COP30 delivered enough political signals to confirm the direction of international carbon markets, with investors now shaping the system’s future more than negotiations themselves, speakers said during a webinar on Wednesday.

With all eyes on Brazil at the Amazon COP, there were still plenty of climate and carbon market developments from nearly a dozen other Latin American countries over the course of the two weeks. 

The UK will phase out free allocation of UKAs to industries covered by its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism over a period of nine years starting in 2027, the government confirmed in a statement on Wednesday.

Guinea is set to become the first West African country to introduce a carbon pricing instrument, and the first on the continent to apply it to a specific sector, according to a consultancy that has advised the government. 

A European airline will seek to compensate its emissions next year with a balanced portfolio of up to 1 million tonnes of carbon credits, a portion of which from carbon removals, but needs more regulatory clarity before purchasing CORSIA-eligible credits, an industry conference heard on Wednesday.

COP30 was a tale of two climate summits: on the one side, divisive negotiations over deals that largely reaffirmed existing climate goals; but on the other, a stronger-than-ever show of how action is already spreading faster and farther.

Barclay’s take on COP30 – COP30 revealed a “quiet shift”, less captivated by the next breakthrough and more focused on the specifics of meeting global climate goals, Barclays’ Daniel Hanna wrote in a blog post. In Hanna’s view, the summit highlighted Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Facility as a model for scalable, place based finance. The conference underscored three things relevant to green finance: 1) Target the real bottlenecks that block capital, 2) Create financing models that can be replicated, 3) Anchor everything in data, integrity and governance.

The non-market approaches of Article 6.8 promote a needs-based, non-correspondingly adjusted source of climate finance that complements the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) and Article 6.2, an African negotiator said on the sidelines of COP30.

Discussions on international carbon trading at COP30 exposed tensions about the function of a technical review process, key for transparency in new Paris Agreement markets, which may have significant implications for those seeking to sell reductions from Article 5.2 REDD+ programmes via Article 6.

Nigeria's COP30 delegation under fire – Nigeria’s decision to send a 749-member delegation to the COP30 international climate summit in Belem, Brazil, has sparked controversy, with critics arguing the size has undermined the summit’s credibility and appeared driven more by political patronage than climate-action urgency, Punch Nigeria reported. Many observers, including former presidential candidate Peter Obi, described the decision as a “misplaced priority”, pointing out that resources spent on travel could instead be used for poverty alleviation and domestic climate adaptation efforts. The government, meanwhile, justified the delegation size by noting that many attendees come from diverse sectors such as government, private sector, and civil society, and claimed a multidisciplinary approach is necessary for effective representation.

Decarbonising military aircraft offers a range of operational and combat benefits, a senior officer in the UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) told an aviation conference this week. 

ICAO has announced it is in the process of revising the CORSIA Annual Sector’s Growth Factor (SGF) for the year 2024.

Ethiopia and Singapore have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on carbon credits during a visit of the Asian country's prime minister to Addis Ababa this week.

Not yet - New Zealand's Climate Change Minister Simon Watts on Wednesday said that the government has ruled out buying foreign carbon credits for this term to meet its NDC, NZ City reported. He added that it could be an option in the future but the country is currently focussed on domestic reductions. The island nation earlier this year submitted its 2035 NDC without setting out a specific ambition for the use of Article 6.

The arrangements for next year’s climate talks, with Turkiye hosting and assuming the COP presidency and Australia leading the negotiations, is a “stepped-up model” of how the workload at the UN talks is usually distributed, said a veteran of past COPs.