevating the mechanism to a structural component of how climate action will be delivered in the Paris Agreement era.

The agreement also reinforces the expectation that social and economic dimensions must be central to national climate plans, not appended to them. 

A just transition for renewables: Why COP30 must put people before power

The work starts now

Civil society will remain closely engaged as the mechanism takes shape, arguing that its effectiveness will depend on whether it reflects the realities facing workers, communities and families in transitions already underway. 

The next phase will hinge on the operational details governments agree in the months ahead. Key questions include the design of the committee, what form secretariat support will take, and whether civil society and trade unions will have a formal seat in its work.

Parties will also need to decide whether the mechanism should help convene a wider network of practitioners. Its first workplan, the identification of support needs, and clarification of how it will interact with existing UNFCCC bodies, will shape how effective it becomes – with decisions expected at COP31.

The post How Belém launched the Just Transition mechanism appeared first on Climate Home News.

“When a power plant closes in a rural area, you don’t just lose jobs,” said Manuel Riera of UGT, one of Spain’s largest unions. “You risk losing the life of the place – the families, the neighbours, the school, the bus line. To keep people rooted, we have to rebuild whole economies.”

The end goal is to safeguard workers, diversify rural economies, and keep families rooted.

Spain’s breakthrough: dialogue and territorial pacts

Spain is among the few countries to have managed coal closures through negotiated territorial pacts. Since 2018, 15 agreements have been signed between national, regional and local governments in areas hit by mine and power plant shutdowns. The government also reached tripartite accords with unions and coal companies, guaranteeing solutions for affected workers.

“For the first time, workers and their communities had a seat at the table. It demonstrated that a just transition is possible and that social dialogue with trade unions must be the first step” Riera said. “That gave people dignity in a moment of loss.”

These frameworks funded retraining, supported job-creating projects and ensured public participation. They became an international reference for how social dialogue can guide decarbonisation.

A just transition for renewables: Why COP30 must put people before power

Lessons learned: from energy to social transition

But the experience has also exposed key limits. Job creation alone has not been enough to sustain rural life.

“Again and again we heard: in addition to employment, what decides if families stay is whether there is transport, housing, health care, education,” Riera said. “That is what keeps a territory alive. We have to move from an energy transition to a social transition.”

Judit Carreras Garcia, director of the Instituto para la Transición Justa (ITJ), reflected on the government’s efforts to respond to these challenges:

“Over the years, we have sought to make the just transition a reality through concrete policies and actions — walking the talk through a wide range of measures that include employability schemes, training, funding lines for job-creating business initiatives, just transition energy tender grids, municipal support programmes and environmental restoration,” she explained.

“All of them aim at minimising the impacts of decarbonisation and optimising outcomes based on participation and social dialogue. This effort has come with its own challenges — from managing timing gaps to addressing very different territorial starting points — but our commitment remains firm.”

Both unions and government acknowledge that anticipation is crucial: closures must be aligned with new opportunities, and support must adapt to vastly different territorial realities – from regions facing depopulation to those with stronger infrastructure.

The next phase for just transition

UGT is now working with its federations to shape Spain’s next Just Transition Strategy (2026–2030). Visits to pact areas, including Aragón, where a coal plant closed in 2020, reveal a rising sense of frustration.

“People are tired of waiting,” Riera said. “We have projects on paper, but they don’t see them materialising. Without effective coherent planning, workers retrain and then have to move to Madrid or Barcelona. That is not territorial justice.”

The unions’ demand: keep the territorial approach, but expand it across ministries and sectors, ensuring that services and infrastructure grow alongside jobs.

For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity

Behind the technical debates lies a deeper fear: the hollowing out of rural Spain, where thousands of villages have already lost their young people and their future. A mishandled transition could accelerate that trend.

“This is not only about jobs,” Riera said. “It is about whether towns survive at all. When a power station shuts, it’s not just the jobs inside the gates that disappear. The bus stops running, the school risks closing, the clinic can’t keep going, housing starts to deteriorate. Families leave, and a town empties. And once they leave, they rarely come back.”

Sharing lessons internationally

In September, Riera met unions from around the world to share Spain’s experience. His message was simple: we must fight for social dialogue and territorial agreements, but these are the beginning — not the end — of a just transition.

“If decisions are only made in the capital, they miss what life is like in a village. What Madrid sees as energy policy, a small town sees as survival: will there still be a bus, a clinic, a school? That is why workers and communities must always be in the room.”

For Riera, the work that goes into the just transition is also a chance to imagine something new.

“We can use this moment not just to protect people from loss, but to renew rural life — to make villages places where families want to stay, where children can imagine their future. This is about dignity, but also about love: love of place, love of community, love of life itself.”

“Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30

A call for Belém – and beyond

Now in Belém for COP30, Riera is bringing a clear message to world leaders: Spain’s experience shows that the just transition must be built from the ground up. The Belém Action Mechanism that has been proposed, he argues, should require cross-sector transition plans – not just energy policies; guarantee participation from workers and communities; and secure public finance capable of delivering not only jobs but the services that sustain life around them.

“The Global South faces the same challenge: how to transition without abandoning people. Without public finance, that is impossible,” he said. “If we treat the just transition as a bargaining chip, we betray them. But if we take it seriously, we can create hope — from Spain to Brazil, from Santander to Belém.”

“This is not only about closing coal or opening renewables,” he added. “It is about whether people can imagine a future for their children. That is what the just transition means.”

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At 3,400 metres (11,150 feet) above sea level in the arid highlands of northwest Argentina, 29-year-old Franco Vedia tends his llamas and fields in the Indigenous community of Tusaquillas – one of more than 30 communities across the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin.

Here, life revolves around a single, sacred element: water, the source that feeds the lagoon, sustains crops and animals, and has anchored centuries of Indigenous life.

The Salinas Grandes, shared between the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, is one of the largest salt flats in South America. Beneath it lies another resource: lithium, the mineral driving the global race for batteries that power the energy transition.

“Lithium activity is water mining,” Franco said. “It consumes vast amounts of water in the Puna – a resource already scarce and extremely valuable here.”

Across Argentina’s northern provinces, environmental groups warn that lithium extraction has already dried rivers and degraded fragile Andean wetlands. The struggle of the Puna communities mirrors that of others across the Gran Atacama region – spanning Argentina, Chile and Bolivia – the so-called lithium triangle, home to more than half the world’s known reserves.

For communities like Franco’s, the balance kept for generations is breaking under a development model that promises progress at the cost of survival.

“If the water disappears, life disappears,” he added.

Families grow beans, potatoes and corn; raise llamas, sheep, and goats; and weave textiles by hand. In recent years, some have opened small community-based tourism projects. “We want to show the world how we work the land and what it means to us,” Franco said.

Their livelihoods sustain an ancient way of life – one now threatened by the expansion of lithium mining.

The energy transition paradox

Global demand for lithium is soaring as countries in the Global North accelerate their energy transitions. While lithium extraction is often portrayed as a solution to the climate crisis, the extraction process risks irreversible damage to fragile ecosystems such as the Andean wetlands.

Franco reflected on the global paradox of the energy transition: “We all use cellphones, computers and cars. It would be hard to imagine a world without technology. But what’s truly impossible is imagining a world without water.”

In the Andean cosmovision – a worldview that sees nature as part of the community – water is a living being. “When a water source is destroyed, a part of the community is destroyed. Without water, there is no balance and no existence,” Franco added.

A decade of community resistance

For more than 10 years, the Indigenous communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc have resisted the entry of lithium companies. Mining projects have advanced without basin-wide environmental assessments or reliable baseline data – in a region already parched and vulnerable to climate change.

Their defence is not only of water and life, but of human rights: the right to information, participation and free, prior, and informed consent, guaranteed under the the UN-brokered Escazu Agreement, and the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, a binding agreement concerning the rights of Indigenous peoples.

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To protect their rights, the communities have taken their claims to national and international courts and created the Kachi Yupi Biocultural Protocol, defining how consultation must take place. Supported by organizations such as FARN (Environment and Natural Resources Foundation), they are building networks of technical and legal assistance.

Franco emphasised the importance of developing these networks to protect their territory: “It is very important for us that support comes from within, from our own people and from those individuals and organisations who want to defend life, the territory, Mother Earth, and the cosmovision of Buen Vivir.”

The road to COP30 in Belém

Franco will bring the voice of the Salinas Grandes to COP30 in Belém, Brazil.

“We want to show the world what is happening in our territories. Many communities across Latin America face the same situation. We need to unite our voices to defend water, human rights, and our collective right to live,” he said.

As the energy transition accelerates and minerals like lithium are treated as the next frontier, Franco carries an ancestral truth: “Water is worth more than lithium – because without water there is no life.”

Global call to rethink transition model

The defence of the Salinas Grandes Basin is more than a local struggle. It is a global call to rethink an energy-transition model that risks repeating the extractivism it claims to replace.

A truly just transition must respect community rights and participation, safeguard the ecosystems on which life depends, and place justice, equity and human rights at its core. The extraction of so-called critical minerals cannot repeat the same logic that has long harmed Indigenous peoples and degraded nature.

Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement

As COP30 gets underway, the proposed Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) – a civil-society call for a global just transition rooted in rights and ecological integrity – offers a path towards the transformation Franco’s community demands.

His message to Belém is simple and urgent: “The energy transition cannot be built on the destruction of water. True progress means caring for life.”

The post “Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.

In Kenya, poor consultation with local communities led to a landmark ruling that revoked the licence for a proposed geothermal project. In India, a 1-gigawatt (GW) solar project funded by the Asian Development Bank was cancelled in 2025 after protests by tribal communities, who reported a lack of proper consultation and faced the displacement of 20,000 people.

In Chile, wind farms built for green hydrogen exports are meeting resistance as residents say such projects threaten ecosystems and livelihoods. In the Philippines, the Tumandok Indigenous people oppose a mega-hydropower project. They say the project risks flooding their ancestral lands and sacred sites, and has violated their right to free, prior and informed consent. And in Pakistan, the 4-GW Dasu Hydropower Project has already uprooted more than 7,000 people, leaving 34 villages abandoned. 

With clean energy mega-projects becoming the norm, as shown in a recent report by CAN International, such conflicts are only likely to increase in number unless things change.

Growth without justice

Despite record expansion, deployment of renewables remains far too slow and far too unequal. Many developing countries are constrained by debt and limited fiscal space, while rich nations continue to over-consume energy.

Even where renewables are rising, the benefits often flow to foreign corporations. And power fed back into national grids frequently enriches independent power producers while leaving consumers with high bills.

For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity

Egypt illustrates the dilemma. To meet its green hydrogen targets and bring in hard currency to service its debt, the country needs to install 41 GW of renewable capacity by 2030 and 114 GW by 2040 – five to fifteen times its current renewable capacity. Four percent of Egypt’s land has been designated for green hydrogen production, even as droughts and water scarcity worsen.

Under the EU-led Global Gateway initiative, some of this electricity could be exported to Europe through the GREGY interconnector. Meanwhile, Egypt is becoming a hub for ‘green’ data centres, even as rural areas and public healthcare facilities face rolling blackouts.

“Some of the world’s largest solar projects are in Morocco and Egypt – but they’re built mainly for export, not to meet domestic needs,” says Mohamed Kamal, executive director of Greenish, an Egypt-based civil society organisation. “The real challenge now is governance: how to ensure that new investments serve local people first, especially in regions that still lack the infrastructure for consistent energy supply.” 

“As we build the renewable energy economy, we must not repeat the mistakes of the fossil fuel era,” he adds. “We cannot look to those failed models for inspiration or replicate their structures of control within the renewable energy value chain.”

A just transition mechanism for renewables at COP30

At COP30 in Belém, civil society networks including Climate Action Network are calling for the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) for a Just Transition under the UN climate process to make a fair transition real.

COP30 could confront “glaring gap” in clean energy agenda: mining

BAM would bring together the many initiatives now working in isolation, from practitioner alliances to community projects or programmes led by intergovernmental organisations. This will help countries change course by removing structural barriers such as debt, unfair trade rules and limited technology transfer that keep developing countries at the bottom of renewable supply chains.

It will also unlock public finance to support worker upskilling, green industrial policies and inclusive ownership models and distributed renewable systems. Furthermore, it can create structured dialogue between governments, workers and communities to share best practices, strengthen participation and scale up solutions that deliver. 

Such a mechanism could help countries develop not only more renewables, but better ones – people-centred, community-led and domestically owned.

Restoring trust, accelerating transition

Globally, the world is not on track to triple renewable capacity by 2030 – as agreed at COP28 – and fossil fuel emissions remain stubbornly high. Unless the renewable transition becomes fairer, it will also become slower.

From rooftop-solar schemes in India that cut bills and spare land, to initiatives in the Philippines, where a coalition of civil society, faith-based and industry groups has launched a “Ten Million Solar Rooftops” challenge, examples are emerging across the world of what fair, people-centred renewables can look like.

In Canada and Australia, projects led by communities or Indigenous people are showing the same spirit. In Western Australia, the Aalga Goorlil “Sun Turtle” Community Power Project – led by the Djarindjin Aboriginal Corporation – aims to reduce the community’s reliance on non-renewable energy and has already become a symbol of self-determination since the community’s official recognition last year. In Bolivia, solar power is strengthening food and economic security for local farming and fishing communities.

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A global just transition mechanism could scale up such efforts, restoring trust and placing equity at the centre of decarbonisation and access to quality energy for everyone.

“Justice isn’t an add-on,” says Mohamed Kamal. “It’s the condition for progress. Without it, the transition won’t hold.” As negotiators prepare for COP30, the question is not only how fast the world can build renewables, but who they are built for and how.

The post A just transition for renewables: Why COP30 must put people before power appeared first on Climate Home News.

Water shortages

Brazil’s northeast region is particularly noted for its semi-arid landscape and water scarcity.

Pernambuco, a small state by Brazilian standards, extends from the eastern Atlantic coast into the region’s interior for around 450 miles. Water availability is a constant concern for many communities across the state, especially family farms which are significant contributors to the regional economy.

“One of the main problems people are facing here is the growing frequency of droughts and the irregularity of rainfall. As a result, producing food has become extremely difficult,” said Carlos Magno, a coordinator at Centro Sabiá, a non-profit organisation in the area.

“We’re also experiencing stronger heatwaves, which have been causing the death of many trees and affecting the local environment even more,” Magno added.

Giving nature breathing room builds climate resilience

He went on to describe how family farming in the region is almost entirely dependent on rain to grow food. There are no irrigation systems or wells to support communities so when the rains fail, it means less food on the table.

Addressing these concerns is a key objective of an ongoing project supported by the Adaptation Fund’s Climate Innovation Accelerator (AFCIA), administered by the UN Development Programme and carried out by Centro Sabiá.

Transforming lives

Centro Sabiá has an intimate knowledge of how family farming operates in the region. It spent time consulting with communities to better understand their concerns, and hearing their ideas on how to combat water scarcity.

The project is implementing simple, yet affordable, climate solutions which are improving the livelihoods of local people. One intervention being explored is to recycle wastewater to help with the growth of new agroforestry plots. The water – taken from washing or cleaning – is filtered and then redirected for use on plots that combine crop farming with tree planting. The technique is designed to improve soil health, cut pollution and improve biodiversity.

“The water that used to pollute the soil now nourishes crops and trees,” added Magno. “When people realise that their available water is limited, but they can reuse it to grow food, it changes everything.”

On the project, 130 families, totalling over 31,000 people, introduced greywater reuse across 30 new agroforestry plots. The systems are low-cost and simple to implement within a farm’s existing infrastructure. They can be used for years with the initial access to technical support, and, as a result, are now treating millions of litres of water each year.

The impacts in Pernambuco have been immediate. Each family is estimated to be saving US$350 a year on water, and earning over US$300 a month from selling agroforestry products.

Making farming greener

Agroforestry has been identified as a sustainable alternative to industrial farming. 

According to some scientists, the Amazon rainforest is able to recycle up to 5 litres of water per square metre a day. By contrast, land used for pasture is only able to recycle 1.5 litres. This helps to explain why some previously biodiverse areas that have been converted for cattle ranching and farming are now becoming drier.

Agroforestry seeks to redress the balance by including trees in the agricultural process, bringing more moisture – and carbon – back into the soil. The response to these techniques from people across Pernambuco has so far been overwhelmingly positive.

“Nature is doing really well for us,” reported Cilene, a local participant in the project. In a recent interview with the Adaptation Fund, she explained how in the past, “we bought things with pesticides. Now with this project we are learning to have better, healthier food.” 

“Compared to how we were living before, we see better results and sustainable benefits,” she added.

How Vanuatu is facing up to rising climate risks

Francisca Ferraz de Aquino Silva, a farmer in Calumbi, agrees. “This project was a real turning point in my life,” she said.

“After the technology arrived, I realised it was possible to make better use of water, without waste, and to produce food while improving the soil. It was a new opportunity in my life,” she told Centro Sabiá.

“Agroforestry reduces the need for heavy labour. You work without much effort, it brings economic return, and nature works in your favour…I saw that it was possible to live in semi-arid conditions with dignity and prosperity – planting biodiversity and working with agroforestry systems,” she added.

What this means for COP30

As heads of state discuss the state of the planet in Belém, they only need look around at the surrounding rainforest to see how vital a role it plays.

Human development and extreme weather are putting significant pressure on nature and people’s livelihoods. If these drier conditions persist, the rainforest could be turned into savannah, which some scientists believe will create further dry weather and drought.

But the lessons from Belém’s southerly neighbour over in Pernambuco could provide an answer.

Five big questions hanging over COP30

“Policymakers and delegates attending COP30 have a lot to learn from the project,” commented Magno. “It was built with civil society. It was carried out with the contribution of organisations and people who work every day with local communities.”

“By the end of the [climate] conference, the decisions and commitments must truly guarantee that adaptation resources reach the communities that are struggling every day to adapt to climate change,” he continued.

“It is crucial for funds from international climate agreements and adaptation policies to reach the local level, where they are needed the most.”

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK

The post COP30: Brazil is drying up despite its rich natural resources appeared first on Climate Home News.

Representing 3.2 million informal workers across 18 states – street vendors, waste pickers, construction labourers, home-based producers and small farmers – SEWA has spent more than five decades fighting for rights and recognition.

“This is what ‘just transition’ must mean for us,” says Mansi Shah, senior coordinator at SEWA. “It is not only about future green jobs or phasing out polluting industries. For women workers on the frontlines, it is about surviving heatwaves, floods and crop failures today – and doing so with dignity.”

SEWA’s own surveys underline the urgency. More than 90% of women workers report livelihood losses from climate shocks, while 74% say their children’s education has been disrupted. Over 80% of households face water insecurity, 62% food insecurity, and nearly 40% report mental health impacts.

“When people talk about adaptation or resilience, it sounds abstract,” Shah says. “For our members, it means the difference between feeding your children and selling your dignity.”

“On one side, hungry children. On the other, her respect”

One member – a smallholder farmer – told SEWA organisers what happened when a prolonged heatwave dried her fields and wiped out any possible work as an agricultural labourer. With children to feed and no savings, she went to a local moneylender.

The terms were brutal: extortionate interest and demands for sexual favours.

“She had to choose between her children’s hunger and her own respect,” Shah says. “That is the kind of choice no woman should ever face. But climate change is forcing it every day.”

By chance, the woman had been enrolled in SEWA’s pilot parametric heat insurance scheme – designed to trigger automatic payouts when temperatures cross preset thresholds, providing fast, predictable relief when heat destroys livelihoods. On the very day she faced the moneylender, the insurance activated and 1,800 rupees (about $20) landed in her account – enough to buy food for two weeks, enough to walk away.

Climate change-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders

Women-led solutions prove just transition works

For Meenaben, a SEWA smallholder in Kutch district, the blow came from unseasonal rain and hail. Her 1.5-acre rain-fed millet crop, almost ready for harvest – and crucial fodder for her cattle – was shredded overnight.

“Government relief can take months to reach a village,” Shah explains. “So women like Meenaben are pushed toward debt – often predatory – just to survive the gap.”

SEWA’s answer is speed and self-help. Through its Livelihood Recovery & Resilience Fund (LRRF) – a blended pool seeded by one day’s wage per member per month, matched by philanthropy – women can access rapid loans within 14 days of a climate shock, long before state compensation arrives. The fund kept Meenaben’s household afloat, paid for inputs for the next sowing, and avoided a spiral into debt.

“We can’t wait for others to save us,” says Shah. “So SEWA women build their own safety nets – and get back to work.”

From Gujarat to the Global South

After piloting its member-owned LRRF a decade ago, SEWA shared its results at a global women leaders’ meeting in 2023 with Secretary Hillary Clinton, Ambassador Melanne Verveer and women’s organisations from Africa and Latin America. The message was clear: women workers across the Global South face the same shocks and the same finance gap.

On the strength of that model, SEWA partnered with the Clinton Global Initiative to launch the Global Climate Resilience Facility (GCRF) in February 2024. Its framework is complete and fundraising is underway. Once capitalised, it will support frontline women’s organisations to run LRRF-style funds, expand parametric insurance, and scale women-led adaptation and clean-energy solutions across the Global South.

From rural daughter to solar entrepreneur

If these stories show the cost of climate shocks, Payalben Munjpura’s shows what investment unlocks.

Payalben grew up in a village of 250 households in Surendranagar district. Her father was an electrician. Like most rural daughters, she was expected to stay indoors – until SEWA persuaded her parents to let her train as a solar PV technician.

She completed a three-month course and certification, then formed a team of four. Drawing on her father’s skills, she brought him into the enterprise, saving costs and rooting the work in local expertise. Together, they now install rooftop solar systems in nearby villages through India’s new PM Surya Ghar scheme, which offers households subsidies covering up to 60% of installation costs.

Her income has transformed the family: she helped reclaim their mortgaged farm, paid for her younger brother’s education, and rebuilt their home.

“Women are always seen as energy users,” Shah says. “Payalben shows they can be owners, managers and distributors. If skills are brought to their doorstep, women will turn the climate crisis into opportunity.”

The women-led solutions already in motion

SEWA’s members are not waiting for policy promises – they are already building resilience from the ground up. Through its Building Cleaner Skies campaign, SEWA links local experience with a broader strategy of women-led adaptation.

Its Climate School turns climate science into simple visual lessons, training grassroots leaders as climate educators. Its Green Villages initiatives bring clean cooking, biogas, drip irrigation and rooftop solar – all managed by women handling finance, vendors and repairs.

Brazil’s environment minister urges heads of state to address fossil fuels at COP30

The movement also nurtures young women climate entrepreneurs who deliver adaptation technologies and green livelihoods. And when shocks hit, SEWA’s insurance and finance schemes move faster than the state, trigger quick payouts and provide loans within 14 days.

“These are not abstract pilots,” says Shah. “They are working now, in villages across Gujarat. The problem is not solutions. The problem is finance.”

Lessons for COP30

A just transition must also confront the realities of climate impacts. For informal women workers, it is not about distant promises of green jobs, but about surviving the effects of warming now – and building social protection systems that can secure their livelihoods.

SEWA’s experience shows that women-led action works. From grassroots insurance schemes to rooftop solar enterprises, women are already designing and scaling climate solutions that protect both their income and dignity.

To take these efforts further, finance for just transition policies must be deployed – and made accessible to women on the frontlines. The Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) for a Global Just Transition – proposed by civil society as a key deliverable for COP30 – could help bridge that gap by aligning governments, international institutions and community movements, creating clearer pathways for funding and technical support to reach grassroots initiatives directly.

But whatever happens in Belém this November, for millions of women like SEWA’s members, the transition has already begun.

The post For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity appeared first on Climate Home News.

Just a few years ago, green hydrogen looked set to become a central pillar of the global energy transition. Governments worldwide rolled out sweeping hydrogen strategies, while companies pitched billion-dollar projects to use clean hydrogen throughout the economy.  

But the realities of green hydrogen costs, exacerbated by high interest rates and supply chain constraints, have undermined these plans.  

Meanwhile, the US – which had among the most ambitious suites of hydrogen policies under the Biden Administration – has reversed course, scaling back its clean hydrogen production incentive, freezing funds for green hydrogen hubs, and cutting the vast majority of federal hydrogen research and development funding. As a result, a number of planned projects have now been canceled.  

Clean hydrogen hype fades as high costs dampen demand

Clean hydrogen is experiencing growing pains elsewhere too, with several major production projects in Australia and Europe scrapped or indefinitely postponed. Demand for green hydrogen is increasingly uncertain as well, with manufacturers like steel giant ArcelorMittal backing away from plans to use green hydrogen.  

Some ‘no-regrets’ uses remain 

Reading the headlines, it can seem like hydrogen has no future as a climate solution.  

And yet, while green hydrogen may not be an emissions panacea, climate and energy experts are clear: it remains a crucial tool to cut carbon in some key areas of the economy.  

“It’s critical to not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” says Nikita Pavlenko, programs director for fuels and aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation. “Now is the time for sober consideration of projects that supply the no-regrets uses of hydrogen necessary for long-term decarbonization, whether for the handful of industries with few alternatives or in long-haul shipping and aviation.” 

And for those countries that invest in green hydrogen development now, there could be economic as well as environmental rewards.  

Not all hydrogen is created equal  

Hydrogen currently plays a niche but important role in the global economy. Nearly 100 million metric tons of hydrogen are produced worldwide each year, largely for use in oil refining and to make ammonia and methanol – feedstocks for fertilizers and industrial chemicals. And most of this hydrogen is produced using methane gas, contributing roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

But there are other, cleaner ways to produce hydrogen. 

“Blue” hydrogen still relies on natural gas but includes equipment to capture some of the carbon emissions released at the production facility. This could significantly lower on-site emissions – although not entirely.  

However, it would do nothing to reduce methane and CO₂ leaks from natural gas fields or pipelines, which an established body of evidence suggests have been systematically underestimated and are often not accounted for in many existing regulations anyway. Put together, this means blue hydrogen is likely much more polluting than is often claimed. 

That’s why clean energy experts view “green” hydrogen as the best option for cutting emissions.  

Green hydrogen is produced via a process called electrolysis, in which electricity is used to split hydrogen from water, leaving only oxygen as a byproduct. This process can be emissions free – but only if the electrolysis is powered by new clean electricity resources that are physically deliverable on an hourly basis to the hydrogen production facility.  

A narrow but necessary path for green hydrogen  

Still, scaling green hydrogen is easier said than done. Green hydrogen remains a nascent technology and costs roughly two to three times more than conventional hydrogen produced from natural gas. Costs are expected to decline as production scales, but only if electricity costs and interest rates are kept in check – which, recently, has not been the case.  

But there is good news: experts argue that green hydrogen will only be needed in a few specific parts of the economy.  

“Given the heavy energy losses in making hydrogen, it will almost always be cheaper and smarter to use electricity directly,” says Katherine Dixon, executive director of the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP). “Heat pumps are the best example: they cut energy demand dramatically compared to gas, while hydrogen for heating would multiply it.”  

And as other technologies get cheaper, the number of applications where green hydrogen is a necessary decarbonization tool will only shrink.  

‘Hard-to-abate’ sectors need hydrogen 

Still, in a net-zero economy, absent unforeseen technology innovations, we are going to need a lot more green hydrogen in the future – roughly four to six times more than all of the hydrogen used today, and many orders of magnitude more than current green hydrogen production.  

Why? Because there remain many non-electrifiable sectors of the economy where no other viable decarbonization tool exists besides hydrogen, such as steel production, where hydrogen serves as a clean alternative to coal-based coke for processing iron ore.  

“Green hydrogen will be critical for decarbonizing applications that have thus far been referred to as ‘hard-to-abate’, such as in the chemicals or steel industries,” says Julia Metz, director of Agora Industry. 

Additionally, experts don’t yet foresee a path for battery technology to work for long-distance shipping or long-haul flights, both highly polluting industries, so green hydrogen and fuels made from green hydrogen will likely be necessary for those uses too. 

Boosting demand to support long-term investment 

Given the cost premium of green hydrogen, strong incentives will be needed to make using it in industry, aviation or shipping an economically viable choice while driving down costs for the future.  

To date, countries have largely focused on policies like tax credits that encourage production of clean hydrogen or government investments in green hydrogen production and equipment manufacturing facilities.  

EU backs North Africa hydrogen pipeline, but is it a green dream?

But scaling hydrogen requires demand-side policies as well. Indeed, we’re seeing planned projects and investments stall for lack of committed buyers. Stable demand-side policies, which can include contracts for differences (government financing for the higher cost of green hydrogen), requirements for a set percentage of hydrogen consumption to be green for certain sectors, and sectoral emissions limits, can help provide that long-term investment certainty.  

Absent such policies, new clean hydrogen production projects have largely proven too risky.  

How green is green enough? 

Policymakers must also ensure they are only incentivizing truly clean hydrogen. Hydrogen produced with electricity largely generated by coal, for instance, can be considerably dirtier than conventional hydrogen production.  

How to measure hydrogen emissions has been the source of robust debate in the European Union (EU), US, and elsewhere. Fossil fuel companies have argued for more lenient standards about what counts as clean. They have also supported using hydrogen in parts of the economy that could be more easily and cheaply electrified, distracting from efforts to electrify quickly.  

For a region like the EU, which is poised to be an importer as well as a producer of green hydrogen, stricter standards can help ensure truly low-carbon hydrogen production around the world.   

China, for instance, has developed its clean hydrogen production with an eye towards meeting the EU standards. China is also placing major bets on the green hydrogen market, as it represents roughly 60% of global electrolyzer production.  

This investment is beginning to drive down equipment costs, which could help make green hydrogen more commercially viable. It could also give China a long-term competitive edge in the global market.  

Smart policies create economic opportunity 

However, other countries with abundant, low-cost renewable energy resources are also recognizing the potential of green hydrogen as both an export opportunity and a way to reduce reliance on volatile natural gas imports.  

For instance, India’s Green Hydrogen Mission targets the production of 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030, and Brazil has an official goal to be the most competitive low-carbon hydrogen producer by that same year.  

To fully capture the economic opportunity, new hydrogen producers will need to ensure their output meets international environmental standards while building up those domestic industries that require green hydrogen to cut emissions, ensuring more economic benefits are realized domestically.  

“Governments play a key role in driving innovation that creates economic opportunities across the value chain,” says Metz of Agora Industry. “By supporting green hydrogen investment and adopting targeted industrial policies, they can strengthen resilience while advancing climate and industrial progress.” 

It’s time for hydrogen sobriety 

The hydrogen bubble has burst. But despite the dire headlines, we cannot achieve global climate goals without some amount of truly clean hydrogen.  

If the last few years were dominated by hydrogen hype, we need the future to be dominated neither by hype nor nihilism, but by a sober focus on designing policy to build demand for green hydrogen in the few, important sectors where it’s really needed.  

Let’s hope the era of hydrogen sobriety has finally arrived.  

The post Hydrogen beyond the hype: The green fuel’s narrow but crucial role in a decarbonized economy  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Vanuatu, a collection of 83 islands separated by around 1,300 km deep in the South Pacific Ocean, is among a group of ocean states widely regarded as uniquely exposed to climate change.

The World Risk Index, created by German academics and NGOs, has consistently ranked Vanuatu as the world’s most vulnerable country to climate risks and natural disasters.

Geography plays a large role in this because of Vanuatu’s proximity to the Pacific “Ring of Fire” – an area of strong volcanic activity and earthquakes – and its position close to the centre of a cyclone belt. Cyclonic storms have become more frequent and powerful in recent years due to global warming.

Category 5 tropical cyclones – the most severe – are particularly occurring more often. In 2015, Cyclone Pam damaged an estimated 90% of all buildings in Vanuatu and impacted half the population. This was followed by Cyclone Harold in 2020 when winds of up to 125 miles per hour caused an estimated US$768 million in damages across the Pacific.

Another reason for Vanuatu’s vulnerability is its scattered population around coasts that are exposed to rising sea levels. A total of 325,000 people live across 65 islands, characterised by rugged terrain and limited infrastructure.

Giving nature breathing room builds climate resilience

Despite these limitations, the country is finding new and innovative ways to protect its population against climate threats and regain its economic competitiveness. 

An ongoing project on the country’s largest island, Espiritu Santo, is trialling techniques to support communities adapt. The project grant – funded by the Adaptation Fund and managed by UNDP through the Adaptation Fund Climate Innovation Accelerator (AFCIA) – focuses on a number of areas that can benefit these isolated communities. Key components include ecosystem restoration, disaster preparedness, improving food security and strengthening institutions.

Disaster committees

The Paris Agreement set a clear goal of limiting global temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius with the aim of keeping to a safer ceiling of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Under current scenarios, where average temperatures increase by more than 2C, island nations such as Vanuatu are predicted to lose 20% of their GDP each year due to climate disasters. This is despite data which shows Vanuatu contributed less than 0.01% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Joses Togase, a project manager at Santo Sunset Environment Network (SSEN), an Indigenous environmental group on the island, told Climate Home News that people in the region are facing serious threats from climate change. “Rising sea levels are damaging the coastal zones and eroding valuable local resources that people depend upon to support their livelihoods,” he said.

Further inland, he commented, people are experiencing an increase in landslides, soil erosion and flooding which is impacting crop production, forest cover and access to freshwater. “The unpredictable changing weather, heavy rainfalls, droughts, very rough storms, and more frequent tropical cyclones are major challenges the communities are facing,” he added.

Climate disasters challenge right to safe and adequate housing

In response, the Espiritu Santo project has supported community leaders, forest rangers and climate-related disaster committees to adapt to a changing climate. In 2023, the island was hit by two Category 5 cyclones within a week. The committees – with the help of the SSEN – immediately undertook a damage assessment and identified emergency needs so the government could act quickly.

In the future, this work will be supported by an upgraded early warning system and improved internet access – thanks to solar-powered satellite communication – to allow the community to access live weather advice.

How to farm smart

Food security is often a concern in remote regions and extreme weather adds another layer of vulnerability to communities on Vanuatu. Under these circumstances, subsistence farmers need to switch to crops which have higher yields in a shorter growing season and are able to withstand much harsher weather conditions.

The project, alongside encouraging families to maintain their traditional methods of food production, is seeking to raise awareness of climate-smart agriculture. Demonstration plots have been established to plant drought-resistant crops, such as manioc, kumara and taro.

Growing cover crops between seasons to protect the soil, and intercropping, where more than one crop is grown side-by-side in the same field, are also promoted. These practices are designed to improve soil health, prevent erosion and protect against extreme weather. 

Togase believes these practices should be shared with other Pacific islands facing similar climate threats. “The traditional planting calendar, food crop planting and preservation are some of the important lessons,” he commented.

Advancing women’s rights and empowerment in climate adaptation

Increase in local awareness

Human settlements on Vanuatu date back over 3,000 years. In that time, Indigenous peoples have dealt with a range of environmental risks. The climate crisis is the latest in that series and local people are looking to utilise – and adapt – traditional ways of life to overcome these challenges. Groups such as SSEN provide an important connection between the community and government as they collectively navigate a way forward.

According to Togase, recent interventions on Espiritu Santo have “increased understanding and realisation among the local people to become more conscious and alert” in mitigating climate threats. This has, in part, been achieved through Indigenous knowledge sharing and respecting community governance.

As Vanuatu faces an uncertain future, its people aren’t shying away from these threats, but using nature, existing customs and new ideas to their advantage.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK

The post How Vanuatu is facing up to rising climate risks appeared first on Climate Home News.

As the European Union accelerates its path towards climate neutrality, 2025 marks a critical juncture for one of its most socially sensitive climate policies – the EU Emissions Trading System for buildings and road transport (known as ETS2). Without quick action from member states, this new climate policy could have regressive social impacts.

Set to launch in 2027, ETS2 will put a price on carbon emissions from household heating and road transport, resulting in inevitable price increases in those two sectors. To help mitigate its impact on the most vulnerable households, transport users and micro-enterprises, 25% of the ETS2 revenues will flow into a Social Climate Fund (SCF).

The SCF can be viewed as Europe’s financial safety net for the most vulnerable people, designed to ensure that, as Europe pushes fossil fuels out of homes, cars and cities, it doesn’t push people into poverty. Therefore, ETS2 and the SCF are two sides of the same coin: while ETS2 imposes a necessary climate cost on carbon-intensive activities, the Social Climate Fund is meant to make that transition affordable and just.

To benefit from the SCF, the EU’s member states are required to submit detailed Social Climate Plans to the European Commission, proving that their policies are inclusive, purpose-oriented and based on high-quality data.

However, until now, only a handful of draft plans have been put out for public consultation within EU countries, and most have yet to submit their plans to the Commission. Without binding plans in place, it’s becoming increasingly unclear how, or even whether, that social shield will be deployed in time.

Without robust Social Climate Plans, the revenue collected from the new emissions trading system risks becoming a regressive tax, disproportionately hitting low-income households and transport users – particularly those already suffering from increased energy and transport poverty.

Uneven progress across countries

A joint analysis by E3G and CEE Bankwatch Network, published in mid-June, revealed significant disparities in the progress of Social Climate Plans across eight Central and Eastern European countries.

Some of them – most notably Estonia, Latvia and Poland – have published draft Social Climate Plans outlining how they will channel their SCF allocations to fund building renovations, clean mobility and direct income support.

Poland, for instance, proposes allocating 37% of its SCF share to direct income support, 39% to energy-efficient housing, and 21% to transport, while Estonia commits a striking 76% of funds to building renovation and 21% to public transport.

Latvia’s plan foresees investments in energy-efficient apartment buildings and social housing, as well as support for connecting single family homes and social housing to renewable or district heating systems. In the transport sector, the country opts for micro-mobility, such as bicycles and electric bicycles, as well as investments in public transport and cycle-route expansion.

EU Commission proposes allowing carbon offsets to help meet 2040 climate goal

While these examples deserve praise, the wider picture looks far from ideal, as illustrated by an evolving SCF tracker, which is a collaborative effort of more than 40 EU and national-level civil society organisations. Several countries, such as Hungary, are vocally fighting against the implementation of ETS2 – and by extension, the SCF it would finance.  

Meanwhile, drafting of the Social Climate Plans is not moving at the necessary pace or with sufficient inclusion. Civil society participation has remained severely limited or non-existent in several countries. And critically, there is growing concern that the window for meaningful reforms is closing fast.

New EU budget loosens guardrails for just transition

Another challenge lies in the EU’s new funding priorities. The European Commission unveiled its draft proposal for the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) in July, asking governments to construct detailed national and regional partnership plans. On paper, the MFF presents an opportunity to address social vulnerabilities, integrating existing initiatives like the SCF.

This is evident in the fact that member states are obliged to include a dedicated chapter in their respective national and regional plans outlining their planned investments under the Social Climate Fund. However, this exercise is descriptive and is not intended to provide further food for thought on how the MFF could better address growing social vulnerabilities.

More importantly, by shifting the focus towards increasing competitiveness, instead of much-needed climate and environmental action, the proposal for the EU’s overarching financial framework loosens the very guardrails that would safeguard a just energy transition.

While the new draft EU budget legislation acknowledges the importance of a just transition and regional equity, it introduces several structural shifts that raise red flags – including the proposed discontinuation of the EU’s Just Transition Fund as a standalone instrument, and the elimination of the LIFE programme which has long supported environmental and climate action.

In doing so, the budget proposal fails to support initiatives that have proven to be successful from the environmental and social point of view, while opening the door to big players without the strong environmental and social rules needed to hold them to account.

Lessons from early plans can be scaled up

Despite the mounting risks, there are valuable lessons to draw from countries that have moved ahead with their Social Climate Fund planning. Early frontrunners like Poland and Estonia offer examples that are worth scaling up.

The existing draft plans show how the SCPs can address both emissions and energy poverty. It is clear from the analysis that when backed by political will and high-quality consultations, Social Climate Plans can be more than bureaucratic checklists.

They can – and should – become tangible action plans, topped up by additional revenues from ETS1 and ETS2 to maximise their transformative potential. To enhance transparency and increase implementation quality, monitoring committees should be appointed in all member states. 

Workers and grassroots groups push Just Transition agenda at Bonn climate talks

Without a broader strategy for mainstreaming, ensuring a socially just and fair transition across the EU will remain highly challenging.

Such a transition requires equity considerations at all levels of climate and energy policy-making – not just in targeted compensation mechanisms. This includes embedding social impact assessments into regulatory frameworks, fostering inclusive governance, and aligning labour, housing and education policies with climate goals.

Unless a holistic approach is adopted, there is a real risk that vulnerable groups will continue to bear a disproportionate cost burden, undermining both public support and the long-term sustainability of the green transition.

The post Without robust action, new EU carbon pricing plan could leave vulnerable people behind appeared first on Climate Home News.

The G77+China umbrella group of developing countries is calling for critical minerals and access to energy to fall within the scope of the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) at the UN climate negotiations and any advice-sharing mechanism that may emerge from COP30 in Brazil in November.

“We see critical minerals as being one of the priorities that we have been trying to address when we look into the just energy transition,” said Egyptian negotiator Khaled Hashem, the G77 group’s lead on this issue, adding that mineral production presents “challenges and opportunities” for developing countries.

Raw materials like copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel are key to green technology like electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, with large reserves found in developing countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile and Indonesia.

These countries say they want to maximise the benefits of producing minerals and metals for the clean economy – by creating local jobs with high wages, revenues for the government and domestic processing industries – while minimising potential downsides like environmental degradation caused by mining and abuses of workers’ rights.

‘Whole economy’ approach

The concept of “just transition” emerged from labour union movements and has traditionally focused mainly on ensuring that workers in polluting industries, including fossil fuel extraction and power production, and their communities are treated fairly as those jobs disappear.

Hashem said this aspect is important. But, since the launch of the Just Transition Work Programme under the UN climate talks two years ago, developing countries have moved beyond this narrow concept to talk about broader transition issues such as critical minerals, energy access and energy poverty.

Hashem said developing countries are united on this approach, adding that developed-country stances would become clearer at a dialogue taking place in the Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa during UN climate week in early September – but added that he didn’t expect much resistance.

Antonio Hill, an advisor with the Natural Resource Governance Institute, supports the push for COP30 to recognise critical minerals as a key element of the just transition.

Dialogues between governments have also considered how to adapt to climate change in an equitable way, he said. “So we have already gone beyond the green jobs and the workforce, and we are now discussing broader just transitions that encompass the whole of an economy,” he explained.

In particular, the energy transition expert wants this theme to be connected to the COP28 agreement to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030 – as renewables growth is “what’s behind the rush on critical minerals at the moment”.

This demand, he said, is not particularly controversial, but there is a risk it could be used as leverage in other negotiations at COP30. “I can imagine countries saying ‘well, we’re not going to support this unless…’ – fill in the blank,” he said. Some nations might also argue that critical minerals should be discussed somewhere other than the climate talks, he warned.

Hill said governments at COP30 should agree to support stronger global governance of transition minerals to ensure fair trade and address the social and environmental impacts of their extraction.

Call for new mechanism at COP30

Campaigners and some governments are pushing for a decision at COP30 to set up a new just transition body to advise, coordinate and accelerate action on the issue, which would potentially be called the “Belém Action Mechanism”.

Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition at Climate Action Network International, which represents hundreds of NGOs working on climate issues, said such a mechanism “can become an anchor of fairness in the global climate transition”, turning the concept of just transition “from rhetoric into a real architecture” at COP30.

“If it is done soon and right, it will provide countries with the support and accountability needed to ensure that workers and communities are at the centre – and knock down the barriers countries face to change their economies,” Rosemberg added.

The post Support grows for COP30 ‘just transition’ talks to address critical minerals appeared first on Climate Home News.

The robotics engineer, now a professor at Columbia University, was referring to the advent of 3D printing – a technology he claimed would “transform every single aspect of our lives”.

That revolution had already been brewing for some time given that the first commercial 3D printer – the SLA-1 – was released in the late 1980s by American firm 3D Systems. 

But it was improvements in the speed, materials and accuracy of the technology that led experts to believe 3D printing would revolutionise the global economy.

Today, it is used in multiple sectors, from automobiles to fashion, housing to healthcare – and in ways many people do not realise. In the future, its efficiency and low cost offer promise to help bring the world’s rapacious use of resources down to levels in line with protecting the climate and nature. 

Engine parts, car dashboards and prosthetics are all 3D printed. New homes, manufacturing tools and custom shoes have followed suit. The possibilities are endless: complex applications such as building human tissue or satellites in space have already been developed.

As a result the industry is now valued at $20 billion-$25 billion, with high growth estimates putting it at over $100 billion within the next 10 years. In the past year alone, the industry grew by around 9%, according to consultants Wohlers Associates. 

The potential for using 3D printing to reduce waste and improve the efficiency of manufacturing processes has also caught the attention of those working on sustainability, as it opens up new possibilities for businesses seeking to reduce their environmental impact. 

The question is whether the industry can live up to its promise and deliver large-scale, affordable environmental solutions.

Built by machines

The extraordinary range of uses for 3D printing is testament to the flexibility of the technology and the ingenuity of its developers. The ability to create freely and on location are hugely attractive options to designers and engineers.

3D printing – also called additive manufacturing – works by first creating a 3D model using computer-aided design (CAD). This model is translated into code the printer can read, and the printer then deposits materials in layers to create the final object.

This process cuts out many of the complicated – and human – elements of manufacturing or construction. Building a house in the conventional manner, for example, can take months, requiring many people from different trades and a multi-layered supply chain.

By contrast, one of the world’s first 3D-printed homes – the TECLA House – was built out of local clay in Italy in around 200 hours and using 60 cubic metres of raw material. Its construction required 350 12-millimetre layers. The house was produced in 2021 as a prototype for future buildings that would need to respond to the climate crisis. 

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In a statement on its launch, Massimo Moretti, founder of WASP, the 3D company behind the project, commented: “TECLA shows that a beautiful, healthy and sustainable home can be built by a machine using on-site materials.”

By using only what is needed in exactly the right place, additive manufacturing greatly reduces waste. Some industry sources claim the difference can be up to 90% less material waste than with traditional methods. The end product can also be designed to be lighter which reduces material use and energy consumption.

Circular by design

The TECLA House, and similar buildings such as the Amsterdam Canal House, are sleek examples of what can be achieved with the latest 3D printing technology.

However, they beg the wider question of whether such projects can be made at scale and within budget, while meeting commercial needs. Affordability and custom-made are words that are rarely used in the same sentence.

Signify, a global lighting company, has been tackling this challenge by turning its attention to how 3D printing can support sustainable, mass-made custom lighting solutions.

Signify began experimenting with 3D printers around 2015, primarily for prototyping moulds, fixtures and early product concepts, explained Bart Maeyens, Signify’s global leader for 3D printing.

“The turning point came when researchers were challenged to explore 3D mass production and succeeded to develop polycarbonate-based formulations able to produce durable end-use parts – not just prototypes – which enabled full-scale production of luminaires,” he added.

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The following year the company launched myCreation, an offshoot that produces on-demand 3D-printed lighting from recycled materials. By 2020, Signify had installed 500 3D printers in hubs around the world, allowing the company to customise lighting at scale.

Signify myCreation offers 3D printing as a sustainability-focused product intended to serve the circular economy. All printed parts are produced with at least 65% recycled materials, while bio-circular and industrial recycled plastics are also used, according to Maeyens.

“We produce on-demand with short production lead times which eradicates obsolete stocks and decimates carbon footprint in production transportation. Rejected parts are recycled in-house, leading to zero waste in production,” he said.

Compared to conventional methods, Signify’s 3D-printed lighting decreases carbon emissions by up to 76% and its products contain up to 40% fewer components, Maeyens noted.

Businesses are responding positively to these possibilities. Food giant McDonald’s and British retailer Marks & Spencer have both signed up to use the 3D-printed products in their stores. 

The El Dorado International Airport in Colombia installed 9,000 3D-printed lights which, along with retrofitting existing points with LEDs, reportedly reduced the airport’s electricity needs by 65%. A similar project at Madrid Barajas Airport saw a 50% drop in electricity needs. 

The quiet revolution

Professor Lipson, when asked by Climate Home about his predictions a decade and a half ago, feels validated.

“3D printers have become so ubiquitous that they exist in every high school in the world, many kids have them at home – and nobody is counting,” he said.

Lipson sees the technology as part of a wider revolution in digital manufacturing, working alongside generative AI, to change how the global industry operates.

How off-grid solar is beating the odds to transform lives in rural Africa

“3D printing allows you to go from a digital blueprint to a physical object quickly, accurately, with little investment in tooling or skill,” he explained. ”That’s the direction manufacturing is moving in many areas that involve complex products.” The result could mean jobs and factories that businesses set up or outsourced overseas to cut costs could be reshored, he added.

The 3D printing age is unfolding without the fanfare of AI, or sky-high levels of investment. This quiet revolution has been embraced behind factory doors where engineers have grasped its enormous potential.

3D printed renewables and batteries

The potential is clear when it comes to cutting environmental impact: lighter-weight products, efficient use of materials, local production and high recycling rates.

There are already examples of 3D-printed solar power cells that can produce renewable electricity without needing to mine and transport heavy materials such as gold or copper over long distances. Wind turbine components, such as blade moulds, are being printed to cut out wasteful alternatives. These flexible and lightweight blades could potentially capture more of the wind’s energy.

And energy storage – a key enabler of the energy transition – is advancing by printing batteries onsite that can increase energy density and improve efficiency. They could also help put an end to environmentally damaging supply chains often associated with battery production.     

These are just a handful of examples where clean tech is taking advantage of the 3D printing revolution. Green industry experts are hoping the next step is to expand the use of these techniques so that the benefits become widespread.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Does the future of green manufacturing lie in 3D printing? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Environmentalists and Indigenous groups held up signs urging countries to show courage, standing in front of the UN buildings in Geneva where negotiations are reaching the final stretch amid a continuing stalemate.

The demonstration, coordinated by the Break Free From Plastic movement of more than 13,000 organisations and individual supporters, coincided with the arrival of nearly 70 ministers at the talks.

“What we have seen here is that if you rely only on consensus, that means a single country or a handful of countries can block the entire process,” said Renée Sharp, director of plastics and petrochemical advocacy at the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “We need strong action – we need a strong treaty,” she added.

Breaking the impasse

With only two days left until the negotiations are due to end, discussions have yet to settle on what the first global plastics pact should tackle.

A coalition of nearly 100 countries has pushed for the treaty to include binding provisions aimed at cutting plastic production to “sustainable levels” as part of a wide-ranging package of solutions.

But an ill-defined group of fossil-fuel producing nations, calling themselves the “like-minded” countries and vocally led by Gulf states, Russia and India, wants to limit the scope of the pact to management of plastic waste and largely voluntary measures.

Wong SiPeng, an advocate with C4 Center, an anti-corruption watchdog in Malaysia, said it would be impossible to make consensus work with two polar-opposite camps that do not want to budge.

“The clearest way to make a decision would be to vote and get us out of this gridlock,” she told Climate Home on the sidelines of Tuesday’s action. “This is not going anywhere – countries need to be brave enough to call for it.”

Voting battle

The issue of how governments should reach an agreement has haunted the UN plastics talks since their inception. The draft rules of procedure governing the negotiations offer the possibility of voting if efforts to reach consensus fail.

But the second round of talks in May 2023 descended into a procedural scuffle when countries, including Saudi Arabia, India and Iran, refused to move into substantive discussions unless that provision was ‘bracketed’ – meaning no agreement had been reached.

The row was eventually resolved with a compromise: an ‘interpretative statement’ noting that the rules of procedure would be applied provisionally and there were different understandings of the rule on voting.

In a panel discussion with Climate Home on Monday, David Azoulay, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said fossil fuel-producing countries had since “laid a number of procedural traps to make it [voting] potentially politically costly and complicated”.

Looking for the right moment

A call for a vote would almost certainly provoke a strong reaction from the members of the “like-minded” group, which have regularly restated in their public speeches that all decisions must be made on consensus. At a plenary last Saturday, Kuwait – speaking on behalf of that group – said that “any attempt to move forward without consensus risks producing an instrument that is neither legitimate nor implementable”.

But for CIEL’s Azoulay, associating multilateralism exclusively with consensus decision-making is “complete and utter nonsense”. He pointed out that voting takes place regularly at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Using that tool “is not weakening multilateralism, it is saving it,” he added.

Comment: The global plastics treaty must move forward, with or without the US

No country has so far openly signalled its intention to call for a vote at the plastics talks, despite the option being informally debated in the corridors of the UN headquarters in Geneva.

Laurianne Trimoulla, a project manager at the Switzerland-based Gallifrey Foundation, said a vote would need to take place “under the right circumstances when all conditions are perfectly aligned”.

“If countries call for a vote and it is not the right moment, it weakens the act of voting,” she added.

NRDC’s Sharp said some countries are hesitant to move beyond decisions approved by consensus because they do not want to give the impression that multilateralism has no future.

“But the reality is that human health and environmental health are on the line – and we can’t have countries hiding behind consensus to not take the action that’s needed,” she added.

The post Show courage to vote for a strong plastics treaty, campaigners urge countries appeared first on Climate Home News.

Despite the vast stretch of water between them, the two small island nations share a common challenge: how to protect their people from rising seas and extreme weather. 

Climate change is an ever-present reality for these two countries – and all other island states – in the region. The land that juts out of the Pacific Ocean makes up less than 1% of the total area. The sea that surrounds these islands is both an essential economic resource and a looming threat.

“Climate change isn’t just science – it’s personal,” one participant told the Cook Islands National Loss and Damage Dialogue held in Rarotonga in mid-April. “With warmer temperatures and fewer pandanus trees, the women’s weaving traditions are under threat.”

Recent research from NASA found that Pacific islands are expected to experience at least 6 inches (15.24 cm) of sea level rise over the next 30 years, whether the world reduces greenhouse gas emissions or not. In recent years, the climate crisis has exacerbated many existing problems for island nations: more severe droughts and cyclones, together with the encroaching sea, have destroyed livelihoods and increased people’s economic vulnerabilities. 

“Communities on remote Pacific islands are in danger of having their culture and way of life erased if we don’t act now and help them survive,” said Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund. “It’s desperately important that we work to support people most vulnerable to climate shocks,” he added.

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As extreme weather persists, small but crucial interventions are being explored to support people to adapt to their new reality. In small island developing states, such as the Cook Islands and Federated States of Micronesia, these ideas have been put to the test, with both nations implementing projects to build climate resilience and enable communities to thrive in spite of the growing stresses they face.

Remoteness makes resilience key

Many of the climate-related issues for small island – or large ocean – states are connected to their remoteness. There are over 1,000 islands comprising the sovereign nations in the Pacific – the Federated States of Micronesia alone has more than 600 islands.

These inhabited islands are often hard to reach and lack basic infrastructure such as electricity access, healthcare provision and water security. This makes them even more vulnerable to disasters and increases the need to build resilience to climate shocks.

In recent years, governments in the Cook Islands and Micronesia have sought financing from the Adaptation Fund to address these chronic issues. The resulting projects provide important lessons in adaptation in places on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Finance flowing for locally led climate adaptation

Both countries have locally based organisations, known as national implementing entities (NIEs), accredited through the Adaptation Fund’s “direct access” scheme which helps countries manage their adaptation efforts. Entities can propose and develop projects and receive financial support from the Fund without going through international agencies.  

Projects in both island states are tailored to local adaptation needs, but bear many similarities in their approach to climate problems. They are focused on outer islands, water and food security, data monitoring, gender concerns and restoring ecosystem health, as a path to climate resilience.

“We need to work harder to understand what life is like for people in remote places, especially on low-lying Pacific islands. From the beginning, these projects built in these concerns, ensuring decisions and solutions were community-led, inclusive, and informed by local knowledge,” added Ollikainen.

Adaptation for farmers and fishers

On the Cook Islands this meant increasing water storage across the outer Pa Enua islands, alongside 25 new farms and 11 agro-nurseries with a strong focus on establishing climate-resilient crops. A new early warning system was created, with local training provided on disaster risk preparedness and centralised data management.

In addition, 35 community grants were awarded to farmers and households to help pay for adaptive tools such as fencing, tanks and agricultural equipment. “The climate has changed, full-stop. But now we’ve got drip irrigation [to sustainably water crops]. We’re still growing,” commented one farmer on Mitiaro, a tiny volcanic island.

Mani Mate, a director at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Management, the NIE carrying out the resilient livelihoods “PEARL” project, said it shows “how small island nations can deliver tangible, locally led resilience when adaptation is community-driven and well-resourced”. 

“While challenges remain, the Cook Islands now have tools, systems and experience to build on, along with growing interest in a second phase of support,” Mate added.

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In a similar way, the Micronesian project implemented by the Micronesia Conservation Trust, also an Adaptation Fund NIE based on the island, has put in place effective state protections for marine habitats, increasing awareness and enforcement capabilities, as well as access to sustainable finance. The project issued locally led small grants across the islands to allow communities to directly implement marine-based measures, such as the restoration of upland forests and mangroves and stronger fisheries management.

The focus on protected areas is in keeping with the wider Micronesia Challenge, an initiative of five governments across the wider region, to conserve 50% of marine resources by 2030, equivalent to 2.5 million square miles (6.5 million square kilometres).

Adaptation Futures conference in the Pacific

Climate scientists have long understood how precarious islands are when confronted with extreme weather, such as powerful cyclones or long dry spells. The experiences of ocean states, and the recent interventions in the Cook Islands and Micronesia, could provide policymakers with sufficient evidence to inform future adaptation responses.

“The project gave us the tools, but more importantly it gave us the confidence to lead our own resilience,” commented a local representative on Mauke in the Cook Islands.

Practitioners will be given ample opportunity to discuss these issues in New Zealand later this year. The biannual Adaptation Futures conference in October will put Indigenous and Pacific island concerns at the heart of the event, providing a unique moment to have these stories told and acted on.

“Pacific island concerns have not always received the right amount of attention and awareness,” said Ollikainen. “But what happens in these places – drought, flooding, sea level rise – is being repeated around the world. Low-lying islands are the canary in the coal mine – we ignore the warning at our peril.”

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Pacific islands push back against growing climate threats appeared first on Climate Home News.

Operating with a small in-built solar panel, connected to a battery and using an LED light bulb, it can transform how rural communities see the world.

Its use in places without access to mains electricity has taken off in the past 15 years, alongside the wider growth in solar power around the world.

An estimated 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still live without reliable access to electricity, according to the World Bank. The introduction of solar power – coupled with energy-efficient lighting – is key in tackling this problem.

Many villages not served by national grids are forced to use kerosene lamps and candles, or burn straw in the evening, which is costly and dangerous to human health. London-based think-tank ODI Global estimates that low-income households in Africa spend US$6.5 billion a year on such inefficient lighting options.

Solar power changes the equation, allowing streets to be lit, children to study at night, and a sense of security to exist. Greater electricity access enables farmers to work an extended day and use solar-powered irrigation and cooling systems to grow and process their crops.

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“Reliable and affordable energy creates economic transformation,” said Eva Roig, a spokesperson for GOGLA, an Amsterdam-based trade body for the off-grid solar energy industry. The organisation estimates that US$9 billion in additional income has already been created by businesses as a result of switching to solar in place of fossil fuel alternatives.

“In off-grid locations, lack of energy restrains farmers from higher productivity and, with a growing young population, offers few employment opportunities or possibilities to create new businesses,” she added.

The challenge for off-grid solar power is to reach the hundreds of millions of people in need and create a stable market for its continuance.

Electric power key to tackling poverty

UK charity SolarAid was founded in 2006 with the aim of creating a world “where everyone has access to clean, renewable energy” and eradicating the use of kerosene lamps in Africa.

A couple of years later it set up SunnyMoney, a social enterprise which uses a community distribution model to raise awareness and increase demand for solar power. Local teachers explain how the technology works and independent agents sell the products. SunnyMoney supports them with logistics, training and engagement along the way.

“We believe that access to electricity is fundamental in the fight against poverty. Access to solar lighting and power means that families are saving money, extending productive hours, increasing access to study hours and also increasing safety,” explained John Keane, CEO at SolarAid, based in Zambia. 

The charity has reportedly helped 12 million people through the social enterprise, with projects in Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Malawi.

While models such as SunnyMoney can stoke the solar market, larger businesses need to step in and supply the kit itself. D.light is one of the solar companies that has done more than most to bring affordable solar power to some of the remotest villages in Africa.

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The US company is deeply embedded across the continent, with a vision to make solar products accessible to low-income families. The business had one of its most successful years in 2024, and says it reached 24 million people with solar systems last year alone.

But it hasn’t always been plain sailing. “I don’t think we realised how difficult it would be to commercialise and scale off-grid solar products,” d.light’s founder and CEO, Nedjip Tozun, commented in an interview last year. 

While its products now power around 32 million homes, building that capacity took time, patience and good fortune. Tozun explained that during the early years in the mid 2000s the difficulties lay in building a high-quality product which could be distributed to remote areas and with financing to enable people to pay for it. The company was forced to create those capabilities in-house in order to scale and overcome external barriers.

Funding energy efficiency to expand use

Improving energy efficiency is one such challenge the off-grid industry has sought to solve. Solar devices need to hold the sun’s energy long enough to be used for a wide range of purposes. This is where LED lighting comes in.

“Over the past 10 years, the growing availability of increasingly energy-efficient appliances, such as LED lighting is transforming what’s possible,” said Keane. “It’s the foundation for designing inclusive solutions that deliver long-term impact.”

The main benefits, he explained, is that LED lighting drastically reduces the amount of electricity needed to light homes, enabling households on lower incomes to meet their essential needs with small solar systems.

As off-grid solar kits are small by design, using the power with efficient lighting or low-voltage appliances, such as refrigerators, means the energy goes further and is matched to the user’s needs.

Pairing solar with technologies to support economic activity, so-called “productive use”, is a growing area within the industry. Solar can be applied in a range of commercial settings, and on any number of appliances, from sewing machines to water pumps, or from seed pressers to ceiling fans. But to do so effectively those appliances need to be energy-efficient and upgrading is expensive. 

New financing initiatives such as PUFF – the Productive Use Financing Facility – are playing a role by offering subsidies to suppliers to help bring down the costs for farmers and businesses. After a successful pilot, the scheme was recently extended with an additional US$6.1 million to support access to 10,000 “high-impact” appliances, according to CLASP, a non-profit which started the initiative.

“Efficient appliances and equipment turn energy into opportunity and should be considered essential energy infrastructure, alongside renewables,” commented Emmanuel Aziebor, a senior director at CLASP, in a media statement.

Financial barriers to adoption

Overall, the coming together of small solar technology, LED lighting and socially minded businesses has grown the market significantly over the past decade.

In Kenya, off-grid solar now accounts for an estimated 75% of rural electricity access. The country has a target to reach universal access by 2030 and solar plays a big part in the government’s plans.

But the same barriers to scaling the market remain. Despite the success of using mobile technology and pay-as-you-go models to spread out costs for the consumer, affordable solar products are still out of reach for many. Research from ESMAP, an energy programme run by the World Bank, found that only 22% of households that lack electricity globally could afford the monthly payment to access a basic solar lantern and home system able to provide power for at least four hours a day.

“Governments should fully integrate off-grid solar into their national energy plans and programmes,” said Roig of GOGLA, adding that incentives such as tax breaks, subsidies and public-private partnerships are needed to reach the poorest households.

Making solar affordable for all

One way to bring down costs for consumers is to de-risk investments for solar power producers. The Beyond Grid for Zambia pilot project sought to do exactly that by providing financing to companies on a per-connection basis. 

The project, which ran from 2016 to 2022, also worked with the Zambian government to smooth market access, such as providing a VAT exemption for LED lights. The successful results – with over 194,000 households fitted with off-grid solar – have led to ambitious plans to scale the project across the whole African continent.

The remoteness of many villages makes repairing and maintaining solar kits another challenge. Collecting, servicing and replacing these products can be expensive for companies. Research from SolarAid suggests that while manufacturers agree that repair work needs to improve, it remains an ambition for many.

Among the possible solutions include extending warranty times, providing technical training in-country, and greater guidance on how to conduct repairs at the community level. SunnyMoney already provides technicians with its own mobile repair app, which could be expanded and used as a template for manufacturers.

Despite the challenges, the work to reach tens of millions of remote households is being reinforced and stepped up. SolarAid is midway through a pilot project to connect TA Kasakula, a village in rural Malawi where almost all residents live in extreme poverty. The project is trialling a new financing model which eliminates upfront costs, with customers only paying for the electricity they use.

The stories coming back to the social enterprise are of revelation and changed lives. “When we switched on the lights, some children were dancing, jumping,” reported Goodwill Kongalwa. “Then everyone rushed to where there were books because they saw they had a chance to study at home.”

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post How off-grid solar is beating the odds to transform lives in rural Africa appeared first on Climate Home News.

As climate action comes under attack from populist elites and Big Tech billionaires, decision-makers must shift gears – climate policy must start delivering for those who keep our societies running: working people.

From factory workers and waste-pickers to Indigenous leaders and feminist economists, dozens of groups have come together under the banner, “Just Transition Rising”, to insist that real climate action must start from the ground up.

“A transition is happening, but justice is nowhere to be found,” said Boitumelo Molete of South Africa’s trade union federation COSATU. “Not enough support is going to communities to find alternative livelihoods nor to workers to find decent jobs – we need recognition, finance and space to lead, especially for South Africa’s women workers who are the first affected by the climate crisis.”

Of the US$12.8 billion pledged to support South Africa’s transition away from coal, only about US$1.9 billion has so far been disbursed – and just US$676 million of that was in the form of grants.

An analysis of roughly half of these grants (US$330 million) found that less than a quarter went to South African entities, while the bulk was channelled back to foreign implementers – most based in the donor countries themselves.

Picket-nicking with purpose: People before profits

Wednesday’s rally outside the World Conference Center Bonn took the form of a picnic – with a twist. Called a “picket-nic” to reflect the participation of workers and unions and the fighting spirit of the convergence, the event featured music, food, a massive banner for people to gather around, and a clear call: climate policies must put the workers and communities on the frontlines of the transition first.

Organisers hope the event will also help build diplomatic consensus – by reminding government negotiators to focus on the needs of their people, not just rehearse entrenched positions.

This mobilisation builds on an online assembly held in May, which brought together more than 1,000 participants from across the globe. Workers and community leaders shared powerful stories of resistance, reinvention, and leadership in the face of the climate crisis.

Challenging global economic rules

Italian workers from the GKN automotive factory described how they turned a mass layoff into a cooperative of 100 workers focused on building low-carbon transport technologies. “We weren’t just fighting job loss,” said GKN worker Dario Salvetti. “We were asking: What should this factory build for society?”

Members of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) explained how informal women workers contribute up to a month’s income into collective climate resilience funds to protect their communities from floods and droughts. Mansi Shah explained, “Last year, when the temperatures crossed 40 degrees and it became unbearable to work in the field, it was the payout from SEWA’s parametric heat insurance that helped with sustaining families and provided two square meals per day.”

Speakers also challenged the global economic rules that block fair transitions. Feminist and Indigenous economists offered alternative models rooted in care, reciprocity and community self-determination.

Youth, disability rights advocates and children’s representatives joined the call, insisting that realising their rights is not peripheral but essential to truly transformative climate action.

Five demands on the table

As communities demand real change, these and other grassroots organisations are advocating for the Just Transition agenda as a pathway to turn that demand into actionable policy – anchored in finance, inclusive governance and international cooperation.

Emboldened by the spirit of the global online assembly, a collective of groups active in the UN climate process (UNFCCC) has put forward five concrete proposals, with the hope that they will be reflected in the draft decision on Just Transition emerging from Bonn: 

1. Protect the core values of Just Transition: Ensure that Just Transition is aligned with the Paris Agreement and rooted in human rights, labour rights, inclusion, social dialogue and public participation, and international cooperation.
2. Make Just Transition financeable: Recognise Just Transition policies as eligible for climate finance, acknowledging their critical role in enabling higher ambition.
3. Integrate Just Transition into national planning: Embed Just Transition strategies into Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), national adaptation plans and long-term development strategies.
4. Institutionalise participation and co-creation at the national level: Establish formal spaces for consultation and co-design of Just Transition pathways – bringing in workers, communities and civil society.
5. Launch the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) for a Global Just Transition: A multilateral initiative to accelerate and support country efforts to transition, making funding and technical support more accessible, taking action to remove barriers to the transition, such as trade or debt, and build a global peer network for shared learning and collaboration.

“Communities and workers aren’t waiting for permission,” said Gina Cortés, a Colombian feminist and a member of the Women and Gender Constituency at the UN talks. “What we need is for governments to stop ignoring the people who sustain the world with their work when moving ahead with climate plans – the international process can move us closer to getting things done better and accelerate a movement that is gaining pace on the ground.”

Eyes on Belém

These proposals are intended to shape the road to the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil – a milestone moment for advancing the UNFCCC’s Just Transition Work Programme.

“The UN process didn’t invent the concept of Just Transition,” said Tasneem Essop from Climate Action Network. “But it has the opportunity to contribute to its realisation and help scale it – if it listens to the people.”

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At a time when nationalism and climate action delay are gaining ground, campaigners see Just Transition as a rare point of convergence.

“It’s more than a policy space,” said Lidy Nacpil, from the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD). “It’s a way to connect our struggles – to show that climate justice isn’t just possible, it’s already happening.”

Whether that message reaches negotiators remains to be seen. But for those gathering in Bonn this week, Just Transition Rising is only getting started.

The post Workers and grassroots groups push Just Transition agenda at Bonn climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the year of its 10^th anniversary, Gillian Cooper, political director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (FFNPT), described the Paris accord as “our North Star” in efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“Unfortunately, as it is structured, it does not mention fossil fuels,” she added in an interview with Climate Home ahead of the mid-year UN climate talks in Bonn. “That is a massive omission because it is the root cause of over 80% of our emissions. So there is very little guidance as to how countries concretely will be able to transition from fossil fuels.”

Cooper argues that another international treaty is needed to provide that support to governments – a goal towards which her organisation has been working since 2020.

“The capacity of countries to transition from fossil fuels varies considerably across the globe and concrete solutions are needed to support an equitable, managed transition,” she said. “The treaty will provide greater guidance and support.”

Growing support for action on fossil fuels

In response to  a call by Pacific Island nations back in 2015 for a moratorium on coal, the FFNPT initiative seeks to foster global cooperation to halt expansion of this planet-heating fuel, as well as oil and gas, and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. With 17 participating nations so far, it is in talks with more countries to sign up to the commitment.

Its members so far are Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Colombia, Micronesia, Fiji, Nauru, Niue, Pakistan, Palau, Marshall Islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

Cooper noted that meetings will be held with some delegations during the Bonn climate talks, especially target countries in Africa and Asia considered key due to their dependence on fossil fuels. “We are fairly confident that we will have more countries by the time we get to COP30,” she added.

Brazil’s current push to approve new oil exploration projects in the Amazon basin, with licences set to be auctioned in mid-June, would make it difficult for President Lula da Silva’s government to join the FFNPT.

The Amazon rainforest emerges as the new global oil frontier 

But in its role as the COP30 Presidency, Brazil could create the political momentum needed to incorporate more ambitious language on fossil fuels in the final decisions stemming from November’s climate summit in Belem – something it has indicated it wants to do. 

That aim is to drive forward the outcome of COP28 in 2023, in which countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems – but since then there has been little concrete progress within the UN climate process on how that could be done. 

Resistance from major producers

A Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty could help sidestep the objections of major oil and gas-producing nations, experts told a symposium in Bonn organised by the initiative.

Peter Newell, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex, said it is expected that big fossil fuel producers like Saudi Arabia or Russia will resist – but that might change as the world moves towards cleaner energy. 

“These countries usually produce for export to Europe or other countries. So, if demand falls, it will be easier to convince them to reduce production,” Newell told Climate Home.

Against the common narrative of “fossil fuels are key to energy security”, he encouraged people to ask whose energy is being secured, how, and at what cost? And in response to the argument that fossil fuels are needed for development, he questioned why in many developing countries that are rich in fossil fuels, there is still so much energy poverty. 

Newell believes that there will come a time when, due to the worsening impacts of climate change, or as the initiative gains more members, even big oil and gas nations might want to join the FFNPT. 

“The challenge will be to have enough countries that want a strong version of the treaty and not the weaker version that large producers may seek to push,” he said.

Another hurdle is fighting disinformation around the initiative’s aims. “Those countries considering endorsing will want answers to tough questions about why they should join,” noted Newell. 

Complementary to UN processes

Meanwhile, discussions about what shape a treaty to phase out fossil fuels could take are gathering momentum. At a ministerial meeting in late 2024 at COP29 in Baku, the initiative’s member countries highlighted the importance of identifying a framework.

One path would be through existing UN processes, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) or the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). But there is a catch. “They are consensus-based decision-making forums,” said Cooper. “This dilutes the ambition that we are pursuing.”

And if an FFNPT were to be pursued via the UN General Assembly (UNGA), it would require a two-thirds majority of states to approve it – and likely take many years to advance.

Comment: COP30 must heed the elephant in the room: fossil fuels 

“The other pathway is a dedicated process outside the UN,” said Cooper, noting that this is what happened in the case of the Mine Ban Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. “A small group of progressive states can initiate a treaty process and start to change the norms and influence other multilateral spaces where climate change and fossil fuels can be discussed,” she added.

In that case, a connection with existing UN processes could be maintained, adopting a dual-track approach that is independent of the UN but still able to shape resolutions at the UNGA – for example, detailing countries’ needs in transitioning away from fossil fuels.

The analysis now being conducted by the FFNPT’s political and technical team will be presented to ministers of participating countries when they meet in Belem in November, so they can decide on a way forward. Building on this, the idea is to work on a diplomatic conference that would frame the issue and launch a mandate for the treaty. 

Text or no text?

While initiative is called a “treaty”, it has yet to start work on a draft text. This is partly to avoid falling prey to the arguments, pressures and blocking that small details such as a comma or a verb can provoke, as often happens in the UN climate negotiations.

Whether a text will be developed will become clearer next year, but in the meantime, the initiative is researching and advising its member countries on areas of policy that are key to progressing their energy transition – work that could form the basis of a treaty, Cooper said. 

Some of these levers were discussed at the FFNPT Research and Policy Symposium in Bonn ahead of the June negotiations. They include trade incentives and opportunities, legal and security aspects for actors involved in the transition, and financing mechanisms for a rapid and fair fossil fuel phase-out.

Funding a fossil fuel phase-out 

“The [FFNPT] treaty has to recognize that many Global South countries are in what we call a climate debt trap,” said Jwala Rambarran, independent expert and senior policy advisor for the Vulnerable Twenty Group (V20) of nations.

“They require considerable investments to finance their climate resilience – and at the same time they have limited fiscal space simply because they are highly indebted. And part of that debt arises because they have to finance the response to a climate shock.”

The challenge for the treaty is to find ways to fund a just energy transition without worsening debt further and avoiding dependence on loans as the primary form of financing. From 2016 to 2022, 90% of financing provided by multilateral development banks was in the form of loans, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“All of this is taking place within this global financial architecture that is 80 years old and was created when many of these countries did not even exist or they were part of colonial systems,” Rambarran said, pointing to the need for reform.

The idea of ​​creating a new fund for the treaty emerged from ministerial discussions. A report by the OECD noted that as of 2022, more than 94 green climate funds had been set up, with 81 of them active, but their financial contribution accounted for less than 1% of global climate finance flows. So why create yet another?

That is being explored as part of the FFNPT discussions, said Rambarran, alongside issues such as: who would provide the money, who would be able to access the fund, would finance be provided as loans or grants, and would it be filled by donor countries or a tax on fossil fuels?

“I think it is good that the treaty is examining those questions and looking at the different types of mechanisms,” he added.

The post What could a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty look like? appeared first on Climate Home News.

But this is Energy House 1, located on Joule Terrace, and it has been designed by scientists researching what Britain’s dreams of an all-electric, net zero future might look like in reality.

The house, and its successor Energy House 2, have been used to test an array of technologies – from smart meters to thermal paints – combined with detailed modelling to understand their real world implications.

As countries race to wean their economies off fossil fuels and reduce their carbon emissions to net zero by mid-century, switching to electricity in homes and transportation looks like a relatively easy win. 

Ageing gas boilers can be replaced with a heat pump to warm radiators and water tanks, for example. And millions of vehicles powered by petrol and diesel can be switched out for electric vehicles (EVs). 

Yet the extent to which that shift contributes to a green energy transition will depend on the level of renewables and other clean energy sources adopted by each country.

How can we create the net zero buildings of tomorrow?

‘Age of electricity’

Globally, power generation from solar panels and wind turbines increased at a record pace in 2024, an annual review by the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows. That was thanks to a rapid rate of new renewables installation, while nuclear power output was boosted by new projects and the restarting of reactors in France and Japan.

But electricity generation from fossil gas and coal kept growing and, overall, fossil fuels still represented 60% of the global electricity mix last year.

Soaring use of cooling technologies like air conditioning in response to extreme heat was a key factor in the growing appetite for electricity, especially in China and India, which are heavy users of coal power, the IEA said. 

Growing electricity consumption by industry, the rollout of electric vehicles and the expansion of data centres also drove power demand, it added.

Rising gas and coal use fuelled a 0.8% increase in global carbon dioxide emissions generated by the energy sector in 2024, the IEA said – but trends varied widely across regions.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, noted that “even though oil and gas will remain essential energy carriers, we hear the footsteps of the age of electricity coming”.

Governments need holistic vision

Despite this expectation of a fundamental shift in how economies are run, electrification as a goal in itself is often neglected in governments’ climate plans, according to Richard Black, director of policy and strategy at Ember, a UK-based energy think-tank.

“Electrification as a concept is something that’s only really talked about by energy analysts,” he said.

“Governments don’t think in these terms. They think about electric cars or heating, or green steel. They don’t necessarily have a holistic vision of why it makes sense to consider all these sectors together, and how you would plan your electricity system expansion alongside that,” he added.

April’s massive power outage across Spain and Portugal was a reminder of the challenges of growing dependence on electricity, as transport networks and businesses were severely disrupted. While the cause is still being investigated, there have been calls for investment in national grid infrastructure and storage to ensure increases in electricity capacity can be managed appropriately – a challenge that is not limited to the Iberian peninsula.

In the Global South, meanwhile, some 750 million people still live without access to electric power – mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the IEA. That is putting the brakes on ambitious plans to boost EV adoption on the continent, especially in remote rural areas. 

Electricity demand surges, expanding renewables and fossil fuels in 2024

Electric vehicles catch up

Despite such issues, vast strides have already been made on electrification globally, Black said, noting that researchers have dubbed China the world’s first major “electrostate”, having electrified by 10 percentage points per decade.

Crucially, the new clean industries leading the electrification charge will allow governments to meet their climate targets while offering the public the promise of economic growth and green jobs.

The boom in EVs over the last decade is a case in point.

EVs aren’t new. In the early 20th century, they were in widespread use in US cities, with up to 30,000 EVs in operation at their peak. This was followed by a short, sharp decline as cheaper and longer-range petrol cars came to dominate.

In 2010, EVs made up less than 1% of all car sales worldwide.

But by the end of 2024, global sales of EVs had reached 17 million units, an increase of 25% on the previous year, according to data firm Rho Motion. Separate figures put the total number of global car sales at 75 million during the year.

The shift to EVs has been supported by strong government incentives such as subsidies – in places such as Norway, these policies helped new EV sales reach 89% of all car sales last year.

Alongside tax exemptions, Norwegian EV drivers have in the past enjoyed perks such as access to bus lanes, free municipal parking and zero charges on toll roads.

Clear emissions targets and the threat of fines have played a role in pushing European manufacturers to go electric. Across the European Union, CO2 targets for new vehicles are coming into force in 2025, which, although recently watered down, still have the ultimate goal of reaching zero emissions by 2035. 

“The EU’s green policies are beginning to bite,” William Todts, executive director at the climate advocacy group Transport & Environment, told Climate Home. “Thanks to the switch to EVs, we are starting to see a structural decline in transport emissions.”

“Now is not the time to roll back green measures. For the continent’s prosperity and security, now is the time to double down,” he added.

Heat pump race

In the lab at the University of Salford, researchers put the Energy House through its paces by recreating the gamut of British weather conditions – from torrential rain to temperatures from minus 13 degrees Celsius (8.6 Fahrenheit) to 30C (86F).

The weather simulations allow researchers to test the effectiveness of technologies such as battery storage, heat pumps and ‘V2G’, or vehicle-to-grid, where power stored in an EV can send electricity back to the national grid in times of need.

One of their recent studies found heat pumps are successful at meeting the hot water demands of an average UK household, even under challenging winter conditions.

Many countries are betting on pumps that suck in heat from the air, ground or water to heat homes and other buildings as a way to cut their emissions. Over 40% of buildings in Sweden and Finland, for example, contain heat pumps, and North America has the largest number of homes with one.

Britain, which has lagged its European neighbours, has a target to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 – 10 times the current number of annual installations.

France has already hit over 600,000 units installed a year, and Poland, Italy and Germany have all reached similar numbers. As with EVs, the right government policies are vital to ensuring take-up, energy experts said.

“In the UK the principal problems are the relatively high costs of heat pumps and the electricity-to-gas price ratio,” said Professor Rob Gross, director at the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), calling for policies to reduce electricity prices, change how energy tariffs are structured, and cut gas dependence which often dictates prices.

High installation costs are also an obstacle. Industry estimates put the average cost at between $3,000 and $6,000, but in some markets it can be much higher, and significantly so when compared to a boiler fired by natural gas. 

Tariffs and tensions

Another potential obstacle for clean power advocates is the dramatic US climate policy shift under President Donald Trump and his import tariffs, which have sparked a trade war with China that threatens to bring in other countries too.

This disruption – especially if it leads to rising prices for clean energy equipment, a market dominated by China – could lead policymakers to think twice about the need to electrify their economies. 

At a recent global energy summit in London, a Trump administration official criticised renewables, arguing they cause power cuts and increase reliance on China.

But Black said heightened international trade tensions mean governments “should be thinking logically about energy security”.

“The only way for most countries to become totally energy secure is through renewables,” he said. “There’s no obstacle to really forging ahead with the transition.”

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK

The post Is electrification a no-brainer in the race to net-zero? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The 55th anniversary of Earth Day comes at a perilous time for the planet. The world faces a series of environmental threats unprecedented in the six decades since the event began.

From extreme weather to species decline, deforestation to water insecurity, these risks are growing in scale and severity as the planet heats up and the climate changes. 

Many of these threats are related and the need to tackle them together is widely recognised by scientists and policymakers. Increasing forest cover, for example, can support stable rainfall and reduce carbon emissions.

There are multiple examples around the world of people putting these ideas into practice. More and more communities are looking to “nature-based solutions” to tackle new threats to their livelihood and local environment.

New global fund for forests is a bold experiment in conservation finance

Restoring the land

One such story of resilience is taking place in the South Ahuachapán region of El Salvador. 

El Salvador is a small and densely populated country in Central America, equivalent to the size of the US state of New Jersey. Its small area belies a wide range of climatic conditions with droughts, floods, and soil erosion commonplace. Its two mountain ranges mean much of the agricultural land exists on slopes prone to landslides.

South Ahuachapán is a dry, coastal territory around 90 kilometres from the capital, San Salvador. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) is implementing a project in this region – financed by the Adaptation Fund – to reduce the vulnerability of local communities to climate shocks. It is seeking to achieve this through land restoration, efficient water management, and climate-smart agriculture practices.

The project has a target to restore 3,865 hectares of degraded land, in large part by introducing agroforestry techniques. This includes integrating essential crops such as maize with native tree-planting. Doing so provides shade to the crops, improves soil health, and protects against landslides.  

Food systems are the missing ingredient from the COP30 menu

“Many of the beneficiaries are smallholder farmers with limited formal education and few prior opportunities for technical training,” Ryna Ávila, a UNDP development specialist based in El Salvador, told Climate Home News.

“Through the project, they received sustained specialised technical assistance, field-based training, and direct support in the adoption of agro-ecological practices.”

She explained that communities have also been equipped with water reservoirs, soil conservation structures, and early warning capacities, which protects against climate shocks such as El Niño-induced droughts and unseasonal storms.

‘They told me I was crazy’

“I used to live on day labour. It was desolate; there was nothing on my plot. I felt depressed because I didn’t know what to do,” Ricardo García, a subsistence farmer in the San Francisco Menendez municipality, told project partners. “The drought would come, and I would lose everything.”

His plot is one which has benefited from sustainable practices – and he now cultivates 12 different crops that can withstand harsh weather conditions and offers him options should some crops fail.

“I never thought about how I was working the soil, and look where I am now. When I planted these coconuts, they told me I was crazy,” he said. 

Ávila explains that through the project, “the introduction of diversified livelihoods, such as climate-resilient crops and improved pasture systems, is reducing dependence on traditional monocultures.”

“These shifts are not only climate-smart but economically beneficial, helping families generate income while preserving ecosystem services,” she added. As a result of these interventions, the local population is becoming more prepared to face climate stresses while quality of life has improved.

Root cause

One of the main aims of the project is to promote efficient water use during times of drought, primarily through improved climate and hydrological data collection. Closely monitoring the quantity and quality of water availability – through local means and satellite data – has provided farmers with more options on how to adapt.

Data was also collected on the effectiveness of these interventions. One climate-smart technique used was drip irrigation – a method designed to drastically reduce water consumption by directly targeting a plant’s “root zone” with small amounts of water.

The results impressed Mevin Pérez, a local farmer in the area. “We have irrigation systems that help us maintain water and give life to the plants,” he told UNDP.

“As a family, we feel grateful because we all work to take care of the plants. It used to be difficult for us to fetch water; now we no longer spend half an hour fetching a jug of water,” he added.

Increasing local knowledge of these techniques – and the data sitting behind it – was seen by project managers as crucial to building climate resilience.

Paying dividends

Over 30,000 people living in rural San Francisco Menendez could benefit from conservation techniques which work with nature instead of against it.

The project – now in its final stages – could have a lasting impact in the region and provide a model for other parts of El Salvador experiencing climate stress. Researchers believe examples like this could be replicated on a much wider scale, providing useful data on how to implement nature-based solutions in agricultural settings elsewhere in the world. And these themes are expected to be discussed and promoted at the UN climate conference – COP30 – in Belem, Brazil later this year.  

2025 is the year to invest in forests – and the people who depend on them 

“The model of ecosystem-based adaptation paired with livelihood diversification offers a replicable strategy for other regions facing climate-related risks,” said Ávila.

“The project has shown that restoring degraded landscapes, when combined with empowerment, training, and inclusive partnerships, can yield durable resilience – especially for those most often left behind in climate action,” she added.

The answer seems simple enough: use nature to tackle nature gone haywire. If climate and nature are seen as two sides of the same coin, then using forests and water systems as a defense strategy against global warming could well pay dividends for the Earth and the people whose well-being depends on it.

The post Giving nature breathing room builds climate resilience appeared first on Climate Home News.

These moves have raised questions about whether China will seize the opportunity to step up its global leadership on clean energy and align more closely with other supporters of the international climate regime. 

Climate Home spoke to China specialist Rebecca Nadin about what Trump’s offensive on trade and the green transition could mean for relations between the world’s two biggest carbon emitters and for China’s climate policies.

Nadin is the director of the global risks and resilience team at ODI Global, a London-based think tank. She previously worked in China, advising the government on adaptation to climate change. Before that, she worked in the British Embassy in Beijing, specialising in Japan-China relations, Central Asia and energy security.

Climate Home: How might Trump’s abandonment of US and international climate action and efforts to use trade as a bargaining chip affect China’s climate policy? 

Nadin: It won’t change too much. China will do what China’s doing. The climate community is calling on China to step up now and be this global leader – but its climate trajectory will always depend on how economically and domestically advantageous that is to China.

Donald Trump has pitched himself as “the tariffs guy” and you might think he would want to crush China’s dominant renewables sector. But Biden also put tariffs on the Chinese solar industry – so, in reality, that’s not such a shift.

Similarly, the Biden administration promoted mining of minerals needed for the energy transition in places like Zambia. Even if Trump doesn’t give a damn about the energy transition, a lot of these minerals are useful for the military or information technology, so this policy won’t change too much.

Electricity demand surges, expanding renewables and fossil fuels in 2024

China set out very clearly in its 14th five-year plan that it wants to dominate renewable energy. In 2023, it accounted for 65% of global wind capacity, and it also dominates the production and building of ships that are needed to transport offshore wind [equipment]. And it dominates the supply chain of a lot of those minerals that are needed for renewable tech.

It’s just announced a big investment, for example, in Kazakhstan in wind. So it is going to carry on doing that because, actually, I think the US market for China is relatively small. Most of China’s renewable tech focus is pretty much Southeast Asia – it’s regional.

Then this month, in what some are interpreting as a step to take on the mantle of global climate leadership, Chinese Premier Li Qiang noted that China would “actively engage in, and steer global environmental and climate governance”.

This is a welcome sign, but don’t expect any shift in terms of finance beyond what was agreed at COP29, where China agreed to a formula for the new finance goal for climate-vulnerable countries that would allow its contributions to be counted on a voluntary basis. China will continue to remind the world that it is willing, though not obliged, to help developing countries enhance their adaptability through South-South cooperation.

Q: How would you interpret the latest government announcements on China’s energy and economic policies – do they show that Beijing is serious about keeping up momentum towards its climate goals? 

A: In December 2024, the state-owned oil refiner Sinopec announced that China’s oil consumption would peak in 2027. That’s quite a big statement! This is as demand for new energy vehicles, which don’t need oil, is soaring in China. On the other hand, they predict that demand for oil for jet and ship fuel will increase.

The other thing that struck me recently was from the Central Economic Work Conference. It’s one of the most important meetings of the Politburo that effectively sets China’s economic priorities and strategies. In 2024, there was not much mention of climate issues there, as it was all recovery from COVID-19 and the economic downturn, but this year you saw a real focus on the need to “advance China’s green low-carbon transition”. 

What Trump got wrong on China, coal and climate 

And just this month Premier Li stressed that China would continue to move towards peaking carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality with an acceleration of the integration of renewable energy into local grids and the construction of transmission routes. He also addressed the “coal conundrum” by indicating that China is going to launch low-carbon upgrade pilots for some of its coal-fired power plants.

With China, you have to be very pragmatic. In some areas, China’s doing good stuff. In others, it’s not. People put it in this area of “you’re a hawk or a dove” – and that’s just not a good way of understanding it.

Q: For example, China recently announced a package of major clean energy projects in a bid to peak emissions by 2030 and become carbon-neutral by 2060 – but it also plans to keep increasing coal production too. What explains these seeming contradictions? 

A: China is exposed to huge climate change risk – and it knows that. It also wants to keep benefiting from its world-leading renewable and green technology industries and, as an energy security-poor nation, to develop domestic renewable energy.

On the other hand, coal is still a primary energy source for China and that is because these energy sectors are still big employers in the poorest parts of the country – the industrial heartlands. Like other countries, China has to balance that just transition [away from coal] as well.

There is a stark realisation in China that the coal industry and the heavy polluting industries are big employers and that these individual provinces need to be supported in a transition away from that. These provinces can be huge – some have more than 100 million people – so it’s difficult. It’s like transitioning several countries.

This Australian coal community is co-designing its own green future

But [the Chinese authorities] have always understood the socio-economic benefits of addressing climate change. Even in the 1990s, climate policy was moved from the China Meteorological Administration to the predecessor of the National Development and Reform Commission. That showed they saw it not just as an environmental issue but as an issue of socio-economic development.

Q: China’s National Development and Reform Commission recently proposed a huge hydropower dam on the Tibetan plateau. What will be the implications of that – and is it a positive move?

A: The Tibetan Plateau is basically the Third Pole. It’s like the water tower of Asia – you’ve got all these major rivers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya basin. Putting a dam up in the Yarlung Tsangpo River would allow China to effectively control the lower riparian countries – India, Bangladesh – which originate rivers in the Brahmaputra. This could be really, really serious. 

The engineering that’s required to build this dam is phenomenal because they’re effectively going to have to tunnel through the mountain, and this gorge is something like 3,000 metres deep. So what they’re expecting is that with the power of the water dropping through this gorge, the power production would be two or three times that of the Three Gorges Dam.

In a major reversal, the World Bank is backing mega dams

As the climate community, we need to also think a little bit about some of the trade-offs. China will meet its renewable energy targets with this dam, but then potentially you’ve got a massive issue with water flow into Bangladesh, India, Laos and all those countries. And the sediment – this is what happened with the Three Gorges [in the 1950s] – they dammed the Yellow River and all the sediment was trapped behind the dam. Then they had to release it. This basically messes up the soil (and) the nutrients. So you solve one problem, but you create another.

The post Q&A: China set to stay the course on green policies, despite Trump    appeared first on Climate Home News.

If the world is to start reducing emissions and reach net zero in the second half of the century, as promised under the Paris climate agreement in 2015, we need to know exactly where those emissions are coming from. Crunching the data offers up estimates of which sectors release the most greenhouse gases – but this is a far harder task at the corporate level.

There are the major fossil fuel firms, both state-run and private – such as Shell, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil or Coal India – which we know play an outsized role. But according to the World Bank, 90% of global businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises.

Understanding their environmental impact – and how they contribute to the emissions of larger companies further up the value chain – is complex but essential if climate action goals set by both governments and the private sector are to be met, experts say.

While businesses have long been aware of the need to curb their emissions, the process of collecting data on their supply chains, and knowing what to do with it, can serve as a barrier to action. And without regulation to make companies set and meet targets to reduce their carbon pollution, monitoring and analysing emissions has so far been a voluntary effort.

Problem with a wide scope

The first attempt to properly account for company-level emissions started almost 25 years ago with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Its corporate standard was developed in 2001 in response to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on limiting the emissions of wealthy countries, and covered reporting of the seven greenhouse gases covered by that agreement.

The GHG Protocol was formed by two non-profit organisations: the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Its work has become a standard bearer in the field of carbon accounting, with its guidance used by thousands of corporations, and updates to its rules closely followed.

The protocol’s lasting contribution was to create the concept of ‘scopes’, which separate a company’s emissions into three distinct categories. Scope 1 covers all emissions from direct sources a company owns or controls. Scope 2 is indirect emissions from purchasing energy. Scope 3 emissions are all other indirect emissions within a company’s supply chain.

Comment: SBTi needs tighter rules on companies’ indirect emissions

Defining Scope 3 – and how to adequately account for and offset those emissions – has proved a difficult task. These emissions can include everything from business travel to a company’s financial investments. The GHG protocol has 15 separate categories on Scope 3 emissions, reflecting the wide range of where they might be found.

These categories are themselves divided into ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’; for example, upstream could include the use of any vehicle a company doesn’t own but is in the service of its business. Downstream can cover activities such as how products are treated at the end of their life.

“Scope 3 has proven to be one of the most challenging topics to be addressed among the business community,” said Ramiro Fernandez, campaign director at Race to Zero, a UN-backed climate campaign. “For years the climate business community has been developing methodologies and metric frameworks to account for the emissions of companies’ value chains.”

The knottiness of the issue means that many companies are reluctant to engage with tackling this category of emissions. A 2024 survey of 300 large public companies by consultancy firm Deloitte found that while three-quarters disclose their Scope 1 emissions, and around half Scope 2, the figure falls dramatically to 15% for Scope 3.

Threat to 1.5C goal

Sustainability experts warn that ignoring Scope 3 emissions is self-defeating and puts at risk the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial times, given that an estimated 75% of the average company’s emissions fall into that category, according to CDP, a non-profit that helps businesses disclose their environmental impact.

“If we fail to address Scope 3, corporate net-zero pledges cannot be achieved,” said Sanda Ojiambo, CEO and executive director of the UN Global Compact, a voluntary initiative supporting sustainability in business.

“Most business-related emissions come from Scope 3, which means neglecting them keeps us on a dangerous path to exceeding 1.5C [of global warming],” she added.

The Science Based Targets initiative, originally set up to ensure that corporate climate plans are in line with the Paris Agreement, has approved 7,000 targets over the past 10 years. Notably, the initiative requires all companies to include Scope 3 emissions in their long-term emissions reduction targets.

Ojiambo told Climate Home the UN Global Compact is working with thousands of businesses to ensure that Scope 3 emissions are “no longer an afterthought but a core pillar of corporate climate strategies”.

Comment: SBTi’s rigid emissions rules don’t reflect business reality

In tech we trust

The thorny challenge of reducing Scope 3 emissions has given rise to a host of solutions aimed at making it easier. Ways to tackle the problem include engaging with suppliers, investing in data collection and using technology to track emissions across the whole life cycle of products.

German software company SAP, for example, is attempting to integrate carbon data with financial data to create a “green ledger”. This system assigns carbon emissions to a company’s transactions, with a dashboard showing the impact of greenhouse gas intensity on operating income, gross margin and net revenue. The hope is that this process will generate real-world numbers rather than relying on estimates, as most businesses do today.

James Sullivan, global head of product management at SAP Sustainability, said the software will “change business practice… to accurately account for, analyse and report carbon footprints”. The ledger is the latest in a range of data-driven services the company and its peers are putting into the market to help businesses wrestle with emissions that are beyond their immediate control.

Locating accurate data on all Scope 3 emissions – and then calculating how they have reduced over time – can seem like a Herculean task. Where data gaps exist, the GHG Protocol advises using secondary data based on industry averages, government statistics, or public databases that are representative of a company’s activities. But using such generic data at scale may not provide an accurate picture of emissions or the impact of corporate action to stem them.

Sullivan believes that better data is key to solving the Scope 3 puzzle. “A major advancement is the widespread understanding that managing Scope 3 emissions requires high-quality data and transparency into supply chains,” he said. “It is crucial for businesses to integrate sustainability data into core business processes.”

Getting ahead of competitors

Companies like SAP are confident their technological solutions are having a tangible impact on that front. Sullivan pointed to one of its customers, Martur Fompak International, a Turkish supplier of seats for the automotive sector. As a result of using SAP’s technology, Sullivan said the company has reported a 52% reduction in transportation-related carbon emissions and a 34% decrease in emissions linked to its automotive seats.

Martur Fompak achieved this, in part, through tracking emissions across its products’ entire lifecycle, from where the materials were sourced to where they were sent and used. The software analysed the carbon footprint of different fabrics and suggested lower-impact alternatives. It also provided real-time monitoring of the company’s energy consumption at more than 600 work centres, and created new delivery routes for its drivers.

Ojiambo noted that many large companies are making emissions reductions a condition of doing business with them and weaving such criteria into their procurement contracts. This could give suppliers like Martur Fompak a major incentive to lower their emissions in order to gain a competitive edge.

“Suppliers are feeling the pressure, but the smartest ones see this as an opportunity rather than a burden,” she added.

Business contribution to NDCs

The current global political climate has made sustainability concerns a convenient punchbag, with US President Donald Trump’s anti-green agenda already encouraging many companies to scale back their environmental ambitions. Across the Atlantic, the European Commission is planning to water down a package of sustainability rules originally intended to be world-leading.

The mood music is not exactly positive. According to the Financial Times, some participants at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos reported that ambition around tackling Scope 3 emissions was “crumbling” among business executives.

This comes at a time of record heat and more frequent extreme weather events, when scientists are concerned at the pace of change in the Earth’s climate and its effects. To tackle this, countries are due to submit stronger national climate plans by September, including emissions reduction targets for 2035, as required by the Paris Agreement.

These plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), are a clear example of where businesses could play a bigger role in supporting government efforts to fight climate change but currently lack the capacity, partly due to a lack of data and other resources.

How can corporates ‘course correct’ on climate?

Tom Cumberlege, a director at The Carbon Trust, who leads the consultancy’s work on value chain analysis and strategy, said NDCs that are able to leverage both public and private funding for implementation “could be a win-win” for governments and businesses.

“It can reduce the risk of investing in projects – such as energy efficiency improvements or renewable assets in the supply chain – and contribute to effective emissions reductions at a national level,” he explained.

Achieving NDC targets will require businesses to align their own climate action plans with those of governments and their suppliers. “Companies have an increasingly important role to play in engaging and supporting their own value chain to be part of the contribution [to NDCs],” said Fernandez of Race to Zero.

“Transitioning to net zero requires a whole of society approach,” he added. “Even with all the uncertainties and lack of clarity, companies have to reduce their Scope 3 emissions if we want to have any chance of remaining within the 1.5C threshold.”

The post Neglecting ‘Scope 3’ emissions could sink corporate climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate change has a habit of exploiting weaknesses. Existing problems are made worse and new ones are created in its wake.

How the climate crisis unequally impacts women is well-documented – but no less shocking. According to the UN, women and girls are estimated to make up around 80% of the people displaced due to climate change. This often forces them into extreme poverty and a heightened threat of violence.

Researchers attribute this disparity to a range of factors. Women are typically among the majority of the world’s poor, with fewer decision-making powers and a greater reliance on their country’s natural resources for survival. The crisis brings deeply entrenched inequalities to the surface and makes them hard to ignore. 

This year’s International Women’s Day takes up the issue with the theme of “For All Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment”.

Many women in Peru, for example, are experiencing these inequalities firsthand as climate change forces them to adapt.

But they aren’t alone in the effort. Profonanpe, the Peruvian environmental fund, was established in 1992, and is at the forefront of conserving the country’s globally significant biodiversity.

As part of this work, the fund empowers women to take a central role in their future, by moving into new roles in their communities, and contributing vital local knowledge to adaptation responses.

Business leaders

Profonanpe is spearheading two climate projects, financed by the Adaptation Fund, and women’s rights are a main priority throughout. One of these initiatives, located in the Andes, is about to get underway, while another on the coast has recently reached completion.

Both present different challenges. In the mountains, women often participate in the same activities as men. The new project will increase adaptive capacity and reduce the vulnerability of forests, grasslands and wetlands using an inclusive approach that combines ecosystem monitoring and resilience-building.

A tale of two women: What climate vulnerability actually looks like

Along the coast it is uncommon to find women who work on fishing boats, but they play a crucial role in processing and marketing the day’s catch. Acknowledging this fact and finding alternative lines of work was a key consideration.

Peru’s significant fishing industry accounts for an estimated 10% of all fish captured around the world, but as fish stocks plummet, local communities need to diversify fast. Profonanpe’s approach was to help women create their own community associations, and run their own businesses.

New industries popped up using fish waste as a biofertiliser, aquaponic plants were created to cultivate fish stocks, and eco-tourism was promoted in marine protected areas.

José Zavala, a general coordinator on the project, explained: “The work of women within the productive chain of artisanal fishing was invisible for a long time. That is why it was decided, in a participatory way, to include activities exclusively for them and that would adapt to their way of life.”

Gloria Tarazona, president of the Women’s Association of Aquaponics in Huacho, said many women in Peru – particularly mothers of young children – can’t get paid work because they have to take care of their family. The project changes this dynamic by allowing them to join part-time with manageable schedules. “We are generating food and jobs for many people,” Tarazona said.

“The food is natural and organic, and little by little with climate change and pollution these products are becoming more necessary. The positive change that I’ve seen in all the women of the project is that they like what they have learned. I always tell them they have to continue forward because this is a project of the future,” Tarazona added.

Inspiring change

Claudia Godfrey, Profonanpe’s director of innovation and strategic management, told Climate Home how women’s stories from the project are a strong motivator. 

“Daughters have seen the change in their mothers, and felt inspired. They realise that their mothers can be leaders and entrepreneurs,” she said.

“Seeing younger generations inspired by their mothers reminds us how important it is to include women in climate adaptation.”

Strong gender policies, including setting high targets for female leadership on projects, have helped embed women’s rights in other organisations. These policies ensure fewer women are overlooked for leadership positions.  

The Adaptation Fund’s own social and gender policies are aimed at empowering women and marginalised groups. They do this by providing equitable access to resources and livelihoods, and inclusive decision-making.

Sustainable fishing offers lifeline to communities hit by climate crisis

“It’s moving to see how women have grown in confidence and recognition within their communities. Many of them have told us that they now have a voice in decision-making and how their lives have changed. Not just economically, but socially,” Godfrey added.

She added that climate change is increasing awareness of women’s roles and pushing them to have a stronger voice on the issue. The crisis has been a catalyst for changing how women within the environmental sector are viewed.

“In Peru, there has been great progress in recognising women’s role in environmental management. But there is still a lot to do,” Godfrey said.

Tracking progress

Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund (AF), said the fund’s gender policies and monitoring approaches are continually being enhanced.

“For me, this resonates deeply with the fund’s ongoing efforts to promote gender equality and empower women and girls.”

“Women are a vulnerable group at risk of being overlooked in the design and implementation of adaptation projects. We need to actively ensure that women’s specific adaptation needs are duly considered. This in turn improves adaptation work on the ground,” he added.

“Lessons learned about considering the needs of women and girls will help us address the needs of other vulnerable groups.”

“We are continuously tracking progress on our gender work. We will continue to increase gender responsiveness so no one is left behind.”

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Advancing women’s rights and empowerment in climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

In recent years, fresh conflicts have erupted across the globe with alarming regularity, coinciding with a decade of record high temperatures.

While the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East tend to receive the bulk of global attention, there are many other conflicts that are equally severe and protracted. According to analysis from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, 59 conflicts were recorded in 2023, the highest number since the end of the Second World War.

Many people would assume that climate adaptation takes a back seat when confronted with conflict. But new research from the Adaptation Fund provides insights and firsthand experience of successful projects operating within fragile states and conflict-affected countries.

The fund has invested $1.2 billion across 180 projects around the world – and so it’s to be expected that some of these would fall within areas of potential conflict. A number of projects are within countries, such as Mali, where wars have raged for years, while others are in places where sporadic and unpredictable violence can suddenly break out.

Still others are in especially fragile areas, such as the Volta Basin in West Africa, which is highly vulnerable to devastating floods and droughts. Knowing how to quickly respond and adapt is crucial within these different contexts, researchers found.

The study highlights a number of key factors for improving the outcomes of projects in conflict zones: strengthening institutions, ensuring local ownership of finance, allowing for flexibility on climate funding, building strong partnerships and close monitoring are all seen as critical.

Cross-border climate risks can’t be solved in isolation

Climate change is exacerbating instability by weakening institutions, displacing communities and increasing tensions over available food and water. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change drew attention to this in its 2022 climate science report, stating “there is increasing evidence linking increased temperatures and drought to conflict risk in Africa.”

Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund, commented last year that conflict-affected countries are “among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and their needs for external assistance are high”.

He added that the fund’s research “reinforces the importance of strengthening institutions in fragile settings to deliver climate finance effectively, and building strong partnerships between governments, civil society and the private sector to ensure proper funding”.

Water conservation in Ethiopia

One case study that demonstrates these complexities is a climate-smart agriculture project in Ethiopia. The $10-million initiative took place between 2017 and 2022, and was designed to increase resilience across seven ‘woredas’ (districts), vulnerable to drought. 

These districts included areas both designated as arid and semi-arid, owing to the predominance of drylands throughout the country. This can make farming difficult as crop production is largely dependent on varying levels of rainfall. An estimated 8 million households in the country earn a living through small-scale subsistence farming, and the practice is of critical importance to overall food supplies.

One of the districts involved in the project was Tigray, an area in the northernmost reaches of Ethiopia, and at the time the site of intense fighting between the government and a paramilitary group called the Tigray Defense Forces.

Can climate funders overcome fear to tread in conflict zones?

The outbreak of conflict meant that planned infrastructure development in the region was delayed and staff were unable to assess sites. Therefore, the project focused on strengthening institutional capacity and increasing local awareness and ownership over adaptation activities in other districts.

One of the long-term benefits was the successful engagement of local communities to provide common training on using new water facilities. According to researchers, water stress was reduced in affected communities as an underground source of drinking water was provided and local training given to ensure its maintenance.

Over 15,000 households benefited from access to safe drinking water, and a further 8,500 farmers were trained in irrigation agriculture. In addition, 3,300 hectares of degraded land were restored using soil and water conservation techniques, such as constructing shallow wells, small dams and hillside terraces to prevent water runoff.

The impact of these interventions was to reduce conflict in parts of the country where climate change is fuelling tensions over the availability of freshwater.

Cristina Dengel, the Adaptation Fund’s knowledge management officer, who coordinated the study, said: “The water facilities helped to drastically limit the conflict between crop farmers and livestock herders at the local level. Even if anecdotal, it shows the potential of climate adaptation projects to have a positive impact in reducing conflict and fragility.”

This success has been used as a template for a much larger project funded by Green Climate Fund which could reach ten times as many districts.

Building trust

Working in conflict-affected countries means having a different mindset about what can be achieved. In Ethiopia, the security situation in Tigray meant it wasn’t possible to operate in the region. As such, attention turned to the other districts involved in the project and how to ensure the best possible outcomes – and reduce further conflict – for people on the ground. 

Speaking at a COP29 event on adaptation in conflict areas co-organised by the Adaptation Fund and the Global Environment Facility, Srilata Kammila, head of climate change adaptation at the United Nations Development Programme, said working in fragile states is complex for a host of reasons.

Not only are institutions weaker to implement projects over the long-term, but there is also often discord between communities and the government. “The people in these situations have been affected with lack of trust in the government and other entities coming from outside. Building that trust and engaging communities becomes a critical part and entry point of designing adaptation projects,” said Kammila. 

Record-hot 2024 shows world must adapt to extremes, says EU climate service

Researchers found that in the case of Ethiopia, and others like it, having flexibility to adapt to a rapidly evolving situation is critical, together with community ownership over how projects are designed and implemented. This is easier said than done while in a conflict zone, but it at least provides better odds for success.

Ollikainen told Climate Home he hoped lessons learned in Ethiopia and the other case studies analysed will be applied elsewhere as conflicts continue to put pressure on local populations struggling with worsening climate extremes.

“We know that people need our help and it’s our responsibility to ensure financing is there to support them,“ he said. “As the climate crisis intensifies, we need to be prepared to work in conflict zones and let communities know we aren’t going to abandon them.”

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Renewed global violence puts pressure on climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

There are an estimated 200-300 million pastoralists – livestock herders – who provide the continent with 75% of its milk and half of its meat. In some countries, the trade can make up more than one-third of GDP.

It might seem surprising then that this vital sector doesn’t have a stronger political voice and that its concerns are not a major priority for many governments. Yet it has long been the case that nomadic groups of herders are likely to be marginalised more than other food producers – or even ignored. 

The centuries-old practice of pastoralism now faces a constellation of threats that are pushing some communities permanently out of business. In some places, the long-term viability of pastoralism is at risk, buffeted by multiple, overlapping factors – both related to climate change, and unconnected to it.

Conflict concerns

Pastoralists make a living by raising animals – including goats, cattle and sheep – and move with their herds across vast distances between seasons. Historically, they have enjoyed a resilient and adaptive lifestyle, allowing them to travel where the weather and grazing conditions are most favourable and avoiding disease and potential disasters. 

The practice also has environmental benefits – periodic grazing improves soil health and prevents the land and vegetation from becoming degraded while improving biodiversity.

The problem facing pastoralists today is that their livelihood has come into direct competition with a range of public and private interests. More and more land traditionally used by herders is being given over to other uses: large-scale commercial farming, mining or energy operations, urbanisation and even conservation areas. 

Cross-border climate risks can’t be solved in isolation

These are often the economic priorities of national governments, which see them as more productive, and so hand farmers and companies stronger rights to manage the land. This puts them in conflict with pastoralists who are forced to graze their livestock on someone else’s land – in some cases leading to violence. 

Thousands of deaths have been reported in West and Central Africa over the past decade as a result of this kind of conflict. Clashes are particularly prominent in Nigeria, Mali and Burkina Faso, where tensions cross ethnic, religious and social lines. 

In Nigeria – home to some of the worst fighting – state governments have enacted controversial anti-grazing laws which they claim are designed to prevent further fatalities. Pastoralist groups have pushed back, arguing that the legal restrictions reflect a longstanding bias against nomadic herders and will make it even harder for them to earn a living.

Despite agreements to allow the free movement of herders, some countries in West Africa have closed their borders, citing the prevalence of livestock disease. With smaller areas of land to graze on and migratory routes closed off, pastoralists are being boxed into a corner.

Climate risk

Climate change serves to pile on the pressure. Persistent drought, more intense rainfall and extreme temperatures are creating difficult conditions for pastoralists. Many animals die on long treks with little water and less productive lands to graze on.

This creates the conditions for conflict with settled farmers – but on the ground, the situation is more complicated, experts say. Camille Laville, a research fellow at ODI Global, a London-based think tank, told Climate Home: “There is an oversimplification in our understanding between herder-farmer conflicts and the role of climate change.”

“We can start this discussion with the climate, but we can also start it with years of political changes, ethnic differences, religious differences. There are many ways to frame this subject and the climate is just one of them,” she added. 

Aid agencies grapple with climate adaptation in fragile states

Climate change creates harsher conditions and increased vulnerabilities, but existing social and political factors weigh heavily on herders’ livelihoods.

Fiona Flintan, a senior scientist at the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), said “climate change may not be the biggest problem that pastoralists face”. 

Among the many different users of land, pastoralists “as ‘masters’ (and ‘mistresses’) of adaptation can be the most resilient and skilled at adapting to climate change”, she added. But trouble can start to mount up when they aren’t given the right kind of support.

Flintan sees land security as the main gap for pastoralists. “If they have guaranteed security to their land and resources, they will be better positioned to deal with shocks and stresses,” she explained. “And more than that, pastoralists will then be willing to invest in their land to support biodiversity, soil health, and emissions reduction. It will resolve a lot of challenges.”

Yet, in many parts of Africa, obtaining secure access to the land is a complex process, and some national governments are more willing to recognise land rights than others. 

Kenya’s Community Land Act, for example, offers pastoralists a route to seeing their land claims recognised and their rights protected. But the challenge in places like Kenya or Ethiopia – which has also adopted a Pastoral Development Policy – is defining in a legal context the unwritten customs and traditions of many different pastoral communities.  

As Flintan notes, governments often lack resources and sometimes the technical expertise to prioritise land use strategies. “It’s about having proper planning and governance, supported by a skilled team and adequate funds in place to ensure it happens,” she said.

Greener pastures

Getting to the root cause of the challenges facing pastoralists could mean missing the urgency of more immediate problems, while difficulty in trying to untangle all of the interwoven factors could slow progress. 

This complexity leads some researchers, such as Laville, to call for more practical responses, while accepting that there isn’t a perfect answer. “If we wait to fully understand this issue, we will never have sufficient time for action,” she said.

Some experts point to the need to raise the profile of pastoralists both within countries and on the international stage. The latest COP summit of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification is taking place in Saudi Arabia this month – reportedly the largest UN land-focused conference to date. 

Can climate funders overcome fear to tread in conflict zones?

Marginalised groups often lack a voice at UN talks – and while pastoralist civil society organisations will be in Riyadh, they need a stronger presence at the negotiating table in order to be able to influence what is decided there, experts say. 

“We are getting better at listening to herders, but we need to be cautious not to bring our own preconceptions to the discussion,” said Laville, commenting on the UN COP process. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to this problem.”

Scientists have argued for some time now that UN member states could benefit from pastoralists’ expertise in tackling emerging threats including biodiversity loss and global warming. Being open to learning from those who know the land intimately and how it is changing could pay practical dividends, they say.

Pastoralism is a livelihood that has lasted for generations and weathered many storms. The first step for any government is recognising the significant economic and environmental contributions it makes, researchers told Climate Home.

“It’s not a job; it’s a cultural identity. This doesn’t get eradicated by droughts or government policy,” added Flintan.

Sponsored by SPARC (Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises).

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK. 

The post The world is getting smaller for pastoralists facing multiple threats appeared first on Climate Home News.

This is the final scheduled round of negotiations for a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty, promised by world leaders two years ago in a historic commitment to ending the crisis of plastic pollution across its lifecycle – including production, design and disposal.

But after four rounds of meetings, in which a small number of fossil fuel-rich countries dug in their heels to delay progress and water down ambition, it is still all to play for in Busan.

State of play on plastic production

On the eve of the negotiations, 1,500 activists marched in Busan and civil society groups delivered a petition of almost three million signatures, demanding a strong treaty that includes plastic production reduction measures.

They are particularly worried because a central point of contention among delegates is whether the treaty should regulate plastic production at all.

“It’s the elephant in the room,” said Swathi Seshadri, oil and gas lead at India’s Centre for Financial Accountability. “The petro-states and petrochemical-producing countries are pushing to keep the ambition low, but a majority of countries do want a strong treaty with upstream measures, including regulating polymer production and chemicals of concern.”

While it is the important ‘downstream’ harms of plastic waste that predominate in the public imagination – marine life choked by packaging, microplastics in human placenta and so on – the production of plastic contributes directly to planetary warming and harms human and environmental health.

Environmental Investigation Agency campaigner Jacob Kean-Hammerson explained: “The pollution doesn’t start when plastic misses a bin on the street. As soon as we start to produce plastic, toxic chemicals leak into the environment, causing harm to frontline communities.”

Primary plastic polymers – the building blocks of any plastic product – are made from fossil fuels through energy-intensive refinement processes, and hazardous chemicals are often added to make the materials more flexible or resilient.

“Moment of truth” for plastic pollution as treaty talks get underway

The $712-billion plastic industry is set to double or triple by 2050, which would see plastic production account for up to 31% of the remaining global carbon budget for staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

Campaigners want mandatory targets to cap and dramatically reduce virgin plastic production, eliminate single-use plastics, and ban toxic chemicals in all virgin and recycled plastics.

‘Get out of jail free’ card for fossil fuels

Griffins Ochieng, of the Centre for Environmental Justice and Development, told Climate Home: “The controls must be global, obligatory and measurable to be meaningful, otherwise countries in the Global South –  that are not major producers of these polymers or chemicals – just have no way they can control what is happening in other places.”

However, some major fossil fuel-producing countries – like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, as well as an ever-increasing number of industry lobbyists – are pushing to exclude plastic production from the treaty altogether.

Kean-Hammerson explained: “Plastics are seen as a ‘get out of jail free card’ for the fossil fuel industry, because they can increase demand for their products even as we take action to reduce demand in the energy sector.”

According to Melissa Blue Sky, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, petro-states’ efforts to obstruct the negotiations extend from the content of the treaty to the procedural elements of the meetings.

Rather than looking to resolve particularly divisive issues through voting, some low-ambition countries have pushed for a consensus-based decision-making approach instead, which would effectively give every country veto power over the treaty text.

As a result, Blue Sky explained, nothing has been finalised in the “non-paper” – a draft treaty text prepared by the meeting’s Chair as a jumping-off point for negotiations – and it lacks any suggested language on plastic production.

“It is highly unusual to be in the final scheduled negotiating meeting and have no agreed text,” Blue Sky added. “This is not a normal situation,” she said, reflecting that “there are extremely far apart visions of what this treaty could be and do.”

Non-toxic reuse and refill 

In addition to capping plastic production, environmentalists say a strong treaty should also include legally binding, time-bound targets to scale up non-toxic reuse and refill solutions, accelerating a transition away from single-use plastic.

This could include policies that incentivise a shift to reuse systems, such as single-use plastic bans, and rejecting “false solutions” – techno-fixes that perpetuate business as usual, like waste-to-energy (WTE), whereby plastics are burned to generate power, producing highly toxic ash.

The fact that polluting technologies like WTE have been rejected in the Global North but are widespread in the Global South is “the nature of colonialism today”, CFA’s Seshadri pointed out.

A strong treaty would also look to eliminate waste colonialism, a practice by which higher-income countries offload waste to lower-income countries, where its disposal harms human health and the environment.

Environmental justice

A just transition for workers and communities along the plastics supply chain also needs to be at the core of a strong treaty, green groups argue.

This must include formally recognising waste pickers, who often work in unsafe conditions, and supporting frontline communities suffering from the toxic impacts of plastic production and disposal.

Jo Banner, co-founder of the racial and environmental justice organisation The Descendants Project, lives in one such community: Wallace, a town in the U.S. State of Louisiana, which was established by her ancestors and their peers who had been emancipated from slavery on nearby sugar plantations.

Wallace lies along an 85-mile stretch of land nicknamed ‘Cancer Alley’, where communities live beside some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations – the starting points of plastic production – and suffer some of the highest rates of cancer and other illnesses in the country.

“We’ve been sacrificed for this,” said Banner. “It’s us who have to live on the fenceline of this pollution, in the same way we lived on the fenceline of the plantation.”

“This is not just about disposable products. It’s about disposable people. And when we stop looking at people as being disposable, that’s when we will see real change,” she said.

How a local victory against petrochemicals can spur global action on plastics

Finance for implementation

If delegates do leave Busan with an ambitious, binding and measurable roadmap to reduce plastic pollution, countries will need money to implement it.

How will those funds be delivered – and who will pay?

Campaigners are calling for a ‘polluter pays’ mechanism, where plastic producers would pay a levy on each tonne produced.

However, Kean-Hammerson warned that innovative private finance mechanisms must not come at the cost of public funding.

“[The] Polluter pays [principle] is often thought about in terms of companies – they are the ones putting the polymer and the plastics on the market,” he said.

But donor countries in the Global North should also dig into their pockets, he said, not just to show solidarity on a global issue, but also in recognition of the fact that they export a lot of waste to the Global South and have high levels of production and consumption onshore too.

As the talks continue in Busan, civil society is unwavering in calling for an ambitious, legally binding treaty. The outcome will hinge on whether high ambition countries are prepared to follow through on their public commitment to address the global plastic crisis – and bring others along with them.

Sponsored by Break Free From Plastic. See our supporters page for what this means. 

Daisy Clague is a freelance journalist based in London, UK. 

The post Production curbs needed for strong global pact on plastic pollution, campaigners say appeared first on Climate Home News.

The deal – the fund’s first sizeable help for a single conflict-affected state – is an early example of the kind of investment climate finance experts say needs to be rapidly expanded as many of the world’s most vulnerable countries face the crushing double pressures of conflict and climate impacts.  

At COP28 in Dubai last year, more than 100 countries, banks and other organisations called for “collective action to build climate resilience at the scale and speed required in highly vulnerable countries and communities, particularly those threatened or affected by fragility or conflict”.

On Friday, as the COP29 climate summit in Baku reached its halfway point, a handful of fragile countries – including Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Chad and Burundi – launched a “Network of Climate-vulnerable Countries Affected by Conflict or High Levels of Humanitarian Needs”, aimed at scaling up the climate finance they say has been lacking. 

“There is a blind spot in climate funding which is preventing the world’s most vulnerable people from receiving the support they desperately need. Our message to all countries is clear: we can no longer afford to ignore this,” said Yemen’s environment minister Tawfiq al-Sharjabi, speaking at a COP event. 

Aid agencies grapple with climate adaptation in fragile states

With climate shocks growing in scale and number, “climate change is a matter of survival for Somalia,” the country’s environment minister Khadija Mohamed Al-Makhzoumi said in October as the new Green Climate Fund (GCF) package was announced. 

But persuading the GCF to take a chance on Somalia took years of diplomatic pressure and wrangling, climate finance analysts say – and rapidly moving the much larger sums of money needed for urgent climate adaptation in fragile nations through a range of finance providers will be a colossal challenge. 

“Somalia is only one country. All that diplomacy and work went for financing $100 million,” said Mauricio Vazquez, who leads work on climate change and conflict at ODI Global, a London-based global affairs think-tank. 

“It’s just not feasible to do that for $35 billion,” he warned, referring to the amount of money the 24 most fragile and conflict-affected countries say they need annually over the next 5-10 years to achieve their national climate adaptation plans. 

As he sees it, the GCF’s Somalia funding “is one in 1,000 they should be doing – so the Somalia success, when you look at it in the big picture, is a demonstration of collective failure.” 

Low appetite for risk 

Countries embroiled in conflicts, or with weak or absent governments, have long struggled to access climate finance, not least because much of it is provided as loans – and loan providers prefer low-risk investments. 

Heavily conflict-affected countries received an average of just $2.74 per capita each year in international adaptation funding in the decade to 2020 – 40% of what other low-income countries got, according to a World Bank report published in July.

Weaker states often also lack the systems, human resources and know-how to effectively apply for funding. As part of its mandate to push half of its adaptation finance to the most vulnerable states, the GCF offers every country at least $4 million in “readiness” funds to help prepare their applications. But an analysis found most fragile and conflict-affected states hadn’t even sought that money. 

“They weren’t accessing investments, or even getting to readiness,” Stephanie Speck, a spokeswoman for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) told Climate Home in an interview. Relying on countries to “come to us” – the normal process – doesn’t work in these cases, she said. 

Adaptation Fund head laments “puzzling” lack of pledges at COP29

Under international pressure to try to move more funding to countries and communities where it is needed most, the GCF – and some other multilateral development banks, including the African Development Bank (AfDB) – are trying to fundamentally rethink how they work with fragile countries. 

They are also looking for new sources of funding – particularly from the long-reluctant private sector – with public climate and development aid unlikely to grow substantially, especially given developments such as the re-election this month of incoming US President Donald Trump, who cut international climate spending during his first term in office. 

“Every actor, including the multilateral development banks, says it’s absolutely vital to bring in the private sector. Otherwise, it’s just a drop in the ocean,” said Yue Cao, an ODI climate finance researcher. 

Much room for improvement 

The AfDB now factors in both fragility and climate change as part of its decision-making on all investments, said Frederik Teufel, the bank’s lead coordinator of efforts to boost its work in fragile contexts. 

To woo more private investors, the bank is moving away from focusing first on the fragility of countries such as Somalia and Chad – a term the countries themselves dislike – to emphasising potential investment opportunities that could aid longer-term development, from expanding access to mini-grid power to building irrigation systems, Teufel said.  

“When you overly focus on the problem, investors say, ‘I can’t invest there,’” he told Climate Home. 

The bank also is shifting from a project-by-project approach in fragile situations to a longer-term investment effort – and its new 2024 strategy sees homegrown African investors as the key. 

“The risk perception from investors is completely different within the continent versus outside the continent,” he said. 

But to attract homegrown – or other – investment, the bank admits in its strategy it will need to help fragile countries develop and put into action stronger financial management systems, aimed at building “transparency, accountability and anti-corruption measures, and sustainable management of debt”. 

The GCF, in turn – which Speck noted was “established to be a high risk taker” – is trying to build more flexibility into its investments to accommodate the often fast-changing situation on the ground in conflict-hit countries. 

“Things sometimes change one day to the next. You think you can work in District A, then a warlord takes over. You don’t want to have to take a year to decide to move to District B,” she said. Being flexible and nimble, she noted, “is new for us”. 

In Somalia, Green Climate Fund tests new approach for left-out communities

Recognising that making applicants wait up to two years for an answer on a funding proposal also didn’t work, especially in fragile settings, the GCF, under its new executive director Mafalda Duarte, has pledged to report back on basic concept proposals within six weeks starting next year, and to provide decisions on full proposals within nine months, Speck said. 

Funders including the GCF and the AfDB say they are also increasingly taking into account that not backing a project in a fragile setting can carry as much or more risk than funding it. 

“People’s careers are based on success – and success is riskier in places that are more difficult,” said Vazquez. Investing in conflict-affected states is also often more expensive than in more stable settings, he said. 

But in places with very low levels of food security or poor health, for instance, the amount of improvement that can potentially be achieved with an investment is huge, he noted, compared to more “minimal” advances in places with less severe problems. 

With climate impacts surging globally, “the adaptation window is closing, and countries affected by conflict and fragility can easily reach their limits, if they’re not already there,” he said. “The question is, who actually pays the cost of doing nothing?” 

Sponsored by SPARC (Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises) through the Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29. See our supporters page for what this means. 

Laurie Goering is a freelance writer and editor based in London, UK. 

The Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29 will host 30 events with world-leading experts, including heads of state and other leading representatives from governments, climate funds, aid agencies, civil society organisations, and more. All events will be livestreamed. For more information visit the Pavilion page here.

The post Can climate funders overcome fear to tread in conflict zones?  appeared first on Climate Home News.

With supplies of international aid increasingly falling short around the world as the number and scale of crises and disasters grows, humanitarian groups are trying out new approaches to close the gap, including “anticipatory action” which pushes small amounts of cash to those in the path of a looming disaster, to help them better protect themselves and their assets.

In countries such as Bangladesh, with strong early warning systems and disaster-reduction mechanisms in place, such efforts have been shown to cut losses by about $7 for each $1 invested. But in the world’s most fragile and conflict-affected states – from Somalia to Afghanistan, and Iraq to Chad – systems like this are often missing.

COP29: We need to adapt to climate chaos now

Reducing humanitarian needs and boosting resilience there will require building basic infrastructure, something that can only happen if development, peace-building and relief groups – and their funders – get out of their comfort zones and overcome obstacles to working together, resilience researchers say.  

“The only way to get ahead of a disaster is not by mitigating its effects but by avoiding it happening in the first place – by investing in disaster-risk reduction and climate adaptation,” said Mauricio Vazquez, who leads work on climate change and conflict at ODI Global, a London-based think-tank. 

“You don’t need to wait for a bad weather forecast to do something. Anticipatory action done by humanitarians doesn’t create opportunities for people, it just helps make the best of a situation,” he said in an interview with Climate Home. 

Weak governance exposes people 

Abdihakim Ainte, director of climate change for Somalia’s prime minister, agreed that “vulnerability primarily stems from the dysfunction of key institutions.” 

“The weaker the institutions, the more susceptible people are to every shock and disruption,” he told Climate Home. 

 At last year’s COP28 climate talks, more than 100 countries, banks and other organisations issued a call for “collective action to build climate resilience at the scale and speed required in highly vulnerable countries and communities, particularly those threatened or affected by fragility or conflict.”

Innovative efforts to make that happen are ramping up. Financiers including the African Development Bank, for instance, are increasingly trying to move development cash through peace-building and humanitarian groups on the ground in conflict-hit areas. 

The bank has signed an agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), an organisation that “has the ability to operate in very insecure environments. They stay there – they’ve been there for decades,” said Frederik Teufel, the bank’s lead coordinator of efforts to boost its investments in fragile contexts. 

The ICRC focuses on using humanitarian grants to deliver short-term aid. But in places like conflict-plagued Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, or in Somalia, “there’s no reason they cannot use that delivery capacity there to also advance irrigation (or) community-based solar,” Teufel said in an interview with Climate Home. 

Humanitarian groups can give funders crucial and otherwise unavailable insights into what communities affected by conflict themselves see as the most useful investments, he said, noting that “they all want development solutions, not another bag of rice.” 

But significant institutional obstacles stand in the way of scaling up such cooperation, including a need by humanitarian groups to be seen as neutral in conflict zones, and accounting rules that require different types of development and climate funding to be kept in separate pots to avoid double counting. 

Humanitarian action limited 

In Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the ICRC, which focuses on protecting victims of armed conflict, is working with development partners and funders over seven years to rehabilitate and expand the Goma West water system – a project that serves both development and humanitarian needs.

But such projects don’t lead to meeting broad country-level needs, warned Catherine-Lune Grayson, head of policy at the ICRC. 

In order to protect their ability to access conflict-hit communities, humanitarian groups need to carefully avoid taking sides in political disputes – and choices about partners and where to spend development money are often political. 

“We have to tread a fine line. Where do we join forces, and where do we need to keep a healthy distance so it’s not read as too political?” Grayson asked, emphasising the need for “complementary” rather than “joint” work. 

Cross-border climate risks can’t be solved in isolation

Scale is another issue. “We can help rehabilitate the water system in Goma, but you cannot ask the ICRC to restore and expand all water systems across the country. We will say we’re not equipped to do this,” she said. 

Still, the view that countries struggling with conflict are not the sole responsibility of humanitarian agencies is fortunately growing, she said. 

“A few years ago, there would not even have been a discussion about this. There’s been a real shift,” she added. 

Maladaptation? 

The different time horizons of humanitarian groups – focused on meeting short-term needs – and development actors – focused on longer-term aims – are another area that needs attention as groups try to work together, said Manisha Gulati, a global risks and resilience researcher with ODI Global. 

In Somalia, for instance, wells and water storage are often being built to meet immediate humanitarian demand – but analysis by ODI researchers suggests the money is not being spent where it will be most needed in the future, as climate change impacts strengthen, she said. 

“We have mapped where water insecurity is now and where it will get worse – and that’s where we should be thinking about. That’s how we prevent the next drought and humanitarian crisis,” Gulati said. 

Today “we’re digging wells that won’t work in the long term. It’s maladaptation and we’re not using finance well if we’re using it in a manner where in the next 5-10 years we create a problem,” she said. 

Simply improving communication among those working to solve problems in armed conflict areas is one way to move ahead, Gulati said. “How do we talk about collective action when agencies have no idea what the others are doing?” she asked. 

Ainte, of Somalia, said efforts to win resources for crucial development in conflict-hit countries – a challenge as development aid stagnates – can often come into conflict with appeals for humanitarian aid, which keep the focus on vulnerability. 

“The humanitarian narrative has to change to a development narrative. Somalia has resources that need to be invested in. We need that kind of mentality, that we are a country that has potential and deserves investment, rather than a country that has a problem,” he said. 

Need to fix systems 

But winning funding to boost development and create resilient systems in fragile countries will also require the countries themselves to step up, including cutting corruption and building stronger guardrails to ensure funds are used effectively, Gulati said. 

“They need to understand it’s not a one-way street – they have to make an equal effort and adjustments,” she said. “You might get $100 million – but you won’t get more unless you fix the basics in your systems.” 

With climate impacts surging and almost two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor expected to live in countries that are fragile or conflict-affected by 2030, the stakes for getting this cooperation right are growing, she added.

“We can keep throwing money at the humanitarian problem, but we’re not reducing the caseload,” she said. “We need to address the basic vulnerabilities that are leading to this situation. If we don’t do that, we’re not going to solve the problem.” 

Sponsored by SPARC (Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises) through the Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29. See our supporters page for what this means. 

Laurie Goering is a freelance writer and editor based in London, UK. 

The Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29 will host 30 events with world-leading experts, including heads of state and other leading representatives from governments, climate funds, aid agencies, civil society organisations, and more. All events will be livestreamed. For more information visit the Pavilion page here.

The post Aid agencies grapple with climate adaptation in fragile states   appeared first on Climate Home News.

The drought that came before this latest disaster didn’t single out one place either. Farmers across the region were faced with destitution from crop losses.  

Extreme weather fuelled by climate change does not respect national borders or geographical boundaries. This simple fact has multiple knock-on effects and dictates how we should respond to such crises – including through international coordination.  

In September, Nigeria’s Alau Dam collapsed as a result of floods in the country’s northeastern region, killing up to 1,000 people and displacing a million. The rupture of the dam was mainly due to poor maintenance over the years – and a government failure to heed warnings of danger.  

A week later, across the border in Cameroon, the government there decided to release water from the Lagdo dam, after the same bout of heavy rainfall had increased levels. This put added pressure on 11 states downstream in the part of Nigeria that was already scrambling to deal with the crisis – although the water releases were regulated, and alerts were issued. 

Nepal says China withholds “essential” info on bursting Himalayan glacial lakes

South Asia is also grappling with cross-border river-related threats. Izabella Koziell, deputy director general of ICIMOD, a Nepal-based research centre working to protect the Hindu Kush Himalaya, said the mountain region is “falling under increasing risk from the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and air pollution”.  

“Each of these risks are mobile and not limited by national borders,” she said. The region extends over 3,500 kilometres from Afghanistan to Myanmar, making cooperation between countries essential, she added. “Over two billion people living within the mountains and downstream will be affected by changes that happen here.” 

Shared prosperity  

Climate change is fuelling new and complex risks that require countries – and the international community – to look beyond their own borders and siloes. But that is not how governments and their partners have typically responded to the threats.  

“Adaptation is still very much seen as a local to national issue. Thinking more broadly and working regionally is challenging. We saw this with the COVID-19 pandemic – just how difficult it was to get coordinated regional and global responses on something which affected everyone,” said Sarah Opitz-Stapleton, a senior research fellow at ODI Global, a London-based think-tank.   

Opitz-Stapleton has been working with a research programme called “Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises” (SPARC) to help policymakers better understand and manage transboundary climate risks, including in Africa.  

She told Climate Home: “Countries tend to think first about their own sovereignty and protecting their own populations. This is understandable – but when we are facing challenges like this, everyone going in on their own is insufficient.”  

Food and finance 

People’s livelihoods and future prosperity are dependent on a globalised economy and shared resources, with flows of trade and finance binding countries together across continents. And it is becoming increasingly how clear how climate change – which affects the whole planet – can hijack development efforts in an interconnected world.  

A simple example of this is food. In Senegal, changing dietary habits have led to a sudden surge in imports of rice from Southeast Asia. This now makes Senegal’s food security dependent on countries far away that are facing their own severe climate risks – because how they adapt to those risks will influence rice supplies to West Africa. 

In 2022, India temporarily banned wheat exports after a severe heatwave jeopardised its own domestic supplies. The move led to a sudden jump in the price of this crucial commodity, impacting countries in Africa, such as Kenya, which rely on imports. 

Transboundary climate risks come in many guises – from shared ecosystems to migration patterns, infectious diseases and ocean resources. 

Finance is one example where the risks and impacts can be indirect and not always immediately clear. Financial firms are often greatly exposed to climate-related risks through investments in sectors from energy to mining.  

When a gold mine is hit by drought or flooding, for example, this can lead to plant shutdowns, lower production and a higher probability of debt default. 

Money is as transboundary as the climate. Banks that fail to carry out climate risk assessments across whole supply chains could be creating the conditions for stranded assets in the future. 

Adaptation winners and losers 

By focusing solely on how to adapt to issues within borders the problem is pushed into someone else’s backyard – the adaptation equivalent of whack-a-mole.  

“The problem is the way we crafted the policy,” said George Wamukoya, team lead at AGNES, a non-profit which advises African governments on climate issues. 

“We focused on ‘national’ adaptation plans and commitments which leads people to think inward. There is competition among neighbouring countries who don’t want to share resources or investment. This is despite the need for regional and global support to achieve these plans. We need to be alive to these facts,” he added. 

Examples abound of so-called “maladaptation”. This can occur when a country seeks to control coastal erosion and flooding by building protective infrastructure but ends up pushing the problem to shorelines further away where the impacts might be worse. Or switching to climate-resilient crops can reduce harvests – and increase prices – for more mainstream varieties. 

Global adaptation goal 

On the other hand, done right, adaptation can lead to shared resilience between neighbours and strengthen global supply chains. Instead of redistributing the risk, the idea is to confront it with collaboration.  

As the world kicks off two weeks of climate negotiations in Baku next week, campaigners are hoping that transboundary risks are higher on the agenda.  

Last year’s UN climate summit, COP28, made only two references to transboundary issues in its final decision text. New work on adaptation did come out of the Dubai talks, including a programme to develop indicators to measure progress on targets under the Global Goal on Adaptation.  

COP29: We need to adapt to climate chaos now

So far, the two-year initiative – called the UAE-Belem work programme – has led to over 5,000 indicators being submitted for consideration. Yet only 22 of these are related to transboundary climate risks. 

This speaks to a lack of awareness among states of the shared risks they face and the dangers of ignoring them. Both Kenya and Ethiopia – which share a border that is porous especially for pastoralist communities – failed to mention cross-border risks in their national adaptation plans (NAPs) submitted to the UN. 

Ensuring that transboundary risks are included in the UAE-Belem work programme is seen as crucial, as its results will dictate how adaptation policy and finance are set in the future. “If we don’t have these indicators, then it becomes very hard to track these particular risks,” said Wamukoya. 

COP29 and beyond 

Experts agree that national and local governments need to do a better job of assessing cross-border risks and working with their neighbours to understand how to collectively address them. To date, they feel that not enough work has been done to research transboundary risks and work out strategies for tackling them.  

“We need to demystify the issue for countries and convince them that, when you include transboundary issues, this will not limit access to resources. We also need to show how and where these risks are occurring within the five subregions of Africa, because some places will be more exposed than others,” adds Wamukoya. 

COP29 offers a unique forum to address transboundary risks that are global in nature – and this perspective also needs to be applied to finance for adaptation projects, where multiple countries are involved, Wamukoya said. COP29 is tasked with agreeing a new global goal for climate finance, he noted. 

Rich nations “on track” to double adaptation finance but huge gap persists

To date, adaptation financing typically goes to a single country, and there are few mechanisms for allowing funding to be split across states – although the Green Climate Fund has taken a regional approach in some of its projects.  

Opitz-Stapleton – who is helping organise several COP29 events on transboundary climate risks at the Climate, Peace and Transboundary Climate Pavilion, the first such COP pavilion – noted that awareness of the issue has grown.  

But, she said, “many countries are not adequately assessing these risks and there isn’t capacity to manage them”. “They need to be incorporated within a country’s adaptation plans and actually acted on,” she emphasised. 

Sponsored by SPARC (Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises) through the Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29. See our supporters page for what this means. 

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK. 

The Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29 will host 30 events with world-leading experts, including heads of state and other leading representatives from governments, climate funds, aid agencies, civil society organisations, and more. All events will be livestreamed. For more information visit the Pavilion page here.

The post Cross-border climate risks can’t be solved in isolation   appeared first on Climate Home News.

New research from the UN Environment Programme highlights the scale of the adaptation challenge and how it has grown in prominence, while finance to tackle rising needs has lagged behind. 

This year’s Adaptation Gap Report highlights the “extremely large” gap between adaptation finance needs in developing countries – estimated at $215 billion-$387 billion per year this decade – and actual flows of money. In 2022, international public finance for adaptation projects reached only $28 billion, up from $22 billion in 2021, the report notes.

“The climate crisis is here. We can’t postpone protection. We must adapt – now,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Gueterres said in a video statement when the report was released, calling for “a massive increase in adaptation finance from public and private sources”.

“Immediate necessity”

Since the Adaptation Fund was established, it has invested more than $1.2 billion in over 180 different projects around the world, benefiting around 46 million vulnerable people and training around 1.6 million people in climate resilience measures.

In the more than 17 years that the fund has operated in the field, the urgency to respond in the present – and not leave it to future generations as the problem was often framed in the past – has become crystal clear. 

The fund has managed to stay flexible and evolve with the world around it. 

“In this rapidly changing world, adaptation is no longer a distant goal; it is an immediate necessity that requires urgent investments because delays in meeting adaptation finance needs lead to increasing costs of inaction, reaching limits of adaptation and increasing loss and damage,” said Adaptation Fund Head Mikko Ollikainen. 

“The Fund’s ability to adapt to a changing landscape has been crucial. By fostering tangible and scalable actions on the ground, innovation and locally led adaptation, we empower pilot projects to demonstrate their value and pave the way for larger-scale climate action.” 

Proud pioneers 

This is what happened, for example, with one of the Adaptation Fund’s earliest recipients of its grant funding: the Centre de Suivi Ecologique (CSE), an environmental institution in Senegal, which tapped into the fund’s pioneering direct access programme. 

Back in 2010, CSE was awarded $8.6 million to implement a complex project to stop coastal erosion in three regions – Rufisque, Saly and Joal – where sea level rise threatened thousands of livelihoods in tourism and fishing. 

In Saly, a village around 50 miles (80.5 km) from the capital Dakar, the project built a new 730-metre seawall, 1.4-km long underwater berms, and a 3.3-km dyke to prevent saltwater from reaching fertile rice fields. 

According to Dr. Assize Toure, then CSE’s director-general, the project “helped protect thousands of lives, infrastructure and goods while raising awareness of climate change in three cities along Senegal’s vulnerable coast”. 

Senegal was “proud to be a pioneer” of that original funding, he said, adding that it directly led to new opportunities and initiatives to combat climate change in the country.

After the success of the initial project – which protected an estimated 3,000 jobs – CSE won a separate round of funding a few years later to further bolster the resilience of coastal communities to the encroaching sea. 

The head of CSE’s climate finance unit, Aïssata Sall, believes that the different forms of support on offer from the Adaptation Fund – to help with everything from project preparation to learning grants – have improved results, and boosted the ability of CSE and other partners working on the ground to mobilise more resources.

“That inevitably contributes to the Paris Agreement,” she told the fund.

Adaptation grows in importance

The earliest UN climate conferences, back in the 1990s, often made only passing references to adaptation.  

The first climate COP in 1995 stated that adaptation would “require short, medium and long-term strategies which are cost-effective”. But it was the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, that first established a specific vehicle – the Adaptation Fund – to help finance these projects in developing countries through concrete projects for the most climate-vulnerable. 

Dr. Toure of CSE described the Adaptation Fund’s arrival in the landscape of climate finance as “a major development for developing countries”. The fund now serves the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015.

Almost 30 years since the fund’s inception, we are living with the impacts of extreme weather on a regular basis – and the need to adapt to this new reality is urgent. It is hard to tell whether those negotiating at the early COP summits fully anticipated how climate change would develop, and the role adaptation would need to play as the crisis intensifies. 

By contrast, the outcome of the COP28 conference in Dubai last year includes almost 100 references to adaptation, starting on the very first page. 

The adaptation landscape has changed considerably since the first UN climate conference was held in Berlin. More money is flowing into projects that vary in size and ambition around the world – and there are more funds dedicated to scaling up this work to ensure many more millions of people can be protected against climate disasters. However, adaptation finance needs continue to rise sharply.

Resource mobilisation target

The Adaptation Fund Board has set a resource mobilisation target of $300 million for this year amid a growing project pipeline approaching $500 million. Leaving Baku without meeting this target would send a dire signal to climate-vulnerable people around the world. 

The importance of the UN COP process as a central place for galvanising adaptation policy and finance should not be underestimated. It remains one of the few forums that gathers so many stakeholders for two weeks – and where new commitments are made each year. This COP in particular is of critical importance as it should agree on a new global climate finance goal. 

Those same governments and partners coming together in Baku for the latest negotiations are aware that sea levels are rising and extreme weather is directly threatening our way of life. Adaptation is the solution that can keep the waters at bay. It’s time to ensure that it’s properly funded. 

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means. 

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK. 

The post COP29: We need to adapt to climate chaos now appeared first on Climate Home News.

That image is even more true to life when it comes to attracting money from private investors. While producing renewable energy offers easily quantifiable results and predictable revenue streams, projects to lessen the negative effects of drought or rising seas are regarded as hard to gauge and nearly impossible to monetise.

There’s no money to be made from adaptation and so private investors steer well clear of it, the common argument goes.

The numbers seem to back this up: the private sector contributed to just over 2% of the average $63 billion per year in global adaptation finance tracked by Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), an international research group, during 2021 and 2022. That is a rounding error when compared with the estimated $215 billion a year needed by developing countries alone to boost their climate resilience, according to the UN Adaptation Gap report.

But some climate finance experts suggest this is only a partial and misleading picture, perpetuated through a lack of data and information.

Morgan Richmond, lead analyst for CPI’s Adaptation and Resilience workstream, says private investments in adaptation are likely to be significantly underestimated as a result of the colossal challenge in tracking them.

“Basically no private-sector institution is currently self-identifying its investments as adaptation even when it could,” she told Climate Home.

Re-evaluating private sector adaptation

An asset manager, for example, could inject some cash into a food company’s efforts to reduce heat-related crop losses along its supply chain. Its primary goal might be the protection of the firm’s productivity and, ultimately, the financier’s bottom line. In doing so, it also helps farmers better withstand the impacts of climate change. Yet, without reporting requirements or specific incentives to spotlight that, what is essentially an adaptation investment falls into an information black hole.

The limited data available on private-sector adaptation finance in turn reinforces the mantra that there are limited or no viable business models for adaptation, CPI wrote in a recent report highlighting its new efforts to bring more of these finance flows to light.

Having developed a more sophisticated tracking mechanism, CPI found private adaptation investments were on average more than four times higher than previously thought in the period from 2019 to 2022. While researchers believe this is still an underestimate, they hope that better identification and recognition of finance flows will encourage more businesses and investors to become active in the adaptation space.

“The idea is to create a common language and allow institutions to get a better sense of what their peers are doing,” said CPI’s Richmond. “Hopefully that creates a sense of the market shift that is happening and those institutions will want to be part of it.”

Some multinational firms – including Nestlé, Danone and Unilever – say they have taken steps, including promoting regenerative green agriculture techniques, to enhance the resilience of their global supply chains to climate shocks. But, outside of the food industry, business action to promote adaptation action has so far been limited despite the growing risks to revenues.

It’s time to end the UN’s artificial divide between biodiversity and climate

In late 2022, at COP27, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) launched a bid to spur more private-sector interest in building climate resilience under its PREPARE Call to Action. In an update on its website this year, it says that 39 companies and partners have so far made voluntary commitments that will mobilise more than $3 billion to help people better manage the impacts of climate change.

The commitments include technologies to expand climate information and early warning systems, new financial products and services, innovations for climate-smart food systems and insurance solutions, according to USAID.

Overcoming risk aversion

Despite this government-led push and efforts to capture finance flows better in the data, many barriers remain in trying to channel more private funding into adaptation, especially in the poorer developing countries at the forefront of the climate crisis. Uncertain parameters for assessing the success of adaptation measures – and putting a price on the risk of funding them – reduces appetite among profit-seeking institutions, experts say.

At the UN level, diplomats and experts are now working on a list of indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation, a vague concept that was enshrined in the Paris Agreement in 2015 and intended to increase resilience-boosting efforts, especially in developing nations.

Parametric triggers: How small islands can escape the climate-poverty trap

A long-awaited playbook for putting the goal into practice, agreed at COP28 in Dubai last year, “recognises the importance” of the private sector – among various actors – in delivering it, though it does not provide specifics on what businesses should do.

One emerging attempt to overcome hurdles for adaptation funding involves “blended finance” mechanisms that bring together the public and private sectors. A public institution, such as a development bank or a government agency, provides early-stage concessional capital or guarantees that take on a substantial share of the project’s risk. This approach can lessen private financiers’ concerns and convince them to contribute funding that would otherwise not be made available.

In its latest report on international climate finance for developing countries, released in May, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said climate finance mobilised from the private sector for adaptation using public money grew from $0.4 billion in 2016 to $3.5 billion in 2022, although it noted that significant jumps in 2020 and 2022 were due to just a few large-scale projects.

Kenyan startup leads the way

One successful product of blended finance is Kenya-based ag-tech startup Apollo Agriculture. Since 2017, it has provided more than 350,000 smallholder farmers across Kenya and Zambia with access to loans that help them switch to more climate-resilient farming methods and thereby boost their earnings.

“Blended financing is very powerful,” Apollo Agriculture’s co-founder Benjamin Njenga told Climate Home. “We’ve been able to get support from DFIs [development finance institutions], which brought in concessional capital and credibility to the business to attract private funders.”

The company has propelled its growth with support from both public institutions, including the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the UK government-backed British International Investment, and leading venture capital funds. It plans to reach more than 2.3 million farmers by 2026.

Apollo does not give out cash but provides credit in the form of vouchers that farmers can redeem upfront against a full package of support including agricultural inputs, like drought-resistant seeds and fertilisers, local training and insurance against crop losses. Repayments are flexible and kick in only after the harvesting season.

Busting myths

Njenga claims the secret is not only to give farmers access to new products and better technology, but to follow them step-by-step with “boots on the ground” and help them to make informed decisions. Apollo has built a network of agents that live in farmers’ communities and speak their local languages, he added.

“Farmers may not be aware that weather patterns have changed because of climate change, and risk losing their crops,” he said. “Our agents advise them with simple messages such as ‘you need to wait for three days before you do your planting now’.”

The model appears to be working so far. Apollo says its clients produce two and a half times more than other farmers in the region and are able to cope better with climate shocks. Around 90% of farmers pay back their loans on time, Njenga said.

Apollo Agriculture is determined to bust the myth that helping smallholder farmers adapt to the effects of climate change does not make business sense, the entrepreneur said.

“Many people think they are just poor people – but that’s not true. They are actually rich in resources,” he said. “What they are lacking are the tools and direct support to make sure they can continue to farm profitably.”

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Businesses may be investing more in climate adaptation than we think appeared first on Climate Home News.

In 2023, the figure reached 26.4 million worldwide as a result of floods, storms, wildfires and other disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Climate change is not solely responsible, but the frequency and intensity of extreme weather is increasing as global temperatures continue to rise. As a result we can expect that more and more people will face losing their homes and their livelihoods.

It is commonplace to see people boarding up their homes and literally battening down the hatches before a major hurricane is predicted to make landfall. For those facing extreme weather, this mentality is no longer confined to one-off events, but a regular mindset as the climate crisis continues to bite. Many communities around the world know that building resilience against intense storms, floods and heat waves is now essential to daily life.

“No country is immune to disaster displacement,” Alexandra Bilak, IDMC’s director, said in a recent press statement. “But we can see a difference in how displacement affects people in countries that prepare and plan for its impacts and those that don’t. Those that look at the data and make prevention, response and long-term development plans that consider displacement fare far better.”

This kind of planning is happening in countries on the front line of the climate crisis. Some small island nations, for example – many of them low-lying – are seeing their homes permanently washed into the Pacific Ocean.

Paradise lost

According to Fiji’s government, disaster events in the Pacific island state over the past 40 years have led to annual economic damages of around US$16 million, with 40,000 people impacted each year. This is due to increase to an average of US$85 million per year in losses, as a result of cyclones and earthquakes. These figures are high for a country with a population of under 1 million people.

Many of the people most impacted by climate disasters live in informal urban settlements. Their homes are extremely vulnerable to the regular cyclones that hit the island nation, especially as they are often located near riverbanks or around the coast.

The subtle art of scaling up climate adaptation

A recent Adaptation Fund project in Fiji was designed to build resilience against regular extreme weather events and “climate proof” housing for the foreseeable future. The project, implemented by UN-Habitat, looked at ways to protect thousands of homes when storm surges overwhelm local water and sanitation infrastructure. The settlements were located across four main urban areas on the island: Lautoka, Sigatoka, Nadi and Lami.

Low-cost, high-impact

Constructing cyclone-resilient buildings was essential to the work.

Moving new homes away from vulnerable hot spots, such as foreshores, floodplains and riverbanks, was a first step. As many settlements are self-built, training local people in new construction methods ensures future homes can be built with extreme weather in mind. An innovative element from the project was so-called ‘stilted safe rooms’ – low-cost and simple raised structures intended to provide refuge during periods of intense flooding.

Flood control is a vital component of climate-proofing infrastructure. In Fiji, priorities included building upgraded site drainage to reduce runoff; upgrading water sources and storage; and improving access ways, to ensure people can respond when cyclones put pressure on local infrastructure.

School’s out

In Haiti, a conflict-torn country beset with repeated natural disasters, climate-proofing infrastructure is still at an early stage. The country’s education sector, for example, has been repeatedly hit by extreme weather, including in 2016 when Hurricane Matthew damaged a quarter of its schools. Rebuilding after such frequent turmoil now requires new ways of thinking.

With the help of around US$10 million of funding from the Adaptation Fund, UNESCO is currently supporting the restoration of 620 schools across the country. Their work has included raising awareness of disaster risk reduction, improving knowledge of safety levels, and retrofitting existing buildings.

As climate disasters grow, early warning systems become essential

Panaroty Ferdinand Prophete, UNESCO’s national coordinator, told Climate Home that “nearly 200 technicians, students and experts received training on new construction techniques, an early warning system and the management of temporary shelters.” This training included working directly with the Ministry of Education to develop new construction standards for schools.

Over 150,000 students have so far benefited from the project, a success Prophete attributes to “very good synergy” between the different stakeholders. “This makes it easy to put in place a community emergency plan as well as the execution of the national action plan for resilient school infrastructure,” he added.

Best defence

Experts agree that we need to change the way we live in response to climate disasters. Moving settlements away from major water sources is, if possible, a simple solution. More projects supported by the Adaptation Fund – from Indonesia to Antigua and Barbuda – are focusing on blocking, redirecting or draining excess water as it comes in, to keep homes intact and habitable. These responses will remain some of our best defence against more unpredictable and extreme weather.

“A key sector for the Adaptation Fund is averting and reducing loss and damage through disaster risk reduction and early warning systems, which account for about 16% of the Fund’s current portfolio. Many additional multi-sector projects also include elements that are building resilience to disasters,” said Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund.

“From climate-proofing homes and community centres to making informal settlements resilient to floods, it’s a vital aspect of the Fund’s work. Many of the projects are replicable and scalable so we hope they will also serve as models to create a larger positive impact on additional vulnerable communities beyond those served by the projects,” he added.

There is only so much adaptation can achieve if the flood waters get too high, or if cyclones increase in intensity and destructive force. But there are many cost-effective solutions to offer people a better chance of keeping their homes intact when extreme weather hits.

These investments can’t come soon enough for communities living in climate hot-spots and can serve to tackle long standing poverty issues at the same time. Fast-tracking these solutions will become ever more important if we want to reduce the millions of newly displaced people each year.

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Climate disasters challenge right to safe and adequate housing appeared first on Climate Home News.

Achieving this aim would mean tens of billions more dollars flowing into adaptation projects. This huge – but achievable – feat would be immensely beneficial for communities around the world suffering from regular extreme weather events.

Alongside his call for greater adaptation finance, Guterres outlined five priorities for the sector, one of which was making it easier to access funding, especially for the vulnerable.

If billions are going to be spent on helping countries adapt to climate change, we need to make sure the money is reaching the people who need it the most. This is where the concept of locally led adaptation (LLA) comes in. The term refers to the central importance of providing frontline communities with the power and resources to respond to the climate crisis.

The Adaptation Fund was among the first group of international organisations to endorse a set of principles on locally led adaptation during COP25 in 2019. These principles cover everything from devolving decision-making to addressing inequalities, from providing predictable funding to ensuring the whole process is open and transparent. The principles have since been endorsed by over 100 organisations, including government ministries, global charities and development agencies.

This new model sets the scene for how current and future climate adaptation should be implemented. The focus is on an inclusive approach which puts communities most affected by climate change at the heart of how decisions are made.

Putting words into practice

The Adaptation Fund has been applying the principles of locally led adaptation for over a decade. The fund’s direct access scheme allows national organisations based in the countries they serve to manage all elements of a project, from design to monitoring.

The fund pioneered its first enhanced direct access (EDA) projects in 2014, taking direct access a step further in empowering national institutions to identify and fund local adaptation projects. This led the fund to establish an EDA funding window in 2021, and in April 2024, it went one step further by creating dedicated finance streams to support locally led adaptation.

The fund believes this new approach makes it “the first multilateral climate fund that has fully operationalised the global LLA principles,” it said in a press statement.

“The Adaptation Fund has a rich history of innovating and evolving to respond to countries’ urgent adaptation needs. Over several years, the fund has continued to offer more opportunities to vulnerable countries through diverse funding windows beyond its regular projects,” Mikko Ollikainen, who heads up the organisation, told Climate Home.

“Creating these dedicated funding windows to support locally led adaptation will open even more opportunities for vulnerable countries to enhance capacity building by offering local governments, NGOs, community organisations, indigenous groups, young entrepreneurs and a broad range of local actors the opportunity to develop and implement sustainable adaptation actions directly,” he added.

Tailored solutions

One of the pioneering locally led adaptation projects the fund supported took place in South Africa from 2015 to 2020. On opposite ends of the country, two districts – Namakwa in the Northern Cape and Mopani in Limpopo – are subject to the same extreme weather: hotter temperatures with more intense dry and wet spells. These more uncertain, dangerous conditions put ever greater pressure on fragile local communities.

The pilot project was implemented by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). It was intended to strengthen local institutions to adapt to these new climate realities, and provided funding to 12 ‘small grant recipients’ – groups based in the region and with an intimate understanding of how the communities work.

Investments were made after vulnerability studies were conducted and tailored solutions created to meet local needs. The ambition of these groups was simple – to ensure resources went to people most vulnerable to climate change. A raft of innovative solutions were then implemented, from rainwater harvesting and solar pumps, to cooling sheds and bio-gas digesters.

‘Considerable impact’

“The reach and positive impact on people’s livelihoods and adaptive capacity through assets, learning and networks was considerable,” the project’s evaluation report concludes, adding that the focus on careful, appropriate investment “has significantly improved the lives of those directly, and indirectly connected with the projects.”

Mandy Barnett, SANBI’s chief director for adaptation policy, told Climate Home that one lesson from the project was a need to develop trust and effective relationships with people on the ground.

“We learned what we should do and what we shouldn’t do in terms of getting climate finance to the right people,” she added, noting that communicating expectations, from the funder downward, was key.

“A wider challenge is the need to translate climate science into local concerns. We want to empower people to make informed decisions, and to do this requires you to invest time and resources into capacity building,” she added.

New opportunities

The South African project helped pave the way for the many LLA schemes the fund is now supporting around the world. Fast forward to 2024 and a range of new proposals have just been approved which puts decision-making powers into the hands of local institutions.

They include a Peruvian project to support water, agriculture and food security; a Rwandan project to build climate resilience in rural areas; and in Belize, a plan to restore ecosystems and livelihoods battered by climate-related disasters. What these projects have in common is not only a plan to fight climate change, but one where the tools and resources are under local control.

“These new LLA windows take a significant step forward in providing an opportunity to directly lead and develop adaptation projects on the ground and accelerate effective, scalable actions worldwide in the process,” said Ollikainen.

The way forward

On World Environment Day this June, the UN Secretary-General took the opportunity to speak up about adaptation finance again. He highlighted how the last 12 months have been the hottest on record. “For every dollar needed to adapt to extreme weather, only about 5 cents is available,” he said.

The most recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows that, in 2022, $115.9 billion was raised for climate finance, the first time this target has been achieved. Adaptation finance made up $32.4 billion of the total, a way off the 50% goal endorsed by the UN head, but still three times higher than what it was in 2016.

Where this money is spent will determine how vulnerable regions can survive the impacts of climate change in the coming years. But as more locally led adaptation projects are rolled out, affected communities will finally have a direct say in how that happens.

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Finance flowing for locally led climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

But recent price spikes mean the commodity has become a flashpoint for wider concerns about the impact of climate change on agriculture and the need to shift to more sustainable farming.

For such a widely consumed product, the cocoa bean requires a surprisingly unique set of conditions in which to grow. Cocoa trees only survive within a belt 20 degrees north or south of the Equator and at an altitude with a consistent, humid climate and plenty of rain.

Around 50 countries meet these exacting conditions, and they account for the vast majority of all cocoa production. West Africa, in particular, is a hotspot, with Ghana and Ivory Coast producing 60-70% of all the world’s cocoa.

“Smallholder cocoa farmers in West Africa are the backbone of the chocolate industry, yet they remain at the losing end of the supply chain,” said Ghana-based Kwame Osei, senior director for global programmes at the Rainforest Alliance, an international nonprofit that works to protect forests through responsible business.

The price of cocoa has skyrocketed as a result of intense heat and rainfall in West Africa, which has greatly reduced crop yields, as shown in data by the International Cocoa Organization.

While the rise in cocoa prices might seem like good news for farmers in the region, Osei noted that they receive on average only 6% of a chocolate bar’s retail price. In recent years, they have struggled with the impacts of climate change, to which their crop is highly susceptible.

The price per tonne for cocoa on the futures market has doubled since the start of the year, reaching over $10,000 for the first time. In the longer term, higher prices could boost farmers’ incomes, experts say – if the right policies are put in place.

Both Ghana and Ivory Coast have recently increased the fixed price producers receive for their crop before export by over 50%, albeit from a low base. But long-term changes are needed for the industry to go green, sector experts told Climate Home.

Currently, the risk is that market volatility linked to extreme weather could drive money away from the sector. Companies seeking to develop cocoa alternatives, for example, have attracted investment of $51 million since the start of 2023, according to recent research from data firm New Food Finance.

Wrong incentives

The upheaval in the market has highlighted the need to adapt cocoa production to a warming world while at the same time reducing the industry’s environmental impacts. Current incentives enable deforestation and water depletion – and need to be changed to support greener practices, the experts said.

Subsidies come in different forms – whether as direct payments and tax breaks, or indirectly through external social and economic impacts. Both types of subsidy combined exceeded $7 trillion in 2023, covering fossil fuels, agriculture and fisheries, according to a 2023 World Bank Report.

Direct subsidies for the agricultural sector add up to $635 billion a year, it notes. They mainly support the use of fossil fuel-based fertilisers and intensive cultivation of cash crops for export, which are contributing to rising emissions of planet-heating gases.

In the case of cocoa, the report suggests that in Ivory Coast, increasing subsidies to the industry drove deforestation, as farmers cleared more land to grow trees along the border between Ivory Coast and Ghana. The analysis shows that, between 2000 and 2010, agricultural subsidies were 56% higher in Ivory Coast than in Ghana, translating into a 3% higher deforestation rate.

Data released this month by Trase, a non-profit initiative tracking commodities, also finds persistently high rates of deforestation in the region. Researchers calculated that between 2003 and 2017, 1.65 million hectares of tropical rainforest in Ivory Coast was lost to cocoa production. That is an average of 110,000 hectares per year – about the size of New York City.

In a bid to rein in forest losses, both Ivory Coast and Ghana are now taking steps to make their key industry more sustainable – and to protect producers against the growing impacts of the climate crisis. This includes shifting subsidies to promote greener methods of production.

Investing in farmers

Reforming subsidies is not only about removing harmful incentives, but also redirecting subsidies and taxes to support regenerative agriculture, said Osei of the Rainforest Alliance.

Poorly designed policies that are seen as unfair to producers can easily escalate into major political problems. This has occurred in European countries where farmers have taken to the streets this year to protest new green rules and the removal of subsidies for diesel.

The world’s food producers need financial and technical support – especially in poorer developing nations – to swap their old practices for newer, more eco-friendly methods, experts say.

“Decades of lack of investment in the farmers who grow our cocoa means they do not have the resources to invest in mitigation,” said Surmaya Talyarkhan, a senior sustainable sourcing manager for cocoa at the Fairtrade Foundation.

She believes the solution lies in ensuring farmers receive a stable price for their crop, allowing them to earn a living income. “Only then will farmers have the financial headroom to invest in measures to manage climate change and other challenges,” she told Climate Home.

To shift the cocoa industry in a greener direction, the Rainforest Alliance recommends taxing chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and ending mono-cropping practices which can harm soil health and biodiversity.

It says subsidies should instead be provided for practices that improve soil conditions and local ecosystems, including growing cover crops that maintain soil nutrition over the winter months, and shade trees to protect seedlings from harsh weather.

“Better farming techniques, like regenerative agriculture, can help farmers improve soil health and productivity while also expanding their sources of income – ultimately making them more resilient to the impacts of climate change,” said Kerry Daroci, cocoa sector lead at the Rainforest Alliance.

EU cocoa pact

In 2022, Ivory Coast and Ghana signed a joint agreement with the European Union, called the Alliance on Sustainable Cocoa, which commits them to a government-led system of transparency and traceability to curb deforestation linked to the industry.

This includes detailed monitoring and data collection on cocoa production in high-risk areas, with the information made publicly available to boost knowledge of what is driving the problem. The project is being supported with upwards of 25 million euros ($27 million) from the EU – a drop in the subsidy ocean.

When the alliance was launched, EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said that the EU – as the world’s largest importer of cocoa – had a duty to act on deforestation. “Together with our African partners, we have built a movement for positive change that can benefit everyone: farmers, industry, traders and consumers alike,” he added in a press statement.

The importance of such partnerships is borne out by the latest Trase data which shows that, in 2021, the EU and Switzerland combined imported 1.1 million tonnes of cocoa products from Ivory Coast, associated with 800,000 hectares of tropical deforestation.

The cocoa alliance preceded the EU’s landmark deforestation law – coming into force in less than a year’s time – which could pose a challenge for smallholders. Cocoa is one of the seven high-risk commodities targeted by the regulation, with farmers required to provide evidence that their produce is free from deforestation.

Meanwhile, the European Commission sees high cocoa prices as an opportunity to boost sustainability in the sector, as long as farmers benefit directly.

A commission spokesperson told Climate Home that farmers need to receive a living income that will “allow for the necessary investments”, such as agroforestry practices that support soil fertility in tropical environments.

“Investments in agricultural research and technical assistance could increase the adoption of such practices even further,” the spokesperson added. Other support could be made available to help ensure fair labour practices, incentivise environmentally sound methods, and build resilience.

Power from cocoa waste

The two West African cocoa powerhouses are already rolling out programmes to make their cultivation more sustainable. Ghana is implementing a climate-smart programme covering over six million hectares of the West Guinean forest. It includes practices such as growing shade trees to improve crop yields and is expected to earn the country $45 million by the end of 2024 in carbon credits via the World Bank.

Meanwhile, Ivory Coast is building a major new biomass power plant to run on the enormous amounts of waste that come from harvesting cocoa. Usually, much of the plant – the shells and pod husks – is thrown away, but these will now be used to generate renewable electricity instead.

Osei of the Rainforest Alliance noted that smallholders produce around 30 percent of the world’s food crops – and it is therefore in the interest of governments to help them become more resilient to climate change, to maintain supplies and export capacity.

This must be done in a way that protects the climate and improves the health of soils, forests and wider ecosystems on which the cocoa crop depends, he added.

“Regenerative agriculture holds huge potential to transform food systems and respond to some of the most pressing challenges governments and farmers are grappling with, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and water scarcity,” he said.

(Reporting by Adam Wentworth; editing by Megan Rowling and Sebastián Rodríguez; graphics by Fanis Kollias)

This story is supported by Unilever. Special reports are produced by Climate Home News journalists with the support of partners on topics of mutual interest. Partners do not review the copy before publication.

The post Can the rising cost of chocolate help cocoa producers go green? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The declaration is thorough in its recognition of Indigenous peoples’ fundamental freedoms, stating that they have “the right to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands or territories and resources”.

The importance and value that Indigenous peoples bring to tackling climate change is essential. Local communities should be at the heart of how to solve the climate crisis not only because they are at risk. Their connection to place provides unique insights into how to adapt to increasingly frequent extreme weather events. They have been the custodians of their land and water for generations – and the knowledge that brings is priceless.

The Adaptation Fund has financed multiple projects around the world where Indigenous peoples are being impacted by climate change. This offers the Fund unique opportunities to explore how climate adaptation can be implemented in lockstep with Indigenous knowledge.

Restoring forest

One such opportunity comes from a project that faced challenging circumstances in the deep jungle between Ecuador and Colombia. The project, implemented by the World Food Programme (WFP), covers an area of over 915,000 hectares and two watersheds important to both countries.

The region’s Afro and Awá communities live in precarious conditions there, affected by extreme weather events including drought, floods and storm surges. This border area is one of the most food-insecure regions in Latin America. Changes in climatic conditions have meant loss of mangrove forests, unstable crop production and a decline in fish species. This is having a knock-on effect on people’s diet, and malnutrition is increasing.

To address these issues, WFP worked closely with communities to raise awareness of climate risks and incorporated ancestral knowledge into adaptation measures. Restoring over 8,000 hectares of forest helped the livelihoods of 120 communities and 1,100 families in the region. In addition, the creation of resilient family gardens using organic products has helped to improve the diet of a further 600 families.

Using these techniques, alongside other activities such as sustainable agroforestry, helped to protect against damage from heavy rains. At each step, WFP has worked with communities imparting their knowledge and sought to empower local people. This included greater representation for women who, given historic inequalities, are more exposed to climate-related risks.

Local knowledge

The project faced unique challenges: the partners had to navigate working across borders in a large and remote region where there are serious security concerns. Diego Guzmán, the WFP’s national programme officer for food systems and climate change, worked closely on the project. He told Climate Home that the team maintained a line of communication to the UN’s security unit in Ecuador. “We actively engaged local organisations and leaders, leveraging their intimate knowledge of the territory,” he said. This solved some of the additional obstacles of size and borders.

Improving food security and its relationship to climate change among the community was one of the key components of the project. This first meant understanding and respecting traditional norms. “It’s crucial to acknowledge and value the local products that hold significance within these communities, fostering sustainable use of resources for improved food security and economic well-being,” said Guzmán. One of the key lessons from the project – and others like it – is to strengthen how local organizations work. Decisions need to be “inclusive, transparent, and reflective of the community’s priorities,” he added.

It is the sense of mutual respect and a shared end goal that supports the success of these projects. The Fund has also seen other significant components aimed at restoring sustainable ancestral practices in projects it funds in Morocco (reviving ancient underground water channels to address drought), Costa Rica (diversified forest farming to enhance food security), and Mexico (adapted fog catchers to store water), among others. 

Local women in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, taking part in an
adaptation project seeking to diversify food and livelihood security.
Photo credit: Adaptation Fund

Diversifying incomes

Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund, said the organisation “takes great pride in supporting and empowering the most vulnerable local communities and groups, and you see this across many of our projects on the ground”.

“Our five-year medium-term strategy and environmental and social safeguards further foster support of human rights and equitable opportunity, including for Indigenous communities, which very often have the best ideas of what works well locally in building climate resilience,” he explained. 

Another related Indigenous project comes from the other side of the world, on the Indonesian island of  Sulawesi in South Sulawesi province. It aimed to raise awareness of watershed and climate impacts among the Indigenous people of Ammatoa Kajang. The implementing entity was Kemitraan, or the Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia, a non-profit established in the country for the past two decades.

Here the challenge was to reduce climate-related vulnerabilities through improving how the watershed was managed. This included the creation of different social business groups to help people diversify incomes, selling existing products like candlenuts in more profitable ways, and upgrading crop machinery. Not only did this approach require a climate adaptation plan based on local knowledge, but active lobbying of the regional government to see it implemented over the long-term. Again, strengthening local governance was seen as key.

A shift in thinking

One of the project participants, Namesiah Munaati, told the Adaptation Fund: “What has changed is the mindset of the community – a shift in thinking, from farming practices to managing agricultural products and marketing strategies.”

“There has been an improvement in our family finances. There is enough for children’s allowances and our household needs are met,” she added.

It’s no secret that outside entities have not always acted with local concerns in mind when developing plans and projects designed to support people on the ground. As Indigenous rights have grown in prominence, so has awareness among external partners. There is now recognition that working in partnership with Indigenous people will empower and protect their unique cultures to face new threats including climate change, ensuring their survival for decades to come.

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Indigenous peoples give fresh impetus to fight against climate crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

National governments signed up to keep global temperatures “well below 2C” and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5C. The immediate years after the deal led to a wave of interest around how this can be achieved and how it translates into action for people, governments, and business.

Since 2015, many corporations have recognised their crucial role in tackling the crisis, with early adopters setting bold targets to reduce emissions quickly. It is now commonplace to hear of another big business pledging to cut their greenhouse emissions by X amount by, say, 2030, or 2050.

As public concern around climate change has grown, business has recognised the need to do something. But the difficulty lies in trying to work out what all these new climate targets mean, and how to hold companies to account on what actions they are taking.

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) was set up after Paris to support businesses by translating the goals of the agreement into meaningful climate action. It’s become the gold standard with targets independently validated by a group of experts. To win approval a company’s target needs to provide a clear pathway to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and be in line with the latest climate science.

The initiative has seen strong growth in recent years. There are now over 2,250 companies with science-based targets – up from 500 a couple of years ago – spanning 70 countries and 15 industries.

But the need for stronger climate action has become clear and corporate commitments need to keep up. Where the Paris Agreement led with “well below 2C”, the focus now is on keeping the goal of 1.5C alive.

The concept of “net zero” has also been introduced to tackle the crisis. Nowhere in the text of the Paris Agreement does this term exist, but it is now essential to credible climate action. Net zero is a state where all greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere are equally removed, or neutralised. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, governments and businesses need to reach this state with their own emissions. 

As interest in science-based targets has grown, so has the need to toughen up what counts as a credible plan. The introduction of the new Net-Zero Corporate Standard by SBTi aims to do just that. The new criteria require companies to make rapid, deep cuts to emissions across their entire operations and supply chain.

A credible net zero plan needs to have targets both in the short and long term, and crucially companies are unable to claim to have reached net zero until those long-term targets have been met. This means companies will need to take proactive steps to reduce their emissions by at least 90-95% by 2050 to meet the new standard. In addition, carbon offsetting is only permitted for the final few percent which cannot be eliminated. The standard also asks companies to go beyond their own business by making investments to tackle climate change elsewhere.

While only 11 companies have an approved net-zero target under the new framework, over 1,000 have reportedly made a commitment to do so.

Ørsted, a global renewable energy company, is one of the few to currently have their net-zero target signed off by SBTi. Their new plan includes a target to reach net-zero emissions across the entire value chain by 2040. 

Mads Nipper, company CEO, said last year that “the only route to a climate-safe future is one that prioritises emissions reductions, both in the near and long-term”. Ørsted is also the only energy company on the Net-Zero Standard list, an important distinction given that the sector contributes 73% to global greenhouse gas emissions.

This point was brought out by a recent report from SBTi which looked at the climate progress of “high-impact” companies. Out of this group of over 2,200 companies across all sectors of the global economy, only 32 companies in power generation had made commitments to cut emissions. Not only were heavy-emitting industries absent, but a very high number of targets were being set by companies based in Europe, North America, or Japan.

It might be the case that many companies have set strong climate targets and haven’t engaged with SBTi, or communicated their plans to the public. But this lack of transparency makes it much harder to judge the credibility of company targets, and to help them improve as time goes on.  

Nipper added: “We need bold but credible net-zero plans from companies. If you are a business leader who wants to walk the talk, I encourage you to align your company’s climate strategy with what is required by science.”

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in London.

This post was sponsored by Orsted. See our editorial guidelines for what this means.

The post How can we zero in on the right climate targets? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Over the course of three decades the technology has gone from research project to global energy technology. The first offshore wind farm was installed in Danish waters in 1991. The 11 turbines had a total capacity of 4.5 megawatts, roughly enough to power 2,000-3,000 homes. Fast forward to today and the industry is developing single turbines which are three times as powerful. One sweep of a modern turbine could power the average European household for more than a day.

The industry has reached this level of maturity in some ways against the odds. In a short number of years the demands placed upon it to grow and cut costs have been enormous. And yet it has delivered through a combination of industry innovation, experience, and supportive government policies.

From those first humble turbines the industry has installed over 60 gigawatts, enough to power tens of millions of households. But this is where things get tricky. The sector now faces unique headwinds which threaten to push its growth journey off course and into choppy waters. 

Challenging environment

At any one time the renewable energy industry has to navigate policy landscapes and uncertainties which are a function of doing business across different countries and continents. In recent years these uncertainties have grown and been exacerbated by economic pressures. Persistent inflation and rising interest rates have meant the cost of building new wind farms has spiralled. The war in Ukraine has led to skyrocketing energy prices and supply chain constraints as Europe confronts a full-scale conflict on its doorstep.

This has had a knock on effect for many millions of people, businesses, and the offshore wind industry. Cost matters when the turbines you are building are bigger than the Eiffel Tower and being placed miles from land. Offshore projects can be sensitive to global shocks as it takes years to go from first designs to final turbines in the water.

Despite these pressures the world is depending on offshore wind to help meet its climate targets and reduce global temperatures to 1.5C. To do this requires a tripling down of support for renewable technologies. The International Energy Agency and its renewables counterpart, IRENA, both see clean energy capacity tripling to 11,000 gigawatts by 2030 if we are to stand a chance of meeting our climate goals.

Getting back on track

Ørsted, a global renewable energy company and the world leader in offshore wind, argues that the long-term prospects for the technology remain bright. But the sector’s current issues jeopardise whether it can build out projects as fast as is needed. Last September the company published a seven-point plan to help the industry get back on track. It insists that offshore wind remains essential to the energy transition especially given the “recent global fossil fuel supply shock”, adding that “it is crucial for governments and industry to work together to weather the current storm and facilitate future offshore wind deployment.” 

This push-pull dynamic has historically been such a success for the sector. Supportive government policies have helped spur innovation and investment. Strong levels of action from policymakers matched by industry commitments to drive down costs will now prove decisive. This means creating a path from high government targets to a place where investment decisions can be made and high volumes of clean power can be brought online. For example, making it simpler and more predictable to get projects approved, and creating a market which accounts for future risks. Among other things, it is these risks, seen in the global upheaval of the past 18 months, which create uncertainty and a lack of confidence.

All hands on deck

Emil Damgaard Grann, head of global positioning at Ørsted, commented: “This is not just an issue facing the offshore wind industry. If we don’t fix these problems, from high inflation to supply chain bottlenecks, then society stands to lose out. Climate targets, job creation, and the huge economic growth opportunities which flow from offshore wind will be missed.”

Government targets for offshore wind will require an estimated US$100 billion in supply chain investment over the next seven years. This would have huge economic and environmental benefits for the planet. But to get there means adopting an all hands on deck approach.

Sponsored post by Ørsted. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

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Research from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) found that between 2000 and 2019, there were almost twice as many climate-related disasters as during the previous 20 years. The number of major floods, for example, doubled from 1,389 to 3,254. These disasters are being fuelled by the world’s toxic love affair with carbon.

There was a time in which people discussed what the impacts of climate change might be on our children or grandchildren. It is clear that the pace of change is happening right here and now. As the planet continues to warm we have to accept that an increased number of climate-related disasters is inevitable, despite what progress is made between now and 2050.

Tried and tested

But accepting their occurrence doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it. There exists a tried and tested approach to tackling the growth in climate disasters. One of the main solutions is to set up an effective early warning system (EWS). This simple concept has proven so popular that the UN has set a target for every person on the planet to be covered by an EWS by 2027.  “The evidence is clear: early warning systems are one of the most effective risk reduction and climate adaptation measures to reduce disaster mortality and economic losses,” the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, recently commented.

The Adaptation Fund was created to support communities against the impacts of climate change. Disaster risk reduction coupled with early warning systems now account for around 18% of all the projects it funds. To date it has helped install 526 early warning systems across all continents, at the local, national and regional levels.

Mikko Ollikainen, who heads up the fund, recently commented that  “many of our projects are helping to reduce and avert further loss and damage,” adding that “the fund is committed to supporting developing countries to build resilience to climate disasters. With the global urgency for adaptation expressed in recent international reports, such as the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report, we must accelerate and scale up our collective adaptation activities, including DRR/EWS. We have seen several instances where Adaptation Fund projects were successfully scaled up to create transformational DRR/EWS systems in countries.”

On the ground

Among the many projects which are now building out early warning systems, one in Colombia stands out. This small-scale, innovative example shows the benefits of a tailored approach working closely with local people. The La Mojana region in northern Colombia is an area of around 500,000 hectares, rich in wetlands and biodiversity. But it is also incredibly vulnerable to climate impacts and has frequently experienced bouts of severe flooding and drought.

Funded by the Adaptation Fund and carried out by the UN Development Programme together with the Colombian government, the project aimed to protect and strengthen local communities to future climate impacts. It managed to achieve this, in part, through creating stronger flood infrastructure, restoring damaged wetland areas, and the creation of an early warning system. A hydro-meteorological forecast and alert centre was created to monitor water levels, map flood threats, and provide safe evacuation routes. This provided 100% coverage for thousands of people in the affected regions, up from zero a few years earlier.

Heed the lessons

Juana Madariaga, a restoration expert, told UNDP that: “We learned about everything. We received a lot of training and finally we were able to move this project forward…now we are supporting other communities in doing the same thing.” The success has been taken forward by the Green Climate Fund which has greatly scaled up the funding and coverage of the EWS to the wider region.

A recent study by AF concluded that the most successful disaster risk reduction projects shared many of the same characteristics. These include leading with the community, empowering women and indigenous groups to design the campaign, and ensuring strong involvement from regional and national institutions. In addition, strong investment in data collection and improving data quality is essential to ensuring long-term sustainability and effectiveness.

These ideas may seem straightforward on paper but each region is unique. When it comes to disaster risk the value comes through forming lasting partnerships, a willingness to learn, and an understanding of local concerns. If the number of climate disasters only continues to grow as expected, we will need to heed these lessons and fast. Because if we cannot prevent disasters from happening, we have to learn to adapt, build resilience and reduce climate change risks.

This post was sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post As climate disasters grow, early warning systems become essential appeared first on Climate Home News.

That time has now come and the verdict is not good. The UN climate chief Simon Stiell told reporters last month “we are far from where we need to be as a global community” and the “window of opportunity is rapidly closing”.

He called for a “course correction”. Governments will debate what that entails at the Cop28 climate summit 30 November-12 December.

But it’s not just governments that will decide our fate. Businesses have the power to get the world’s emissions down too. And part of the response to the global stocktake is increasing transparency and accountability around corporate action.

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Kaveh Guilanpour is a vice president at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “2024 really needs to see an effective response to the outcomes of the global stocktake so that it doesn’t remain words on paper,” he said.

Governments may agree at Cop28 to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by 2030 and phase out fossil fuels by mid-century.

“The corporate world needs to see that clear signal,” Guilanpour said, and could work with governments and organisations like the International Renewable Energy Agency to map out those transitions.

Equally, voluntary corporate initiatives like RE100, under which members commit to getting 100% of their electricity from renewables, bolster political will to aim high. The initiative calculates its 400+ members collectively use more electricity than France. They’ve got buying power.

Business knows

As the head of climate solutions at business research firm Morningstar Sustainalytics, Anya Solovieva talks often with investors and the upper echelons of the corporate world.

Over a full English breakfast at a private members club in London’s financial centre, she told Climate Home that “there is an awareness of the global stocktake, I think investors are watching”.

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But, she added, investors see 1.5C as “a minimum as opposed to a goal” and for them “it actually doesn’t necessarily have that big of an impact if we move from 1.5[C] to 1.6[C], the reality is that the transition is happening”.

For the people that will suffer from the extra climate disaster, the difference between 1.5C and 1.6C matters hugely. But for either target, the solution for businesses is the same – get emissions down as fast as possible.

Solovieva said that corporations’ managements are aware of this need to reduce emissions to net zero.

The UAE’s answer

For most companies, that is a decades-long project which will far outlast any CEO or sustainability lead.

That’s why initiatives have sprouted up in recent years asking businesses to commit to setting and meeting targets.

The latest comes from the United Arab Emirates’ Cop28 presidency, which is asking firms to sign a Net Zero Transition Charter (NZTC).

In a statement, the Cop28 presidency said the charter follows September’s technical report from the global stocktake “which showed that the world is off track to keeping the goals of the Paris agreement alive”.

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By signing the charter, companies are promising to “publicly set 1.5C-aligned, science-based, credible and transparent net zero 2050 and interim emissions reduction targets”.

This can be through a “net zero-aligned national pledge” or by signing up for an existing programme like the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), Race to Zero or 2050 Pathways.

Over 250 companies have already registered targets judged 1.5C-compatible by SBTi including beer brewer Heineken, toy-maker Hasbro and fashion brand Burberry.

To be compatible with the NZTC, they must also produce a “credible” net zero transition plan within a year of Cop28 and publicly report their emissions and progress on their transition plan.

Companies that do this will be praised on the Cop28 website and will be able to boast of their involvement in their marketing materials.

Cop28 president Sultan Al-Jaber said “the private sector’s  engagement in Cop28 – their resources, expertise, and commitment – is vital in driving real-world action”.

The charter will further enable them to ” take meaningful action on climate, track progress and be held accountable”.

Greenwashing risk

The NZTC builds upon the work of a 16-person taskforce convened by the UN chief Antonio Guterres to tackle corporate greenwash.

At Cop27 in Egypt last year, the taskforce launched its recommendations. Its chair Catherine McKenna told a packed tent that “too many of these net zero pledges represent little more than empty slogans and hype”.

Some recommendations from the McKenna taskforce have been adopted by the Cop28 presidency. Both say that firms should should support a just transition, align their lobbying with their climate commitments and leave trade associations whose activities aren’t compatible with 1.5C of warming.

Other taskforce recommendations are absent from the NZTC. The taskforce said that companies “cannot claim to be net zero while continuing to build or invest in new fossil fuel supply”. The Cop28 presidency left this out.

Cop28 president Sultan Al-Jaber is the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. The company has a net zero by 2045 target but only for its operational emissions – not the much larger carbon impact of customers burning its products. It is set to spend $1 billion every month this decade on oil and gas production.

Bill Hare was one of the members of the UN taskforce. He accused the NZTC of being soft on investment in fossil fuels, use of carbon credits and of relying on weak voluntary standards.

“It’s a mild form of greenwashing,” he said. “They’re providing the opportunity for companies to do yet again what they’ve done in other context – to claim they’re going to net zero when no one really knows whether they are or not.”

Building on UN taskforce

After the McKenna taskforce reported, the UN’s head Guterres asked the UN climate change arm to move forward on its recommendations.

They tasked Bing Leng from China and Sarah Bloom-Raskin from the USA to lead consultations on how to do that and they will report back at Cop28.

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At the same time, the UN is developing a climate action portal. This will be a website which aims to put all corporate net zero targets in one place so that the public can look at them and compare them.

“That’s an essential element if the average person wants to access the data that tells you what’s really going on and have confidence that it’s real data,” Hare said.

He said that progress had been slow but it is “getting off the ground” now and more is likely to be revealed at Cop28.

The post How can corporates ‘course correct’ on climate? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tens of trillions of dollars move through the global economy and financial markets each year. Finding a way to direct that money towards fighting climate change is one of the most pressing and urgent questions we face.

The Paris Agreement contains an important line on climate finance. It says that governments should “make financial flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development”.

If the world is to be successful in this objective then it would mean nothing less than a complete transformation of the financial sector as we currently understand it. But before that can be achieved there is also a huge amount of groundwork which needs to be laid.

Trailblazers

A variety of different climate funds have been set up to support the goals of the Paris Agreement. And even before the landmark deal was signed there existed funds which helped countries and communities build resilience to the climate crisis. These funds can be seen as the first movers, or early adopters, of a different way of doing finance. One which prioritises the climate, communities and the natural world.

The Adaptation Fund (AF) was established to protect vulnerable communities against the devastating impacts of climate change. Its pioneering approach is to create small-scale pilot projects which are innovative, impactful and can be scaled up elsewhere. By providing entities with direct access to finance from the Fund the work can be conducted quickly, something of great benefit when combating the urgency of the crisis.

Since 2010, AF has committed over US$1 billion across nearly 160 projects with an estimated 42 million people impacted. Its work has touched communities on almost every continent; from coastal erosion in Senegal to water management in the Maldives. Mahamat Abakar Assouyouti is a senior climate change specialist at the Fund. He comments that the scalability of financed projects “allows targeted and efficient use of resources, and ultimately an increased and long-lasting impact,” adding that scalability leads to economies of scale and “enables proof of concept”.

At the Fund’s heart is providing the space and opportunity to affect change where it is needed most, and to set an example for others to follow. This has been seen in the work of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the world’s largest climate fund with over US$13.5 billion allocated across 240 projects.

Restoring mangroves

One of the clearest examples of scaling up innovation comes from the waterways of Andhra Pradesh in India. The state sits on India’s southern coast and is exposed to an increased number of cyclones and storm surges coming in from the Bay of Bengal. This causes coastal erosion, depleted fishing stocks, and ruined crops from saltwater intrusion. 

The AF project, funded through its pioneering direct access modality and carried out by its national implementing partner in India, NABARD, sought to combat the problem by restoring mangroves in the Krishna Delta. This would prevent sea-level rises and create a habitat for fish farming. The project used a small sum of US$0.7 million to restore degraded mangrove forests, train local people in the techniques, and create 50 hectares of an integrated fish farming system. The low-budget, innovative techniques, and successful outcomes provided a strong example to follow. The GCF did exactly that with a scaled-up, US$130 million project to protect mangroves and seagrass in 24 ecosystems across coastal districts in India.

Scaling up successful projects such as this one ultimately means more impact and reaching more vulnerable people. But taking a successful smaller project and widening its scope is not without its challenges. Each project is only as good as the support it receives from host countries and institutions, local communities, and the availability of financing. The more complex the project, the greater likelihood it will need extra support to ensure its sustainability in the long-term. 

Teaming up

For this reason, climate funds often work together to ensure effectiveness, and the Adaptation Fund and GCF have agreed on a framework to scale up projects. The relationship has been working well with the larger GCF involved in scaling up around 18 projects initially funded by AF. 

In addition to its concrete projects on the ground, the AF also recently started offering scale-up grants to help bridge the gap from completion of a project in preparations to scale it up.

The private sector and national governments should look at the example set by climate funds. Financing innovative projects on the ground and with direct local involvement is a proven recipe for lasting impact. As we seek to change the way the financial system operates, we need to have strong and actionable examples of how to do things differently. Climate funds offer one recipe which does exactly that.

This post was sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post The subtle art of scaling up climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.