Some sectors, such as livestock farming and heavy industry, are viewed as particularly hard to decarbonise. This is due, in part, to a perceived lack of cheap technological solutions.
Any “residual emissions” from these practices will have to be balanced by removals from the atmosphere, if nations want to claim they have achieved their net-zero goals.
The new study, published in One Earth, analyses the strategies that nations have submitted to the UN to understand their approach to these emissions, and how they define them.
It finds significant uncertainty, with just 26 out of 71 countries with long-term plans having outlined how much they expect to still be emitting by 2050.
These nations alone say their residual emissions could be up to 2.9bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) – equivalent to around 5% of the current global total.
Fossil-fuel producing nations, such as Australia and Canada, plan to continue producing large volumes of emissions – before removing them via carbon capture technologies or paying for them to be offset elsewhere.
The study authors warn that the slow development and rollout of CO2 removal technologies means this approach could lead to net-zero ambitions ending in “failure”.
“Residual” emissions are defined as those that remain once a nation, or some other entity, has gone as far as it thinks is possible to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The concept is closely tied with the net-zero targets that many nations have set for the middle of the century. A country must remove CO2 from the atmosphere that is equivalent in volume to its residual emissions, in order to say it has reached net-zero.
The amount of residual emissions each country is left with therefore dictates how much it will have to invest in CO2 removal – either by planting trees or building machines that directly remove the CO2 from the atmosphere.
So far, countries have shown very little progress in developing technologies to remove CO2.
Yet, as the new study explains, “there is a tendency to treat residual emissions as inevitable”. One key reason for this is that these emissions are expected to largely come from so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors.
These sectors are generally framed as those that lack cheap and widely available technologies to drastically cut their emissions. Examples include steel production, aviation and many aspects of livestock agriculture, such as rearing cows, growing rice and using fertilisers..
Yet, despite these common framings, in practice, both residual emissions and hard-to-abate sectors remain poorly defined. Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that even “hard-to-abate” sectors can feasibly be decarbonised using available technologies.
According to Prof Naomi Vaughan, a climate change researcher at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and one of the new study’s co-authors, this means “net-zero can hide a multitude of sins”. Speaking to Carbon Brief, she asks:
“What are you choosing – as an industry or as a country – to decide is hard to abate…And what genuinely is?”
In order to interrogate this, the team led by Harry Smith, a UEA PhD student focusing on the role of CO2 removal in climate policy, set out to understand what different countries were describing as “residual emissions” and how they were justifying this description.
Under the Paris Agreement, nations are encouraged to submit long-term low-emission development strategies (LT-LEDS). If a country has a mid-century net-zero target, this document will explain how it intends to get there.
In their study, Smith and his colleagues analyse every LT-LEDS submitted to the UN by October 2023 – covering a total of 67 countries. They also include four extra long-term strategies produced by EU member states, but not submitted to the UN.
The 71 nations with long-term strategies for tackling climate change cover 71% of global emissions, the study notes.
However, the majority – 41 in total – do not quantify residual emissions at all in their plans. These include major emitters with net-zero targets, such as China, India and Russia.
The researchers identify 26 countries that have calculated the amount of emissions they expect to still be producing at the point they reach net-zero.
In total, this amounts to between 2.6-2.9GtCO2e, excluding emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). (The range results from countries including several different scenarios in their strategies.)
The study also compares the scale of each nation’s residual emissions to the highest level its emissions have reached in a year. If countries are yet to peak, data from 2021 was used.
The authors conclude that, on average, the 16 developed “Annex I” countries assessed in this study plan on still producing 21% of their peak emissions when they reach net-zero.
Meanwhile, the nine developing and emerging “Annex II” economies expect to continue producing 34% of their peak emissions, the study finds. This estimate excludes Cambodia, which plans to keep increasing its emissions but cancelling them out by turning its extensive forests into a net carbon sink.
The chart below shows residual emissions (red) as a share of each nation’s peak emissions (blue) – or its most recent annual emissions, if its emissions have not yet peaked. Residual emissions from the US alone are set to be higher than the total emissions of nearly every other country.
To understand more about how governments justify the residual emissions in their strategies, the researchers analyse the sectors where emissions remain high out into the second half of this century.
Overall, agriculture is expected to see the least progress in emissions reductions, contributing roughly one-third of residual emissions across all the nations assessed, the study finds.
Methane from livestock and emissions from fertilisers are frequently cited as some of the “hardest-to-abate”. Developed countries only expect their agricultural emissions to drop 37%, on average, by the time they hit net-zero.
(International aviation and shipping, while viewed as some of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, are simply excluded from most countries’ long-term plans, meaning they do not feature prominently in this analysis.)
The researchers also look in greater depth at the rationales given by each country for defining emissions as “residual” or “hard-to-abate”, by analysing 357 statements on the topic within the long-term strategies. They group the statements into different categories, based on which sectors are described and the type of language used.
As the chart below shows, countries frequently provide no justification at all for their continued production of residual emissions in particular sectors.
The definition of “residual” varies considerably between countries, with governments focusing on different aspects depending on their circumstances. Smith tells Carbon Brief:
“What you find is this range of rationales [that are] not just technical…They’re not just political either…It’s a kind of pick your buffet of rationales.”
The most common arguments concern residual emissions from industry and transport – particularly the production of cement and steel, the emissions of F-gases and domestic aviation and shipping. (The researchers note a “mismatch” here, with arguments explaining residual emissions from agriculture often overlooked, despite it being the largest contributor.)
Countries most frequently cite the lack of new technologies and limits to existing ones as the reasons for continued emissions from these sectors.
Despite these assertions, hundreds of industry leaders from the heavy industry and heavy-duty transport sectors have described net-zero goals as “technically and financially possible by mid-century”.
For example, a recent report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) concluded that “the technologies to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors have seen significant progress in recent years and are today largely available”.
The large amounts of residual emissions in most nations’ long-term strategies reveals that many are expecting to lean heavily on carbon removal to meet their net-zero targets, the study says.
The study notes that this “risks the credibility of their target[s] and risks a failure to meet national and global net-zero”, given the known limits to carbon removals.
In some cases, this could also mean shifting responsibility elsewhere by purchasing carbon offsets from other countries.
Moreover, the study adds that some nations “may attempt to retain or expand their fossil fuel production”, and pass off resulting emissions as “residual”. Vaughan explains that countries may lean towards looser definitions of residual emissions, if it benefits them:
“If you have a country with a very significant investment in the fossil fuel industry or extraction industries, then there is an incentive to imagine getting to net-zero where you still have quite a lot of emissions – but you’re using lot’s of CO2 removal to get there.”
The authors highlight Australia and Canada, two nations that currently produce large amounts of fossil fuels. Both include scenarios in their net-zero strategies – albeit at the high end of several potential outcomes – where emissions only fall by around half by 2050.
In Australia’s case, this scenario relies on purchasing large amounts of carbon offsets from other countries. Canada relies on very high use of CO2 removal technologies.
Prof Holly Jean Buck, a climate researcher at the University of Buffalo who published an initial investigation into residual emissions in countries’ LT-LEDS last year, but was not involved in this research. She says tackling the “ambiguity” around these emissions is key:
“We don’t know if countries are planning to phase out fossil fuels…We have infrastructure that has long lifetimes in terms of how long it takes to build it and how long it will be in operation. Without specificity around which sectors or activities we hope to fully decarbonise and electricity, it’s hard for countries to do that planning.”
Experts tell Carbon Brief the new study is a welcome contribution to a relatively sparse literature on residual emissions.
Buck says it is a “thorough and careful” study that expands on her work, both by increasing the number of strategies assessed and broadening the scope of the analysis.
Her assessment only focused on high-ambition strategies for LT-LEDS from Annex I countries. The new research led by Smith and his colleagues includes a broader range of scenarios, and suggests that residual emissions could be even higher in 2050 than thought.
The study proposes a number of measures to tighten the definition of “residual” emissions and help countries better address them. This includes stronger reporting requirements for national strategies.
The researchers also propose separate targets for emissions reductions and CO2 removals, in order to prevent countries continuing to burn fossil fuels while simply pledging to remove emissions.
Dr William Lamb, a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief he supports this idea and adds:
“I would also like to see the discussion of residual emissions become more political than it currently is. If countries were asking questions such as ‘how fast can we phase out fossil fuels?’ and ‘what human needs and services do we need to deliver, at minimum impact to the climate?’ then their long-term strategies would look very different.”
In 2023 alone, 70 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity was constructed in China, up four-fold since 2019 and accounts for 95% of the world’s new coal power construction activity in that year.
This surge of coal capacity raises concerns about China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and climate goals, as well as the risk of stranded assets down the line.
Coal is being pitched by the Chinese government as the means to guarantee energy security and to meet rapidly-rising peaks in electricity demand, because solar and wind output is variable.
At the same time, China’s electricity sector is seeing major changes in terms of costs, demand patterns, regulation and market operation. Our new study indicates that the traditional economic calculus used to justify new coal capacity may be outdated.
Using a simple, analytical metric for evaluating the most economic way to meet peak demand, we show that a combination of solar plus battery storage may be a more cost-effective option than new coal.
Over the past decade, the costs of renewables and battery storage have decreased substantially, peak-time residential and commercial demand has surged, and wholesale electricity markets have gained greater traction.
Meanwhile, China also announced “dual carbon” goals of peaking CO2 emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. Given these transformations, building more unabated coal power conflicts with China’s long-term climate commitments and may no longer be the most cost-effective option to meet demand growth. It also diverts much-needed capital from the transition toward a clean power system.
Our study introduces an alternative metric for calculating the cost-optimal investments needed to meet rising peak electricity demand.
This metric, “net capacity cost”, is the annualised fixed costs of investment in infrastructure needed to meet peak demand minus electricity market revenues earned by this infrastructure, or its “system value”. In this metric, a negative figure means that instead of a cost, such investments would turn a profit.
To explore this metric in a Chinese context, we use a simple example of a 1,500 megawatt (MW) increase in peak electricity demand and a 6,570 gigawatt hour (GWh) rise in demand across a full year, in a hypothetical province.
We then outline five strategies (cases) for meeting these peak and annual energy demands, ranging from heavy reliance on coal through to a combination of solar and battery storage.
In the different cases, resources are sized based on how much they can reliably contribute to peak supply needs and annual energy needs:
For each case, shown in the table below, we calculated the annual net cost for both the individual resource (coal, battery or solar), as well as for the system as a whole for securing one kilowatt (kW) of power generation capacity in yuan per year.
The resource net capacity cost in the top half of the table is the net cost of that resource (i.e., the annualised fixed cost minus annual revenue that resource earns from providing energy and ancillary services, such as frequency regulation). Positive numbers show a net cost to the grid operator in adding or procuring that resource.
The total system net capacity cost, in the second half of the table, is the net cost of meeting peak demand growth with the combination of resources in each case.
The weighting that we used to calculate system net costs is based on the ratio of installed capacity and peak demand growth.
Cost of different combinations of energy sources to meet electricity demand
| Case 1 | Case 2 | Case 3 | Case 4 | Case 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resource net capacity cost (yuan per kW per year, per kW of installed capacity) | |||||
| Coal | 424 | 424 | 512 | ||
| Battery | 248 | 781 | |||
| Solar | -128 | -128 | -128 | -128 | |
| System net capacity cost (yuan per kW per year, per kW of capacity used to meet peak demand, after capacity credit) | |||||
| Coal | 471 | 306 | 236 | ||
| Battery | 138 | 434 | |||
| Solar | -223 | -319 | -319 | -319 | |
| Total | 471 | 83 | -83 | -181 | 115 |
In order to stress-test this simple analysis, we looked at sensitivities of a variety of prices for different sources.
With solar prices in China already very low, our sensitivity analysis focused on the price of coal, batteries and other inputs to the analysis.
Our results indicate that when battery storage provides frequency regulation reserves (case 4), a combination of solar and storage is the most cost-effective option for meeting peak demand growth.
This combination could cost grid operators -181 yuan (about -$25 or -£20) for each kilowatt of capacity added.
In contrast, building new coal capacity to meet peak demand growth (case 1) is the most expensive option, with a net capacity cost of 471 yuan (about $65 or £52) for securing one kilowatt of capacity per year.
Case 3, in which large coal power plants are only used for backup power (little to no generation), may not be politically feasible in China, at least in the near term.
The other two cases (case 2 and case 5) are more comparable, but given that battery prices have fallen by more than 30% since this analysis was performed – to about 1 yuan (about $0.14 or £0.11) per watt-hour (Wh) of capacity – the batteries in case 5 are likely more economically attractive than the coal in case 2.
To navigate this changing landscape, our analysis suggests that a near-term strategy for meeting China’s rising energy demand while also working towards its climate goals involves enabling battery storage participation in electricity markets.
Currently, the Chinese government allows “new energy storage”, including batteries, to participate in the electricity market. However, the detailed regulations are ambiguous and battery participation could be made simpler.
For example, battery storage is not allowed to provide “operational reserves” referring to capacity that is held in reserve to manage unexpected differences between supply and demand. Making battery storage eligible for this would enhance its business case.
Allowing greater market participation for battery storage would foster continued innovation and cost reductions in battery storage systems, while offering valuable operational experience for system operators.
Such a strategy would be consistent with market outcomes and reflects recent electricity market experience in the US and Europe.
It would also help to resolve near-term capacity and energy needs, as batteries and solar generation can typically be built more quickly than coal-fired power plants.
Moreover, it would help to alleviate future conflicts between new coal generation and renewable energy. New coal generation built mainly as a backup for renewable generation will either rarely operate or encroach on operating hours and net income for other existing coal generators, creating new stranded asset risks.
Continued electricity market reforms would also facilitate more efficient investments in renewable generation and electricity storage.
Allowing wholesale electricity prices to be set by the market and allowing renewable generation and electricity storage to participate in wholesale markets can enhance their revenue and profits.
Furthermore, the reforms would encourage the efficient utilisation of electricity storage, which is our key finding. Electricity storage can provide a variety of functions for the electricity system; wholesale prices can help to guide the operation of storage toward those functions that have the highest value at the lowest cost.
The recent directive from China’s national energy administration (NEA) that integrates new types of storage facilities (non-pumped hydro) into grid dispatch operation is a step towards the reforms we outline.
Appropriate compensation mechanisms, such as capacity payments in some provinces, for all the services that such storage facilities provide, may need to be further defined to promote the sustainable development and integration of these storage facilities into the grid.
Finally, additional supply alone is unlikely to be the lowest-cost way to meet growth in electricity demand in China. Improving end-use efficiency and “demand response” can also help to reduce the overall cost of supplying electricity.
As China continues its electricity market reforms, regional market designs linking multiple provinces, as well as and regional approaches to resource adequacy that encourage resource sharing among provinces, could also help to meet China’s rising electricity use and peak demand in the most cost-effective and lowest-carbon way possible.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
BITTER TRUTHS: Cocoa futures contracts being traded on the New York commodities exchange “hit an all-time high above $12,000 per tonne in April”, but fell below $9,000 this week “on the news of rains arriving in west Africa”, the Financial Times reported. The “wild swings” that are “enough to be bankrupting for a lot of people” are “a sign of market volatility and stress following successive poor harvests in Ivory Coast and Ghana” – the world’s two top producers of cocoa. Both countries, along with Nigeria and Cameroon, “have seen drastically reduced crop yields amid droughts, fires and other climate change-induced weather phenomena”, African Business reported, further “exacerbated by decades of underinvestment in the sector”. Farmers are having to “pursue alternative revenue streams”, the outlet added. The crisis facing the cocoa sector points to a systemic problem, the Guardian wrote: “Faced with global heating, increasing conflict and energy price instability, depending on the free market is a poor bet.”
‘HEATFLATION’: A global olive oil shortage brought on by drought and extreme heat in Europe has driven prices to record highs and even “fuelled a crime surge”, CNBC News reported. Spain, the world’s largest olive supplier, saw output cut between 30-50% of its usual 1.3m-tonne harvest, with Spanish supermarkets reporting that “olive oil had become the most stolen item” across the country, the story added. Helena Bennett at policy thinktank Green Alliance UK “unequivocally attributed the record spike in olive oil prices to climate change”, telling CNBC: “It’s happening to other food crops too…Olive oil today, everything else soon.” The experts who predicted last year that “heatflation” would send olive oil price’s skyrocketing “were right”, Salon wrote.
‘SOGFLATION’: Meanwhile, the UK is staring at the costs of “sogflation”, according to Bloomberg. Bread, beer and biscuit prices “look set to rise sharply” after a wet winter impacted crops across the UK, according to new analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), the Press Association reported. According to ECIU, yields of key crops such as wheat, barley, oats and rapeseed “might drop by 4m tonnes” compared to 2023, with wheat slated to see a 27% drop. Between October 2022 and March 2024, England experienced “the wettest 18-month period since records began in 1836”, the Guardian said, resulting in “crops either being flooded[,] damaged…or farmers not being able to establish crops at all.”
MARINE HEATWAVES: The Indian Ocean “is experiencing unprecedented and accelerated warming” and could hit a rate of 1.7-3.8C per century “unless greenhouse gas [emissions] are reduced immediately”, Down to Earth wrote, reporting on new research. The work – which forms the chapter of a new book – found that marine heatwave days “are expected to rise” from 20 to 220-250 a year, meaning that “most of the Indian Ocean could be in a near-permanent state of marine heatwave conditions”, the story said. This could cause tropical cyclones to intensify rapidly, “putting fisheries and people living along the coastline at risk”, Mongabay wrote, reporting on the same study.
LAKSHADWEEP LOSS: The Hindu reported that researchers at India’s Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) recorded “widespread bleaching impacting coral reefs in the Lakshadweep Sea owing to marine heatwaves” this week. Since October last year, the Lakshadweep Sea – bordering India, Maldives and Sri Lanka – saw temperature “rises greater than 1C”, CMFRI scientists told the paper. “If the situation continues to rise, it could precipitate an unprecedented biodiversity crisis due to multispecies mortality,” said Dr KR Sreenath, senior scientist at the CMFRI. “The degradation of these ecosystems can lead to the collapse of local marine food webs, affecting a wide range of marine species, from fish communities to marine mammals like dugongs and dolphins,” he added.
FIRE IN THE MOUNTAIN: Meanwhile, on land, India reported a record 75,000 forest fires in April, according to the Hindustan Times. The eastern states of Odisha and Chhattisgarh and the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand were among the worst affected, with a senior forest official telling the paper that a “warmer-than-usual April and drier winter this year are the reasons for sudden spurt”. The mountainous state of Uttarakhand lost more than 142 hectares of forest to fires in just 72 hours, with “scanty winter rain” playing a major role in the 6,701 blazes that broke out in the hill state last month, another Hindustan Times story reported. A NewsLaundry investigation reported that Uttarakhand’s district authorities “ignored” warnings and deployed nearly all of their forest staff and vehicles for election duty during peak fire season, affecting “official preparedness to deal with the [fires]”.
In this spotlight, Carbon Brief reports on a new study finding that biodiversity loss is the largest driver of infectious diseases, with climate change, pollution and invasive species also increasing outbreak risks.
The role of environmental problems, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, in spreading infectious diseases to humans and animals has received renewed focus since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The root cause of the pandemic has never been identified, but some researchers suspect that the virus passed from bats to humans through an unknown intermediary animal, possibly a pangolin.
An infection or disease that has passed from an animal to a human is known as a “zoonosis”. Back in 2020, a range of scientists told Carbon Brief that such events could be increasing because of climate change, biodiversity loss and habitat destruction, which are each creating new opportunities for humans and animals to come into contact.
A new study in Nature conducted a meta-analysis of the available scientific literature to try to understand what the main global drivers of infectious disease risk could be for both humans and wildlife.
For the research, the scientists identified studies on the links between infectious disease and environmental change, a category that included biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, climate change, habitat loss or change and invasive alien species.
They extracted the relevant data from these studies to create a database detailing nearly 3,000 observations of infectious disease spread or harm in response to environmental change.
The next step was to standardise the data so that they could compare how different environmental change drivers affect infectious disease risk.
The results showed that biodiversity loss was the largest driver of infectious disease risk across the studies included in the database, co-lead author Prof Jason Rohr, an ecology and public health researcher at the University of Notre Dame in the US, told Carbon Brief:
“Biodiversity loss, climate change and alien species tend to increase infections, and urbanisation tends to decrease infections. These results were generally consistent across human and non-human diseases.”
The results could help policymakers to channel financial resources for tackling infectious diseases more effectively, Rohr said:
“The findings [we] uncovered should help target disease management and surveillance efforts towards global change drivers that increase disease.
“Specifically, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing ecosystem health and preventing biological invasions and biodiversity loss could help to reduce the burden of plant, animal and human diseases, especially when coupled with improvements to social and economic determinants of health.”
MAASAI MAROONED: Forty tourists and staff members marooned in Kenya’s Maasai Mara Game Reserve due to flooding were rescued by local authorities, the Star reported. Dozens “narrowly escaped death at dawn” when the Talek River, which runs through the park, burst its banks after “torrential” rains, the East African reported. The outlet added that visitors and workers were “forced to climb trees” after the camps became waterlogged. At least 11 people have died due to the floods in Narok and Bomet counties, the Nation said. Gazelles and giraffes were the most affected wild animals, with the floods “disrupting habitats, food sources and water availability”.
EARTH ANGELS: Seven environmental defenders from six different continents were awarded this year’s Goldman Prize. Widely described as the “green Nobel”, the prize is given out to campaigners for “sustained and significant” efforts to protect the environment, Reuters wrote, profiling India’s Alok Shukla and his role in the decade-long movement to protect the Hasdeo Arand forest from coal mining. Marcel Gomes, executive secretary at Repórter Brasil, won the prize for coordinating an international investigation that “pressured big European retailers to stop selling illegally sourced” beef, Mongabay reported. Other winners this year include Murrawah Johnson from Australia’s First Nations, Nonhle Mbuthuma from South Africa and Spain’s Teresa Vincente.
NICKEL FOR FORESTS: According to a Global Forest Watch report, primary forest loss in Indonesia increased by 27% in 2023 compared to the previous year, the Associated Press reported. While the report said this loss is “still seen as historically low compared to the 2010s”, some experts “saw concern in the recent uptick”, tying it to the “world’s appetite for mining Indonesia’s vast deposits of nickel, which is critical for the green energy transition”, the newswire wrote. AP added that Global Forest Watch’s data on deforestation is “higher” than official Indonesian figures.
BRAZIL FLOODS: Storms and flooding in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul have killed at least 78 people and displaced a further 115,000 people, Al Jazeera reported. The floods have caused damage to roads and bridges, triggered landslides and caused the partial collapse of a dam at a small hydroelectric power plant, the outlet noted. A second dam in the area is also at risk of collapsing due to rising water levels, according to BBC News. It added that the extreme weather has been caused by “a rare combination of hotter than average temperatures, high humidity and strong winds”.
G7 MEETING: A meeting of ministers from the G7 – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US – in Turin saw countries restate and add detail to climate, energy and biodiversity commitments. Along with a much-publicised pledge to end new coal power by 2035, the G7 also committed to a “swift, full and effective implementation” of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and to submit new national biodiversity plans ahead of the COP16 biodiversity summit in October. (France and Japan are the only G7 nations to have submitted plans so far and the US is not party to the UN biodiversity convention.) The G7 also said it would hold a workshop on implementing the GBF, with a focus on invasive species.
‘FIELDS OF FILTH’: Intensive meat and dairy farms in England have breached environmental regulations thousands of times in the past few years, according to a new investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The organisation obtained investigation records from England’s Environment Agency describing more than 3,000 incidents, including “routine discharge of slurry and dirty water, maggot-infested carcass bins and the illegal incineration of pigs”. An Environment Agency spokesperson told the publication that there was a clear need for improvement, noting that around 80% of pig and poultry farm inspections resulted in advice and guidance, 16% resulted in a warning and around 2% resulted in a formal caution or prosecution.
RESTORATION RETHINK: Dr Forrest Fleischman gave a talk at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery on the relationship between ecosystem restoration and social science, as large-scale restoration projects gain more traction as a climate solution.
OFFSETS INVESTIGATED: The BBC’s flagship investigations show Panorama exposed serious issues with company net-zero claims that rely on carbon offsets.
KILLER GANG: A Mongabay story reported on how a single poaching ring may have “wip[ed] out 10% of the entire global population of the critically endangered” Javan rhino.
SEDIMENT STRATEGY: A deep dive in Nature unpacked Maldives’ “race” to reclaim land from the sea to combat sea level rise, but critics say the environmental costs are too high.
Asymmetric impacts of forest gain and loss on tropical land surface temperature
Nature Geoscience
A new study found that land-surface warming caused by tropical forest loss is stronger than the cooling produced by forest gain – a significant finding, since tree-planting is often viewed as a key climate solution. The authors used multiple sources of satellite data to understand how land temperatures responded to forest loss and gain, finding that loss caused warming of about 0.56C and afforestation only brought down temperatures by around 0.10C. This asymmetry has not been captured by current Earth-system models and “could overestimate the cooling effect of afforestation in future”, the authors said.
Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050
Science
Climate change could become the largest driver of biodiversity loss by the middle of the century, new research suggested. The study used modelling to examine past and future drivers of global biodiversity loss. It found that during the 20th century, global biodiversity declined by 2-11%, with land-use change as the major driver. However, projections for the future suggested that climate change is likely to overtake land-use change to become the biggest driver by mid-century, especially under high emissions scenarios, the researchers said. They added that the findings “robustly show that renewed policy efforts are needed to meet the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity”.
The positive impact of conservation action
Science
New research found that conservation actions improved the state of biodiversity – or at least slowed down biodiversity loss – but did not halt it “more than half of the time”. Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 186 studies that measured biodiversity over time and contrasted conservation outcomes against areas where there were no measures in place to protect nature. Of all the conservation actions studied, invasive species control, habitat loss reduction and restoration, creation of protected areas and sustainable management had the highest impact. The authors concluded: “Conservation actions are investments rather than payments – and, as our study demonstrates, they are typically investments that yield genuine, high-magnitude positive impacts.”
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org.
It says they are now growing fast enough to exceed rising demand, meaning there will be a peak in fossil fuel electricity generation – and emissions – from this year.
As a result, Ember says in its latest annual review of global electricity data that a “new era of falling fossil fuel generation is imminent”.
Renewables met a record 30% of global electricity demand in 2023 and emissions from the sector would already have peaked if not for a record fall in hydropower, the analysis says.
The rise of wind and solar has been stemming the growth of fossil fuel power, which would have been 22% higher in 2023 without them, Ember says. This would have added around 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) to annual global emissions.
Nevertheless, the growth of clean electricity sources needs to accelerate to meet the global goal of tripling renewables by 2030, Ember says.
Meeting this goal would almost halve power sector emissions by the end of the decade, and put the world on a pathway aligned with the 1.5C climate target set in the Paris Agreement.
In 2023, more than twice as much new electricity generation from solar was added around the world as from coal, Ember says.
The share of solar within the global energy mix reached 5.5%, up from 4.6% in 2022, according to Ember. The share of wind stayed steady at 7.8% (2,304 terawatt hours, TWh).
No other sources of electricity generation have ever grown from 100TWh per year to 1,000TWh faster than solar and wind, Ember says. These took just eight and 12 years respectively, as shown in the figure below.
This sits far ahead of gas generation at 28 years, coal at 32 years and hydropower at 39 years. (Nuclear also grew from 100TWh to 1,000TWh over 12 years, the Ember figure shows, but tailed off more quickly than wind).
In response to Ember’s report, Dr Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor at Our World in Data, says in a statement:
“The main headline from Ember’s 2023 review is that the world sees a bright future for solar power. It is consistently breaking records and maintains its position as the fastest-growing power source in history. This is not only driven by the need to move to clean energy, but by its exciting economics as prices continue to fall. There are early signs that a peak in power sector emissions is imminent. Faster growth in low-carbon energy will be needed to drive down emissions quickly, especially as countries electrify transport, heating and industry.”
Despite solar and wind capacity growth in 2023, generation grew more slowly than expected, rising by 513TWh – a small drop from the 517TWh added in 2022.
Solar generation growth lagged behind record high capacity addition growth of 36%, due to lower sunlight levels in 2023, especially in China, as well as underreporting of solar generation in some countries. This is expected to be temporary, notes Ember.
For wind, there was a fall in generation for the first time since 2001, down 9.1TWh or 2.1%. Low wind conditions kept load factors close to their lowest level in five years, Ember says.
Additionally, higher costs slowed wind capacity additions as developers were forced to delay or cancel projects. More than $30bn in investment was put on hold as at least 10 offshore wind projects in the US and Europe were hit by delays, the Wall Street Journal reported for example.
In other renewables, hydropower’s share of the electricity mix fell by 0.6 percentage points to 14.3% of the world’s electricity mix, Ember reports. It therefore remains the world’s largest source of clean power, but its share of the mix is now at the lowest since at least 2000, with wind and solar combined sitting just 1 percentage point behind at 13.4% (3,935TWh) .
This is despite 7GW of new hydropower capacity coming online in 2023, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
Ember had previously estimated that there would be a 0.4% reduction in global power sector emissions in 2023, but the fall in hydropower generation prevented this. Instead, emissions from the power sector rose by 1%, as the hydro shortfall was mostly met by coal.
Wind and solar have expanded from 0.2% of the global electricity mix in 2000 to 13.4% in 2023. Over the last year, their share grew by another 1.5 percentage points, up from 11.9% in 2022.
While wind and solar were rising fast, 2023 also saw global electricity demand reaching a record high, with an increase in demand of 627TWh, Ember reports. This is the equivalent of adding the entire demand of Canada (607TWh), for example.
With wind and solar having grown by 513TWh in 2023 and nuclear by 46TWh, but hydro falling 88TWh, the remaining demand growth was met by increased fossil fuel use.
This continued the trend of recent years where the gap between clean power growth and rapidly-rising demand was met by expanded electricity generation from fossil fuels.
Moreover, last year’s increase in demand was below the recent average, rising by 2.2%. This was due to a pronounced decrease in demand from OECD countries, including the US (-1.4%) and the European Union (-3.4%).
Elsewhere, there was rapid growth in electricity demand in China, growing nearly 7%. This was the equivalent of the total global demand growth in 2023, Ember notes.
Looking ahead, demand is likely to grow even faster as energy use is increasingly electrified. Already more than half of global electricity demand growth in 2023 was driven by the rise of electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, electrolysers, air conditioning and data centres, the report states.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), nearly 14m EVs were registered globally in 2023, bringing the total number on the roads to 40m. This puts electric car sales last year at 3.5m higher than in 2022, a 35% year-on-year increase.
Ember forecasts that electricity demand will accelerate significantly going forwards, with a growth of 968TWh expected in 2024. Even faster growth would be expected on a path to staying below 1.5C under the IEA’s “NZE” scenario, it notes.
Yet clean electricity generation is expected to grow faster still, with wind,solar and other clean energy sources adding an estimated 1,300TWh in 2024, as shown in the chart below.
This would be more than double the increase in 2023 (493TWh), due to an expected uplift in the US from the Inflation Reduction Act and a reversal in short-term factors such as last year’s hydro drought, the report says.
As a result of this, Ember estimates that fossil generation will decline by 333TWh or 2% in 2024. Even more importantly, Ember says clean energy growth makes ongoing falls in power sector fossil fuel use “inevitable” – meaning a steady decline in related emissions.
Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and founding partner of Global Optimism, says in a press statement:
“The fossil fuel era has reached its necessary and inevitable expiration date as these findings show so clearly. This is a critical turning point: Last century’s outdated technologies can no longer compete with the exponential innovations and declining cost curves in renewable energy and storage. All of humanity and the planet upon which we depend will be better off for it.”
At the COP28 UN climate conference in Dubai in 2023, all countries agreed to contribute to the tripling of global renewable energy capacity by 2030, in what was seen as a “crucial” step for 1.5C.
Although the COP28 outcome did not include numerical targets, Ember says tripling renewables would mean adding 14,000TWh of annual renewable generation by 2030, compared to 2022 levels. In 2022, renewables accounted for 8,599TWh of the 28,844TWh of electricity generated globally.
After accounting for rising electricity demand, it says this tripling would help cut fossil fuel generation by 6,570TWh, or 37%. With highly-polluting coal power bearing the brunt of this reduction, power sector emissions would fall even faster, by 45% in 2030, it says.
Already, the expansion of renewable energy has slowed fossil fuel growth substantially, as the graph below shows.
After recording average annual growth of 3.5% over the decade 2004-2013, fossil fuel generation only grew by an average of 1.3% in the decade to 2023.
Fossil fuel generation was 22% lower in 2023 than it would have been without solar and wind generation. Between 2015 and 2023, wind and solar have together avoided more than 4GtCO2 emissions, Ember notes.
Meeting the tripling goal would mean some 60% of global electricity supplies coming from renewable sources by 2030.
This would mark a dramatic shift from current renewable shares. In 2023, 102 countries had a renewable generation share of 30% or higher, up from 98 in 2022. Yet only 69 countries in 2023 had a share in excess of 50%.
Hitting the tripling target would help put “the world on a pathway aligned with the 1.5C climate goal”, says Ember.
Ember’s director of global insights, Dave Jones says in a statement:
“We already know the key enablers that help countries unleash the full potential of solar and wind. There’s an unprecedented opportunity for countries that choose to be at the forefront of the clean energy future.”
CUTTING COAL: The US, UK, Germany and other Group of Seven (G7) countries committed to phase out coal power by 2035, the Associated Press reported, noting that it “puts a timeline” on global pledges to “phase down” coal. G7 countries agreed two years ago to decarbonise their power sectors by 2035 and Climate Home News noted that most nations in the group already have coal phase-out plans.
LEEWAY: However, the G7 pact also included an “alternative goal” to phase out coal power “in a timeline consistent with keeping a limit of a 1.5C temperature rise within reach”, Reuters said. Sources told the outlet that this would “grant room for manoeuvre to Germany and Japan”, two coal-reliant countries. The Financial Times said the deal also leaves open the possibility of “continued investment in gas”.
FUELLING THE FIRE: A study found that global banks lent $470bn (£374bn) to coal industry companies between January 2021 and December 2023, Der Spiegel reported. Meanwhile, in the UK, the government is expected to permit fossil fuel companies to explore for oil and gas under offshore wind sites for the first time, the Guardian reported, with experts saying this will likely do little to increase production.
COUNTRYWIDE IMPACT: Heavy rainfall and flooding have hit many parts of Kenya in recent weeks, killing more than 180 people, Reuters reported. At least 48 people were killed after a dam burst its banks near a town in the south of the country, according to the Standard newspaper. A river also overflowed into the famous Masai Mara wildlife reserve and flooded tourist camps, the New York Times said.
CLIMATE LINK: Context News reported that scientists blame a “deadly cocktail” of climate change and the El Niño weather pattern for floods in Kenya and other neighbouring countries. In the Conversation, a hydrology consultant said that the floods also “expose decades of poor urban planning and bad land management”.
HIGHWAY HIT: Meanwhile, heavy rainfall persisted in China’s Guangdong province. At least 24 people died after a highway collapsed due to the “torrential rain”, the Independent said. There is no formal “attribution” study on whether global warming worsened the Guangdong floods, but one rapid analysis found that the “somewhat uncommon event” was “exacerbated” by both human-caused climate change and natural variability.
BURST DAM: In Brazil, more than 30 people following heavy rains and flooding and a hydroelectric dam burst, BBC News reported. The “extreme weather” across the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul was caused by a “rare combination of hotter than average temperatures, high humidity and strong winds”, the outlet said.
The number of countries expected to submit new biodiversity pledges ahead of the UN summit COP16 in October.
Countries that have done so, Carbon Brief analysis showed.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Recent Carbon Brief analysis showed that fossil fuels supplied a record-low 2.4% of electricity in Britain, for one hour on Monday 15 April. This new chart paints a more complete picture of how British electricity supplies are shifting decisively away from fossil fuels. The figure shows the distribution of half-hours in each year since 2009, arranged according to the share of fossil fuels during each time period. Periods when the grid was more than 50% reliant on fossil fuels are shaded red and, reading from top to bottom, these have become increasingly rare over the past 15 years. Periods with less than 50% fossil fuel, shaded blue, are becoming more common.
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to a policy expert about how Brazil’s plan to tax billionaires could help to address climate change.
Earlier this year, Brazil proposed a global tax on the ultra-wealthy, an idea recently supported by other Group of 20 (G20) countries.
The funds could be used to tackle inequality and climate change, ministers from Brazil, South Africa, Germany and Spain wrote in the Guardian last week.
The tax would raise up to $250bn (£200bn) each year from around 2,700 billionaires, according to a report from the EU Tax Observatory.
Quentin Parrinello, a senior policy advisor at the think-tank, tells Carbon Brief about the proposal and how it could help to tackle climate change. This interview was edited for length.
Carbon Brief: Can you explain how a 2% billionaire wealth tax would work?
Quentin Parrinello: We’re looking at all of the taxes paid by the super-rich, adding all of them and, if they do not add up to a minimum amount [of] 2% of their wealth, then there’s a top-up tax to reach that 2%…Back in February, there was a meeting of finance ministers from the G20 in São Paulo. Gabriel Zucman [director of the EU Tax Observatory] was invited to present that idea of a minimum tax on the super-rich…There was a wide recognition in response that tax progressivity is indeed a topic that needs to be tackled and also a lot of demands for technical details, which is why the Brazil [G20] presidency commissioned us to do a report that is due to look at the feasibility of the technical implications of that tax.
CB: With climate change already intensifying each year, should these discussions have been pursued decades ago?
QP: Billionaires derive their wealth from global assets that have access to global markets and that emit carbon all over the globe. So they have a very clear responsibility in heightening climate change and carbon emissions…I think that, sadly, the conversation might be slightly easier now than it was 10 or 15 years ago because we’re seeing in many more countries today the effect of climate change. It’s not rhetoric about potential future impacts, we’re seeing the impact now. We’re seeing an increasing number of floodings and heatwaves everywhere.
CB: The proposal is due to be discussed at the G20 summit in July. What are the next steps?
QP: We’re releasing our report with all the technical details around June. Our understanding is that the [Brazilian G20] presidency wants to use that report to convince a large number of countries to endorse the need for a discussion to happen around the summer. As more countries endorse it, perhaps we’ll have enough countries to start an international negotiation. Those things, unfortunately, take time. So we’re not looking at something that will deliver a tax up and running in six months. That might take a few months more, perhaps a few years more. I think what we need to have is clear commitment from G20 presidencies, from an increasing number of countries to actually talk about this to go towards a negotiation framework that enables us to deliver on that tax.
CLIMATE SOLUTIONS: Data scientist Hannah Ritchie spoke to the New York Times podcast the Ezra Klein Show about the feasibility of “sustainability without sacrifice”.
WOODLAND WOES: The Financial Times looked at how deforestation can be a “driving factor” in diseases spreading from animals to humans.
GREEN PUSHBACK: The Guardian examined how climate policies have become a “focal point for far-right attacks” in Germany in a short video documentary.
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Keeping global temperatures below the limit set in the 2015 Paris Agreement requires rapid cuts in greenhouse emissions.
However, scenarios consistent with the Paris limit also assume heavy reliance on CDR, particularly in the second half of the 21st century.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, quantifies the “CDR gap” – the difference between the amount of CDR included in national climate plans and what would be needed to limit warming to 1.5C.
CDR currently removes about 3bn tonnes of CO2 from the air every year, of which almost 100% comes from land-based methods, such as afforestation and reforestation, the study says.
The authors estimate that if countries implement their national targets, CDR will increase by up to 1.9bn tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050.
However, assessing a range of scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5C, the authors find a “CDR gap” in 2050 of 0.4bn-5.5bn tonnes of CDR per year.
One scientist, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that framing the lack of additional plans for CDR as a “gap” is an “interesting idea”. However, he says it may not reflect a “definitive need for action” because the future role of CDR is debated.
Some scientists argue that reliance on CDR should be avoided, because land-based CDR can cause significant ecological and societal risks. Others worry that the promise of being able to use CDR in the future might dilute incentives to cut fossil-fuel use today.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that he recognises these concerns and made an effort to discuss them in the paper.
However, he says that calculating the CDR gap is important for assessing nations’ progress – and will provide a way of knowing whether countries are under- or over-committing to CDR in the future.
CO2 removal (CDR) refers to methods that draw down CO2 from the air and store it indefinitely on land, in the ocean, in geological formations or in products.
The study authors note that the term CDR “includes human enhancement of natural removal processes, but excludes natural uptake not caused directly by human activities”. The latter includes the huge amounts of CO2 absorbed by the land and oceans each year.
The paper groups CDR into two categories:
Using data collected over 2011-20, the authors estimate that total human emissions of all greenhouse gases have reached 60bn tonnes per year. Of this, CDR efforts currently remove around 3bn every year, they find. The study calculates global emissions in CO2 equivalent (CO2e).
The plot below shows current global greenhouse gas emissions and removals. The bar on the left shows emissions of CO2 (blue) and non-CO2 (pink) gases, as well as land emissions (brown). CO2 removal is shown in yellow.
The bars on the right show that 99.9% of CDR comes from conventional CDR on land (dark yellow), while “novel” CDR (light yellow) has a negligible contribution.
In 2015, countries agreed under the Paris Agreement to keep warming “well below 2C” above pre-industrial temperatures, with an aspiration of limiting warming to 1.5C.
Rapid cuts in emissions are crucial to meet this goal. To make progress, countries are required to submit – and regularly update – their plans for reducing emissions. There is currently a sizeable “emissions gap” between the cuts included in these national proposals and those needed to limit warming to 1.5C.
In many future scenarios that meet the Paris limit, CDR features heavily. For example, in scenarios where global temperatures initially “overshoot” 1.5C, before falling below the limit by 2100, large-scale CDR would be used to remove carbon from the atmosphere and allow global temperatures to decline.
In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) modelled 541 pathways that hold warming to 1.5C or 2C. All of these pathways involve CDR implementation between 2020 and 2100, ranging from a total of 450bn to 1.1tn tonnes of CO2, in addition to deep emissions cuts.
However, there are currently no rules requiring governments to clearly report their CDR plans.
To assess the amount of CDR proposed by governments, the authors therefore had to analyse a range of documents submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), such as countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and their long-term low-emissions development strategies.
The authors find that if countries implement their national targets, CDR could expand by 1.5-1.9bn tonnes of CO2 per year, compared to levels in 2020. The paper notes that many countries plan to expand land-based removals, but none has yet committed to “substantively scaling” novel CDR methods.
To assess how much CDR is needed to meet the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement, the authors use Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). These models look at the energy technologies, energy use choices, land-use changes and societal trends that cause, or prevent, greenhouse gas emissions.
The authors select a range of IAM scenarios from the latest IPCC scenario database for its sixth assessment report (AR6). Scenarios that limit warming to 2C require emissions to fall by 46-75% between 2020 and 2050, but CDR becomes the “main mitigation strategy” in the second half of the century, the study says.
The authors add that in these scenarios, conventional CDR on land “starts from a high baseline, but quickly reaches saturation by the mid-century due to land area constraints for afforestation/restoration”. Meanwhile, novel CDR scales up throughout the 21st century and accounts for more than half of cumulative emissions by the year 2100.
To assess the pathways in more detail, the authors select three scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
In the “demand reduction” scenario, humanity focuses on efficiency and sufficiency measures. This scenario requires an increase in land-based CDR, but no increase in “novel” CDR methods.
The “renewables” scenario sees a supply-side transformation towards renewable energy. This scenario mainly requires land-based CDR, but also includes a small contribution from novel methods.
The “carbon removal” scenario involves a rapid near-term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but fossil fuels are never entirely phased out, leading to higher “residual emissions” at net-zero CO2. Near-equal levels of land-based and novel CDR are needed by 2050, meaning that novel CDR needs to scale up more than a thousand times from its current capacity.
The plot below shows annual CDR under these three scenarios. The blue line indicates current CDR and each yellow line shows a different scenario. A lower (more negative) number means more CDR.
The study shows that current government plans – which would result in an extra 1.5-1.9bn tonnes of CDR per year by 2050 – are not ambitious enough to comply with any of the three 1.5C scenarios.
The table below shows the changes in different types of CDR required under the different scenarios by 2050, compared to 2020 levels. The column on the right shows the “CDR gap” between current plans and each scenario in 2050.
| Scenario | Total additional CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | Additional land-based CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | Additional novel CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | CDR gap (bn tonnes CO2/year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demand reduction | 2.3 | 2.3 | 0 | 0.4 |
| Renewables | 5.1 | 4.1 | 0.91 | 3.2 |
| Carbon removal | 7.4 | 4.0 | 3.5 | 5.5 |
The analysis shows that countries “lack progress in this domain of mitigation”, the study says. However, the size of the shortfall depends heavily on the scenario.
Under the demand reduction scenario, the CDR gap in 2050 is only 0.4bn tonnes of CDR per year, but this grows more than tenfold to 5.5bn tonnes of CDR per year under the carbon removal scenario.
The prospect of relying on large-scale CDR to meet global climate goals is one that prompts concern in many experts.
One fear is that the promise of being able to use CDR in the future might dilute incentives to cut fossil fuel use today, a phenomenon known as “mitigation deterrence”.
Dr William Lamb – a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and lead author on the study – tells Carbon Brief that the paper acknowledges this concern and tries to be clear that CDR is not a replacement for mitigation.
Prof Steve Pye is a professor at University College London’s Energy Institute, who was not involved in the study. He says that framing the lack of CDR as a “gap” is an “interesting idea”, but does not necessarily reflect a “definitive need for action” in the same way as the emissions gap:
“The implications of the CDR gap are much more open to debate as CDR is a category of mitigation action, with the size of the gap either a cause for alarm or not depending on one’s view of what role that option will or should play.”
He adds that the analysis could even be “interpreted as positive”, because it shows that countries are not being distracted by novel CDR.
Alexandra Deprez – a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, who is not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that in her opinion, the new study does not do enough to consider the “sustainability limits” of CDR.
She recently co-wrote a Carbon Brief guest post explaining these limits, which said:
“The large-scale deployment of land-based CDR could come with major challenges. These include significant ecological and societal risks – particularly to biodiversity loss, food security, freshwater use and human rights, among others – which have not been comprehensively assessed.”
Deprez and Lamb have “opposite starting points” in their work on CDR and therefore arrive at different conclusions, she explains.
Lamb starts by asking “how much CDR is needed” by looking at 1.5C and 2C scenarios, and concludes that it needs to be scaled up “significantly”, she says. Meanwhile, she tells Carbon Brief that her own work starts by asking “how much CDR can be sustainably deployed” and finds that “a large number of ‘Paris compatible’ scenarios overstep high CDR sustainability risk”.
Lamb says the authors were “very careful” in selecting the three focus scenarios for the study. He adds:
“We have a kind of selection criteria that includes thinking about the sustainability constraints, whether they’re using too much biomass, whether they’re scaling up novel methods too quickly. And so we’re quite conservative about the specific scenarios we choose.”
Meanwhile Prof Joeri Roglej – director of research at the Grantham Institute – tells Carbon Brief that the study “puts pathways that aim to keep warming as close to 1.5C as possible in the same basket as pathways that keep it below 2C only, therewith suggesting a lower overall ambition than the Paris Agreement”.
He adds:
“The study doesn’t distinguish scenarios with CDR levels that risk undermining sustainability. These presentation choices therefore perpetuate some of the reasons why CDR research is often criticised, including that CDR scholarship often turns a blind eye to the sustainability risks of large-scale CDR deployment.”
Pye adds a note of caution about using IAMs, saying they have “relied heavily on CDR to meet high ambition targets” without accounting for the “political reality” faced by many governments.
According to the study, only about 40 countries, including the EU, have outlined scenarios in their long-term strategies that depict quantifiable levels of CDR by 2050.
For the other countries – which account for 62% of current conventional CDR on land – the authors assume that overall CDR levels will remain constant.
Lamb tells Carbon Brief that this is a “big assumption”. He notes that while CDR globally has been “quite stable over the past 20 years”, there is a lot of variation between countries. For example, he says that China has been “rapidly increasing” its CDR through large afforestation projects, while many countries in Europe have seen a decrease due to problems in their forestry sector.
The study also assumes that countries without quantifiable scenarios do not currently plan to implement novel CDR methods. “This includes China, Norway and Saudi Arabia, which are all developing technology roadmaps towards novel CDR and could contribute to closing the gap,” the paper says.
Dr Ajay Gambhir is a visiting senior research fellow at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that many land-based carbon sinks, such as forests, have the potential to transition to sources of carbon over the coming years.
He adds:
“The authors are mindful of potential reversibility of forest carbon, but this highlights the risks that we are even further from our CDR, and emissions reduction, needs than might be indicated in this analysis.”
The lack of clear data shows that “we need more clarity” in CDR reporting, Lamb tells Carbon Brief. He argues that increasing transparency would “allow more critical reflection actually on carbon dioxide removal plans and whether they’re ambitious enough – or even too ambitious at the expense of emissions reductions”.
The analysis from this paper will be included in the next State of CDR report, which will be released this summer.
The analysis illustrated how National Grid Electricity System Operator (NGESO), which runs the island’s grid, is closing in on its target of “zero carbon operation” for short periods by 2025.
Yet, despite there being increasingly frequent periods with hardly any electricity coming from fossil fuels, there are still times when gas power remains essential for the GB grid.
Indeed, the analysis noted that for a few hours this January, fossil fuels were meeting around 66% of demand. So is the GB grid getting less dependent on fossil fuels or not?
Snapshots from short periods – when the fossil fuel share of supplies can be very low, or stubbornly high – fail to paint a full picture of what is going on.
Even the annual averages included in the analysis obscure the variability resulting from increased reliance on wind and solar power, which depend on the weather.
The figure below – reminiscent of Joy Division’s iconic “Unknown Pleasures” album cover, designed by Peter Saville in 1979 – paints a more complete picture of how British electricity supplies are shifting decisively away from fossil fuels.
The figure shows the distribution of half-hours in each year since 2009, arranged according to the share of fossil fuels during each time period. (Half-hours are the time period currently used for electricity market “settlement”, when contracts for supply and demand are settled up.)
Periods when the grid was more than 50% reliant on fossil fuels are shaded red and, reading from top to bottom, these have become increasingly rare over the past 15 years. Conversely, periods with less than 50% fossil fuel, shaded blue, are becoming increasingly common.
The figure shows that the entire distribution of half-hour periods in each year has shifted – quite dramatically – away from reliance on fossil fuels.
In other words, not only have the maximum and minimum extremes of fossil fuel reliance reduced, but everything in between has shifted away from fossil fuels, too, including the annual average.
For example, every single half-hour period in 2009 was at least 50% reliant on fossil fuels. In 2024 to date, nearly all half-hours – some 92% of them – were less than 50% reliant on fossil fuels.
Indeed, fossil fuels were supplying less than 15% of GB electricity in around a third of all half-hours in 2024 to date – and less than 23% of the mix in half of all settlement periods.
The figure also shows that the range of maximum to minimum fossil fuel share has widened.
Crucially, there continue to be periods when fossil fuels are indispensable for maintaining secure electricity supplies. Yet as the country shifts towards the current government target of a “fully decarbonised” grid by 2035, those periods will become increasingly unusual.
As a result, while there is a clear need for alternatives to gas power if the grid decarbonisation target is to be met, those alternatives are likely to be called upon fairly infrequently.
This has obvious implications for the alternatives to gas that will be needed. Specifically, there will be a need for flexible low-carbon capacity that can be switched on for relatively short periods.
Overall, while achieving a record-low 2.4% fossil fuel share for an hour in April is a major step forward, there is still a very long way to go if the 2035 target is to be met.
]]>China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here.
FULL TEXT: The latest draft of China’s long-awaited Energy Law has been issued for public comment following approval by China’s top legislative body, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC), economic newswire Jiemian reported, in an analysis of the text. The law, which was initially drafted in 2005, will likely be “considered at three [NPCSC] meetings before being put to a [final] vote”, the outlet said, which means it could be formally enacted “within the year”.
PRIORITISING RENEWABLES: Jiemian added that the law “clearly supports prioritising the development of renewable energy; rational development of clean and efficient use of fossil energy; and orderly promotion of non-fossil fuel energy instead of fossil fuel energy and low-carbon energy instead of high-carbon energy”. Chinese energy news site International Energy Net noted that the draft law calls on the state to “establish a mechanism to promote green energy consumption and encourage energy users to prioritise using renewable energy and other clean and low-carbon energy sources”. Elsewhere, Chen Xinghua, associate professor at North China University of Technology and deputy secretary-general of the China Law Society’s energy law research group, told China Environment News that, until now, the “development of the energy industry…has relied more on dividends from reform of the energy system”. He added that a unified Energy Law is “urgently needed” to resolve the “intricate and complex” interests of various stakeholders, as well as the challenges of a modern energy system and meeting China’s carbon neutrality goals.
LONG ROAD: The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post said that the law “has been [on] one of the longest [journeys] for any piece of Chinese legislation”. It quoted an unnamed Tsinghua University law professor attributing the delays to staunch resistance from energy sector stakeholders, who “lobbied extensively” to “[try] to hold onto their territory”. The professor speculated that this resistance may have been broken by president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.
2024 TARGET: The Ministry of Environment and Ecology (MEE) is aiming for carbon emissions per unit of GDP – also known as carbon intensity – to fall by 3.9% in 2024, according to state broadcaster CCTV. Previous Carbon Brief analysis found that carbon intensity would need to fall by 7% per year to meet China’s 2025 climate commitments. This was echoed by consultancy Trivium China, which said in a recent newsletter that the target for 2024 “isn’t enough to get China emissions intensity reductions back on track”.
‘BE REALISTIC’: Meanwhile, Chinese president Xi Jinping called on policymakers to both “be realistic, by not slowing the pace of green and low-carbon development, and not be too idealistic, above all guaranteeing energy supply”, International Energy Net reported. At a technology-focused forum in Beijing, National Energy Administration director Zhang Jianhua said China would “lead the innovation of the clean energy industry…further strengthen the foundation of energy security [and] continue to improve the scale and quality of non-fossil energy supply”, according to state news agency Xinhua.
COAL CAPACITY: Following an announcement that China will establish a coal production capacity reserve system by 2027, Xinhua published an analysis stating that the move will allow China to “quickly release reserve capacity in extreme situations, such as fluctuations in the international energy market, instances of severe weather and [other] drastic changes to supply and demand”. It added that this measure was not intended “to significantly increase coal production capacity”. (Read more in Carbon Brief’s China Briefing from 18 April).
BLINKEN TRIP: With US secretary of state Anthony Blinken visiting Beijing last week, the “two superpowers continued dialogue to manage a growing list of differences”, reported Bloomberg. Citing a Chinese foreign ministry statement, the outlet said Xi told Blinken that “China and the US should be partners rather than rivals”. The Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi also told Blinken that China “urged” the US “not to interfere in China’s internal affairs, not to hold China’s development back, and not to step on China’s red lines on China’s sovereignty, security, and development interests”, according to a report from the Associated Press. Blinken responded by saying that “the Biden administration places a premium on” the bilateral dialogue even “on issues of dispute”, according to the newswire.
EASIER FUTURE?: Despite several areas of disagreement, the Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily mentioned the two sides reached an agreement on further “cooperation” on climate change. China Environment published an announcement by the MEE that a US-China climate action working group held a virtual meeting, at which they pledged to “strengthen communication” and cooperation on controlling methane emissions. Meanwhile, China enacted a tariff law during Blinken’s visit to strengthen China’s “trade defence capabilities”, Reuters reported. The outlet said the law was passed amid US and EU industrial “overcapacity” concerns and outlines “a range of legal provisions related to tariffs on Chinese imports and exports”. It quoted Henry Gao, a professor at Singapore Management University, who described the law as “a nuclear weapon” to show the US and EU “that this is our prerogative: If you’re going to hit us with tariffs, we can do the same”.
MAY VISIT: In an interview with Bloomberg, China’s climate envoy Liu Zhenmin announced that he plans to visit the US in May for his first formal face-to-face meeting with US counterpart John Podesta. Liu stated that China aims to “extend cooperation on issues including energy, the circular economy and efforts to curb greenhouse gases beyond carbon dioxide”. He added that the US and China “have to cooperate as far as possible” on climate, and that the two nations “also need to respect each other on all issues”. Another Bloomberg article on the Liu interview said: “Efforts by the US and Europe to stem China’s dominance in green technologies risk stalling the fight against global warming, according to [Liu].”
‘DIFFERENT LENS’: Elsewhere, Liu raised four challenges to global resilience at a forum hosted by the thinktank Center for China and Globalisation. Notably, he listed these challenges in the following order: geopolitical conflicts; setbacks to economic globalisation; climate change; and unease around artificial intelligence. In an earlier article, the Diplomat had suggested that Liu – given his Ministry of Foreign Affairs background – may see climate “more as a lever in China’s overall diplomatic strategy, rather than a critical, standalone issue to address”.
Guangdong province in southern China has been pounded by heavy rains since 19 April, causing flooding that has left at least four dead and seen more than 110,000 people evacuated.
Guangdong is China’s most populous province and an economic powerhouse driving China’s manufacturing industry and exports.
In this issue, Carbon Brief examines the impact of climate change on the flooding and the response from Chinese and international media.
“Intense” rainstorms began in the northern and western regions of Guangdong province on 19 April, with the ensuing rainfall breaking records for the month, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Originally, floodwaters from the Bei River, a major tributary of the Pearl River, were expected to peak on 22 April, the newspaper added.
The heavy rainstorms continued, however, and by 28 April three separate floods had been recorded, according to the Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily and regional newspaper Southern Daily.
On 30 April, state broadcaster CGTN announced that China issued a severe weather warning for further torrential rain, thunderstorms, gales and hail for parts of Guangdong, as well as five other provinces.
Four people were reported dead and 10 missing during the initial flood, BBC News said, adding that at least 110,000 people were evacuated.
The worst-hit areas included the provincial capital Guangzhou – home to almost 19 million people – as well as the cities of Zhaoqing, Shaoguan, Qingyuan, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Heyuan, according to various media outlets.
Guangzhou Daily reported that the provincial government announced a relief fund of 90m yuan ($12.4m) to be used to recover from the damage caused by the flood.
Meanwhile, Chinese vice-premier Zhang Guoqing and Guangdong governor Wang Weizhong both called on local governments to improve monitoring of extreme weather, the China Daily and Southern Daily reported.
In addition to the floods, CNN reported that a tornado, which appeared after “multiple days of heavy rains”, killed “at least five people” in Guangzhou on 27 April.
On 1 May, the collapse of a highway near Meizhou city in Guangdong killed at least 48 people, the Associated Press reported, adding that ongoing torrential rainfall was hampering rescue efforts.
Separate Associated Press coverage noted that heavy rains “pose a special risk to mountain roadways and highway bridges”, although an official cause of the accident had not yet been established.
While the Pearl River delta is prone to summer flooding, the rains this year were unusually early, according to Reuters.
Agence France-Presse reported that Yin Zhijie, chief hydrology forecaster at the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources, told state-run China National Radio that “intensifying climate change” raised the likelihood of early heavy rains.
Xu Xiaofeng, executive vice-chairman of the Chinese government’s China Meteorological Work Development Advisory Committee and president of the China Meteorological Services Association, told economic newswire Jiemian that recent warm and humid currents in the north-west Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean have created significant water vapour in southern China, contributing to the rainfall.
According to the outlet, Xu said: “Recent record-breaking precipitation…occurred precisely against the backdrop of global warming.”
The outlet also quoted another expert, Zhang Qiang from the Gansu Meteorological Administration, saying heavy and abnormal rainfall in the region is becoming “a normal phenomenon” due to the influence of global warming.
While there is, as yet, no formal “attribution” study of whether the flooding was made worse by human-caused global warming, one rapid analysis found that the “somewhat uncommon event” was “exacerbated” by both human-caused climate change and natural variability.
It concluded that weather systems similar to those that caused the floods are 8-12% wetter over Guangdong province in the present climate than they were in the past.
Previous Carbon Brief analysis has also identified a number of attribution studies that have quantified the influence of climate change on flooding in southern China.
For example, record-breaking rainfall in the June-July period of 2020 was found by one study to be more than five times more likely in the present-day climate – “80% of which can be attributed to climate change”.
While most local media coverage focused on individual stories and local responses, several Chinese media outlets have pointed to links between the floods and climate change.
In its reporting, China Daily cited a China Meteorological Administration (CMA) interview with Chinese Academy of Engineering member Ding Yihui, who said: “The world has entered a new phase of climate change, which is characterised by an increased frequency of extreme weather events, resulting in the occurrences of sudden climate and weather-related disasters.”
The municipal newspaper Guangzhou Daily made a connection with extreme rainfall in Dubai and quoted Zhang Xingying, deputy director of the CMA’s science, technology and climate change department, saying that, due to “global warming and El Niño”, China will see more extreme weather, including floods, in 2024.
“Chinese and foreign scientists”, the Guangzhou Daily article said, “remind us that new features of extreme weather and climate events are emerging globally.”
It added that “our generation will witness more and more extreme weather…All we can do now is leave a better future for future generations.”
On 28 April, the Guangzhou Daily also reposted an article by Shanghai-based newspaper the Paper, in which China Academy of Meteorological Sciences scholar Sun Shao argued that “recent extreme weather events are closely linked to climate change”.
Sun said that, in the face of this challenge, the international community must strengthen global cooperation to combat climate change.
Meanwhile, an SCMP editorial said that both the flooding and an emerging drought in nearby hydropower-producing Yunnan province, “illustrate just how critical the climate-change issue is – not just for China but globally”.
It added: “While the flooding is a reminder to be prepared for sudden climate-linked extreme events, including fires and violent storms, the drought is a wake-up call about longer term consequences for the climate of failure to rein in carbon emissions.”
2035 NDC: Project Syndicate published an article by the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Li Shuo and Lauri Myllyvirta about how setting ambitious commitments in its “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) for 2035 could both spur China’s energy transition and boost its profile as a climate leader.
GLOBAL COMPETITION: The substack High Capacity explored the “paradox” of how several Chinese clean-energy technology industries were able to overtake competitors in Germany, despite Germany’s significant industrial advantages.
JUST TRANSITION: Dialogue Earth reported on the need for China to give “higher priority to a just transition” in coal-producing provinces such as Inner Mongolia and Shanxi.
NAVIGATING OVERCAPACITY: Bloomberg: The China Show interviewed a representative of polysilicon producer GCL Technology on how the industry survives cycles of overcapacity.
The amount of battery storage capacity added in China in 2023, in gigawatts, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency. This was triple the amount added in 2022, according to the report, and accounted for 55% of global growth.
Co-production of steel and chemicals to mitigate hard-to-abate carbon emissions
Nature Chemical Engineering
New research examined how co-producing steel and chemicals in China could mitigate greenhouse gases and lower costs. The study found that co-production, by itself, would cut greenhouse gas emissions for the steel and chemical sectors by 36m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e, 7%) and reduce costs by 1.5bn yuan ($21m, 1%), compared to independent production. However, it found that if a carbon price of 350 yuan ($48) per tonne of CO2 were enacted in addition to co-production, emissions would drop by 113 MtCO2e (22%) and costs by 25.5bn yuan ($3.5bn, 10%).
Increased harvested carbon of cropland in China
Environmental Research Letters
A new study collected statistical data on crop production for ten crop types in China from 1981 to 2020 to assess trends in carbon stored in harvested crops, which “significantly [influence] the carbon budget of the cropland ecosystem”. It revealed that harvested crop carbon increased from 0.185 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon in 1981 to 0.423Gt in 2020. It also found that the average annual removal of carbon sink capacity through harvesting crops totalled 0.32Gt of carbon, which it said was greater than the net carbon sink of China’s entire terrestrial ecosystem – “substantially impact[ing]” calculations of China’s carbon budget.
Large methane mitigation potential through prioritised closure of gas-rich coal mines
Nature Climate Change
Methane emissions from China’s abandoned coal mines have been underestimated, according to a new study. The authors constructed a “coal mine database” to estimate China’s coal methane emissions between 2011 and 2019, and calculated future emissions based on different mine closure policies. They estimated that by 2035, abandoned mines will be China’s largest sources of coal methane emissions – larger than emissions from active coal mines. The authors also developed a “coal mine closure strategy”, which they say could “reduce cumulative methane emissions by 67m tonnes (26%) to 2050, potentially reaching 100m tonnes (39%) with improved methane recovery and utilisation practices”.
China Briefing is compiled by Wanyuan Song and Anika Patel. It is edited by Wanyuan Song and Dr Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org
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Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), countries pledged to release new national plans for how they will achieve a range of goals and targets.
These plans are known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs).
The GBF requires countries to submit new NBSAPs ahead of COP16, the next global biodiversity summit being held in Cali, Colombia in October.
Below, Carbon Brief tracks which countries have submitted new NBSAPs and analyses how each country has pledged to meet the key targets outlined in the GBF.
NBSAPs are blueprints for how individual countries plan to tackle biodiversity loss within their borders, as well as ensure they meet the international targets outlined in the GBF.
Each country that is party to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is expected – but not legally required – to submit NBSAPs.
There are 196 parties to the CBD including the EU. This includes every country of the world except the US and the Holy See, the governing body of the Vatican. (Republican lawmakers have blocked the US from joining the CBD, citing concerns over “American sovereignty” and “financial burdens”.)
Under the GBF, countries agreed to submit updated NBSAPs ahead of COP16, which is scheduled for 21 October to 1 November 2024 in Colombia.
NBSAPs are similar to nationally determined contributions (NDCs), plans that outline how individual countries envisage meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, a key difference is that countries are legally obliged to submit NDCs, but not NBSAPs.
(The Paris Agreement is an international treaty agreed in 2015 aimed at keeping global temperatures well below 2C, with an ambition of limiting them to 1.5C, by the end of the century.)
The GBF contains a set of four goals and 23 targets, which collectively aim to reverse the rapid decline of biodiversity by 2030 and “restore harmony with nature” by 2050.
One of the most publicised targets is target 3, which commits countries to protecting 30% of their land and seas for nature by 2030 (commonly known as “30 by 30”). The full list of targets is included below.
| Target | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Effective management of land- and sea-use change, loss of highly important biodiverse areas close to zero by 2030 |
| 2 | Effective restoration of 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030 |
| 3 | Effective conservation and management of 30% of land and 30% of oceans by 2030 |
| 4 | Halt human-induced extinctions and maintain and restore genetic diversity |
| 5 | Sustainable use, harvesting and trade of wild species |
| 6 | Mitigate or eliminate the impacts of invasive alien species, reduce the rates of establishment of invasive species by 50% by 2030 |
| 7 | Reduce pollution risks and impacts from all sources by 2030, reduce the overall risk from pesticides by half |
| 8 | Minimise the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on biodiversity |
| 9 | Ensure sustainable use and management of wild species, while protecting customary use by Indigenous peoples |
| 10 | Sustainable management of areas under agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry |
| 11 | Restore and enhance ecosystem function through nature-based solutions and ecosystem-based approaches |
| 12 | Increase the area and quality of urban green and blue spaces |
| 13 | Fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources |
| 14 | Integration of biodiversity into policies and development across all sectors |
| 15 | Enable businesses to monitor, assess and disclose their impacts on biodiversity |
| 16 | Encourage sustainable consumption, including by reducing food waste by half by 2030 |
| 17 | Strengthen capacity for biosafety measures and ensure benefits-sharing from biotechnology |
| 18 | Phase out or reform harmful subsidies in a just way, reducing them by $500bn by 2030 |
| 19 | Substantially increase financial resources, mobilise $200bn per year by 2030 from all sources, including $30bn from developed to developing countries |
| 20 | Strengthen capacity-building and technology transfer |
| 21 | Integrated and participatory management, including the use of traditional knowledge |
| 22 | Equitable representation and participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities |
| 23 | Ensure gender equality in the implementation of the framework |
In their NBSAPs, countries are expected to set out how they will work towards achieving these goals and targets.
But while countries are working towards a shared set of goals, each NBSAP will be highly unique. This is because every country has its own unique blend of species and habitats – and its own challenges when it comes to conserving them.
For example, Ireland’s NBSAP speaks about restoring commercial fish stocks in Irish waters to sustainable levels and repairing the nation’s highly degraded peatlands.
By contrast, Japan’s NBSAP talks about ensuring “appropriate distance between human beings and wildlife is maintained”, likely referring to its booming nature tourism industry.
As of 2 May 2024, just seven countries and the EU had fulfilled the request to submit an updated NBSAP.
That leaves 188 countries that are yet to submit updated NBSAPs.
The map below shows countries that have submitted updated NBSAPs in green.
At the COP28 climate summit in December 2023, the UK indicated that it will release its updated NBSAP by May.
COP16 host Colombia is among the countries that are yet to submit an updated NBSAP.
Examining NBSAPs can offer clues into how countries are responding to the targets set out in the GBF – and their views on traditionally contentious issues such as biodiversity finance, Indigenous rights and the sharing of genetic resources.
The headline “mission” of the GBF is to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
While many people associate “biodiversity” with iconic species and tropical rainforests, the term actually covers the whole spectrum of Earth’s biological diversity, ranging from the organisation of genes within organisms to the communities of animals and plants that make up ecosystems.
Last year, a group of biologists explained to Carbon Brief that halting and reversing all biodiversity loss by 2030 would be a “huge challenge”, with one expert saying they were “highly doubtful” it was scientifically possible.
Out of the small group of countries that had released updated NBSAPs at the time of publication, the vast majority did not mention halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 in their plans.
The EU and some of its member states, such as Ireland and Luxembourg, did make a reference to halting and reversing the loss of pollinators, a target set out in the EU biodiversity strategy.
France’s plan says that it will aim to reverse the decline of “threatened flagship species, especially endemic species in overseas territories”.
All of these references are a far cry from reversing the loss of all biodiversity.
The only country to explicitly mention this target in its NBSAP was China, the host nation for COP15.
There are some areas of convergence among the very small number of countries that have released updated NBSAPs.
Target 6 of the GBF is to “mitigate or eliminate the impacts of invasive alien species” and to “reduce the rates of establishment of invasive species by 50% by 2030”.
The EU, China and Japan all mention targets to reduce the impact of invasive species.
However, there are differences in what the targets aim to achieve. For example, EU nations are targeting a 50% reduction in the number of Red List species threatened by invasive alien species, whereas China and Japan are targeting a 50% reduction in the rate of invasive species establishment.
Target 7 of the GBF is to “reduce the overall risk from pesticides by half”. (It is worth noting that some parties wanted a more ambitious target to reduce the use – rather than the risk – of pesticides by half.)
In its NBSAP, the EU references a target whereby “the risk and use of chemical pesticides is reduced by 50% and the use of more hazardous pesticides is reduced by 50%”.
This wording is repeated in the NBSAPs of many of its member states – so far, Ireland, France, Luxembourg and Spain.
By contrast, Japan references a need for a “reduction in risk-weighted use of chemical pesticides”, while China commits to “reduce” pesticides and to “gradually phase out highly toxic and high-risk pesticides”.
When it comes to the topic of developed nations providing more finance to help developing nations protect biodiversity – one of the most contentious issues at COP15 – there is little consistency among NBSAPs.
Japan makes the clearest pledge when it comes to supporting developing nations, with a target that says the country will aim to ensure “financial resources for the conservation of biodiversity are secured to improve biodiversity global finance gap”.
Japan will also aim to ensure that “capacity-building…in developing countries by Japan’s support are further implemented”.
Ireland also mentions a target to “strengthen the inclusion of biodiversity in international diplomacy and financing”.
In addition, Japan makes reference to target 18 of the GBF, which is to “phase out or reform harmful subsidies in a just way, reducing them by $500bn by 2030”. (“Harmful subsidies” refer to those that prop up industries known to harm nature, such as large-scale meat farming and fossil-fuel extraction.)
Japan says it will “consider” the “identification and reforms of subsidies harmful for biodiversity”.
Spain has a more clear target for subsidy reform, stating:
“By 2025, 50% of identified harmful subsidies will be reformed, redirected or eliminated and ensure that by 2030 all subsidies or incentives are neutral or positive for natural heritage and biodiversity and adequately incorporate environmental externalities.”
