COP29

World leaders are meeting in Brazil's Amazon city of Belem for COP30, the 30th UN climate summit, to discuss how to curb global warming and act on past promises to cut fossil fuel use

Today's Best of BS Opinion analyses India's Quality Control Order overreach, dim prospects for COP30, Ajay Shah on Trump's tariff shock, and Jordan Ellenberg's review of The Great Math War

As COP30 heads to Belem, India aims to push finance and tech for the Global South - but will it bring real capital or just more promises and targets?

30 years, 30 COPs - still counting degrees. Is this where promises go to melt? This two-part series on COP30 tracks how the UN's flagship climate summit lost its direction and what's at stake

These carbon pricing mechanisms, however, allegedly may give rise to 'carbon leakage', when applied unilaterally by countries

The government has expressed its disappointment with the outcome of COP-29 at Baku, saying the new global climate finance target of USD 300 billion annually by 2035 is "substantially insufficient" to meet the financing needs of developing nations. Responding to a question in the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Environment Kirti Vardhan Singh said that the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance "does not address the needs and priorities of developing countries" and is "incompatible with the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC) and Equity". He cited estimates of the Standing Committee on Finance under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which place these needs between USD 5.1-6.8 trillion (equivalent to USD 455-584 billion) per year for up to 2030. The minister said that the categorisation of climate-related outflows and financial efforts by multilateral development banks as contributions to the U

Says adaptation will be the focus area for all nations, urges India to accelerate its clean energy efforts, lauded LiFE mission and says India could be an example for the world on climate action

China has also built major dams on Tibet's major rivers to block access to water to downstream countries

By embedding food systems into urban governance, cities can influence local food environments and broader supply chains, paving the way for a more resilient and sustainable system

As the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, India requires over $10 trillion to achieve its net zero emissions target by 2070

The goal of tripling renewable energy by 2030, set at COP28, depends on urgently mobilising international finances for the developing world

This comes even as New Delhi is struggling to strike a balance between rapidly adopting EV and bolstering energy security by taking recourse to affordable and more reliable transport fuels

Describing COP29 as one steeped in "semantics and not solutions", a senior Indian official has called the proceedings a missed opportunity to mobilize meaningful climate finance for adaptation and mitigation efforts in developing nations. Leena Nandan, Secretary of the Environment, Forest, and Climate Change Ministry, highlighted India's strong stance during negotiations and its leadership role in articulating concerns of the developing world. Speaking about the outcomes of COP29 at a session, she said the conference, which was anticipated to focus on implementation, fell short of expectations. "This was to be an enabling COP, a COP which was going to be focused on the means of implementation and what is means of implementation other than funds and resources. And here it was that we found semantics and not solutions. We found rhetoric and not results. And that has been the biggest disappointment," she said, adding that the sentiment was echoed across the Global South. Nandan ...

Negotiators working on a treaty to address the global crisis of plastic pollution for a week in South Korea won't reach an agreement and plan to resume the talks next year. They are at an impasse over whether the treaty should reduce the total plastic on Earth and put global, legally binding controls on toxic chemicals used to make plastics. The negotiations in Busan, South Korea, were supposed to be the fifth and final round, to produce the first legally binding treaty on plastics pollution, including in the oceans, by the end of 2024. But with time running out early Monday, negotiators plan to resume the talks next year. More than 100 countries want the treaty to limit production as well as tackle cleanup and recycling, and many have said that is essential to address chemicals of concern. But for some plastic-producing and oil and gas countries, that crosses a red line. For any proposal to make it into the treaty, every nation must agree to it. Some countries sought to change the

Unusually for a UN climate summit, COP29 was mainly about climate finance, and yet the finance mandarins were missing

Investors largely agree that climate risks aren't fully priced into markets, and academics are now studying what they're calling the climate-sovereign debt doom loop to calculate the potential costs

India has gained traction from its negotiator's astringent rejection of the deal and advocacy for the Global South

Policymakers are missing a key point - there are few new and scaled-up technology solutions to mitigate climate change

UN Climate Change chief Simon Stiell lauded the passage and said that carbon markets would enable flow of $250 billion in annual financing

The transport sector is the second-highest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) globally, after the electricity and heat production sector