Geoengineering Monitor newsletter December 2025
Billed variously as the “Implementation COP”, “Forest COP”, and “Bioeconomy COP”, the latest round of UN climate talks, COP30 in Belém, Brazil, delivered weak voluntary pledges, no fossil-fuel phase-out, and a worrying push to expand carbon markets and geoengineering schemes like Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).
Even after 30 rounds of major UN climate talks, negotiators still weren’t even able to agree to include a direct mention of fossil fuels in the resulting texts. As a consequence, “overshoot” is now baked into multilateral climate mitigation efforts. Much faith is being placed on carbon markets and their ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere through as yet unproven means.
National climate commitments (NDCs) under the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are still nowhere near ambitious enough, and are likely to usher in between two and three degrees of warming — an optimistic prediction that will have devastating consequences.
Worse still, many NDCs include huge CDR commitments, laid bare in the latest edition of the Land Gap Report, whose findings suggest that the land area pledged for CDR now exceeds one billion hectares — an area the size of China and equivalent to a third of the world’s arable land. This is neither sustainable nor realistic, and certainly not compatible with climate justice and protecting human rights.
Throughout the build-up to and aftermath of COP30, Geoengineering Monitor covered the major developments around CDR, land-based geoengineering and the carbon markets that they are inextricably linked to.
In “Carbon Dioxide Removal Narrative is Greenwashing Monoculture Tree Plantations,” Biofuelwatch campaigner Gary Hughes and Global Forest Coalition’s Oli Munnion made the link between CDR and the impacts of industrial plantation forestry, particularly in Latin America. They discussed so-called “conventional” CDR, which to date has been almost entirely reliant on plantation expansion, and “novel” CDR (aka geoengineering), with examples of BECCS and biochar projects linked to the expansion of eucalyptus monocultures.
In a two-part series, Tamra Gilbertson talked us through the role of CDR and carbon markets at COP30 in “Entrenching a New Era of Climate Colonialism,” Parts One and Two. The pieces firstly identified the likely fault lines and flashpoints around key issues such as Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and then helped us to understand what really unfolded behind the scenes — from late-night Article 6 “non-negotiations” to the growing web of CDR initiatives and market alliances.
Finally, Rachel Kennerley, Senior International Carbon Capture Campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law, exposed how Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and engineered CDR are being pushed as false solutions in “COP30’s Carbon Capture Frenzy – Lobbyists Pushing False Solutions Are Distracting From Real Climate Action.” The article described how a record 531 CCS lobbyists were registered at COP30, from oil giants like Exxon and Shell to CCS trade groups. If counted as a single delegation, they would have been the second largest at the entire summit.
Whilst COP30 ended in major disappointment, mass protests and vibrant counter-summits in Belém showed that, as multilateralism fails to deliver, international climate justice struggles are producing real alternatives. As our contribution to these struggles, Geoengineering Monitor will continue to bring you the latest news and updates on technological false solutions to the climate crisis.
Stay tuned in 2026 for much more!
