Bonn Climate Talks Rife With Roadblocks and Dead Ends

As some wealthy countries backslide on climate promises, the world’s least developed countries warn that “every fraction of a degree matters.”

As the United Nations climate talks came to a faltering end Thursday in Bonn, Germany, the world’s least developed countries and island nations feared for their future while some rich, developed countries backslid on climate promises and doubled down on fossil fuels.

Preventing long-term warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial level should remain the laser focus of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change talks, said Evans Njewa, chair of the United Nations group of Least Developed Countries.

“As we gather here in Bonn, we remain nowhere near being on the path of 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said. Science unequivocally shows that level of warming over pre-industrial temperatures, which was reached for the first full year in 2024, is a “climate emergency” that endangers lives and must be addressed, he added.

“Every fraction of a degree matters to the group of least developed countries … home to more than 1 billion people on the front lines of the climate crisis,” he said, noting that those nations have done far less than developed nations to cause global warming. “We are already enduring the most devastating impacts, as shown by cyclones recently experienced in Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar, floods across Nepal, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, and droughts that destroy or have destroyed millions of livelihoods.”

Decrying the lack of progress at the annual talks, a coalition of more than 200 civil society and Indigenous groups delivered a letter to the UNFCCC on June 23, outlining ideas for reform, including ending what they see as corporate capture of the talks, ensuring more transparency in negotiations and putting human rights at the core of climate policy and action.

That puts climate policy squarely at an intersection with current political trends in some countries that are key to effective climate action, including the United States, where the new Republican administration is trying to dismantle climate policies established by the previous Democratic administration, and trying to enact other policies that would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. already emits about double the combined total greenhouse gas pollution of all 28 European Union countries, and is the single largest climate polluter in history.

But it’s not just the U.S. that’s backpedaling. New Zealand, under a conservative government elected in 2023, eased restrictions on offshore drilling for fossil fuels, and announced during the Bonn talks that it’s leaving the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. That alliance was formed by a coalition of countries trying to collaborate on a higher level of climate action, in part as a response to the slow UNFCCC process. 

In the European Union this week, mainstream conservative parties allied themselves with far-right nationalist parties to try and delay implementation of an important law that could help prevent tropical deforestation. And in Germany, a new conservative government has signaled that new spending on weapons may come at the expense of climate financing. 

More Talk, More Emissions

The 11 days of talks in Bonn mark the halfway point between last year’s 29th Conference of the Parties climate gathering in Baku, Azerbaijan, and COP30 this November in Belém, Brazil. The intersessional talks take place annually and focus on the work of subsidiary technical groups that provide the nuts and bolts for how the various UNFCCC agreements and programs are implemented and monitored, laying the groundwork for the next COP summit.

This summer, the talks came during a sweltering heat dome in the United States and on the heels of Earth’s hottest years on record. A sudden temperature spike in 2023 and 2024 raised concerns about accelerated warming, and the growing likelihood of high-impact climate shifts that seemed nearly unthinkable just a few years ago, like a civilization-altering shutdown of a key heat-distributing Atlantic Ocean current.

A few key areas of focus this year included finalizing a way to come up with the $1.3 trillion dollars in climate financing that was broadly agreed to at COP29 and finalizing a set of tools to measure the monitoring and effectiveness of climate adaptation measures. Countries were also prodded to submit more ambitious plans for emissions cuts via their voluntary Nationally Determined Contributions, the primary tool to limit warming under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.

The UNFCCC touted progress at the Bonn talks, including a new transparency framework for accountability in the Paris Agreement climate pledges. That enabled Panama to show how its ecosystems take up more carbon dioxide than the country emits, making it a net carbon sink. On the next-to-last day, many delegates said they see emerging solidarity on a key gender action plan, to be finalized at COP30 in Belém, that will spell out ways to effectively implement gender-responsive climate action.

But observers of the talks said there was not much progress on core issues, especially regarding finance, with some countries shifting spending priorities to weapons and other war materials. Recent elections and resulting policy changes in the United States and Germany, to name just a few, as well as the influence of far-right parties in the European Union, also made more ambitious emissions targets seem less likely in some key industrial countries that are among the world’s biggest historical climate polluters.

Ten Years After the Paris Pact

Despite the current hurdles, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said the world still has reason to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement. 

“Ten years ago, the Paris Agreement showed the world that multilateralism can deliver,” he said in a June 21 speech at the Bonn conference. “The prognosis was—and remains—clear: Without cooperation between nations, humanity was on a crash course for self-destruction.”

He said research shows that, without the Paris accord, the world would be on course for about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) of human-caused warming. 

“No nation, no economy, could survive that,” he said. “We’re now headed for around 3. It shows how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.”

That distance includes the gap between financial promises made and kept, said Anne Rasmussen, the lead climate negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, at a Tuesday press conference in Bonn.

“AOSIS is bewildered by the backwards tracking on finance,” she said, adding that the UNFCCC member countries are obligated to implement the $1.3 billion climate finance package approved at COP29.

“The discussions here in Bonn must be urgently progressed,” she said. “Climate change and its devastating impacts are accelerating. Why are we not acting at least apace?”

She said it’s easy to succumb to the “distraction and despair of international military conflicts, which are highlighted in the headlines,” but if “countries do not act with real ambition to achieve the pledges they made when we all committed to the Paris Agreement 10 years ago, we will be truly lost.”

The economies of small island states are stymied by climate disasters they did not cause, she said. Not even a year ago, she noted, the Caribbean was ravaged by Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic ever recorded and a storm that was super-charged by human-caused warming.

Rising Geoengineering Concerns in Africa

The backsliding on climate promises goes hand-in-hand with increasing talk about controversial and unproven climate-hacking schemes like intentionally polluting the stratosphere to reflect heat away from the planet, according to Hands Off Mother Earth, a nonprofit watchdog group that tries to track all types of geoengineering plans, policies and research around the planet.

Geoengineering was not specifically itemized on the UNFCCC’s Bonn agenda, but showed up in various negotiations, as well as during side events during the talks, said Tamra Gilbertson, who tracked the Bonn talks for the Indigenous Environmental Network.

She said geoengineering oceans to absorb more carbon by adding mass quantities of certain minerals to their waters was discussed in formal sessions in the UNFCCC’s Ocean Dialogue, and in discussions about the carbon markets section of the Paris Agreement. “Proponents of ocean geoengineering pushed blue carbon, blue offsets, and the blue economy,” she wrote via email.

Watchdog groups are concerned that the next round of national climate plans, which are due in November before COP30, could include geoengineering offsets as part of high-risk methods to mitigate global warming, which “raises red flags for land rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and environmental integrity,” she wrote.

International climate justice groups are concerned that geoengineering plans are already being made without adequate engagement with the people who would be most affected, including Indigenous communities and developing countries in the Global South, and potentially in violation of existing international restrictions on climate hacking. 

“Geoengineering is a smokescreen that delays the urgent emissions cuts we need,” said Kwami Kpondzo, speaking at a June 24 press conference in Bonn on behalf of the Global Forest Coalition and as co-coordinator of the HOME Alliance Africa Working Group.

As the number of outdoor geoengineering experiments grows, and as various countries establish research plans, Kpondzo said he’s concerned “the development of technologies is being quietly embedded into the UNFCCC process,” he said. “It is not a climate solution. It is a climate scam. It is colonialism in a new form.”

Africa has been proposed as a potential target area for some geoengineering plans, but those intentions may be misguided, said Mfoniso Xael, who tracked the Bonn talks for the Nigeria-based Health of Mother Earth Foundation.

“The very idea that African lands, skies and communities should be used to test risky technologies like solar radiation modification, or what is now called manipulation, is both unethical and unjust,” she said.

Not Africa, but the Global North, “through centuries of industrial emissions, land grabs and environmental destruction, is overwhelmingly responsible for the warming of our planet and the crisis that we face today,” she said. “Yet today, instead of cutting the emissions at the source, some of these same powerful actors are pushing unproven technologies, technologies that interfere with the Earth system, onto Africa.”

Some scientists, including well-respected climate experts like James Hansen, have said geoengineering should at least be well-researched to preserve options for future generations, but Dylan Hamilton, with the Alliance of Non-Governmental Radical Youth, said many young people don’t see a future that includes geoengineering. 

“There is no future that includes fossil fuel expansion,” he said. “There is no future that includes the same capitalist and colonial systems of exploitation. There is no future where commodifying our planet will somehow save it.” 

Instead, Hamilton said, “solutions will come from dismantling our extractive economy, redistributing power and centering those who are most impacted in this fight for a livable future.”

Cover photo:  Representatives attend the closing plenary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change talks on June 26 in Bonn, Germany. Credit: Lara Murillo/U.N. Climate Change