§ Key developments

Food systems on the menu at COP29

MITIGATING METHANE: Yesterday was “food, agriculture and water day” at COP29, with a number of new initiatives and updates to existing initiatives announced. Down to Earth reported that more than 30 countries had endorsed the COP29 Declaration on Reducing Methane from Organic Waste, which includes a commitment to including sectoral targets in countries’ climate pledges. It added that the European Commission “welcomed the declaration, but did not endorse the pledge” due to a lack of time to consult with all member states. 

PEACE AND HARMONIYA: The COP29 presidency also announced the Baku Harmoniya Climate Initiative for Farmers on Tuesday, in partnership with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The Harmoniya initiative has three stated priorities: creating a “streamlined knowledge hub” for improving collaboration and knowledge-sharing; making investment in food systems more attractive to both public and private investors; and empowering women and youth farmers to adapt to climate change. The declaration said: “Given the multitude of initiatives, there is a need for coherence, alignment and sharing of lessons learned to deliver greater impact.” No new commitments or funding accompanied Harmoniya’s release. 

CHAMPIONING CHANGE: Food day also delivered an update on one of the key food-systems announcements from last year’s summit, the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF) – a group of six countries that had committed to taking stronger action on transforming food systems. During the summit, the ACF released a “progress snapshot” highlighting actions and policies each country had taken towards the priority action areas defined by the ACF. Tanzania confirmed its intention to join the coalition, the Guardian said. Vietnam also reportedly expressed their interest in joining.

AIM FOR THE SKY: Devex reported that the Agriculture Innovation Mechanism for Scale (AIM for Scale) initiative “has introduced its first package of investments”, which amounts to $1bn to strengthen weather forecasting for farmers. This “includes both new and existing investments from a consortium of global partners”, such as the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development and NASA. According to Emirates News Agency, investments in “climate-smart agriculture and food systems innovation” through the wider AIM for Climate initiative total $29.2bn to date. DeSmog previously reported concerns that the solutions pushed by AIM for Climate “are not the kinds of technology that will benefit small-scale farmers in Africa”. 

‘Big ag’ in Baku

COP LOBBYING: Hundreds of “lobbyists for industrial farming” attended COP29, analysis from DeSmog and the Guardian found, with more than 200 delegates from agriculture companies and trade groups at the talks. Nearly 40% travelled with delegations of countries, such as Brazil, “giving them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations”, the Guardian noted. The number of industrial agriculture attendees dropped from “record highs” of 340 at last year’s summit, the newspaper said. They represent “some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies, including the Brazilian meatpacker JBS, the animal pharmaceuticals company Elanco and the food giant PepsiCo”, the Guardian said. DeSmog and the Guardian also revealed that a “record” 1,261 business and industry delegates registered to attend last month’s COP16 biodiversity summit. 

OFFSET ADVICE: The UK released new guidelines for voluntary carbon and nature markets in Baku, BusinessGreen reported. These aim to give “clearer guidelines to companies involved in the purchase, sale and development of carbon offsets and nature credits”, the outlet said. One of the guidelines advises that credits should “complement” emissions-cutting and other climate action, not replace them. These represent a “vote of confidence in a largely experimental financial product that’s intended to protect biodiversity”, Bloomberg said. (Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A on biodiversity offsets.) Meanwhile, Brazil’s Congress signed off on a bill setting rules for a national carbon market, according to Reuters. 

FARMER FUNDS: New analysis released during COP29 found that 14% of global public climate finance for agriculture and land use went to activities relevant to small-scale farmers in 2021-22. This is a small portion given that these farmers produce 70-80% of the food eaten in Africa and Asia, according to advisory company Climate Focus, which completed the analysis. Covering the report, Bloomberg spoke to Esther Penunia, secretary general of the Asian Farmers Association, who said: “[Climate change is] affecting our crops, our yields and therefore our incomes.” The Associated Press spoke to Penunia and others about climate finance for small farmers. Elsewhere, a policy paper found that “regenerative farming” has “shown promising results” in Africa and India, First Post said. 

§ Spotlight

The ups and downs of Brazil’s new climate pledge

Brazil released its new climate pledge at COP29 last week, committing to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 59-67% by 2035. Here, Carbon Brief speaks to two Brazilian experts about the implications of the new nationally determined contribution (NDC).

Dr Ane Alencar is the director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. Claudio Angelo is the coordinator of international policy at Observatório do Clima, a Brazilian network of civil-society organisations. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity. 

For more on Brazil’s NDC, see Carbon Brief’s just-published article on the five key takeaways.

Carbon Brief: What is your opinion on Brazil’s new NDC? 

Ane Alencar: Even with all the difficulties we have in Brazil, there is a commitment of the government to actually move forward and be more ambitious [on climate change]. I think they did that…even though I think it could be a little bit more. But I think this is an important step.

Claudio Angelo: Policy-wise, it’s a pretty good NDC…We can say that the NDC reflects a shift of gear for Brazil and that’s important. But, again, we’re talking about policies. We’re not talking about the target. And the target of the NDC is very weak. You can’t say it is 1.5-aligned…There are things Brazil is already doing, such as tackling deforestation in the Amazon…So, I would say [the] direction of travel is right, but the speed is totally wrong.

CB: How does the NDC compare to previous pledges made by the Brazilian government?

CA: If you look at what Brazil has already committed to doing – for instance, zero deforestation, the methane pledge, [which is a] 30% reduction in methane, just the sheer pace of increase of renewable energies in the energy mix…There’s a new sustainable fuels legislation that was just passed this year. If you put all those things together, Brazil could aim much higher than the current limits…We’re hoping to get an increased ambition ahead of COP30. I think there’s [a] margin for that in the NDC. We will certainly push for [the new NDC] to be the ambition floor, not the ambition ceiling. 

CB: Are the NDC promises to combat deforestation strong enough? 

AA: The government has done a very good job in the past to reach that important reduction of deforestation…However, we do have to deal with the fact that there are people who still can deforest legally. And what would be the incentives for these people to not deforest? The incentives that exist today seem not to be enough.

CB: Are pledges to boost “sustainable agriculture” sufficient to meet climate goals?

AA: I think the agriculture sector is one that can provide lots of contribution, by improving their practices, investing in technologies to reduce the cattle contributions and also with soil management…If the Brazilian agriculture sector really goes in the direction of sustainability, then I think it’s possible to actually fulfil the NDC targets.

§ News and views

G20 TALKS: At the G20 summit, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, presented a new “alliance” to tackle poverty and hunger, Al Jazeera reported. It added that 81 countries signed the initiative. Before the summit, Joe Biden became the first US president to visit the Amazon rainforest, the Associated Press reported. In his speech, he said that the incoming administration of president-elect Donald Trump would not be able to halt his country’s progress on clean energy, the newswire added. Meanwhile, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, proposed allocating 1% of military expenditure to fund a global reforestation programme, which could free up $24bn annually to support 6m farmers to plant 15m hectares of trees.

‘GROUNDBREAKING’ DISCOVERY: The world’s largest coral, measuring more than 34 metres wide and 32 metres long, was discovered by a team of scientists in the Solomon Islands, Pasifika Environews reported. The outlet dubbed the discovery “groundbreaking” and noted that the coral structure is between 300 and 500 years old. It quoted Enric Sala, executive director of National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project, who stressed the urgency “for rich countries to invest significantly in reducing carbon emissions to combat threats like ocean warming and acidification” as negotiations at COP29 continue. Elsewhere, a “graveyard of corals” was found off an island on the Great Barrier Reef after months of extreme weather, the Guardian said. 

AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT: Air pollution in Delhi “hit 50 times the safe limit” this week, due in part to “farmers burn]ing] crop residue in agricultural areas”, according to the Associated Press. In response, the government has started enacting strict control measures, including banning most trucks from entering the city and moving school classes online. According to the Times of India, more than 1,250 agricultural fires were recorded in the state of Punjab on Monday, “the highest single-day tally of the season”. Delhi’s environment minister, Gopal Rai, said “the time has come for artificial rain to remove this smog cover and provide relief to the people”. 

FARMER FURY: Thousands of farmers “descended” on Westminster in London to “protest a tax hike they say will deal a ‘hammer blow’ to struggling family farms”, the Associated Press reported. The UK government recently announced plans to get rid of a tax break that would introduce a 20% inheritance tax for farms worth more than £1m from 2026. (BBC News factchecked how many farms this might affect.) “Everyone’s mad” at this change, the co-organiser of the protest, Olly Harrison, told AP, adding that many “want to take to the streets and block roads and go full French”. (Farmers held a so-called “siege of Paris” earlier this year amid widespread EU farmer protests.) In ongoing farmer protests across the Channel, French farmers and their tractors blocked roads around the country to protest a trade deal between the EU and Mercosur countries in South America, according to Le Monde. 

PUSHBACK: European lawmakers voted to “water down” and delay the EU’s anti-deforestation law, Reuters reported. The European Commission recently proposed a one-year delay for the law, which was due to take effect this December. This delay was backed by the European parliament in a 14 November vote, the newswire said, adding that politicians also voted to “add a new ‘no risk’ category of countries with far lighter controls”. This would “severely weaken” the law, BirdLife said in a statement, “making it inadequate to address global deforestation”. Elsewhere, BBC News said that Denmark signed off on the finer details of its world-first tax on farming emissions. (See Carbon Brief’s Q&A on the Danish plan.) 

HIDDEN COSTS: Agrifood systems contain “hidden costs” – such as unaccounted for impacts on health and the environment – totalling around $12tn annually, the latest State of Food and Agriculture report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization found. More than 70% of the costs stem from unhealthy dietary patterns and are linked to non-communicable diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes. The hidden environmental costs outlined in the report included emissions of greenhouse gases, nitrogen run-off and water pollution. 

§ Watch, read, listen

GOING GREEN: Yale Environment 360 explored Brazil’s “bioeconomy”, which the country’s president hopes can act as a guide for other governments.

KITTENS CORRIDORS: A Mongabay podcast addressed why biological corridors are important for feline species in Latin America, such as puma, ocelot and jaguar.

PROMPTING TRANSITION: An NBC video showed how a nonprofit organisation helps farmers in North Carolina transition from traditional livestock to sustainable agriculture.

GO FISH: Scientists thought the Mekong giant salmon carp was extinct. But one scientist kept looking – and recently published evidence of its survival, the New York Times reported.

§ New science

• New research in Ecological Economics found that climate change-induced migration of Nigerian herders seeking new grazing sites is a “key driver” of conflict between the herders and farmers. However, the study added, respondents who understood climate as the driving factor behind the migration were more likely to support policies that integrated herders into their community.
• In the 2019-20 Australian “megafires”, plants and animals were worst affected in areas that were frequently burned or had recently burned in the past, according to a new Nature study. The “unprecedented” fires had a small, but overall negative impact on the abundance and occurrence of species, the researchers found. 
• Reduced deforestation brings health benefits to Amazon populations, according to new research in Communications Earth and Environment. The study found that reduced deforestation pressure lowers the incidence of forest fires, lowering particulate matter concentrations and decreasing respiratory health problems for local communities.

§ In the diary

• 28 November: [Lecture] Towards a liveable planet: land, energy and food system transitions | Oxford, UK and Online
• 25 November-1 December: 5th session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution | Busan, South Korea
• 5 December: World Soil Day
• 2-13 December: COP16 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification | Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

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.

§ 1. Combat deforestation and restore degraded lands 

Since his 2022 election win, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pledged to reach “zero deforestation” in the country by 2030.

The country’s new NDC, however, does not explicitly contain this pledge. 

The plan outlines the “coordinated and continuous efforts to achieve zero deforestation, by eliminating illegal deforestation and compensating for the legal suppression of native vegetation and the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from it”. 

Observatório do Clima, a coalition of Brazilian civil-society organisations, warns that this “still allows high levels of deforestation by 2035” within the higher and lower ends of Brazil’s emissions-cutting target.

Dr Ane Alencar, the director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), notes the uncertainty with illegal deforestation because laws can change over time. She tells Carbon Brief:

“I think it’s important to have a clear target that cannot be challenged. Brazil knows that fighting deforestation is very important for many reasons.”

(Brazil accounts for almost 60% of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest.)

A 2023 adjustment to Brazil’s previous NDC committed to reaching zero deforestation by 2030. A 2022 update, sent when former president Jair Bolsonaro was in power, said the country committed to “eliminating illegal deforestation” by 2028. 

Forest restoration will be a “key factor” in Brazil’s climate action, the new NDC says, “as it consists of the nature-based removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and, at the same time, allows the goal of climate neutrality by 2050 to be achieved”. 

To halt deforestation and preserve native vegetation, it adds that current restoration work will need to be “strengthen[ed] and deepen[ed]”, with more “positive incentives” to maintain forests and vegetation on private rural properties.

Alencar says that existing incentives against deforestation, such as direct payments to conserve forests, “seem not to be enough”, telling Carbon Brief: 

“We need more than payments for these areas, paying them for the environmental services. We need the engagement of the private sector, for example, and we need the engagement of local governments.” 

Nonetheless, Alencar notes, the Brazilian government has “done a very good job” to reduce deforestation levels in recent years. 

Deforestation rates in the Brazilian section of the Amazon dropped by almost one-third between 2023 and 2024, the NDC said. Deforestation is also falling in the Cerrado after rising in recent years. 

Alencar notes that stopping all deforestation is near-impossible, telling Carbon Brief: 

“There are many people like smallholders and also some producers that will keep deforesting. It’s part of their rotation system…So zero deforestation, I think, is something hard to reach. But I think we can have deforestation at the minimum level.”

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§ 2. Fossil fuels and energy transition

According to Brazil’s new NDC, renewable energy sources – primarily, hydropower, but with growing contributions from wind and solar – already comprise 89.1% of the country’s electricity mix and nearly half of its energy mix. 

Still, the document says, the country will “seek to expand electricity generation with an increased share of technology and clean sources”. 

Several of the sectoral mitigation plans sit under this overarching goal, including one on energy (including electricity, mining and fuels), one on industry and one on transportation.

In terms of industry, the country will “reduce emissions intensity by progressively replacing fossil fuels with biofuels and electrification”. The NDC also calls for developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies in certain industries.

Similarly, the mitigation plan for the transportation sector will seek to “replac[e] fossil fuels with electricity and biofuels”, according to the NDC. It also says that infrastructure improvements will “contribute to an immediate reduction in fuel consumption”.

While there are references to other national plans and policies, there are no specific numerical targets laid out in the NDC for any of these sectors.

The NDC’s 26 “priority issues” include many that relate to creating a legal and regulatory framework to accelerate a transition to clean energy, including on:

• Offshore wind energy production.
• Low-carbon hydrogen production.
• Production of sustainable aviation fuel.
• Carbon dioxide capture and storage.
• Synthetic-fuel production and biofuels.

A technical note published by Observatório do Clima notes that Brazil “keeps silent about its own fossil-fuel expansion plans, implying that the problem is all in the demand side”.

On fossil-fuel phase-out, the NDC quotes the deal struck at COP28, saying: 

“Brazil would welcome the launching of international work for the definition of schedules for transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

It caveats that this would be done “with developing countries taking the lead” and reflecting “common but differentiated responsibilities”. (This is the principle that all countries are responsible for addressing climate change, but not to the same degree – and that those more responsible for causing climate change should bear greater responsibility to address it.)

Multiple NGOs have praised this aspect of Brazil’s NDC, with the ECO NGO newsletter calling it a hidden “jewel” in the pledge. 

Política por Inteiro, a Brazilian publication from the Talanoa Institute climate-policy thinktank, says that it “demonstrates that Brazil is ready to position itself as a climate leader among oil, gas and coal-producing nations”.

Alencar says the plan could have been more ambitious, but adds that she believes it is notable that Brazil was among the first to submit an updated climate pledge. She tells Carbon Brief:  

“Even with all the difficulties we have in Brazil, there is a commitment of the government to actually move forward and be more ambitious [on climate change]. I think they did that, they renewed their commitment and they were more ambitious, even though I think it could be a little bit more. But I think this is an important step.” 

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§ 3. ‘Sustainable’ expansion of agricultural production

Agriculture is an important sector in Brazil, with agribusiness making up almost half of the country’s exports. The sector also accounts for around a quarter of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions each year. 

The country produces and exports vast amounts of meat, coffee, soybeans, corn and other products. Brazil intends to encourage and incentivise more “sustainable” agriculture as part of its emission-cutting efforts, the NDC says. 

One of the country’s “national mitigation objectives” is to encourage the “widespread adoption of sustainable agricultural and livestock production models with low greenhouse gas emissions, guaranteeing food security for all”, the NDC says. 

It adds that, in this sector, Brazil wants to “continue to demonstrate that it is possible to sustainably expand agricultural production while guaranteeing food security and energy security through the sustainable production of biofuels”. 

For this, the country will rely on “two fundamental transformations”: 

1. Converting new areas, mostly from degraded pastures, for agricultural production, while also expanding “integrated systems” where crops, livestock and trees are grown on the same land. 
2. “Productivity gains” in agriculture through these integrated growing methods and an “increase in high productivity systems”.

The NDC further outlines a number of plans the country has or will put in place to achieve this, such as a 2021 agriculture adaptation plan.

Further agriculture and livestock mitigation and adaptation strategies are among the sectoral plans in development in Brazil, the NDC says. Alencar tells Carbon Brief:

“I think the agriculture sector is one that can provide lots of contribution, by improving their practices, investing in technologies to reduce cattle contributions and also with soil management.”

One “barrier” for emissions-cutting in agriculture is “land grabbing in the Amazon” and other illegal activities, she notes, saying these actions “generate a burden to the sector as a whole”: 

“If the Brazilian agriculture sector really goes in the direction of sustainability, then I think it’s possible to actually fulfil the NDC targets. But, the thing is, part of the sector is actually not [going] in that direction.” 

Dr Karen Silverwood-Cope, the climate director of the World Resources Institute Brasil, said in a statement: 

“To position itself as a climate leader, Brazil must make progress in the energy and agriculture sectors, which are projected to be major sources of pollution in the years to come.”  

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§ 4. Funding the transition, including carbon markets

Brazil’s new NDC lays out an ecological transformation plan (ETP) for the country, which contains a range of financial mechanisms – both existing and proposed – that can be used to fund the transition to a net-zero economy.

The Amazon Fund is one of the most well-known financial mechanisms for supporting efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation, with more than 100 projects in its portfolio. Last year, the fund committed R$1.3bn ($226.3m) for such projects.

Brazil’s Climate Fund, established by law in 2009, but “reformulated” last year to include new financial streams, is “one of the main instruments for financing Brazil’s ecological transformation in the short- and medium-term”, according to the NDC.

The plan also points out the benefits of tax reform, noting that Brazil’s simplified consumption tax, amended into the constitution last year, created funds that have been used for “reducing regional and social inequalities”.

Sustainable sovereign bonds are another potential financing source for positive ecological change. (Sovereign bonds are essentially loans issued by the government with the promise of future repayment on a specific date.) The government has pledged to allocate the net proceeds to projects with positive environmental outcomes.

The NDC notes that Brazil issued $2bn in sustainable sovereign bonds in November 2023 and again in June 2024. These funds “will be used to control deforestation, to conserve biodiversity, to replenish the [Climate Fund], with a focus on renewable energy and clean transport, and to programs against poverty and hunger”.

At COP28 in 2022, Brazil proposed the creation of a new financing mechanism, the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF). The TFFF “uses blended finance to generate financial returns” to pay countries for keeping their forests intact, including allocating a percentage of the funds raised directly to Indigenous peoples. 

The NDC also calls for the “approval of the legal framework and regulation of the carbon market” as one of its 26 priority issues.

The Brazilian Congress is currently considering legislation to create the Brazilian emissions trading system, with revenue directed towards encouraging decarbonisation and low-carbon technology development.

The new NDC is the first time that the country “has openly stated its plan to trade emissions reductions with other countries under the rules of the Paris Agreement”, according to Política por Inteiro. 

According to the NDC, the government will use the lower-ambition target of 1.05GtCO2e as the “reference for assessing the progress and ambition of future contributions” and, if it surpasses this target, “may” authorise transfers of emissions-reductions up to that level.

Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at Observatório do Clima, tells Carbon Brief: 

“I think the institutions are there, the tools are there, and this is one of the reasons why we don’t understand why Brazil aimed so low in the NDC – because we have the institutional capacity. We have the finance tools to go much further than we are going.”

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§ 5. Adaptation and sustainable development

Adaptation measures – which aim to improve the resilience of populations, ecosystems and species to the impacts of climate change – feature prominently in Brazil’s new climate commitment.

The country will review its national adaptation plan and encourage the creation of local adaptation plans and sectoral plans (16 for adaptation and seven for mitigation) by mid-2025. Such plans will lay out sector-by-sector contributions to emissions reductions. 

The NDC also commits to mainstreaming adaptation into policies and projects vulnerable to climate change, promoting public awareness of climate change and transparency and adopting ecosystem-based adaptation approaches.

The government will widen the presence and strengthen the capacities of the three branches of government – Congress, head of state and courts – to implement the goals of the NDC.

Observatório do Clima says the NDC “makes extensive and important references to the topic of adaptation”. It adds: 

“This is an extremely relevant issue for a country whose population is already experiencing the consequences of the climate crisis.” 

Hand in hand with adaptation, Brazil’s new NDC sets out plans to use the state’s institutional and financial capacity to “foster” sustainable development and a just transition while reducing inequalities.

For example, its national adaptation objectives include increasing the resilience of populations by promoting water and energy security and socioeconomic development. 

The NDC mentions a “renewed emphasis on promoting sustainable development” and cites recent policies such as the National Bioeconomy Strategy, which aims to ensure that products and services derived from biological resources are produced in a sustainable way. The bioeconomy strategy will aid the state in conserving biodiversity, decarbonising energy use and promoting recycling of such resources, the NDC says.

Elsewhere, the NDC says that the country aims to develop the Brazilian Sustainable Taxonomy, a classification system of projects that benefit the climate, environment or society.

Additionally, Brazil will expand financing and improve insurance mechanisms for sustainable sectors and practices. It will deploy an investment plan for boosting sustainable development called the Ecological Transformation Plan, comprising various economic instruments to encourage sustainable investments. (See: Funding the transition, including carbon markets.)

Angelo, from Observatório do Clima, tells Carbon Brief:

“Policy-wise, it’s a pretty good NDC. It does mention a series of policies that are already in place or being planned…But the NDC [emissions reduction target] is very weak; it is [not] 1.5C aligned. I would say the direction of travel is right, but the speed is totally wrong.”

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§ History matters

Historical CO2 emissions matter for climate change, because there is a finite “carbon budget” that can be released into the atmosphere before a given level of global warming is breached.

For example, in order to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, only around 2,800GtCO2 can be added to the atmosphere, counting all emissions since the pre-industrial period. (This is according to a 2023 study updating figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)

Cumulative emissions since 1850 will reach 2,607CO2 by the end of 2024, according to Carbon Brief’s new analysis, meaning that some 94% of the 1.5C budget will have been used up.

These cumulative historical emissions are directly and proportionally linked to the amount of global warming that has already been seen to date.

Conclusions adopted by countries at the end of the first week at COP29 also make this link, in light of 2024 being on track to be the hottest year on record:

“The [subsidiary body to the UN climate process] SBSTA…expressed utmost concern about the state of the global climate system…with 2024 being on track to be the hottest year on record, which is primarily a result of the long-term warming caused by emissions from pre-industrial times until now.”

In addition, draft text on the new climate finance goal explicitly links responsibility for global warming to finance “burden-sharing arrangements” – meaning who should pay and how much.

In one passage of a draft published on 16 November 2024, there is a reference to the “principle of historical responsibility”. Another passage says that developed-country cumulative emissions should be used as a “proxy for historic responsibility for climate change”. The draft states:

“[D]eveloped country parties shall establish burden-sharing arrangements to enable the delivery of the [new climate finance] goal based on cumulative territorial CO2 emissions…as a proxy for historic responsibility for climate change.”

An alternative option in the draft says that countries should have to contribute to the new climate finance target if they are one of the world’s “top 10 emitters” based on cumulative emissions – and if they have average per-capita incomes above a certain level.

(If agreed, this would mean China, as a top-10 historical emitter, being obliged to contribute to climate finance. However, the draft is not final and is likely to change significantly. Many parts of the draft are enclosed in square brackets, indicating that they are not agreed.)

At the annual UN climate talks, it is also common for developing countries to remind developed nations that they have used up a large share of the world’s carbon budget – and that they should, therefore, be making stronger efforts to cut their emissions.

For example, in the closing plenary of the first week at COP29, Saudi Arabia “lamented depleted carbon budgets…in light of historic cumulative emissions as well as developed countries’ insufficient mitigation efforts”, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

§ China’s rising contribution

It is true that developed countries have been the leading contributors to historical emissions. This is despite the fact that China now has the world’s highest emissions on an annual basis.

Put another way, developed countries have made a disproportionately large contribution to current global warming, particularly when considering the number of people that live in them.

This is a key reason why the Paris Agreement says they “should continue taking the lead” on cutting their emissions – and why they must provide climate finance for developing nations.

The 1992 UN climate convention (UNFCCC) listed “developed” countries in Annex I, based on membership of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development at the time.

The convention says that the “largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries”.

Indeed, at the time of the convention being agreed in 1992, Annex I countries accounted for 22% of the world’s population and a disproportionately large 61% of historical emissions.

By the end of 2024, however, Annex I countries’ share of cumulative historical emissions will have fallen to 52% of the global total. Carbon Brief’s analysis suggests that developing countries – those outside Annex I – will account for a majority of historical emissions in roughly six years.

China’s rapidly rising contribution to cumulative emissions is a major driver of this shift.

In 1992, China’s historical emissions were around two-fifths (41%) the size of the EU’s. By 2015, when the Paris Agreement was finalised, they were still only four-fifths (80%) of the EU’s total.

By the end of 2023, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that China’s cumulative emissions (red line in the figure below) had overtaken those from the 27 EU member states (yellow).

Still, it is worth emphasising that China’s emissions remain far behind those of the EU on a per-capita basis.

When weighting historical emissions per head of population in 2024, China’s contribution is just 227tCO2 per capita, less than a third of the 682tCO2 for people in the EU27.

(There are several other ways to measure historical contributions. These include adjustments to account for CO2 embedded in imported goods and services, or shifting responsibility under periods of colonial rule. See the table below to compare countries using different metrics.)

§ US still most responsible

While China is now the world’s second-largest contributor to historical emissions, ahead of the EU27, it remains far behind the US, as shown in the figure below.

With cumulative emissions of 537GtCO2 by the end of 2024, the US total is two-thirds higher than China’s and three-quarters above the EU27.

Still, China is closing the gap, given its annual emissions are now roughly double those of the US. This is clear from the slope of the curves in the chart above, where China’s line is rising steeply.

§ China may never overtake the US

The fact that China’s annual emissions are so much higher than those from the US begs the question of when might it overtake the US, in terms of its cumulative historical total.

A 2023 article in the Washington Post attempted to answer this question, asserting that China would overtake the US in 2050. However, it used implausible projections in which annual emissions from the US, China and Europe remained almost unchanged for decades.

To attempt a more plausible answer, Carbon Brief has used data from the latest International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook, published in October 2024.

Specifically, Carbon Brief looked at how annual emissions in China, the US and EU27 might change under “current policy settings” in the IEA’s “stated policies scenario” (STEPS). This reflects governments’ current and committed plans, as well as the latest energy-price trends.

The dashed lines in the figure below illustrate how the annual emissions of the US, EU and China are each expected to fall steeply under those current policy settings.

Adding these annual emissions outlooks to the historical totals up to this year suggests that China may never overtake the US in terms of its cumulative emissions, as shown in the figure below.

Emissions outlooks are by their nature uncertain. For example, China’s emissions might fail to fall as fast as the IEA expects – or the US might go faster than expected.
On the other hand, the impact of the incoming Trump presidency rolling back climate rules and aiming to “drill baby, drill” would make it even less likely that China would ever overtake the US.

Whether or not China overtakes the US in terms of its historical emissions, it is unlikely to escape pressure to contribute to global flows of climate finance.

At COP29, Ding Xuexiang, Chinese president Xi Jinping’s “special representative” and the nation’s executive vice-premier, notably used the UN language of climate finance to describe Chinese overseas aid for the first time. However, China has insisted that it will only provide such finance voluntarily.

§ About the data

This analysis is based on historical CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use, cement production, land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF), during the period 1850-2024.

The approach mirrors the methodology used for Carbon Brief’s analysis of historical responsibility according to emissions within national borders, and when considering colonial rule.

Those articles explain how it is possible to confidently estimate emissions that took place more than 100 years ago, how the analysis deals with changes in national borders, how emissions from land use can be estimated and why the analysis only starts in 1850.

As those articles illustrated, there are many different lenses through which historical responsibility for climate change can be viewed, each offering an alternative viewpoint on the world.

The table below, which is sortable and searchable, shows a selection of the different ways that historical responsibility can be carved up.

It lists countries according to population, historical emissions within their own borders, emissions after accounting for colonial responsibility and the impact of CO2 embedded in trade since 1990.

The table also shows two alternative per capita metrics. The first shows cumulative territorial emissions for each country, divided by its population in 2024. The second shows per-capita territorial emissions in each year, cumulatively added up through to the present day.

(Note that the table excludes countries with a population of less than 1 million people.)

This data is free to use under the terms of Carbon Brief’s CC licence. The licence applies to non-commercial use and requires a credit to “Carbon Brief” and a link to this article.

§ What are the origins of ‘extreme weather attribution’?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made its first mention of attribution in its first assessment report (pdf), published in 1990. In a section called “Attribution and the fingerprint method”, the report refers to attribution as “linking cause and effect”.

In these early days of attribution science, experts used statistical methods to search for the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change in global temperature records. 

However, the 1990 report says that “it is not possible at this time to attribute all or even a large part of the observed global mean warming to the enhanced greenhouse effect on the basis of the observational data currently available”.

As the observational record lengthened and scientists refined their methods, experts became more confident about attributing global temperature rise to human-caused climate change. By the time its third assessment report was published in 2001, the IPCC could state that “detection and attribution studies consistently find evidence for an anthropogenic signal in the climate record of the last 35 to 50 years”.

Just two years later, Prof Myles Allen – professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford – wrote a Nature commentary from his home in Oxford that would open the door for attributing extreme weather events to climate change. The article begins:

“As I write this article in January 2003, the floodwaters of the River Thames are about 30 centimetres from my kitchen door and slowly rising. On the radio, a representative of the UK Met Office has just explained that although this is the kind of phenomenon that global warming might make more frequent, it is impossible to attribute this particular event (floods in southern England) to past emissions of greenhouse gases. What is less clear is whether the attribution of specific weather events to external drivers of climate change will always be impossible in principle, or whether it is simply impossible at present, given our current state of understanding of the climate system.”

Just months after Oxford’s floodwaters began to recede, a now-infamous heatwave swept across Europe. The summer of 2003 was the hottest ever recorded for central and western Europe, with average temperatures in many countries reaching 5C higher than usual. 

The unexpected heat resulted in an estimated 20,000 “excess” deaths, making the heatwave one of Europe’s deadliest on record.

In 2004, Allen and two other UK-based climate scientists produced the first formal attribution study, published in Nature, which estimated the impact of human-caused climate change on the heatwave.

To conduct the study, the authors first chose the temperature “threshold” to define their heatwave. They decided on 1.6C above the 1961-90 average, because the European summer of 2003 was the first on record to exceed this average temperature.

They then used a global climate model to simulate two worlds – one mirroring the world as it was in 2003 and the other a fictional world in which the industrial revolution never happened. In the second case, the climate is influenced solely by natural changes, such as solar energy and volcanic activity, and there is no human-caused warming.

The authors ran their models thousands of times in each scenario from 1989 to 2003. As the climate is inherently chaotic, each model “run” – individual simulations of how the climate progresses over many years – produces a slightly different progression of temperatures. This means that some runs simulated a heatwave in the summer of 2003, while others did not.

The authors counted how many times the 1.6C threshold temperature was crossed in the summer of 2003 in each model run. They then compared the likelihood of crossing the threshold temperature in the world with – and a world without – climate change.

They concluded that “it is very likely that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding this threshold magnitude”. 

A Nature commentary linked to the study called the paper a “breakthrough”, stating that it was the “first successful attempt to detect man-made influence on a specific extreme climatic event”. 

In the decade following the heatwave study, more teams from around the world began to use the same methods – known as “probabilistic”, “risk-based” or “unconditional” attribution.

Prof Peter Stott is a science fellow in climate attribution at the UK Met Office and an author on the study. Stott tells Carbon Brief that the basic methods used in this first attribution study are “still used to this day”, but that scientists now use more “up-to-date” climate models than the one used in his seminal study.

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§ What is ‘probabilistic’ attribution?

As the 2004 Nature study demonstrated, probabilistic attribution involves scientists running climate models thousands of times in scenarios with and without human-caused climate change, then comparing the two.

This allows them to say how much more likely, intense or long-lasting an event was due to climate change.

Many studies since have added a third scenario, in which the planet is warmer than present-day temperatures, to assess how climate change may impact extreme weather events in the future.

The figure below shows three distributions of multiple different simulated extreme events. The x-axis (horizontal) represents the intensity of the climate variable – in this instance temperature – with lower temperatures on the left and higher temperatures on the right. The y-axis (vertical) shows the likelihood of this variable hitting certain values.

Each curve shows how the climate variable behaves in a different scenario, or “world”. The red-shaded curve shows a pre-industrial world that was not warmed by human influence, the yellow-shaded curve indicates today’s climate, while the dashed line shows a future, warmer world. The curves shift from left to right as the climate warms.

The peak of each curve shows the most likely temperatures, while likelihood is lowest at the far left and far right of each curve, where temperatures are most extreme. The hatched areas show the temperatures that cross a predefined “threshold” temperature. (In the attribution study on the 2003 European heatwave, this threshold was defined as 1.6C above the 1961-90 average.)

The three curves show how the threshold is more likely to be crossed as the world warms.

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§ Which weather extremes can scientists link to climate change?

In 2011, the American Meteorological Society decided to include a “special supplement” about attribution research in its annual report. 

The supplement presented six different attribution studies. It generated significant media interest and the “Explaining Extreme Events” report has been published by Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society almost every year since.

As the research field has grown, so too has the range of different extremes that have been studied.

Heatwaves are generally considered the simplest extreme events to attribute, because they are mainly driven by thermodynamic influences. In contrast, storms and droughts are more strongly affected by complex atmospheric dynamics, so can be trickier to simulate in a model.

The graphic below shows the relative confidence of attributing different types of extreme events. 

Attribution studies on extreme heat often assess how much hotter, long-lasting or likely an event was due to climate change. For example, one study finds that the summer heatwave that hit France in 2019 was made 1.5-3C hotter due to climate change and about 100 times more likely.

Heatwaves are the most-studied extreme event in attribution literature, but are becoming “less and less interesting for researchers”, according to a Bloomberg article from 2020.

Assessing extreme rainfall is more complicated – in part because the Earth’s chaotic weather system means that the size and path of a storm or heavy rainfall event has a large element of chance, which can make it challenging to identify where climate change fits in.

Nevertheless, many teams have published studies attributing extreme rainfall events and storms. For example, one study (pdf) found that climate change doubled the likelihood of the intense rainfall that fell in northern China in September 2021.

Scientists also study more complex events, such as drought, wildfires and floods, which are impacted by factors including land use and disaster preparedness.

For example, there are many different ways to define a drought. Some are linked just to rainfall, while others consider factors including soil moisture, groundwater and river flow. Some attribution studies investigating the impact of climate change on drought focus only on rainfall deficit, while others (pdf) study temperature or vapour pressure deficit – the difference between the amount of moisture in the air and how much moisture the air can hold when it is saturated.

A scientist’s decision about which type of drought to study sometimes depends on the available data and the type of impacts caused by the drought. In other cases, the choice may come down to what caused the biggest impact on people.

For example, in late 2022, South America was plagued by a severe drought that caused widespread crop failure. An attribution study on the event, therefore, focused on “agricultural” drought, which captures the response of rainfall on soil moisture conditions and is the most relevant for crop health.

Meanwhile, a study on drought in Madagascar over 2019-21 chose to focus on rainfall deficit. The study says “this was because recent research found rainfall deficits were the primary driver of drought in regions of East Africa with very similar climatic properties to south-west Madagascar”.

Wildfires are affected by conditions including temperature, rainfall, wind speed and land use. While some wildfire attribution studies focus on vapour pressure deficit, others quantify the fire weather index, which looks at the effects of fuel moisture and wind on fire behaviour and spread”.

Tropical cyclones are also complex. There is evidence that climate change can increase the peak “rain rates” and wind speeds of tropical cyclones, and that storm tracks are shifting poleward. There are many aspects of a cyclone that can be analysed, such as rainfall intensity, storm surge height and storm size.

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§ Why do scientists perform ‘rapid’ attribution studies?

As extreme weather attribution became more mainstream, researchers began to produce studies more quickly. However, challenges in communicating the findings of attribution studies in a timely way soon became evident. 

After conducting a study, writing it up and submitting it to a journal, it can still take months or years for research to be published. This means that, by the time an attribution study is published, the extreme event has likely long passed.

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative was founded in 2015 to tackle this issue. The team uses a standard, peer-reviewed methodology for their studies, but does not publish the results in formal journals – instead publishing them directly on their website.

(After publishing these “rapid attribution” studies on their website, the team often write full papers for publication in formal journals, which are then peer reviewed.)

This means that rather than taking months or years to publish their research, the team can make their findings public just days or weeks after an extreme weather event occurs. 

In 2021, the founders of the initiative – including Carbon Brief contributing editor Dr Friederike Otto, who is a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute – wrote a Carbon Brief guest post explaining why they founded WWA:

“By reacting in a matter of days or weeks, we have been able to inform key audiences with a solid scientific result swiftly after an extreme event has occurred – when the interest is highest and results most relevant.”

The guest post explains that to conduct an attribution study, the WWA team first uses observed data to assess how rare the event is in the current climate – and how much this has changed over the observed record. This is communicated using a “return period” – the expected frequency an event of this magnitude could be expected under a given climate.

For example, the WWA analysed the UK’s record-shattering heatwave of 2022, when the country recorded temperatures above 40C for the first time. They found that the maximum temperature seen in the UK on 19 July 2022 has a 1,000-year return period in today’s climate – meaning that even in today’s climate, 40C heat would only be expected, on average, once in a millennium.

The authors then use climate models to carry out the “probabilistic” attribution study, to determine how much more intense, likely or long-lasting the event was as a result of climate change. They conclude by conducting “vulnerability and exposure” analysis, which often highlights other socioeconomic problems.

Sometimes, the authors conclude that climate change did not influence the event. For example, a 2021 rapid attribution study by WWA found that poverty, poor infrastructure and dependence on rain-fed agriculture were the main drivers of the ongoing food crisis in Madagascar, while climate change played “no more than a small part”.

Other groups are also conducting rapid attribution studies. For example, a group of scientists – including some WWA collaborators – recently launched a “rapid experimental framework” research project called ClimaMeter. The tool provides initial attribution results just hours after an extreme weather event takes place.

ClimaMeter focuses on the atmospheric circulation patterns that cause an extreme event – for example, a low-pressure system in a particular region. Once an event is defined, the scientists search the historical record to find events with similar circulation patterns to calculate how the intensity of the events has changed over time.

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§ Can the impacts of extreme weather be linked to climate change?

A branch of attribution science called “impact attribution” – which aims to quantify the social, economic and/or ecological impacts of climate change on extreme weather events – is also gaining popularity. There are four main types of impact attribution, as shown in the graphic below.

1) Trend-to-trend impact attribution

The first method, called “trend-to-trend” impact attribution, assesses long-term trends in both the climate system and in “health outcomes”. This approach was used in a 2021 study on heat-related mortality around the world, which received extensive media attention.

The authors used data from 732 locations in 43 countries to identify relationships between temperature and mortality in different locations, known as “exposure-response functions”. This allowed them to estimate how many people would die in a given location, if temperatures reach a certain level.

The authors used these relationships to calculate heat-related mortality over 1991-2018 for each location under two scenarios – one with and one without human-caused climate change. The study concluded that 37% of “warm-season heat-related deaths” can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

2) Event-to-event attribution

The second type of study is known as “event-to-event” attribution. In one study using this method, the authors used data on observed mortality rates to determine how many people died in Switzerland during the unusually warm summer of 2022.

They calculated how much climate change contributed to warming during that summer. They then then ran a model to calculate the “hypothetical heat-related burden” that would have been seen during the summer without the warming influence of climate change. 

Using this method, they estimate that 60% of the 623 heat-related deaths “could have been avoided in absence of human-induced climate change”.

3) Risk-based event attribution

“Risk-based” event impact attribution – which is demonstrated in a more recent study on the 2003 European heatwave – is the third type of impact attribution. This method combines probabilistic event attribution with resulting health outcomes.

When the paper was published, its lead author, Prof Dann Mitchell – a professor of climate science at the University of Bristol – explained the method to Carbon Brief:

“We have a statistical relationship between the number of additional deaths per degree of warming. This is specific to a certain city and changes a lot between cities. We use climate simulations to calculate the heat in 2003, and in 2003 without human influences. Then we compare the simulations, along with the observations.”

They find, for example, that in the summer of 2003, anthropogenic climate change increased the risk of heat-related mortality in London by around 20%. This means that out of the estimated 315 deaths in London during the heatwave, 64 were due to climate change.

4) Fractional attribution

In the final method, known as “fractional” attribution, the authors combine the results of two independent numbers – an estimation of the total damages caused by an extreme weather event, and a calculation of the proportion of the risk from an extreme weather event for which anthropogenic climate change is responsible, known as the “fraction of attributable risk” (FAR).

The authors of one study used this method to estimate the economic damages linked to Hurricane Harvey.

The authors calculate that “fraction of attributable risk” for the rainfall from Harvey was around three-quarters – meaning that climate change was responsible for three-quarters of the intense rainfall.

Separately, the authors find that according to best estimates, the hurricane caused damages of around US$90bn. From this, the authors conclude that US$67bn of the damages caused by the Hurricane’s intense rainfall can be attributed to climate change.

A study on the 2010 Russian heatwave also used this method. The authors found that the heatwave was responsible for more than 55,000 deaths (pdf), and found an 80% chance that the extreme heat would not have occurred without climate warming. The study concludes that almost 45,000 of the deaths were attributable to human-caused climate change.

However, the fractional attribution method has received criticism. One paper argues that the method “inflates the impacts associated with anthropogenic climate change”, because it “incorrectly assumes” that the event has no impact unless it exceeds the threshold defined by the researchers.

Some of the authors of the Hurricane Harvey paper later wrote a paper advising caution in interpreting the results of FAR studies. They say:

“The fraction of attributable risk (FAR) method, useful in extreme weather attribution research, has a very specific interpretation concerning a class of events, and there is potential to misinterpret results from weather event analyses as being applicable to specific events and their impact outcomes…FAR is not generally appropriate when estimating the magnitude of the anthropogenic signal behind a specific impact.”

Expanding scope

Impact attribution is continuing to expand in scope. For example, studies are now being conducted to assess the impact of climate change on disease transmission.

In 2020, scientists quantified the influence of climate change on specific episodes of extreme ice loss from glaciers for the first time. They found that human-caused climate change made the extreme “mass loss” seen in glaciers in the Southern Alps, New Zealand, in 2018 at least 10 times more likely. 

Scientists have also linked climate change to ecosystem shifts. One study focusing on temperature finds that the “extremely early cherry tree flowering” seen in Kyoto in 2021 was made 15 times more likely due to climate change. 

Others go even further, linking weather extremes to societal impacts. For example, a 2021 study published in Scientific Reports says:

“By combining an extreme event attribution analysis with a probabilistic model of food production and prices, we find that climate change increased the likelihood of the 2007 co-occurring drought in South Africa and Lesotho, aggravating the food crisis in Lesotho.”

Meanwhile, Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute is working on an initiative to publish rapid impact attribution studies about extreme weather events around the world. Similar to WWA studies, these rapid studies will not be peer reviewed individually, but will be based on a peer-reviewed methodology.

Dr Emily Theokritoff – a research associate at Grantham, who is working on the initiative, tells Carbon Brief that it will be launched “in the near future”. She adds:

“The aim is to recharge the field, start a conversation about climate losses and damages, and help people understand how climate change is making life more dangerous and more expensive.”

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§ How do scientists attribute ‘unprecedented’ events?

An attribution method known as the “storyline approach” or “conditional attribution” has become increasingly popular over the past decade – despite initially causing controversy in the attribution community.

In this approach, researchers first select an extreme weather event, such as a specific heatwave, storm or drought. They then identify the physical components, such as sea surface temperature, soil moisture and atmospheric dynamics, that led to the event unfolding in the way it did. This series of events is called a “storyline”. 

The authors then use models to simulate this “storyline” in two different worlds – one in the world as we know it and one in a counterfactual world – for example, with a different sea surface temperature or CO2 level. By comparing the model runs, the researchers can draw conclusions about how much climate change influenced that event.

The storyline approach is useful for explaining the influence of climate change on the physical processes that contributed to the event. It can also be used to explore in detail how this event would have played out in a warmer (future) or cooler (pre-industrial) climate. 

One study describes the storyline approach as an “autopsy”, explaining that it “gives an account of the causes of the extreme event”.

Prof Ted Shepherd, a researcher at the University of Reading, was one of the earliest advocates of the storyline attribution approach. At the EGU general assembly in Vienna in April 2024, Shepherd provided the opening talk in a session on storyline attribution. 

He told the packed conference room that the storyline approach was born out of the need for a “forensic” approach to attribution, rather than a “yes/no” approach. He emphasised that extreme weather events have “multiple causes” and that the storyline approach allows researchers to dissect each of these components.

Dr Linda van Garderen is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University and has carried out multiple studies using the storyline method. She tells Carbon Brief that, while traditional attribution typically investigates probability, the storyline approach analyses intensity. 

For example, she led an attribution study using the storyline method which concluded that the 2003 European and 2010 Russian heatwaves would have been 2.5-4C cooler in a world without climate change.

She adds that it can make communication easier, telling Carbon Brief that “probabilities can be challenging to interpret in practical daily life, whereas the intensity framing of storyline studies is more intuitive and can make attribution studies easier to understand”.

Dr Nicholas Leach is a researcher at the University of Oxford who has conducted multiple studies using the storyline approach. He tells Carbon Brief that probabilistic attribution often produces “false negatives”, wrongly concluding that climate change did not influence an event. 

This is because climate models have “biases and uncertainties” which can lead to “noise” – particularly when it comes to dynamical features such as atmospheric circulation patterns. Probabilistic attribution methods often end up losing the signal of climate change in this noise, he explains.

The storyline approach is able to avoid these issues more easily, he says. He explains that by focusing on the dynamics of one specific event, rather than a “broad class of events”, storyline studies can eliminate some of this noise, making it more straightforward to identify a signal, he says.

Conversely, others have critiqued the storyline method for producing false positives, which  wrongly claim that climate change influenced an extreme weather event.

The storyline approach has also been praised for its ability to attribute “unprecedented” events. In the EGU session on the storyline method, many presentations explored how the storyline method could be used to attribute “statistically impossible” extremes.

Leach explains that when a completely unprecedented extreme event occurs, statistical models often indicate that the event “shouldn’t have happened”. When running a probabilistic analysis using these models, Leach explains: “You end up with the present probability being zero and past probability being zero, so you can’t say a lot.”

He points to the Pacific north-west heatwave of 2021 as an example of this. This event was one of the most extreme regional heat events ever recorded globally, breaking some local high temperature records by more than 6C.

WWA conducted a rapid attribution study on the heatwave, using its probabilistic attribution method. The heatwave was “so extreme” that the observed temperatures “lie far outside the range” of historical observations, the researchers said. 

Their assessment suggests that the heatwave was around a one-in-1,000-year event in today’s climate and was made at least 150-times more likely because of climate change.

Leach and his colleagues used the storyline method to attribute the same heatwave. The methods of this study will be discussed more in the following section.

Leach explains that using the storyline approach, he was able to consider the physics of the event, including an atmospheric river that coincided with the “heat dome” that was a key feature of the event. This helped him to represent the event well in his models. The study concluded that the heatwave was 1.3C hotter and eight times more likely as a result of climate change. 

Many experts tell Carbon Brief there was initially tension in the attribution community between probabilistic and storyline advocates when the latter was first introduced. However, as the storyline method has become more mainstream, criticism has abated and many scientists are now publishing research using both techniques.

Van Garderen tells Carbon Brief that storyline attribution is “adding to the attribution toolbox”, rather than attempting to replace existing methods. She emphasises that probability-based and storyline attribution answer different questions, and that both are important. 

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§ How can weather forecasts be used in attribution studies?

Forecast attribution is the most recent major addition to the attribution toolbox. This method uses weather forecasts instead of climate models to carry out attribution studies. Many experts describe this method as sitting part-way between probabilistic and storyline attribution.

One benefit of using forecasts, rather than climate models, is that their higher resolution allows them to simulate extreme weather events in more detail. By using forecasts, scientists can also attribute events that have not yet happened.

The first use of “advance forecasted” attribution analysis (pdf) quantified the impact of climate change on the size, rainfall and intensity of Hurricane Florence before it made landfall in North Carolina in September 2018. 

The authors, in essence, carried out the probabilistic attribution method, using two sets of short-term forecasts for the hurricane rather than large-scale climate models. The analysis received a mixed reaction. Stott told Carbon Brief at the time that it was “quite a cool idea”, but was highly dependent on being able to forecast such events reliably.

Dr Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Carbon Brief in 2019 that the study was “a bit of a disaster”, explaining that the quality of the forecast was questionable for the assessment.

The authors subsequently published a paper in Science Advances reviewing their study “with the benefit of hindsight”. The authors acknowledged that the results are quite a way off what they forecasted. However, they also claimed to have identified what went wrong with their forecasted analysis.

Problems with the “without climate change” model runs created a larger contrast against their real-world simulations, meaning the analysis overestimated the impact of climate change on the event, they said.

Nonetheless, the study did identify a quantifiable impact of climate change on Hurricane Florence, adding to the evidence from studies by other author groups.

This research team has since published more forecast-based attribution studies on hurricanes. One study used hindcasts – forecasts that start from the past and then run forward into the present – to analyse the 2020 hurricane season. The team then ran a series of “counterfactual” hindcasts over the same period, without the influence of human warming from sea surface temperatures.

They found that warmer waters increased three-hour rainfall rates and three-day accumulated rainfall for tropical storms by 10% and 5%, respectively, over the 2020 season.

Meanwhile, a 2021 study by a different team showed how it was possible to use traditional weather forecasts for attribution. The researchers, who penned a Carbon Brief guest post about their work, found that the European heatwave of February 2019 was 42% more likely for the British Isles and at least 100% more likely for France.

To conduct their study, the authors used a weather forecast model – also known as a “numerical weather prediction” model (NWP).

They explain that a NWP typically runs at a higher resolution than a climate model, meaning that it has more, smaller grid cells. This allows it to simulate processes that a climate model cannot and makes them “more suitable for studying the most extreme events than conventional climate models,” the authors argue.

More recently, Leach and his team carried out a forecast attribution study on the record-breaking Pacific north-west heatwave of 2021, years after the event took place.

The authors defined 29 June 2021 as the start of the event, as this is when the maximum temperature of the heatwave was recorded. They then ran their forecasts using a range of “lead times” – the number of days before the event starts that the model simulation is initialised.

The shortest lead time in this study was three days, meaning the scientists began running the model using the weather conditions recorded on 26 June 2021. The short lead time meant that they could tailor the model very closely to the weather conditions at this time and simulated the event itself very accurately. 

By comparison, the longest lead times used in this study were 2-4 months. This means that the models were initialised in spring and, by the time they simulated the June heatwave, their simulation did not closely resemble the events that actually unfolded. 

Leach tells Carbon Brief that by lengthening the lead time of the weather forecast, they can effectively “shift the dial” from storyline to probabilistic attribution. He explains:

“If you’re using a forecast that’s initialised really near to your event, then you’re kind of going down that storyline approach, by saying, ‘I want what my model is stimulating to look really similar to the event I’m interested in’…

“The further back [in time] you go, the closer you get to the more probabilistic style of statements that are more unconditioned.”

This combination of storyline and probabilistic attribution allows the authors to draw conclusions both about how climate change affected the intensity and the likelihood of the heatwave. The authors estimate that the heatwave was 1.3C more intense and eight times more likely as a result of climate change.

More recently, Climate Central has produced a tool that uses temperature forecasts over the US over the coming days to calculate a “climate shift index”. This index gives the ratio of how common the forecasted temperature is in today’s climate, compared to how likely it would be in a world without climate change.

The index runs from five to minus five. A result of zero indicates that climate change has no detectable influence, an index of five means that climate change made the temperature at least five times more likely and an index of minus five means that climate change made the temperature at least five times less likely.

The tool can be used for attribution. For example, recent analysis by the group used the index to quantify how climate change has influenced the number of uncomfortably hot nights. It concluded:

“Due to human-caused climate change, 2.4 billion people experienced an average of at least two additional weeks per year where nighttime temperatures exceeded 25C. Over one billion people experienced an average of at least two additional weeks per year of nights above 20C and 18C.”

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§ What are the applications of attribution science?

One often-touted application of attribution studies is to raise awareness about the role of climate change in extreme weather events. However, there are limited studies about how effective this is.

One study presents the results of focus group interviews with UK scientists, who were not working on climate change, in which participants were given attribution statements. The study concludes:

“Extreme event attribution shows significant promise for climate change communication because of its ability to connect novel, attention-grabbing and event-specific scientific information to personal experiences and observations of extreme events.”

However, the study identified a range of challenges, including “adequately capturing nuances”, “expressing scientific uncertainty without undermining accessibility of key findings” and difficulties interpreting mathematical aspects of the results.

In another experiment, researchers informed nearly 4,000 adults in the US that climate change had made the July 2023 heatwave in the US at least five times more likely. The team also shared information from Climate Central’s climate shift index. According to the study, both approaches “increased the belief that climate change made the July 2023 heatwave more likely and is making heatwaves in general more likely as well”.

Meanwhile, as the science of extreme weather attribution becomes more established, lawyers, governments and civil society are finding more uses for this evolving field. 

For example, attribution is starting to play an important role in courts. In 2017, two lawyers wrote a Carbon Brief guest post stating “we expect that attribution science will provide crucial evidence that will help courts determine liability for climate change related harm”.

Four years later, the authors of a study on “climate litigation” wrote a Carbon Brief guest post explaining how attribution science can be “translated into legal causality”. They wrote:

“Attribution can bridge the gap identified by judges between a general understanding that human-induced climate change has many negative impacts and providing concrete evidence of the role of climate change at a specific location for a specific extreme event that already has led or will lead to damages.”

In 2024, around 2,000 Swiss women used an attribution study, alongside other evidence, to win a landmark case in the European Court of Human Rights. The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to heatwaves linked to climate change. The court ruled that Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emissions targets had been “woefully inadequate”.

The 2024 European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna dedicated an entire session to climate change and litigation. Prof Wim Thiery – a scientist who was involved in many conference sessions on climate change and litigation – tells Carbon Brief that attribution science is particularly important for supporting “reparation cases”, in which vulnerable countries or communities seek compensation for the damages caused by climate change.

He adds Carbon Brief that seeing the “direct and tangible impact” of an attribution study in a court case “motivates climate scientists in engaging in this community”.

(Other types of science are also important in court cases related to climate change, he added. For example, “source attribution” identifies the relative contribution of different sectors and entities – such as companies or governments – to climate change.)

Dr Rupert Stuart-Smith, a research associate in climate science and the law at the University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme, adds: 

“We’re seeing a new evolution whereby communities are increasingly looking at impact-relevant variables. Think about inundated areas, lake levels, heatwave mortalities. These are the new target variables of attribution science. This is a new frontier and we are seeing that those studies are directly usable in court cases.”

He tells Carbon Brief that some cases “have sought to hold high-emitting corporations – such as fossil fuel or agricultural companies – liable for the costs of climate change impacts”. He continues:

“In cases like these, claimants typically need to show that climate change is causing specific harms affecting them and courts may leverage attribution or climate projections to adjudicate these claims. Impact attribution is particularly relevant in this context.”

Dr Delta Merner is a lead scientist at the science hub for climate litigation. She tells Carbon Brief that “enhanced source attribution for companies and countries” will be “critical” for holding major emitters accountable. She adds:

“This is an urgent time for the field of attribution science, which is uniquely capable of providing robust, actionable evidence to inform decision-making and drive accountability.”

Meanwhile, many countries’s national weather services are working on “operational attribution” – the regular production of rapid attribution assessments.

Stott tells Carbon Brief that the UK Met Office is operationalising attribution studies. For example, on 2 January 2024, it announced that 2023 was the second-warmest year on record for the UK, with an average temperature of 9.97C.

New methods are also being developed. For example, groups, such as the “eXtreme events: Artificial Intelligence for Detection and Attribution” (XAIDA) team, are researching the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence for attribution studies.

One recent attribution study uses a machine-learning approach to create “dynamically consistent counterfactual versions of historical extreme events under different levels of global mean temperature”. The authors estimate that the south-central North American heatwave of 2023 was 1.18-1.42C warmer because of global warming.

The authors conclude:

“Our results broadly agree with other attribution techniques, suggesting that machine learning can be used to perform rapid, low-cost attribution of extreme events.”

Other scientists are using a method called UNSEEN, which involves running models thousands of times to increase the size of the datasets used to make it easier to derive accurate probabilities from highly variable extremes.

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§ What are the next steps for attribution research?

The experts that Carbon Brief spoke to for this article have high hopes for the future of attribution science. For example, Stott says:

“Attribution science has great potential to improve the resilience of societies to future climate change, can help monitor progress towards the Paris goals of keeping global warming to well below 2C and can motivate progress in driving down emissions towards net-zero by the middle of this century.”

However, despite the progress made over the past two decades, there are still challenges to overcome. One of the key barriers in attribution science is a lack of high-quality observational data in low-income countries.

To carry out an attribution study, researchers need a Iong, high-quality dataset of observations from the area being studied. However, inadequate funding or political instability means that many developing countries do not have sufficient weather station data.

In a 2016 interview with Carbon Brief, Allen said that “right now there is obviously a bias towards our own backyards – north-west Europe, Australia and New Zealand.”

Many WWA studies in global-south countries mention the challenge of finding adequate data and sometimes this affects the results. A WWA study of the 2022 drought in west Africa’s Sahel region was unable to find the signal of climate change in the region’s rainfall pattern – in part, due to widespread uncertainties in the observational data.

Otto, who was an author on the study, explained at the time:

“It could either be because the data is quite poor or because we have found the wrong indices. Or it could be because there really is no climate change signal…We have no way of identifying which of these three options it is.”

Developing better observational datasets is an ongoing challenge. It is highlighted in much of the literature on attribution as an important next step for attribution science – and for climate science more widely. Merner tells Carbon Brief that scientists also need to work on developing “novel approaches for regions without baseline data”.

Meanwhile, many scientists expect the methods used in attribution science to continue evolving. The Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparison Project is currently collecting simulations, which will support improved attribution of climate change in the next set of assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Mitchell says that, over the next decade, he thinks that “we will move away from the more generic attribution methods that have served us well to this point, and start developing and applying more targeted – and even more defensible – methods”.

In particular, he highlights the need for more specific methods for impact attribution – for example, studying the impacts of weather events on health outcomes, biodiversity changes or financial losses.

He continues:

“The interplay of different socioeconomic states and interventions with that of climate change can make these particularly difficult to study – but we are getting there with our more advanced, albeit computationally expensive methods, such as using weather forecast models as the foundation of our attribution statements.”

Stott tells Carbon Brief that incorporating impacts into attribution assessments is a “crucial area for development” in attribution science. He explains that impact attribution is “very relevant to the loss-and-damage agenda and further developments in attribution science are likely to include the ability to attribute the financial costs of storms”. 

Stuart-Smith tells Carbon Brief that, “in the coming years, growing numbers of studies will quantify the economic burden of climate change and its effects on a broader range of health impacts, including from vector and water-borne diseases”.

Leach also tells Carbon Brief that it is “important for attribution to move their focus beyond physical studies and into quantitative impact studies to increase their relevance and utility in policy and the media”.

He adds:

“Utilising weather forecasts for attribution would fit neatly with this aim as those same models are already widely used by emergency managers and built into impact modelling frameworks.”

Similarly, Stott tells Carbon Brief that “forecast attribution shows great potential”. He explains that by “progressing that science” will allow this method to be used to attribute more types of extreme weather with greater confidence.

Leach advocates for greater use of weather forecast models for all types of attribution. He says:

“Weather forecast models have demonstrated repeatedly over the past few years that they are capable of accurately representing even unprecedented weather extremes. Using these validated state-of-the-art models for attribution could bring an increase in confidence in the results.”

Many scientists also tell Carbon Brief about the importance of operationalising attribution. The weather services in many countries already have this in place. Stott tells Carbon Brief that groups in Japan, South Korea, Australia and the US are also “at various stages of developing operational attribution services”.

Meanwhile, Otto tells Carbon Brief that “the most important next step for attribution in my view is to really integrate the assessment of vulnerability and exposure into the attribution studies”. She adds:

“In order for attribution to truly inform adaptation it is essential though to go from attributing hazards, as we do now mainly, to disentangling drivers of disasters.”

Mitchell adds that he thinks attribution statements “are absolutely essential for [countries to make] national adaptation plans”. 

Meanwhile, another study suggests that extreme event attribution studies could be used by engineers, along with climate projections, to assist climate adaptation for civil infrastructure.

Leach tells Carbon Brief that attribution could be useful in the insurance sector for similar reasons. He adds that many insurance sectors use the same forecasts in their catastrophe models that climate scientists use for forecast attribution, meaning that it should be straightforward to add attribution studies into their pipelines.

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§ This week

COP29 kicks off

AGENDA FIGHT: The UN’s COP29 climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan got off to a shaky start on Monday. The host nation attempted to repeat the UAE’s COP28 day-one “win” by pushing through a deal on Article 6.4, which governs international carbon trading, in a move described by one party as a “horrible precedent”. But, instead of adulation, the COP29 presidency landed in a lengthy “agenda fight”, resolved in classic COP fashion with a footnote. This fight reflected the key battlelines at the summit: the new climate finance goal; and how, where – or even whether – to carry forward COP28’s deal on “transitioning away from fossil fuels”. Carbon Brief journalists will host a free webinar to answer questions about COP29 later today. Sign up.

COUNTRY CLIMATE PLANS: Three nations – UAE, Brazil and the UK – have come forward with new UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), ahead of the February 2025 deadline. Climate Home News reported that the UAE’s plan was criticised for failing to include measures to restrain oil and gas production, which is projected to rise by a third by 2035. Meanwhile, the Brazilian climate NGO Climate Observatory said the emissions cut planned by the nation falls far short of its fair share towards limiting global warming to 1.5C. The UK’s emissions aim has broadly been welcomed by climate experts.

‘PAY UP’: With a new climate-finance goal seen as the main COP29 objective, UN secretary general António Guterres told leaders to “pay up, or humanity will pay the price”, Reuters reported. Early disputes over the goal produced a draft text with “pretty much every option…on the table”, showing “polarised views” between countries, explained the Hindustan Times. (For more on the negotiations, see Spotlight below.) Meanwhile, multilateral development banks announced that their climate-finance contributions will reach $120bn annually by 2030, according to Azernews. 

World leaders summit

‘GIFT OF GOD’: The president of Azerbaijan, the country hosting COP29, caused a media firestorm by describing oil and gas a “gift of god” during his address at the opening of the conference’s World Leaders Climate Action summit. BBC News reported that Ilham Aliyev criticised “western fake news” about the country’s emissions and said nations “should not be blamed” for exploiting their fossil fuels. On Friday, senior figures including former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres wrote in a letter that the COP process is “no longer fit for purpose”. 

UNITED MESSAGES: Aliyev’s address at the summit was followed by interventions from 80 heads of state on Tuesday and Wednesday. Carbon Brief was in the room for the summit’s first day and summarised what each leader chose to focus on. Developing countries put on a united front calling for “climate justice” to be at the heart of climate-finance discussions, while European leaders implored all countries to release new plans to keep the 1.5C temperature goal in sight.

LEADERSHIP SCRAMBLE: After Donald Trump’s US election win, debate is swirling over which party might take over as a “leader” at the talks. The UK government told the Observer it intended to step up to “save COP29”. At its first press conference, the European Union said it will lead from the front at the negotiations – despite France’s environment minister deciding to skip the summit following a diplomatic spat with Azerbaijan. At the sidelines, a senior Chinese official told delegates that “China is willing to take a more active role in global climate governance”, according to Carbon Brief’s China Briefing.

§ Around the world

• SHELL COURT WIN: Oil giant Shell has won a “landmark case” in the Dutch courts, reported BBC News, overturning a ruling requiring the company to cut its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. 
• EMISSIONS RISE: A new Global Carbon Budget report has found there is “no sign” of the transition away from burning fossil fuels pledged at COP28, with emissions from coal, oil and gas rising by 0.8% in 2024, the Guardian reported. Carbon Brief has an in-depth write-up of the report. 
• ‘THREE-YEAR STANDSTILL’: Current policies would put the world on track for 2.7C of warming by 2100 – following a “three-year standstill” in significant climate progress, according to a Climate Action Tracker report covered by the New York Times.
• TRUMP MOVES: Donald Trump is expected to nominate former Republican congressman Lee Zeldin as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a federal body responsible for enforcing climate rules, according to the New York Times. The Hill reported that, in a recent interview, Zeldin said that the Trump administration would “roll back regulations that are forcing businesses to struggle”.
• VALENCIA PROTESTS: Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Valencia, Spain last weekend, calling on the local leaders to resign after more than 200 people were killed in recent flooding, according to the Guardian.

§ 12%

The proportion of heads of state speaking at COP29 that were female, based on the official running order.

§ Latest climate research

• Human-induced climate change has driven a 1.49C temperature increase compared to a pre-1700 baseline, according to a new Nature Geoscience study using Antarctic ice-core data.
• Air temperatures inside caves in the European Alps have increased by around 0.2C per decade over the past 20 years, a new Scientific Reports study found.
• A new research paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that the capacity of land to store carbon has weakened during warm extremes over the past 40 years – mainly in tropical regions.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

More than 65,000 delegates have registered to attend COP29 in Baku, potentially making it the second-largest COP on record. This total is more than 15,000 lower than the record-breaking COP in Dubai last year – and marks the first time in seven years that a COP is not larger than its predecessor. According to Carbon Brief analysis, host country Azerbaijan has the largest delegation at the summit, with 2,229 people registered. This is followed by Brazil (1,914), Turkey (1,862), the UAE (1,011) and China (969).

§ Spotlight

§ Finance and fossil-fuel fights at COP29

This week, Carbon Brief outlines what to expect from the two biggest topics being negotiated at COP29.

Climate finance

Nations gathered at COP29 must agree on a global target to channel finance into climate action, known as the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG). 

There are major rifts between parties over virtually every aspect of the NCQG. As a result, negotiations got off to a shaky start. 

Broadly, developing countries want developed countries to provide or “mobilise” at least $1tn a year to them, largely as grants. Developed country parties, such as the US and the EU, want a goal that does not rely entirely on them, including lots of private investment and input from the wealthier developing countries. Parties have diverging views on when the goal should be delivered, but dates broadly range between 2025 and 2035.

At the first opportunity, developing countries unanimously rejected the nine-page text meant as the starting point for negotiations and requested a rewrite.

Ali Mohamed, chair of the African Group of Negotiators, told journalists that the “biggest obstacle” was language that shifted responsibility away from developed countries’ obligation to provide funds to developing countries. 

Having incorporated the views of all countries, the co-chairs facilitating the talks released a new version that had ballooned to 34 pages and was widely viewed as unworkable. There were more delays as parties only allowed the chairs to slightly streamline this text, producing one that was just a page shorter. 

By this point, talks were entering the second half of the week and delegates expressed concerns that so little progress had been made. EU lead negotiator Jacob Werksman told a press briefing that they were “very worried”, lamenting that “more than a year of preparation” had gone into the initial text that had been rejected.

Negotiators are engaging in informal talks to hash out some of the less divisive elements, such as how easy it is for countries to access funds. Next week will see government ministers take over, with the goal of steering them through more controversial territories into a final conclusion.

Fossil fuels

Apart from climate finance, the other key battleground at COP29 is around how – or even whether – to carry forward the outcome of last year’s “global stocktake”, in which all parties agreed to help with “transitioning away from fossil fuels”.

This question was a major part of the “agenda fight” at the start of the summit. Disagreement centred on which part of the agenda would include the “UAE dialogue”, which was created to discuss “implementing the global stocktake outcomes”.

The Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries (LMDCs), including China and India, want this dialogue to focus exclusively on finance, as do the Arab Group and the African Group. Many others want a broader focus, taking in all stocktake outcomes, including fossil-fuel transition.

Supporters, including the EU, US, UK, small island states (AOSIS) and Latin American countries (AILAC), are pushing for text on ambitious climate action in several venues.

Ultimately, fossil-fuel transition could end up in a so-called “cover text” at COP29. This has become a space to include more political language that does not have a “home” elsewhere.

On Thursday evening, the Azerbaijan presidency began talks with parties on where to put text on climate ambition – including fossil-fuel transition – but it has yet to give more details on its plans.

§ Watch, read, listen

TRUMP FAILSAFE: Politico’s Power Play podcast spoke to Ali Zaidi, the White House’s national climate advisor, on whether Biden’s climate policies were built to outlast the incoming Trump administration.

EXXON SAYS STAY: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said Donald Trump “shouldn’t pull” the US from the Paris Agreement.
PARTISAN OVERFLOW: New DeSmog analysis found that industrial agriculture and biotechnology representatives “enjoyed privileged access” to the COP16 biodiversity summit negotiations, brought in on country badges.

§ Coming up

• 11-22 November: UN Climate Change Conference COP29, Baku, Azerbaijan 
• 18-19 November: G20 heads of state summit, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• 18-22 November: International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Council 133rd Session, London

§ Pick of the jobs

• CNN, extreme weather editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Hong Kong
• World Meteorological Organization (WMO)-World Health Organization (WHO) Joint Office, associate programme officer for climate and health | Salary: $50,377. Location: Geneva
• Columbia University Climate School, assistant/associate professor in climate finance | Salary: $200,000-$300,000. Location: New York
• Cooperative Institute for Modelling the Earth System (CIMES), Princeton University, summer research internships in atmospheric, oceanic and earth system science | Salary: $5,600-$6,300 for a 40-hour work week. Location: Princeton, New Jersey
• Wellcome Trust, head of communications for climate and health | Salary: £94,100. Location: London (hybrid, two days remote work)

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.

§ Key developments

Voices from China 

‘TRUE MULTILATERILIAM’: Although not attending COP29 in person, Chinese president Xi Jinping issued a call for the global south to “work together to practise true multilateralism, and to advocate for an equal and orderly multipolar world and universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalisation”, state-run newspaper China Daily reported. 

CLIMATE FINANCE: Ding Xuexiang, Xi’s “special representative” at COP and China’s executive vice-premier, notably used the UN language of climate finance to describe Chinese overseas aid for the first time (see below). Speaking at a “high level segment” on Tuesday, Ding added that the “complete transformation of growth models is the fundamental solution to climate change”. He also called for “strengthening early-warning systems for all and enhancing climate adaptation capacity” – a ”specific requirement” from Xi, according to state news agency Xinhua.

‘ENHANCED’ ACTION: At a methane summit co-hosted by China and the US, and attended by Carbon Brief, climate envoy Liu Zhenmin said that “co-operation on global climate action will continue to be enhanced.” (See below.) Speaking at China’s large and very busy “pavilion”, Liu said climate change is a global challenge and China, in particular, has experienced more severe extreme weather events recently. He touted investments worth $676bn in energy transformation and said China’s export of wind and solar products had helped the world cut emissions by 810m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. 

‘PUSHING FORWARD’: Speaking at a separate China pavilion event, Zhao Yingmin, vice minister of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), said that “addressing climate change is a global consensus” and that China is taking the responsibility of “pushing forward green and low-carbon development”. He also emphasised the role of women and young people in tackling climate change, saying “we need to mobilise all forces”.

‘CRITICAL POINT’: Xia Yingxian, director of the climate department of the MEE, commented at a press conference ahead of COP29 that this year is a “critical point for climate-finance negotiations” and that developed countries must “fulfil their commitment”, according to business news outlet 21st Century Business Herald. Back at the COP29 China pavilion, Carbon Brief heard an official speaking on behalf of Xia again supporting multilateral cooperation and saying China had an “unswerving” commitment to climate action. He added that an energy transition covering “all aspects” of society is needed. The official representing Xia closed his remarks in English, saying: “China is very willing to cooperate…to promote a low-carbon and sustainable future.”

STEPPING UP: Wen Hua, deputy director-general of the Department of Resources Conservation and Environmental Protection of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top planner, told the methane event that “China is willing to take a more active role in global climate governance”.

Agenda fight

TRADE CONCERNS: China, on behalf of the BASIC group (Brazil, China, India and South Africa), “submitted a proposal” ahead of COP29 to include “concerns with climate-change related unilateral restrictive trade measures” in the conference’s agenda, Reuters reported. According to the full text of the request, BASIC argued that “unilateral trade-restrictive measures adopted by developed country parties under the guise of climate objectives [have] disproportionate adverse effects on developing country parties”. The text added that parties must “send a clear and strong signal of commitment to multilateralism and global cooperation”.

HORSE-TRADING: The request was largely interpreted as pushback to the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which China has “strongly criticised” in the past. Climate Home News noted that “BASIC countries have long opposed” the CBAM and “made a similar agenda proposal” for COP28. The BASIC request – ultimately shunted into unofficial “presidential consultations” – was at the heart of an “agenda fight” that dominated the first day in Baku. The fight also encompassed a broader, ongoing argument over how to take forward the COP28 pledge on “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, with the LMDC group, including China, opposing this being part of the so-called UAE dialogue.

Climate finance 

‘HUGE DIVISIONS’: China entered the “finance COP” under pressure to play an upgraded role in climate finance, as “huge divisions” emerged over how much money should be paid into the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) and by whom, the Financial Times reported. Beijing has “firmly rejected” these calls, according to Agence France-Presse, which quoted a Chinese official “warning on Sunday during a closed-door session that the talks should not aim to ‘renegotiate’ existing agreements”. The state-run broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN) quoted envoy Liu calling on “developed countries to take the lead in providing financial assistance to developing nations”. 

$1.3 TRILLION: Early on in negotiations, the G77+China negotiating bloc also rejected the proposed text for a NCQG framework, the New Indian Express reported, adding that they called for $1.3tn per year to be provided by developed countries and for “a fresh, equitable text…prioritis[ing] the needs of developing countries and uphold[ing] the principles of equity and ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’”.

OLIVE BRANCH: In his COP29 speech, vice premier Ding offered an olive branch by telling delegates that China has already “provided and mobilised project funds of more than 177bn yuan ($24.5bn) for developing countries’ climate response”. This is the first time China has used the language of climate finance, Kate Logan, director at the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), wrote on Twitter. She added that this “plac[ed China’s contributions] on the same order – if not higher than – many developed countries’ efforts” and gave China “teeth in pushing developed countries to do more”. 

SOLUTION PROVIDER: Speaking to Carbon Brief in May, Li Shuo, director at ASPI’s China climate hub, said that one possible solution, in his view, was to leverage China’s position as “the biggest solution provider” for low-carbon technologies to encourage it to “provide finance or facilitate investment” in developing countries’ energy transitions, allowing China to find a palatable role for itself in an outer layer of a potential “onion” structure for the NCQG.

US-China climate cooperation 

LOOMING SHADOW: China and the US entered COP29 after a series of meetings between climate envoys John Podesta and Liu Zhenmin, but without an equivalent to last year’s Sunnylands statement – a document that “signalled Biden and Xi’s shared intent to address the climate crisis”, according to thinktank the Lowy Institute. Liu told reporters that China is “concerned” about US climate policy under a second Trump administration, although he emphasised that “international multilateral climate cooperation should continue”. Meanwhile, Podesta said in a press conference attended by Carbon Brief that China has an “obligation…to come forward with a 1.5C-aligned, all-greenhouse-gas, economy-wide [NDC climate pledge]”, adding that, on the climate-finance question, expanding the donor base is “long warranted” and that “large emitters must be accountable”. (Ding confirmed in his COP29 address that China’s climate pledge would be economy-wide and cover all greenhouse gases.) However, the New York Times noted that it may be difficult at COP29 to replicate the “key roles” US negotiators have played in “persuading countries like China…to commit to tougher emissions targets”.

CHINA LEADS: As the world awaits a US retreat from the global climate stage, China “appears more committed to the [Paris] agreement than ever”, the Wall Street Journal reported, quoting former climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing saying: “Everyone looks to China now…I think with the US out, China will step up, but in a very different way.” In a press conference watched by Carbon Brief, Yuan Ying, chief China representative at Greenpeace, echoed this message, saying that the US election results should not cause China to “lower their ambition level” and that it should instead fill the “climate leadership vacuum”. ASPI’s Li, speaking at a Carbon Brief event ahead of COP29, said that it is crucial for China to note that its actions in negotiations will send a “strong signal” to the rest of the world on the “future of global climate governance”, adding that “China has invested a lot” in its image as a climate leader.

BRIGHT SPOT: Methane remains one area where US-China cooperation has traction.  While China did not make any new announcements at the COP29 summit on methane and non-CO2 greenhouse gases, attended by Carbon Brief, Liu did use the platform to state that “China-US co-operation on enhancing climate action had been effective over the past year”, adding that he “hope[d]” that US-China climate cooperation “will continue to be enhanced”. Ryna Cui, associate research professor and acting director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, told Carbon Brief that both countries underscored their “strong interest to continue [cooperation], especially on issues like methane” at the summit , adding that “strong” channels at the subnational and non-government levels “will become increasingly critical to make engagement [in methane and other areas] more robust” in the years ahead. 

Emphasising energy transition

TRANSITION PATHWAYS: “Energy transition” has been emphasised by multiple high-level Chinese officials at this year’s COP. At the China pavilion, the Energy Research Institute of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research (ERI), a research thinktank under the supervision of the NDRC, launched its 2024 China energy transition report – a key document illustrating China’s potential energy transition pathways. Lyu Wenbin, head of the institute, told Carbon Brief: “The Chinese government has proposed the ‘dual-carbon’ goal and energy transition is an important part of it. With the goal being clearly set, what we can do for delivering it is to choose the best pathway.” Bai Quan, director of the energy study centre, told Carbon Brief that the biggest difference between the 2023 and 2024 report was the “emphasis on global cooperation”. He said: “Our report has absorbed [energy transition] experiences from different places…We would love to discuss more new ideas with everyone else in the world.”

COAL CRITICISM: The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) executive director Fatih Birol said at the launch of the report that there are few countries that are prepared for the new era of electricity and that China is the “leading one”. However, he cautioned that China “needs to pay attention to its coal-fired power plants sooner than later”, adding that “renewable energy with batteries will be a better solution for China’s energy demands than coal”.

§ Captured

China sent a delegation of 969 people to COP29, according to new analysis by Carbon Brief, as the country seeks to boost its influence in climate diplomacy. The numbers are lower than they were for COP28, when the China delegation included 1,296 people. Nevertheless, the size of the official “party” delegation, at 190, is double the average party delegation China sent from COP20 to COP27. A further 779 members of the Chinese delegation went to Baku as “overflow” participants.

§ Watch, read, listen

CHINESE LENDING: A new report by ODI explored recent “diversification of Chinese lending” to infrastructure projects, including energy infrastructure, in African countries.   

NCQG: A new article by the Asia Society Policy Institute assessed how China could be incentivised to contribute more to the new COP29 finance goal.

EXPERT VIEWS: Greenovation Hub published a readout from a closed-door session, in which they hosted a number of China’s climate experts to “discuss the mobilisation of climate finance and the strengthening of climate goal setting” ahead of COP29.

NEW ERA: The European Council on Foreign Relations described how the EU could use its “diplomatic and regulatory toolbox” to encourage China to set ambitious climate targets in the absence of “crucial” US climate diplomacy.

§ $24.5 billion 

The amount of money (alternatively, 177bn yuan) China has “provided and mobilised” for “other developing countries” to address climate change since 2016, according to Chinese executive vice-premier and politburo standing committee member Ding Xuexiang in his COP29 address, using UN-speak for climate finance “provided and mobilised” for the first time. It is not clear how this figure, which is lower than other recent estimates of China’s climate finance provision, was calculated.

§ New science 

The 2024 China report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: launching a new low-carbon, healthy journey
The Lancet Public Health 

A new report found that “China is faced with an increase in health threats from hot and dry weather conditions, such as heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires”, with the country seeing an average of 16 heatwave exposure days per person in 2023, which “resulted in a 1.9 times surge in heatwave-related deaths”. This is the Lancet’s fifth annual China report. Zhang Shihui, co-first author of the research, told Carbon Brief at COP29 that they noticed China’s action on talking climate-related health problems has become more systematic, but there is still an “urgent need to increase funding, actively promote synergistic governance for pollution reduction and carbon emission abatement, strengthen interdepartmental collaboration, and enhance refined health meteorological services”. 

Inequality in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions intensity has risen in rural China from 1993 to 2020
Nature Food

A new study found that the greenhouse gas emissions intensity (GEI) – defined as GHG emissions per unit planting size – in crop production in rural China is falling, but that the inequality in GEI is increasing. The authors used survey data taken from more than 430,000 farming households over 1993-2020 to explore the driving forces of GEI in crop production. They found that overall GEI increased until 2015 and then began dropping, but that inequality in GEI continued to increase 13%.

Fewer than 15% of coal power plant workers in China can easily shift to green jobs by 2060
One Earth

Fewer than 15% of coal power plant workers in China will be able to easily access “green jobs” by 2060, according to new research. The study found that difficulties stand in the way of this transition, such as workers travelling long distances to access “green” job opportunities. The transition rate could be even lower in provinces dominated by coal power, the research found, with just 2% of workers making the move in Shandong province, for example.

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

§ Both global fossil and total CO2 emissions at record levels

The 2024 Global Carbon Budget finds that CO2 emissions from fossil use are projected to rise 0.8% in 2024, reaching a record 37.4GtCO2 – 0.4GtCO2 higher than the previous record, set last year.

Total CO2 emissions, which include land-use change, are also expected to reach record highs at 41.6GtCO2, or 2.0% above the previous record set in 2023. 

This large increase was driven both by consistent growth in fossil-fuel emissions and abnormally high land-use emissions in 2024 – due in part to wildfires in South America exacerbated by a strong El Niño event and high temperatures.

Each year the Global Carbon Budget is updated to include the latest data as well as improvements to modelling sources and sinks, resulting in some year-to-year revisions to the historical record.

The figure below shows the 2024 global CO2 emissions update (dark blue solid line) alongside 2023 (grey dotted) 2022 (yellow dotted), 2021 (bright blue dotted) and 2020 (red dotted). The shaded area indicates the uncertainty around the new 2024 budget. 

The 2024 figures are generally quite similar to those in the 2023 Global Carbon Budget, though they show somewhat higher emissions prior to 1980 and slightly lower emissions over the past seven years. Revisions to the data mean that 2023 is no longer a hair below 2019 levels, as was reported by Carbon Brief last year, but rather exceeds them by nearly 0.5GtCO2.

Total global CO2 emissions have notably plateaued in the past decade (2015-24), growing at only 0.2% per year compared to the 1.9% rate of growth over the previous decade (2005-214) and the longer-term average growth rate of 1.7% between 1959 and 2014. 

This apparent flattening is due to declining land-use emissions compensating for continued increases in fossil CO2 emissions. Fossil emissions grew around 0.2GtCO2 per year over the past decade, while land-use emissions decreased by a comparable amount.

However, despite the emissions plateau, there is still no sign of the rapid and deep decrease in CO2 emissions needed to reach net-zero and stabilise global temperatures in-line with Paris Agreement goals.

If global emissions remain at current levels, the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C (with a 50% chance) will be exhausted in the next six years. Carbon budgets to limit warming to 1.7C and 2C would similarly be used up in 15 and 27 years, respectively.

Global fossil CO2 emissions also grew more slowly in the past decade (0.7% per year) compared to the previous decade (2.1%). This was driven by the continued decarbonisation of energy systems – including a shift from burning coal to gas and replacing fossil fuels with renewables – as well as slightly weaker global economic growth during the past decade. 

The figure below breaks down global emissions (dark blue line) in the 2024 budget into fossil (mid blue) and land-use (light blue) components. Fossil CO2 emissions represent the bulk of total global emissions in recent years, accounting for approximately 90% of emissions in 2024 (compared to 10% for land use). This represents a large change from the first half of the 20th century, when land-use emissions were approximately the same as fossil emissions.

Global fossil emissions include CO2 emitted from burning coal, oil and gas, as well as the production of cement. However, the Global Carbon Budget also subtracts the cement carbonation sink – CO2 slowly absorbed by cement once it is exposed to the air – from fossil emissions in each year to determine total fossil emissions.

Global emissions can also be expressed on a per-capita basis, as shown in the figure below. While it is ultimately total global emissions that matter for the Earth’s climate – and a global per-capita figure glosses over a lot of variation among and within countries it is noteworthy that global per-capita emissions peaked in 2012 and have been slightly declining in the years since.

§ Land-use emissions trending downward

Global land-use emissions stem from deforestation, degradation, loss of peatlands and harvesting trees for wood. They averaged 4GtCO2 over the past decade (2015-24) and the Global Carbon Budget provides an initial projection for 2024 of 4.2GtCO2.

This represents a 0.5GtCO2 increase over land-use emissions in 2023. This was primarily driven by wildfire emissions linked to deforestation and forest degradation in South America. Drought conditions associated with this year’s El Niño event contributed to the severity of the fires.

Overall, land-use emissions have decreased by around 28% since their peak in the late-1990s, with a particularly large drop in the past decade. 

This decline is statistically significant and is due both to decreasing deforestation and increasing levels of reforestation and afforestation globally (though rates of reforestation and afforestation have largely stagnated over the past decade).

This year’s Global Carbon Budget features a number of important improvements to land-use change emissions estimates, including updated estimates of cropland and pasture area in major countries. 

Four countries – Brazil, Indonesia, China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – collectively contribute approximately 60% of the global land-use emissions. 

The figure below shows changes in emissions over time in these countries, as well as land-use emissions in the rest of the world (grey). Note that Chinese land-use emissions are negative in recent years.

§ Fossil CO2 in major emitting countries

Global emissions of fossil CO2 – including coal, oil, gas and cement – increased by around 0.8% in 2024, relative to 2023, with an uncertainty range of -0.3% to 1.9%. This represents a new record high and is 2.6% above the 2019 pre-Covid levels.

The figure below shows global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, divided into emissions from major emitting countries including China (dark blue shading), India (mid blue), the US (light blue), EU (pale blue) and the remainder of the world (grey).

For this year, China represents 32% of global CO2 emissions. Their emissions in 2024 are projected to increase by a relatively small 0.2% (with an uncertainty range of -1.6% to +2%), driven by a small rise in emissions from coal (0.3%) and a large rise in natural gas emissions (8%). Emissions from oil are expected to decrease modestly (-0.8%), while emissions from cement are expected to fall sharply (-8.1%). 

The Global Carbon Budget report suggests that Chinese oil emissions have probably already peaked, reflecting the acceleration of vehicle electrification. 

India represents 8% of global emissions. In 2024, Indian emissions are projected to increase by 4.6% (with a range  from 3.0% to 6.1%), with a 4.5% increase in emissions from coal, a 3.6% increase in emissions from oil, a 11.8% increase in emissions from natural gas and a 4% increase in emissions from cement. 

While renewable energy is expanding quickly in India, it remains far slower than the rate of power demand growth as the economy rapidly expands.

The US represents 13% of global emissions this year – though is responsible for a much larger portion of historical emissions and associated atmospheric accumulation of CO2. 

US emissions are projected to decrease by 0.6% in 2024 (ranging from -2.9% to +1.7%). This is being driven by a modest decrease in coal emissions (falling 3.5%). Oil emissions are expected to decline by a slight 0.7%, reflecting the rise of electric vehicles, while emissions from gas are expected to increase by 1%. 

The EU represents 7% of global emissions. EU emissions are expected to decrease by 3.8% in 2024, driven by a 15.8% decline in coal emissions, a 1.3% decline in natural gas emissions, and a 3.5% decline in cement emissions. EU oil emissions are expected to increase slightly, by 0.2%. 

The EU’s overall emissions decline is being driven by a combination of rapid clean energy adoption as well as relatively weak economic growth and high energy prices.

International aviation and shipping (included in the “rest of world” in the figure above) are responsible for 3% of global emissions. They are projected to increase by

7.8% in 2024, but remain below their 2019 pre-pandemic level by 3.5%.

The rest of the world (excluding aviation) represents 38% of global emissions. Emissions are expected to grow by 1.1% in 2024 (ranging from -1.0% to +3.3%), with increases in emissions from coal (0.5%), oil (0.5%), natural gas (2.2%) and cement (2%).

Overall, emissions are projected to decrease in the EU and US in 2024, increase slightly in China, and increase significantly in India and the rest of the world. 

The total emissions for each year between 2021 and 2024, as well as the countries and regions that were responsible for the changes in absolute emissions, are shown in the figure below. 

Annual emissions for 2021, 2022, 2023 and estimates for 2024 are shown by the navy blue bars. The smaller bars show the change in emissions between each set of years, broken down by country or region – the US (dark blue), EU (mid blue), China (light blue), India (pale blue) and the rest of the world (grey). Negative values show reductions in emissions, while positive values reflect emission increases.

The Global Carbon Project notes that emissions have declined over the past decade (2014-23) in 22 nations – up from 18 countries during the decade prior to that (2004-13). This decrease comes despite continued domestic economic growth and represents a long-term decoupling of CO2 emissions and the economy.

CO2 emissions decreased in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries by 1.4% per year over the past decade, compared to a decrease of 0.9% per year in the decade prior. Non-OECD countries saw their emissions grow more slowly (1.8%) over the last decade than the prior one (4.9%).

§ Growth in emissions from coal, oil, and gas

Global fossil-fuel emissions primarily result from the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas. Coal is responsible for more emissions than any other fossil fuel, representing approximately 41% of global fossil CO2 emissions in 2024. Oil is the second largest contributor at 33% of fossil CO2, while gas rounds out the pack at 22%.

These percentages reflect both the amount of each fossil fuel consumed globally, but also differences in CO2 intensities. Coal results in the most CO2 emitted per unit of heat or energy produced, followed by oil and natural gas.

The figure below shows global CO2 emissions from different fuels over time, covering coal (dark blue shading), oil (mid blue) and gas (light blue), as well as cement production (pale blue) and other sources (grey). 

While coal emissions increased rapidly in the mid-2000s, it has largely plateaued since 2013. However, coal use increased significantly in 2021 and then slightly in the subsequent three years.

Global emissions from coal increased by 0.2% in 2024 compared to 2023, while oil emissions increased 0.9% and gas emissions increased by 2.4%. Emissions from cement and other sources fell by 3%. 

Despite setting a new record this year, global coal use is only 3% above 2013 levels – a full 12 years ago. By contrast, during the 2000s, global coal use grew at a rate of around 4% every single year.

The total emissions for each year between 2021 and 2024 (navy blue bars), as well as the absolute change in emissions for each fuel between years, are shown in the figure below.

Even though they have been increasing over the past four years, global CO2 emissions from oil remain very slightly (0.8%) below the pre-pandemic highs of 2019. 

§ The global carbon budget

Every year, the Global Carbon Project provides an estimate of the overall “global carbon budget”. This is based on estimates of the release of CO2 through human activity and its uptake by the oceans and land, with the remainder adding to atmospheric concentrations of the gas.

(This differs from the commonly used term “remaining carbon budget”, which refers to the amount of CO2 that can be released while keeping warming below global limits of 1.5 or 2C.)

The most recent budget, including estimated values for 2024, is shown in the figure below. Values above zero represent sources of CO2 – from fossil fuels and industry (dark blue shading) and land use (mid blue) – while values below zero represent “carbon sinks” that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Any CO2 emissions that are not absorbed by the oceans (light grey) or land vegetation (mid grey) accumulate in the atmosphere (dark grey).

Over the past decade (2015-24), the world’s oceans have taken up approximately 26.5% of total human emissions, or around 10.6GtCO2 per year. The ocean CO2 sink has been relatively flat since 2016 after growing rapidly over the prior decades, reflecting the plateauing of global emissions during that period. 

The land sink takes up around 29% of global emissions, or 11.5GtCO2 per year on average. While the land sink was quite weak in 2023 – leading some to speculate that it may be on a path toward collapse – it appears to have largely recovered back to close to its average level over the past decade in 2024 as El Niño conditions have faded. 

Global CO2 emissions from fires were quite high in 2024, around 7GtCO2 over the first 10 months of the year and similar to the above average values in 2023. 

This was driven by large emissions in North and South America, particularly in Canada and Brazil. (It is not possible to make a direct comparison between reported fire CO2 emissions and other components of the global carbon budget as they already show up in both parts of the land sink and land-use emissions.)

Overall, the impact of the ongoing emissions from human activity is that atmospheric CO2 continues to increase. 

The growth rate of atmospheric CO2 in 2024 is expected to be around 2.76ppm, which is above average compared to the rate of 2.46% over the past decade (2014-23). 

The 2024 rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration was the fifth largest over the 1959-2024 period, closely following 2023, 2015, 2016 and 1998 – most of which were strong El Niño years.

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are set to reach an annual average of 422.5ppm in 2024, representing an increase of 52% above pre-industrial levels of 280ppm.

§ 1. There is no agreed definition of what counts as ‘climate finance’

There is no universal agreement on what should, or should not, count towards the international “climate finance” provided by developed countries to developing countries.

Unofficial definitions, including those of the UN Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), broadly agree that climate finance should support activities that cut emissions or help adapt to climate change.

As for the types of finance that should count, nations decided that the $100bn target would cover “a wide variety of sources”, including public money, support via multilateral development banks (MDBs) and private investment spurred by public spending.

However, the kinds of activities and finance streams falling into these broad categories are open to interpretation. In practice, governments of developed countries use their own methodologies and set their own rules when reporting climate finance. 

Developed countries also pledged to provide climate finance that is “new and additional” – a term often taken to mean extra funding on top of other aid programmes. However, this framing is contested and, in practice, much of the reported climate finance comes from existing development budgets. 

Prof Romain Weikmans, an international climate-finance researcher at the Free University of Brussels, tells Carbon Brief that developed countries have “diverging understandings on what should count as climate finance and on how to count it”. He adds that reporting requirements negotiated at the UN “allow countries to remain vague”.

Many expert analyses have concluded that self-reporting by governments, facing political pressure to act on climate change, contributes to an “overestimation” of total climate finance. 

While it was widely reported that, based on OECD data, developed countries met the $100bn target two years late in 2022, Weikmans says the lack of a universal definition “makes it impossible to assess whether the $100bn has been met or not”. 

The chart below shows how different assumptions about “climate finance” by key financial organisations lead to divergent estimates of how much has been provided.

Igor Shishlov, head of climate finance at Perspectives Climate Group, tells Carbon Brief that the lack of clarity contributes to an “erosion of trust” in climate negotiations between developed and developing countries.

These tensions have existed since the start of UN climate negotiations in the 1990s. An attempt by COP presidencies in 2015 to “reassure” nations about progress towards the $100bn goal with a special OECD report ended up sparking more disputes. 

(A response at the time from the Indian Ministry of Finance – reflected in the chart above – estimated that climate finance was 26 times smaller than the OECD estimate. This was based on money that had been paid out, rather than pledged, from climate funds deemed “new and additional”.)

Efforts since then to agree on a definition have failed. Joe Thwaites, a senior advocate on international climate finance at NRDC, tells Carbon Brief that both developed and developing countries contribute to this deadlock:

“Developed countries oppose a definition that would restrict climate finance to certain financial instruments, while petrostates oppose a definition that would exclude counting funding for fossil-fuel projects as climate finance.”

As countries negotiate the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for climate finance at COP29, observers say it is unlikely that nations will make significant progress on a comprehensive definition. 

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§ 2. Climate-finance accounting is not consistent or transparent

The systems for climate-finance accounting have been described as full of “inconsistencies” and “discrepancies”, as well as “prone to huge overestimations”.

Joseph Kraus, senior policy director at the ONE Campaign, which has attempted its own assessment of climate finance based on available data, tells Carbon Brief:

“Climate finance accounting is like the wild west: Every climate finance provider makes its own rules about what to count. Predictably, that makes it virtually impossible to get accurate numbers.”

Governments report their climate-finance contributions to three major international bodies: the OECD; the UNFCCC; and, in the case of EU member states, the European Commission.

Most climate finance is drawn from developed countries’ aid budgets and they register their bilateral contributions in the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS). Officials then mark projects as being related to climate mitigation or adaptation.

This “Rio marker system” was implemented in 1998 to assess whether aid projects align with the three “Rio Conventions” on climate change, biodiversity and desertification.

The tags were never meant to define the amount of “climate finance” counted under the UN system. They have effectively filled the gap left by the lack of official guidance.

Most developed countries use the data submitted to the OECD CRS to guide what they report as “official” climate finance in reports to the UNFCCC. Only a handful, including the UK and the US, assess projects on a more case-by-case basis.

Governments use the Rio Markers to calculate climate finance in different ways. Most say they count 100% of the projects where climate has been marked as a “principal” objective towards their UNFCCC totals.

Projects where climate is deemed “significant”, implying a partial focus on climate, vary a lot more. Countries state that they report between 30% and 50% of these projects as climate finance. 

Analysts have warned that the blanket application of fixed percentages is arbitrary and can lead to figures being inflated. They also note that, in practice, UNFCCC and OECD figures are difficult to compare and do not always match up in the ways countries report them.

The figures for bilateral climate finance that developed countries report to the UNFCCC are used as the basis for the OECD’s annual reports of progress towards the $100bn goal. They are combined with the OECD’s figures for MDBs, multilateral funds and the private sector.

(These are generally cited as the definitive figures for $100bn tracking, although they are contested. The OECD does not provide a breakdown of contributors to the target and its reports are released two years in arrears, making real-time scrutiny difficult.)

While the OECD screens projects reported in its system, it has no power to amend those that have been marked “incorrectly”. Analysis by Development Initiatives of climate-related aid projects found countries, such as France, Japan and Australia, frequently tagged projects that “deviated” from OECD guidance – those that include fossil fuels, for example. 

Independent audits in Denmark, the Netherlands and the EU have all found significant evidence of “climate” projects being mislabelled, or their relevance overstated. 

Reflecting on the wider state of climate-finance accounting, Thwaites tells Carbon Brief:

“I think understanding of climate finance is getting better, both through improvements in official reporting and through greater scrutiny from journalists and civil society. But as those third-party audits have shown, there is much room for improvement.”

All of this is further complicated by the lack of transparency from governments, when reporting their official climate-finance contributions to the UNFCCC. The lack of detail in submissions makes it difficult to assess the relevance of each project for tackling climate change. 

For example, NGO FragDenStaat has documented its difficulties evaluating the German government’s claim that its climate finance reached a “record level” in 2022.

Poor transparency makes it difficult for those in developing countries as well. Turkish banks have received millions of dollars in climate finance from Germany and France, but there is little information provided either by the banks or the donors on how it is used.

“Citizens have no access to any information about these public funds,” Özgür Gürbüz, campaign director of the Turkish NGO Ekosfer, tells Carbon Brief.

Sehr Raheja, a programme officer specialising in climate finance at the Centre for Science and Environment in India, tells Carbon Brief:

“Implications…include the inability to clearly hold actors accountable, or even first understand the complete reality of the situation of climate finance for developing countries.”

Such scrutiny is important. The UK has traditionally been viewed as one of the more rigorous climate-finance reporters, but the government loosened its accounting system in 2023 to bring it more in line with those of less strict donors. 

In doing so, an independent audit found that the UK added an extra £1.7bn ($2.2bn) to its projected climate finance spending without contributing any new funds, as the chart below shows. 

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§ 3. Some climate finance is not helping to tackle climate change

Climate-finance databases contain details of tens of thousands of projects operating in developing countries around the world.

Most of these projects have clear links to tackling climate change. They might, for example, support solar power projects in Kenya, the construction of a train line in India, or improving the climate resilience of drought-prone farms in Guatemala.

However, among them are aid projects that may bring benefits to the target countries, but have little or no relevance for tackling climate change. Some could even undermine such efforts, by supporting fossil fuels and carbon-intensive sectors.

Stacy-ann Robinson, a climate-adaptation finance researcher at Emory University in the US state of Georgia, tells Carbon Brief that some climate finance “has been going to questionable places to support objectives that are clearly not related to…reducing vulnerability or increasing resilience”.

Some assessments indicate that “inaccurately” categorised climate projects are relatively common among the largest donors, notably Japan and France. NGOs have also identified many “troubling and high-emitting projects” reported as climate finance by MDBs.

Over the years, researchers and journalists have unearthed climate finance being used to, for example, buy uniforms for park rangers, support anti-terrorism programmes and fund luxury hotels. 

However, the overall lack of transparency makes it difficult to ascertain exactly how much money from these “questionable” projects is feeding into the official totals reported to the OECD. 

An investigation by Reuters in 2023 uncovered $3bn of finance reported to the UNFCCC that had gone towards “programmes that do little or nothing to ease the effects of climate change”. However, Reuters noted that its review only covered around 10% of countries’ submissions.

Carbon Brief has identified at least $6.5bn of finance attributed to projects involving coal, oil and gas that has been tagged as climate-related in the OECD’s climate-related aid database, over the decade from 2012-2021. If countries have followed their own guidelines for reporting climate finance, much of this money will have been reported to the UNFCCC.

Japan is frequently cited for labelling fossil-fuel finance as climate finance, including billions of dollars for coal- and gas-fired power plants in places such as Bangladesh and Indonesia.

However, Carbon Brief’s assessment of the data reveals that some European countries have also been reporting smaller amounts of fossil fuel-related “climate finance”. 

For example, Sweden counted around €5m for a gas-fired power plant in Mozambique between 2012 and 2015, while Germany supported a gas power plant in the Ivory Coast in 2022. In both cases, the governments have confirmed to Carbon Brief that projects marked in the OECD registry were also reported to the UNFCCC.

Defenders of fossil-fuel finance argue that developing countries need investment in cleaner or more efficient fossil-fuel infrastructure – and that this does, in fact, reduce emissions. Others argue that these funds simply should not be labelled as climate-related.

Another example of questionable climate finance comes from the French development finance institution Proparco, which provided a €20m loan to Cabo Verde Airports in 2023, a subsidiary of French construction company Vinci Group. 

This project was too recent to have been officially reported to the UNFCCC. However, Proparco has reported that 20% of its financing for the project would lead to “climate co-benefits”, such as “renewable energy investments, the installation of LED lighting and the replacement of air-conditioning systems”.

At the same time, Vinci Group says its other goal is to help Cabo Verde boost tourism through increased traffic at its airports. The company has celebrated “record passenger numbers” at its Cabo Verde airports, where traffic increased by 17% year-on-year in August thanks to rising passenger flows from western Europe.

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§ 4. Reliance on loans ‘overstates’ climate finance flows

Most climate finance is delivered as loans to developing countries and their institutions. This is one of the most contentious issues in international climate-finance reporting.

More than half of the bilateral finance committed by wealthy countries – and around three-quarters of the investments by MDBs – comes in the form of loans, as shown by the red bars in the figure below.

In fact, the nations that consistently rank among the largest climate-finance providers – Japan, France and the US – all provide the majority of their climate finance as loans.

Loans have to be paid back, leading to climate finance returning to contributor countries as profits, through repayments plus interest. This has led to accusations by civil society groups that developed countries “overstate” their climate finance by leaning heavily on loans.

Public climate-finance institutions generally offer loans at lower-than-market “concessional” rates, or else with longer repayment periods. 

However, Carbon Brief analysis shows that at least $18bn of official climate finance reported by developed countries between 2015 and 2020 – roughly 10% of the total – was “non-concessional”, as the chart below shows. (While less desirable than loans officially described as “concessional”, these public institution loans are still generally offered at better-than-market rates.)

The reliance on loans is especially controversial amid the debt crisis facing many developing countries. 

The world’s least-developed countries and small-island developing states collectively spent twice as much repaying debts in 2022 as they received in climate finance, according to analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

There has been considerable pressure from civil society, researchers, developing countries and even UN climate chief Simon Stiell to increase the “concessionality” of climate finance.

NGOs, such as Oxfam, argue that climate-related loans should be reported as “grant equivalents”, rather than at face value. This is a measure of how much the developed-country government is subsidising the loan.

Since 2018, development aid reported in the OECD’s database has been expressed in grant equivalents in order to better communicate the “financial effort” being made by donors. 

However, when the OECD reports progress towards the $100bn climate-finance goal, drawing from developed countries’ reports to the UNFCCC, it still uses face-value figures for loans. This is one of the key reasons that developing countries have disputed these figures.

Oxfam releases an annual report that drastically downgrades the OECD figures, primarily by using grant equivalent values. Rather than exceeding the $100bn goal in 2022, the NGO argues that developed countries’ true financial effort only amounted to around $28-35bn that year.

From 2024, countries will be able to start reporting loans in grant-equivalent amounts to the UNFCCC in the newly introduced “biennial transparency reports” (BTRs) that all nations must file under the Paris Agreement. However, they are not required to do so, meaning it is unlikely that an “official” total for grant-equivalent loans will be available.

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§ 5. Countries are reporting money that may never get spent

Climate finance only has an impact when it is provided – or “disbursed” – to people and institutions who can use the money.

Yet some countries, including France, Germany and Denmark, choose not to report the amount of climate finance they have actually provided to developing countries. 

Instead, they record the amount they have “committed”, or else a mix of committed and provided sums. These numbers feed into the totals reported by national governments and they count towards the $100bn target, even if the money has not left the donor country.

The OECD defines a commitment as a “firm written obligation by a government or official agency”. Over time, the amount of money provided should match the amount committed.

But between a nation committing money and handing it out, all sorts of things can change, as Mattias Söderberg, global climate lead at the NGO DanChurchAid, tells Carbon Brief:

“In some situations, projects are interrupted. Changes in the context or in the projects or within partners, for example, when there was a coup in Mali, means that committed funds may not be disbursed as planned.”

Climate projects could also collapse because a new government in the donor country decides to cancel the project for political or financial reasons. Other issues, such as shifting exchange rates, can also lead to divergences between committed and disbursed funds.

The reliance on commitments to meet climate-finance targets has drawn criticism. In its 2015 critique of progress towards the $100bn target, the Indian government said it needed “actual disbursements” rather than “promises, pledges or multi-year commitments about promised sums in the future”.

An analysis by ONE Campaign of climate-related aid reported to the OECD found that, of $616bn committed since 2013, data was missing for $69bn of disbursements and another $228bn had not yet been disbursed. (This data is not a direct reflection of “climate finance” under the UN, but it is a rough proxy.)

Some lag between commitments and payments is to be expected. Countries tend to commit to big climate-finance projects and then gradually pay out the money over time. 

However, civil society groups have highlighted “significant differences” between committed and provided sums. 

In recent years, EU member states have had to start reporting both commitments and disbursements. The chart below shows the sizable gap between the money Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy pledge and the amount they provide. 

(It is worth noting that there is significant variability. Sweden sometimes provides more finance than it commits, whereas, in two years, France did not report disbursements at all.)

Identifying climate-finance projects that have completely failed to pay out is difficult. Governments are not obliged to report to the UNFCCC when they have provided finance and neither do they have to update the record to reflect any cancellations or changes.

Reuters identified three French climate projects between 2016-2018 – collectively worth half a billion dollars – that had been cancelled. This equates to 4% of France’s climate finance over this period.

“Commitments look better, so more effort is put into reporting them than into tracking actual disbursements,” Kraus from ONE Campaign tells Carbon Brief.

Civil society groups argue that all governments should start reporting disbursements to reduce the risk of “over-reporting”.

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§ 6. Climate finance is used to boost donors’ economic interests

Developed nations provide climate finance in a variety of different ways. 

In projects that involve building infrastructure, such as windfarms and train lines, companies must be enlisted to work on the engineering and construction. Often, donor governments will work with firms based in their own countries to carry out climate projects. 

The French Development Agency (AFD) has reported that the majority of its aid is entrusted to projects involving at least one French “economic actor”, resulting in significant economic benefits for the country. 

Meanwhile, one-third of Japanese climate loans are given with the condition that Japanese companies are hired to work on the project, according to Reuters analysis of OECD data.

Stacy-ann Robinson of Emory University notes that this is not a “black-and-white” issue, as sometimes a company from the donor nation will be best placed to carry out the project. However, she notes that it has implications for capacity building in developing countries.

France has committed billions of dollars towards rail infrastructure in developing countries.  Given France’s global leadership in the sector, a significant share of these projects have been implemented by French companies.

Project-level data about which companies are awarded contracts is not reported to the UNFCCC. However, one climate-finance project identified by Carbon Brief involves €230m worth of loans provided by AFD for an express regional train in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. This was co-funded with an extra €1bn from development banks.

While the project has clear benefits for the decarbonisation of transport in Dakar, it also helped several French companies expand their activities in the region. 

These include Eiffage, which built the infrastructure; Systra, which provided engineering consultancy services; Thales and Engie, which together won a €225m project to design and build the electricity infrastructure for the train; and Alstom, which supplied trains.

Reflecting on this issue, Robinson tells Carbon Brief:

“Perhaps we need regulations around the conditionalities associated with [climate] finance that would reduce the possibility of only French companies, for example, being able to work on these climate-finance projects.”

Another way climate finance might benefit donor nations is through projects that involve hiring consultants and other experts based domestically. One paper notes how such projects can result in money “flowing back to developed countries”.

Previous Carbon Brief analysis found that one-tenth of the climate funds disbursed by the UK between 2010 and 2023 had gone to private consultancies, largely based in the UK.

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe. Carbon Brief worked with journalists based in France, Germany, Sweden and Turkey, and they provided input on how different countries have been providing international climate finance.

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§ All aboard to Baku

COP28 in Dubai last year was the largest COP in an almost 30-year history of summits – by some distance. More than 83,000 people attended the summit in person, beating the previous record of around 50,000 set in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt the year before.

The total number of registered delegates for COP29 in Baku clocks in at 66,778 – falling between the totals of the previous two COPs. With 3,975 “virtual” participants, this takes the overall provisional delegate total for COP29 to 70,753. (This is close to the 72,000 figure quoted by Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev in his opening address at the COP.)

As the chart below shows, this bucks the recent trend that has seen the size of COPs increase every year since the 16,000 participants that travelled to Bonn, Germany, for COP23 in 2017. 

It is worth noting that these are provisional figures, based on the delegates that have registered for the summit. The UNFCCC will release the final figures – based on participants collecting a physical badge at the venue – after the summit has closed.

This group adds up to 17,680 delegates – second only to COP28 in Dubai. 

At last year’s COP, the participant lists published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – for the first time – named every single person that had registered for the summit (excluding support staff). Previously, COPs have typically included thousands of “overflow” participants in which countries and UN agencies could nominate delegates without their names appearing on their official lists. 

The Baku summit continues this more transparent approach, providing spreadsheets that name all participants. 

For consistency with Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous COPs, the above chart includes overflow delegates as a single group. However, the participant lists do divide the overflow delegates between parties and observer groups. Including the overflow numbers takes the total for party representatives to 33,158.

The next-largest group is that of observers from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which totals 9,881 delegates. This is the third-largest total in COP history (after the previous two COPs).

Along with the NGOs, there are several other groups that fall into the category of “observer organisations” – such as those participants representing UN bodies, intergovernmental organisations, other agencies and business representatives. These total 2,377 registered delegates – or 3,204 when overflow badges are included.

Finally, 3,575 media delegates have registered for COP29, a provisional total that is second only to COP3 in Kyoto in 1997.

§ Host lead

As is common at COP summits, the largest delegation at COP29 represents the host country. Azerbaijan has registered a delegation – including party overflow badges – of 2,229.

This is a far cry from Azerbaijan’s tiny delegations of the past. Before COP28 in Dubai, Azerbaijan’s delegation amounted to an average of six people. 

The second-largest delegation comes from Brazil with 1,914 participants. Brazil typically brings one of the largest delegations and this year is no exception. A substantial delegation from Brazil was also likely considering they will be hosting COP30 next year.

(It is worth noting that some countries allocate some of their party badges to NGOs, which can artificially inflate the size of their official delegation.)

The third-largest delegation comes from Turkey (1,892), followed by UAE (1,011) and China (969). The rest of the top 10 comprises Russia (900), Indonesia (810), Nigeria (634), Japan (595) and Kazakhstan (478).

Just outside the top 10 is the UK in 11th (470), as well as the US (405) in 16th and Australia (394) in 19th.

Azerbaijan has seen the biggest increase in delegation size since COP28, increasing by 995 people. This is followed by Turkey (966 more) and Russia (448).

The smallest delegations belong to Niger and San Marino (two), Nicaragua (three), and Andorra and North Korea (five). 

Unsurprisingly, the largest decrease in delegation size is for UEA (dropping by 3,148). Next is India (909) and France (649), while the US delegation has shrunk by 434.

Papua New Guinea has registered a delegation of 28, although prime minister James Marape announced back in August that the country would not be attending to “signal our protest at the big nations…for their lack of quick support to those who are victims of climate change, and those of us who are forest and ocean nations”.

Also, according to the provisional participant lists, Afghanistan has not registered a delegation. However, reports earlier this week suggested that Taliban officials will attend as observers. Therefore, their invitation from COP hosts Azerbaijan may have come outside the usual registration process. Armenia and Myanmar are the other two parties that have not sent a delegation.

The map and table below present the delegation size – split between party and overflow badges – for all the countries registered for COP29. The darker the shading, the more delegates that country has signed up. Use the search box to find the data for a specific party.

§ Gender split

The UNFCCC’s participant lists typically provide a title – such as Mr, Ms, Sr or Sra – for each registered delegate. In the past, this has allowed Carbon Brief to work out the balance of men to women in the delegations that each country has sent to a COP. 

(This analysis always carries the caveat that the titles are designated by UNFCCC and not by Carbon Brief. In addition, Carbon Brief recognises that gender is not best categorised using a binary “male” or “female” label and appreciates that the UNFCCC’s lists may not be wholly accurate.)

However, since COP28 last year, the UNFCCC has started using other titles that do not indicate gender – such as Dr, Prof, Ambassador and Honourable. Therefore, for this analysis, these non-gendered titles – which make up around 150 names of more than 17,000 in the list of party delegates – have not been included.

This gives an average gender balance of party delegations of 60% male to 40% female. 

As the chart below shows, this makes COP29 the most balanced COP in history. (Note that, for consistency, the COP28 and COP29 figures only include those on party badges, not overflow ones.

There are two all-male party delegations this year – North Korea (five delegates) and Niger (two delegates).

In addition, this year, Carbon Brief’s analysis reveals that the gender balance across all registered delegates – both in-person and virtual – for COP29 is 59% male to 41% female.

The full list of COP29 party delegation sizes can be found here.