Climate calling

Australia has been hit with severe storms in the past few weeks. The increasingly common presence of floods has worried Australians that fear a future of extreme weather for the country.

The world’s nations will finish negotiating a treaty this weekend to address the global plastic pollution crisis. Led by Norway and Rwanda, 66 countries plus the European Union say they want to address the total amount of plastic on Earth by controlling its design, production, consumption and disposal.

The COP-29 summit has ended without clear climate finance targets, highlighting divisions over funding commitments to tackle global warming and support vulnerable nations. A last-minute agreement on funding increases has failed to satisfy developing and developed countries, leaving key issues unresolved and raising doubts about the global response to the climate crisis.

Substantial coral losses on the Great Barrier Reef of up to 72 per cent have been recorded following extensive bleaching and natural disasters last summer. The declines have been noted in new research - from the Australian Institute of Marine Science - for more than half of its reefs surveyed between Lizard Island and Cardwell.

The COP Climate Summit has been branded "no longer fit for purpose" in an open letter to the United Nations. The letter, signed by a series of former diplomats and leading climate experts, calls for urgent reforms to the annual summit as progress towards emission targets slow down.

Economists have told COP29 that developing countries need at least $1.5 trillion annually by the end of the decade to cope with climate change. The success of this year's UN climate summit therefore hinges on whether countries can agree on a new finance target for richer countries, development lenders and the private sector to deliver each year. But political tensions and disagreements are making progress a challenge.

A new report has calculated how much annual climate finance is needed to flow from rich nations to Pacific countries. The funds would help speed up the energy transition, address climate impacts, and deal with climate-related loss and damage. The report by Caritas Australia and the Jubilee Australia Research Centre finds that around US$1.5 billion is needed annually to meet the climate finance needs for Pacific nations. The current gap or shortfall is calculated to be two-thirds of that amount. Report co-author Damian Spruce from Caritas Australia spoke to Biwa Kwan about the report's findings as world leaders at COP29 negotiate a deal for a new climate finance target.

Argentina's government has ordered its negotiators to withdraw from the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan. The country's leader, Javier Milei, has described the climate crisis as a socialist lie, and has threatened to withdraw from the Paris agreement.

Pacific Island youth leaders say the stakes couldn't be higher at this year's United Nations climate summit. Even as Donald Trump threatens to pull out of the Paris climate agreement for a second time, world leaders meeting in Azerbaijan for COP29 have to decide on a new climate finance goal. Fifteen years after the last target was set, the new deal will involve determining how many hundreds of billions - or even trillions - of dollars a year will flow from rich nations to poor nations to help them reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

As world leaders debate ways to reduce carbon emissions at the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan ((Nov 11-22)), one Australian start-up believes fungi could be the key to mitigating climate change. The company has developed a product for farmers made from live fungi spores to help lock carbon in agricultural soils.