13 November 2026 2:14 pm
Countries Most Vulnerable to Fossil Fuel Phaseout Insights

Countries Most Vulnerable to Fossil Fuel Phaseout Insights

Oct 16, 2026

Wide shot of an empty Conoil gas station in Nigeria, showcasing fuel pumps and canopy. by Bashir Hussaini Ahmed via Pexels

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Countries most vulnerable to fossil fuel phaseout generate just 6% of global output, climate analysis finds

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by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan

Phys.org – 15 October 2026

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Countries highly vulnerable to the phase-out of oil, gas and coal account for just 6% of global economic output, countries in Africa stand to benefit from their vast solar energy potential, and the economic interests of the U.S., Europe and China are affected by climate policy in surprisingly similar ways. A study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) published in Nature Sustainability now shows, for 169 countries around the world, how the fight against global heating affects national assets—and what geopolitical challenges and opportunities arise as a result.

The comprehensive dataset compiled by the research team shows how climate policy affects national assets in four ways: it reduces demand for fossil fuels, potentially leading to losses in oil, gas and coal revenues; it reduces climate-related damage to the national economy; it creates new economic opportunities for solar and wind energy development; and it increases the value of a country’s capacity to absorb and store CO₂ from the atmosphere—whether “naturally” via forests or “managed” through the stewardship of natural areas.

“Based on our data analysis, we can map how countries could gain or lose from different aspects of decarbonization by the end of this century, depending on the level of ambition in climate policy,” reports Guanna Pan, PIK researcher and lead author of the study. “We explore geopolitical tensions that may arise from some countries experiencing losses, but we also show how national interests can foster international cooperation, and how this can be further strengthened through targeted incentives.”

Five groups of countries with similar interests

To better understand potential economic gains and losses across countries, the research team has identified clusters—that is, groups of states in which climate policy generates similar economic opportunities and risks, and potentially shared interests. According to the study, 19 fossil fuel–dependent countries would potentially oppose ambitious measures.

By contrast, 51 countries in the Global South have a strong interest in a rapid climate transition as they would otherwise face particularly severe climate damage. Likewise, 13 countries “with high potential for renewable energy”—the majority of which are in Africa—and 17 countries “with high carbon sequestration capacity” would also naturally favor swift action in the fight against global heating.

However, these four clusters do not carry all that much political weight: the group of oil-, gas- and coal-dependent countries accounts for only 6% of global economic output, and the three groups of countries that especially stand to benefit from climate protection account for only 13% combined.

The remaining 81% of economic output is accounted for by the fifth cluster—the 69 “economies with moderate impacts”—which includes the EU, China and the U.S. In this group of countries, the economic benefits of climate policy are, in absolute terms, considerable in many cases, particularly due to avoided climate damage. Calculated as a percentage, however, they are not as large as in the three clusters of strong winners.

Climate policy safeguards long-term prosperity

In summary, the research team notes that humanity as a whole must take a collective interest in climate action, but that the differences in gains and losses between countries need to be fully understood. The study provides the necessary guidance and concludes with the recommendation that, where interests diverge, climate cooperation should be strengthened through “package deals.” This means that concessions on climate protection for hesitant countries should be linked with promises regarding trade or research and development; it could also mean simply offsetting losses through financial transfers.

“In view of the current resurgence of opposition to a committed climate policy, it is important to recognize that climate policy does not merely devalue certain assets—namely those of fossil fuel suppliers,” emphasizes Ottmar Edenhofer, PIK director and one of the co-authors. “Our study also demonstrates quite precisely how new assets are simultaneously being built up. Overall, climate policy revalues the capital stock of economies in a new and sustainable way, thereby safeguarding long-term prosperity.”


 

Will AI Be Good or Bad for Future Climate Solutions?

Will AI Be Good or Bad for Future Climate Solutions?

Oct 15, 2026

A wind farm with turbines against a clear blue sky in a desert setting. by Kindel Media via Pexels

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Will AI be good or bad for the climate? Here’s what the latest evidence on energy use suggests

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Francesco Grillo, Bocconi University

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Is AI a climate change villain, whose insatiable hunger for electricity will roast the planet? Or will it help predict where the next climate disaster will strike and what to do about it?

In order to weigh these questions up, a good starting point is with AI’s energy consumption.

The 2015 Paris agreement was a deal among almost 200 countries to keep “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.

Training and deploying AI models takes place in large data centres which use a lot of power. A typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households. That’s why energy use is at the heart of this question about how AI will affect climate change.

Data centre use rises

But AI’s energy consumption is increasing fast. According to the International Energy Agency, the power used to train large language models (LLMs) and to run them has risen roughly tenfold since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. And AI data centres of the future will consume far more electricity than they do today, perhaps 20 times more.

Use of AI has grown very fast, and is still growing. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet which is Google’s parent company, recently said that Google’s monthly usage of its AI products has increased sevenfold to 3.2 quadrillion tokens (the units of data AI models read and process) since last year.

However, power consumption per AI task is going down. So efficiency is growing. The problem is that our demand for it is also growing. Economists know this as Jevons’s paradox: where technological gains can wipe out efficiencies as they create more use.

AI consumes about 155 terawatt-hours of electricity a year, based on IEA figures, and a third of the energy used by data centres overall. That is a lot. But it is still only about 0.5% of the world’s electricity, and around 0.1% of its total energy use (when we also consider oil, gas and carbon).

However, other factors are also significant. Data centres cluster, and in places where they do, such as Ireland and northern Virginia, they already strain local grids.

How AI is driving energy use.

Can AI help with climate change?

But what about AI’s potential to help with climate change? In 2025, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts put an AI model into use, AIFS, which produces forecasts that improve on traditional physics-based models. It cannot tell you whether rain will fall on your street 30 days from now, but it can assess the probabilities of extreme weather events with much more geographical detail and offer more time to plan ahead.

This massively improves the possibility for insurers to assess risks as well as for government departments to put plans in place to avoid, or mitigate, disasters. It also significantly uses less energy than other physics-based weather forecasting systems.

The bigger prize lies beyond forecasting. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific pillar of the UN’s climate machinery, exists “to give governments at all levels the information they need to make policy”. Its reports take years, and not everybody seems convinced that its conclusions are fully independent.

AI could be a powerful lever for the IPCC to better serve its mission. A public AI model (similar to the AIFS) could potentially reduce biases, if used well. And it could do more than forecasting. It could suggest actions as well as describe risks; cover adaptation as well as mitigation; and reach not only government departments but city councils, farmers and households. This would turn global science into a decision-supporting system about which crop to plant or whether to insulate a roof as well as the policy decisions on how to manage energy transition.

That will not happen by itself. We need incentives to make the use of AI more energy efficient.

Here lies the most striking contrast between the two sides of the argument over AI and climate change. The world has a governance mechanism for climate change, however imperfect: the Conference of the Parties (COP), which has met almost every year since 1995. But AI has little more than voluntary codes, occasional summits and a UN scientific panel created only last year.

Could AI’s energy use be less than feared?

A new paper by Vision, the thinktank I direct, has tried to measure both sides of the ledger for AI on climate change. Its findings will feed into Vision’s fifth conference on the global governance of climate change, to be held in Venice from October 15 to 17.

The work suggests that AI’s appetite for energy could be smaller than feared, and its potential is larger. But concludes that neither will matter much unless we learn to govern it.

Whether AI warms or cools the planet could depend less on its chips than on the institutions we build around AI, and how we use it.The Conversation

Francesco Grillo, Academic Fellow, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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IPCC Is Under Pressure and Vulnerable Nations Fear Delay

IPCC Is Under Pressure and Vulnerable Nations Fear Delay

Oct 13, 2026

Drone captures devastating flooding in a rural village in Kashmir. by Imad Clicks via Pexels

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IPCC is under pressure to delay publication of key global climate report

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– Environment editor

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AR7 report was scheduled for 2028 in time for Cop33 summit but some petro-states and major developing countries want to postpone it

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Scientists are coming under pressure from some petro-states and major developing countries to delay publication of a key global report on the climate, despite pleas from vulnerable countries worried that postponement could spell disaster for them.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-convened body of the world’s leading climate scientists, is meeting this week in Addis Ababa to discuss its seventh assessment report, a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the climate crisis.

The report, known as AR7, was scheduled to appear in 2028 in time for deliberations at the UN climate summit, Cop33, late that year. Cop33 is scheduled to critique governments’ actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement target of limiting temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

But a group of countries, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia and including India and China, is pressing for publication of the report to be pushed back to 2029.

They argue this is necessary in order to allow developing countries to have more input into the scientific findings. Climate science has been dominated for three decades by countries and blocs including the EU, the UK and the US, though under Donald Trump’s presidency in the last of these it has has been severely curtailed.

Waves crash against the waterfront promenade as Hurricane Simon approaches Mexico’s Pacific coast in Puerto Vallarta, on Sunday. More extreme weather is forecast globally. Photograph: Christian Ruano/Reuters

Many poor and vulnerable countries – which are also among those contributing least to the science – strongly oppose any such delay. Ministers from 34 members of the High Ambition Coalition, made up of some of the poorest countries and those most at risk from climate breakdown, as well as the EU and the Least Developed Countries grouping, called on Friday for publication of AR7 to be expedited.

Jess Gasper, a minister for the Marshall Islands, said: “We cannot allow political interests to determine which science the world is willing to hear.”

Jiwoh Emmanuel Abdulai, the minister of environment for Sierra Leone, added: “The Paris agreement can only deliver on its promise if the best available science continues to guide climate change negotiations.”

Global temperatures have already exceeded the threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, though the IPCC has previously suggested there is still a way to restore them. If current national emissions targets are met, global temperatures would exceed 1.8C. That is a very big “if”, as most countries do not have fully articulated plans for meeting the targets, meaning far higher temperatures are likely.

The global stocktake at Cop33 in 2028 is meant to provide a check on whether governments need to ramp up their efforts, and is crucial to the Paris agreement “ratchet” which demands stronger action.

The overflowing Gomti river flooded the Fazullaganj residential area of Lucknow, India, last week. Photograph: Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP

AR7 is the latest in a series of comprehensive reports on climate science dating back to 1988 that have grown increasingly stark in their warnings of the impacts of pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The last such assessment, published in three parts in 2021 and 2022, found that unless emissions were swiftly reduced the world would face unstoppable impacts that would swiftly become catastrophic and in some cases irreversible.

AR7 is expected to strike an even more urgent note, as greenhouse gases in the interim have continued to rise, and the impacts such as rising temperatures, heatwaves, floods and droughts are increasingly apparent. This year has seen temperature records tumble and drought grip swathes of Europe and the US, while a gathering El Nino weather system, supercharged by the climate crisis, is forecast to bring extreme weather and rising food prices.

The IPCC is supposed to carry on its work free from government interference. However, key documents known as the “summary for policymakers”, published alongside the thousands of pages of the official reports, are subject to approval from all governments that wish to play a role.

The Guardian has previously uncovered evidence of involvement in the IPCC’s assessments of representatives of oil interests under control of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Despite these flaws, the IPCC is the most authoritative global body on climate science, and many experts say delaying its input to the Cop talks would weaken the global response to the climate crisis at a time when adverse geopolitics already threaten progress on emissions. The US is leading attacks on climate action, but far-right populist politicians across Europe also want to water down the EU’s regulations, and in Latin America a tide of rightwing populism, particularly in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, threatens the same.

Water levels in the Jatigede reservoir recede amid drought in Sumedang Regency, West Java province, Indonesia. Photograph: Claudio Pramana/Reuters

Within this context, waiting for developing countries to be able to contribute more science makes little sense, according to Claudio Angelo of the Observatório do Clima in Brazil. “It’s extremely concerning the way the structural issue of equity is being weaponised by some big developing countries,” he said. “It’s true that integrated assessment [climate science] models are mostly built by global north countries and therefore biased. [But] that’s not a problem that can be fixed just by giving the IPCC an extra few months to work. We can’t afford to leave Addis without a decision [to press ahead with the 2028 timetable].”

Angelo queried why countries such as India and Saudi Arabia were claiming to be standing up for developing countries by backing a delay. “They have the money and the technology to send rockets to the moon – why couldn’t they bother to build their own models to be reviewed by the IPCC?”

But the row has exposed splits within the environmental NGO movement. Some civil society groups are sympathetic to calls for more science from developing countries, and the Guardian understands that some are considering backing the call for a delay.

The IPCC declined to comment. The Guardian has approached Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and India for comment.

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Fossil Fuel Interests Have Infiltrated the IPCC: What Now?

Fossil Fuel Interests Have Infiltrated the IPCC: What Now?

Sep 27, 2026

The above illustration is a close-up of a rusty, abandoned fuel pump at a gas station in Prackenbach, Germany. by Lucian Cornea 🇩🇪 via Pexels

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Fossil fuel interests have infiltrated the IPCC

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EARTH.ORG || 26 September 2026

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Also this week: world leaders speak up about climate change at the UN General Assembly in New York; a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season (but not what you think).

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This week, the Guardian released a bombshell investigation into how fossil fuel interests are penetrating the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change. Let’s talk about it.

The IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a United Nations body founded in 1988 to advance scientific knowledge about human-caused climate change and to “provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies.” It does so through comprehensive scientific assessments, published every five to seven years, which inform policymakers on the climate crisis and its potential future risks, and put forward adaptation and mitigation recommendations.

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The IPCC does not conduct its own research – rather, its job is to gather experts from various fields, who then study the thousands of scientific papers on climate science published each year and summarize them into comprehensive reports. Once completed, the reports are thoroughly reviewed in plenary sessions by UN member states, who need to approve and adopt them.

During plenary sessions, which take place at least once a year, the hundreds of attendees from relevant ministries, agencies, and research institutions from both member countries and observer organizations also decide on the IPCC’s budget and work program as well as the scope and outline of its upcoming reports.

Over 8,000 experts from nearly all countries in the world have volunteered their time to the IPCC assessment cycles – with six completed to date. They put together dozens of reports on various climate-related topics, including more than a dozen so-called “Special Reports” on topics agreed to by its member governments, ranging from the impacts of aviation and land-use change to carbon dioxide capture and storage, renewable energy, and managing the risks of extreme weather events.

Each assessment cycle concludes with the publishing of an Assessment Report, covering the state of scientific, technical, and socio-economic knowledge on climate change, its impacts and future risks, and strategies to mitigate or adapt to them. They come in four parts – a contribution from each of the three IPCC Working Groups, plus a Synthesis Report, which includes a Summary for Policymakers.

Covers of the first and latest IPCC Assessment Reports. Image: IPCC/screenshots.

Overall, each report has delivered increasingly stark warnings, painting a clear picture of accelerating global warming, escalating climate impacts, and a rapidly narrowing window for effective action. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, its most recent, delivered a “final warning” to countries to invest in mitigation and adaptation projects upon which “the magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks” strongly depend:

It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole … are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Global warming of 1.5C and 2C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.

Conflict of interest?

Across the scientific community, the IPCC’s work is broadly viewed as the most comprehensive and reliable assessment of the climate crisis, undergoing “more scrutiny than any other documents in the history of science.” It was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

This week, the authority the UN body has built over many decades came into question.

The Guardian investigation, carried out in partnership with a team of international journalists with the support of Journalismfund Europe, identified 20 cases “with strong conflict of interest concerns.” Of these, 11 were IPCC lead authors with ties to Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest petroleum company; Saudi-funded universities and research institutions; and other fossil fuel interests. The remaining cases involved experts from other nations linked to industry collaborations, fossil-fuel sponsorship of academic research, environmental campaigning, and sustainable finance.

The journalists looked at the 223 lead authors in Working Group III, which is tasked with exploring emission reduction and removal strategies, policies and technologies (Working Groups I and II cover the science surrounding climate change and the impacts). The group is currently working on the Seventh Assessment Report, scheduled for release by late 2029.

Experts interviewed about the findings do not recall ever seeing such a heavy presence of people with Saudi ties within the institution and argue they would be in breach of the IPCC’s Conflict of Interest Policy.

The Conflict of Interest Policy was adopted in 2011 following mistakes in its major reports and allegations of financial conflicts involving Rajendra Pachauri, who served as the IPCC’s chairman from 2002 to 2015. As per the IPCC website:

The overall purpose of the Conflict of Interest Policy is to protect the legitimacy, integrity, trust, and credibility of the IPCC and of those directly involved in the preparation of reports, and its activities. The staff of the IPCC Secretariat is subject to the disclosure and ethics policies of the WMO and UNEP. For the purposes of the IPCC Conflict of Interest Policy, individuals must disclose circumstances that could lead a reasonable person to question an individual’s objectivity, or whether an unfair advantage has been created, constitute a potential conflict of interest.

According to an IPCC member interviewed for the investigation, at least one IPCC member, Mustafa Babiker, had declared his role as a consultant for Saudi Aramco on the IPCC’s conflict of interest form. And yet the latest Conflict of Interest (COI) Committee meeting, held this February, noted “with appreciation” that a review of all forms submitted by all the IPCC Bureau and Task Force Bureau members found “no conflict of interest.” Crucially, these forms are never made public, and the COI Committee provides no details regarding its deliberations.

Saudi Aramco is part of the Carbon Majors, a group of around 100 private and state-owned companies that have been responsible for a significant proportion of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. It ranked first for emissions in 2024, with a global carbon dioxide emissions share of 4.28%.

At least two of the 14 lead authors for the chapter on energy systems, which looks at ways to reduce emissions across the board, also have ties to Saudi Aramco. They are Diego Armando Moya Pinta, who has worked as an energy and sustainability scientist at the company since 2022, and Professor Zain Yamani from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, who, the Guardian says, “was conducting joint research with Aramco’s New Energies Research Division during the past year while also serving in his IPCC role.”

The list goes on. Dr Malak Al-Nory, a senior adviser to the Saudi energy ministry, also serves as one of Working Group III’s seven vice-chairs, a job that requires her to evaluate authors’ conflict of interest disclosures, among other tasks. Saudi Arabia, the quintessential petrostate, holds the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world, with the government depending on oil and gas revenues for much of its income and export earnings.

Malak Al-Nory representing Saudi Arabia at COP26 in Glasgow. Photo: Malak Al-Nory. Ph.D via LinkedIn.

The nation is part of a broader coalition of fossil fuel-friendly states that have long campaigned against phasing them out at UN climate negotiations, instead pushing for technological climate solutions like carbon capture and storage, which is widely seen as a necessary but limited tool in the fight against climate change.

Professor Hussein Hoteit from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, was conducting research on underground carbon storage that was heavily funded by Saudi Aramco when he was appointed as a lead author on the IPCC chapter on carbon dioxide removal technologies. Working Group III also includes five authors from the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (KAPSARC), a think-tank funded by the Saudi government and chaired by the country’s energy minister, whose stated mission is to “advance Saudi Arabia’s energy sector.” The appointments make KAPSARC the most represented institution in the group, alongside Imperial College London and Vienna’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, according to the Guardian investigation.

Reclaiming integrity

At a time when anti-climate rhetoric is gaining political traction worldwide and public trust in multilateral bodies is hitting historic lows – particularly in the US – revelations like these are catastrophic for science communication. When international institutions like the UN and the IPCC suffer from perceived or actual regulatory capture by the very industries driving planetary degradation, it hands fuel to climate skeptics and isolationist political movements seeking to dismantle international climate agreements altogether.

If the world’s gold standard for climate science loses its perceived independence, the fallout will extend far beyond academic debates. It risks undermining the fragile global consensus required to fund energy transitions and policy reform. To rebuild trust, the IPCC must enforce robust, transparent governance mechanisms that hold conflict of interest disclosures to public scrutiny – before the consensus model breaks down completely.

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Global Renewable Deployment Must Double for COP28 Pledge

Global Renewable Deployment Must Double for COP28 Pledge

Sep 22, 2026

Aerial shot of wind turbines in a sprawling desert at sunset, capturing renewable energy. by Vinicius Dattwyler via Pexels

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Global renewable deployment must double to hit 2030 climate target, report says

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By

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LONDON, Sept 21 (Reuters) – The global deployment of renewable power must more than double to meet a climate pledge on renewable growth by 2030, ​even though it hit a record level last year, a report ‌by renewable groups showed on Monday.
  • More than 100 countries at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023 agreed to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
  • The world ​added just over 690 gigawatts of renewable power capacity in 2025.
  • It ​still needs to accelerate installations to roughly 1,200 GW on ⁠average, every year through 2030, to meet the tripling pledge, the report ​compiled by the International Renewable Energy Agency, the COP31 Presidency and the ​Global Renewables Alliance said.
  • Total global installed renewable capacity reached 5.15 terawatts at the end of 2025 — still less than half the 11.2 TW target needed to meet the pledge.
  • Energy ​efficiency measures are also falling short, with energy intensity improving by ​about 2% in 2025, below the 4% annual rate needed to meet efficiency-doubling commitments.
  • “Renewables can ‌still ⁠close the gap towards 2030, but energy efficiency is falling behind, electricity demand is rising faster than expected, and the grid infrastructure has failed to keep pace,” Francesco La Camera, director-general of the International Renewable Energy ​Agency, said in the ​report.
  • Nearly $1 trillion ⁠a year on average is needed in grid investment between 2026 and 2030, the report said, up from $525 billion ​in 2025.
  • Ben Backwell, chair of the Global Renewables Alliance, ​said governments ⁠needed to “make renewables a national economic priority,” including by expanding grids, deploying storage and electrifying homes, transport and industry.
  • This year’s COP climate talks in Turkey ⁠in ​November are expected to focus on using electricity ​to power more sectors and push for a new target of electricity meeting 35% of ​global final energy consumption by 2035.

Reporting By Susanna Twidale; editing by Barbara Lewis

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