Publications

The COP29 in Baku was supposed to breathe new life into North-South climate cooperation through the negotiation of the new NCQG financing target. Instead, confrontational negotiations produced a half-hearted agreement, and the onerous task of charting a path to bridge the resource gap before the next COP.

Tense climate negotiations just ended in Bonn with limited progress on finance and the revised climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. During the opening ceremony of the sixtieth sessions of the subsidiary bodies (SB 60) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Simon Stiell –Executive Secretary– highlighted the need to “make serious progress on finance, the great enabler of climate action” and to aim for bolder, broader and inclusive third generation Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs 3.0) that “can serve as blueprints to propel economies and societies forward and drive more resilience”.

Last month, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Simon Stiell, stressed how important this and next year are for the achievement of the Paris Agreement and called for “a quantum leap in climate finance” ahead of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund. Indeed, with emissions required to peak before 2025, our window of opportunity is rapidly closing to keep 1.5°C within reach. More and better finance is urgently needed. Carbon pricing policies and their revenues are part of the tools available that can help fill the climate finance gap.

After several years of strong growth, the revenue generated by carbon pricing mechanisms (carbon taxes or markets) worldwide, as reported in our 2023 edition of the Global Carbon Accounts, stabilized at nearly USD 100 billion. This stabilization could not be more deceptive.  The future has rarely been so uncertain for carbon prices, caught between very strong opposing trends, and the next two years could mark a major turning point, for good or bad, for the use of these climate policy instruments worldwide. 

The current economic crisis has caused a drop in the price on the European carbon market (or EU ETS for European Union Emissions Trading System) and will contribute to the increase in the surplus of allowances. This highlights how necessary it is to reform the mechanism for managing this surplus or even to implement a floor price. However, for Charlotte Vailles from I4CE and Nicolas Berghmans from IDDRI, this crisis should lead us to consider the EU ETS no longer as the "cornerstone" of decarbonisation in Europe, but as a safety net.

COP24 in Katowice just ended and was marked by the difficult adoption of a package of practical rules - the Katowice Climate Package - on transparency, the content of national contributions or their revision. It was also a COP marked by deep concerns about the willingness of Signatory Countries to increase their climate ambition in the coming years. Currently, countries' commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will lead to global warming well above 2°C, the threshold above which our climate would jump into the unknown.

The I4CE team will be present throughout the two weeks of negotiations, in order to present its latest achievements in about ten side-events, whether on carbon pricing, climate investment tracking, climate action by financial actors or carbon certification of innovative practices in the land sector. Please see below the full list of events organized by I4CE - or where I4CE will be participating.