World's most powerful nations are backtracking on fossil fuel pledge, say campaigners

This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Campaigners have claimed some of the world’s largest economies are turning their backs on a pledge made last year to transition away from fossil fuels.

Ministers from the G20 group of developed and developing countries, including the US, UK, China and India, will meet in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday to discuss the global approach to the climate crisis.

The talks will be chaired by Brazil, which holds the revolving presidency of the group. But members have left the explicit pledge out of the latest draft of their resolutions. The omission could result in a serious backsliding, campaigners fear, and they have called for the commitment to be reinstated.

In the first draft of the G20 communique on climate, which is under discussion, members explicitly reaffirmed the pledge to “transition away from fossil fuels”. The phrase was the most important commitment to emerge from the UN Cop28 climate summit in Dubai last year.

Never before had all countries directly addressed the need to give up fossil fuels, with previous agreements focusing on greenhouse gas emissions, temperature rises and the need to boost renewable energy, rather than name the root cause of the climate crisis.

The “transition away” pledge, which does not carry a timeline, was regarded as weak by some campaigners but was fought by some oil-producing countries.

Since the Cop summit, there have also been signs that Saudi Arabia, in particular, has tried to reinterpret the pledge as simply one option among many, rather than an imperative.

This year’s G20 meetings in Brazil are regarded as an important step to consolidating the progress made last year, and pushing the world forward to take action on the pledge.

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that in the latest draft of paragraph 5 of the communique, where the commitment appeared in the first draft, there is no repetition of the reference to “transition away”.

Instead, there is an oblique reference to the pledge, through a reference to “the goals set forth” in the Cop28 outcome, which include the commitment to transition away.

The latest version of the crucial paragraph, under discussion by the TF-Clima group, as the G20 ministerial climate taskforce is known, reads: “We welcome and fully subscribe to the ambitious and balanced outcome of the UN climate change conference in Dubai (Cop28), particularly the first global stocktake (GST-1) of the Paris agreement, which builds on the intent of the G20 New Delhi leaders’ declaration to pursue and encourage efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally and other zero- and low-emission technologies, including abatement and removal technologies, and to double the rate of energy efficiency improvement by 2030.

“We commit to operationalising our steps in this regard and to contributing to the goals set forth in paragraph 28 of the GST-1 decision, in line with our national circumstances.”

For the explicit pledge to be dropped from the G20 communique would mark a clear step backwards, campaigners warned.

Stela Herschmann, a climate policy specialist at Observatório do Clima in Brazil, said: “The resistance of countries to explicitly mention fossil fuels and the need to phase them out is evident, even after the GST-1 decision.

“However, there is no chance of limiting global warming to that level without tackling the root cause of the problem [fossil fuels] head on. Countries need to operationalise this now, and the G20 should lead this discussion, not shy away from it.”

Shreeshan Venkatesh, a global policy lead at the Climate Action Network, said: “Climate impacts are escalating, hence the costs of our collective inaction are increasing too. However, finance is continuing to flow in the wrong direction, adding fuel to the rapidly intensifying climate crisis.

“In this context, it is very concerning that G20 countries are unwilling to come through on their responsibilities to rapidly divest from harmful fossil fuels and lead efforts to amend our current economic system in a manner that unlocks lifesaving green investments in the global south and fosters a just and equitable transition.”

The leaders of the G20 countries will meet on 18 and 19 November, where geopolitics including the conflicts in Ukraine and Russia as well as Israel and Gaza are likely to dominate.

The conference will take place at the same time countries meet in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, for the Cop29 climate summit on 11-22 November.

Next year’s climate Cop – which stands for conference of the parties, under the 1992 UN framework convention on climate change, the parent treaty to the 2015 Paris agreement – will be held in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon.

The country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has taken a strong stance on economic justice as a significant theme of his G20 presidency.

Lula wants a global 2% wealth tax on billionaires, which would raise $250bn (£191bn), with some of the money going to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate breakdown.