Rich nations have stuck to pledges to phase-out coal power despite the war in Ukraine to help reach their climate targets but expansion of China’s coal fleet risks counteracting the impact of the closures, a report said on Tuesday, November 15.

Countries within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) policy forum and the European Union are on track to close more than 75% of their coal power capacity from 2010 to 2030, the report by the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) said.

Greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal are the single biggest contributor to climate change and weaning the world off coal is considered vital to achieving global climate targets.

While some countries such as Britain and Germany have delayed the closure of coal plants this winter due to the war in Ukraine and concerns over Russian energy supply, overall phase-out dates remained intact, according to the report released to coincide with the COP27 climate summit of world leaders in Egypt.

“Instead, governments are increasing their efforts to invest in renewables and increase energy efficiency, in order to accelerate the transition away from power generation fueled by both coal and gas,” said the PPCA, an international campaign aimed at phasing out the fuel.

China has pledged to bring the country’s carbon emissions to a peak by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. On Monday, China said it did not oppose mentioning 1.5 degrees Celsius as a goal for limiting global warming.

China’s climate envoy, Xei Zhenhua said last week at the COP27 climate talks in Egypt the country would need to retain some coal plants to help maintain the stability of its power grid.

There are still plans for almost 300 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity globally with around two-thirds of this, or 197 GW slated to be built in China, the report showed.

“Accelerated retirements within the OECD and the collapse in the scale of new project proposals in the rest of the world have been counteracted by the ongoing expansion of the coal fleet in China,” the report said.

The PPCA said many of these proposed projects may eventually be cancelled.

US President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed on Monday, November 14, to resume cooperation on climate change and other issues, offering a boost to bogged down and behind schedule negotiations at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt

The leaders of the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases met at the G20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali where climate change will be competing for time with issues such as the global economy and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Their agreement to talk again about climate thawed relations frozen earlier this year after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi angered China by visiting Taiwan.

News of the rapprochement came just as COP27 climate negotiators at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh were looking for a sign that G20 nations were willing to stump up more cash and fresh commitments in the fight against rising global temperatures.

Teresa Ribera, Spain’s climate minister, said she was hopeful that the rapprochement would energize negotiations. “The two biggest emitters need to be cooperative and ambitious,” she told Reuters.

Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, called it “essential.”

“This unequivocal signal from the two largest economies to work together to address the climate crisis is more than welcome; it’s essential,” Bapna said.

Heading into the last week of the two-week conference progress has been slow, frustrating negotiators who are struggling to find consensus on how rich countries should help developing nations meet the cost of climate-fueled disasters.

The outcome on that issue, referred to in climate talks as “loss and damage,” could define the perceived success or failure of the COP27 talks.

One senior negotiator, who could not be named due to the sensitivity of the talks, said that after an opening week heavy on promises but light on new cash commitments, many developing nations were watching Bali closely for a signal that the richest economies were taking concrete actions.

Progress from the G20 group of the world’s wealthiest economies – and also its largest emissions producers – could come in the form of both cash and political signaling.

One issue some delegates and observers in Egypt were looking for progress on was the provision of climate finance to developing countries by multilateral development banks – the international financial institutions whose sovereign shareholders sit mostly within the G20.

“It’s important that they do that, and that will provide support and momentum for COP,” Avinash Persaud, special envoy on climate finance to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, told Reuters.

The United States is expected to announce an energy transition plan with Indonesia on Tuesday, November 15, which will also involve other G7 nations – essentially a funding package to help switch from coal power to clean energy.

G20 leaders may also look to agree a statement on addressing environmental concerns, providing some relief after officials in August failed to agree a joint communique, amid objections over language used on climate targets and the war in Ukraine.

The United Nations on Monday, November 14, published a draft text setting out what the COP27 climate summit could agree on “loss and damage” financing for countries ravaged by climate impacts.

The negotiating text will be debated and reworked by diplomats and ministers from nearly 200 countries before its hoped-for adoption at the end of the summit, negotiators said.

For some countries, progress on loss and damage funding will be their measure of whether the talks in Egypt succeed.

Nations are split over whether to agree to a new fund, even after they agreed for the first time to hold formal UN talks on loss and damage – UN jargon for irreparable destruction caused by climate change-fueled disasters.

Previous UN talks did not do so given resistance from rich countries nervous about spiraling liability for emissions historically linked the developed world.

The draft text says COP27 will launch a two-year process in which countries would work on how to provide funding to developing countries suffering “loss and damage” and gave two options for what that process could deliver.

Option one would see the process lead to “funding arrangements” for loss and damage by November 2024. The draft said this could include a UN funding facility.

Option two would delay until 2023 a decision on what the UN climate body’s role will be in a broader “mosaic” of options to fund loss and damage.

More than 130 developing countries, among them small island states and large emerging economies, have demanded that COP27 ends with a firm decision to launch a loss and damage fund – even if it will still take years to get it running.

“The language is still too ambiguous, there needs to be a clear decision on what COP27 will deliver,” Carolina Cecilio, a policy expert at climate think-tank E3G, said, adding this should include the establishment of loss and damage funding arrangements.

“It will be key for restoring trust and solidarity,” she said.

China climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said on Monday, November 14, that Beijing would like a COP27 deal that contains language similar to last year’s agreement in Glasgow on targets for limiting global warming, and was not opposed to mentioning 1.5 degree Celsius.

“Last year’s Glasgow decision already clearly says it, we should follow the Paris Agreement and Glasgow,” Xie said.

US Special Envoy John Kerry had said late last week that a few countries at summit had resisted mentioning the 1.5ºC target in the official text of COP27, but didn’t name them.

China is the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter.

Countries at last year’s climate summit in Scotland had reaffirmed the ambition set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to halt warming at less than 2ºC above pre-industrial times, as well as its aim for 1.5ºC as a better outcome.

The final text of the Glasgow pact also went a step further to elaborate on the benefits of halting warming at 1.5C, and the UK hosts touted the deal as one that would keep the 1.5ºC goal alive.

Scientists say crossing the 1.5ºC threshold risks bringing on the worst effects of climate change, and that the world will blow past it without more ambitious cuts to emissions.

The world’s three largest rainforest nations Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia on Monday, November 14, formally launched a partnership to cooperate on forest preservation after a decade of on-off talks on a trilateral alliance.

Reuters reported in August that Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, elected as Brazil’s president at the end of October, would seek a partnership with the two other leading rainforest nations to pressure the rich world to finance forest conservation.

The rapid destruction of rainforests, which through their dense vegetation serve as carbon sinks, releases planet-warming carbon dioxide, imperiling global climate targets. Regrowing previously deforested jungle has the benefit of removing greenhouse gas already in the atmosphere.

Representatives of the three countries, which represent 52% of the world’s tropical rainforest, signed the joint statement at the talks in Indonesia ahead of the G20, or Group of 20 industrialized nations, which begins on Tuesday. (Read the story here.)

India will prioritize a phased transition to cleaner fuels and slashing household consumption to achieve net zero emissions by 2070, according to a national report released Monday, November 14, at the United Nations COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

The report for the first time sketches out how the world’s second-biggest consumer of coal will meet its decarbonization pledge made in 2021 as par of international efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.

“This is an important milestone,” said India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav at a COP27 event marking the report’s launch. “Once again India has demonstrated that it walks the talk on climate change.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not attend this year’s climate talks in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Under the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015, all countries are required to submit a strategy document to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change showing how they’ll help combat global warming. These plans are known as a Long-Term Low Emissions and Development Strategies(LT-LEDS).

Despite a 2020 deadline for the plans, just 56 countries have so far submitted one. India is the last of the world’s five largest economies to do so.

India’s LT-LEDS zeroes in on six key areas to reduce net emissions, including electricity, urbanization, transport, forests, finance, and industry.

The country, for example, proposes increasing the use of biofuels – particularly ethanol blending in petrol – boosting the number of electric vehicles on the road, alongside expanded public transport networks, and using more green hydrogen fuel.

India has already pledged to phase down coal use along with other nations, and has become a big market for renewable energy projects like solar.

What’s novel in India’s strategy, said Taryn Fransen, an international climate change policy expert at the non-profit World Resources Institute in the United States, is the focus on reducing consumption at the individual or household level, as well as its inclusion of carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS).

This includes technology that can capture carbon from polluting industries so it never reaches the atmosphere. Environmentalists have cautioned against using it in a way that extends the lives of coal plants.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty around it, but at the same time the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change research indicates we will need large CO2 removal,” Fransen told Reuters.

India said it will work on advancing the technologies used in CCUS.

Unlike Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are also mandated under the Paris Agreement, LT-LEDS focus on a longer time horizon and don’t require countries to report progress.

India updated its NDC in August, committing the country to reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 45% from its 2005 level in the next 7 years – a 10 percentage point increase over its previous 2016 pledge.

While India’s LT-LEDS laid out an ambitious green transition strategy, Yadav said the country could not “have a situation where the energy security of developing countries is ignored in the name of urgent mitigation”.

India and other developing countries have long resisted calls for a rapid move away from fossil fuels that could undermine their economic growth and impose big costs.

“India is having to pay for a crisis that it didn’t cause with money that it doesn’t have,” said Dipa Singh Bagai, country head for Natural Resources Defense Council in India.

India wants countries to agree to phase down all fossil fuels at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, rather than a narrower deal to phase down coal as was agreed last year, two sources familiar with the negotiations told Reuters on Saturday.

China climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said on Monday, November 14, that Beijing would like a COP27 deal that sets a goal for limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and that adds countries should try for 1.5ºC – similar to the language agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The United Nations on Monday, November 14, what the COP27 climate summit could agree on the subject of ‘loss and damage’ financing for countries being ravaged by climate impacts.

The draft text will be debated and likely revised before its hoped-for adoption at the end of the summit, negotiators said. Progress on the loss and damage issue is a key goal of the talks in Egypt, and for some countries a measure of whether the talks will succeed.

The draft text outlines several options for financially supporting developing countries hit by climate-fueled disasters. One of those options is setting up a new fund – a key demand by developing countries.

The text also envisions two more years of negotiations on the issue.