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The Energy Supply Financing Ratio (ESFR) compares a bank's financing of fossil fuels against its financing of sustainable energy alternatives. Based on the International Energy Agency's (IEA) Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenario, a ratio of 6:1 is required by 2030 to meet climate goals. However, Reclaim Finance finds that the 65 largest global banks averaged a ratio of only 0.42:1 between 2021 and 2024. The document warns that banks often use misleading methodologies—such as excluding capital markets activities or including fossil-fuel-linked technologies like CCUS in 'low-carbon' categories—to greenwash their climate strategies.

The document argues that the global military carbon footprint estimates provided by Bohigas et al (ranging from 0.5% to 1.3% of global emissions) are unreliable due to implausible assumptions and incomplete data. Specifically, it notes that the lower estimate assumes non-US militaries have zero emissions, while the upper estimate relies on US emissions intensity which may not reflect the higher fossil-fuel intensity of other major military spenders like China, Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia. The author further highlights the omission of aviation's upper-atmosphere heating effects, 'scope 3+' war-fighting impacts, and the potential of environmentally-extended input output models (EEIOMs) to provide more accurate data.

This working paper examines the tension between quantitative 'precisionism' and qualitative 'groundtruthing' in climate-risk mapping within the global South, proposing a framework called 'epistemic diplomacy' to integrate both evidence types for more equitable and effective policy interventions.

The document challenges the narrative that carbon credits drive corporate climate ambition, asserting that existing studies showing a correlation between credit use and decarbonisation suffer from methodological flaws, including sample bias and confounding factors. It highlights risks such as the 'investment effect' and 'target effect,' where credits compete with or substitute for internal abatement. The brief recommends that companies, regulators, and standard setters treat carbon credits only as complementary contributions (Beyond Value Chain Mitigation) and maintain a strict firewall between credit use and internal emission reduction targets.

Carbon Market Watch argues that the proposed CLEAR Methodology for Cooking Energy Transitions contains shortcomings and optionalities that risk overcrediting. The organization recommends replacing arbitrary downward adjustments for the Hawthorne effect with scientific evidence, adopting a conservative 4:1 wood-to-charcoal conversion factor, and implementing the annual downward baseline adjustments required by the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) Standard. Additionally, it suggests increasing the default leakage adjustment factor to 5%, updating fraction of non-renewable biomass (fNRB) values more frequently, and strengthening additionality testing by lowering the common practice threshold to 20%.

Reclaim Finance critiques PCAF's proposed expansion of avoided emissions reporting and the introduction of Expected Emission Reductions (EER), warning that these counterfactual-based metrics are subjective and prone to greenwashing. The briefing also highlights flaws in the 'financed emissions' formula, noting that it often fails to track real-world emissions due to its sensitivity to corporate value fluctuations. Reclaim Finance recommends that PCAF withdraw these proposed methodologies and instead adopt metrics that reflect actual counterparty performance and physical emissions intensities for target setting.

Australia's coal industry has seen a rapid expansion of open-cut mining, which grew by 224% between 1990 and 2022 and now accounts for over 85% of total production. This shift has led to a decrease in reported emissions intensity because open-cut mines rely on gas models from 1991 for estimates rather than direct measurement. Consequently, reported fugitive emissions from surface mines have grown at a significantly slower rate than production; for example, since 2005, production increased by 45% while fugitive emissions only rose by 13%.

Ember argues that the draft FNA methodology focuses too narrowly on "surplus" renewable power rather than the broader goal of decarbonising the electricity system. The organization advocates for renaming flexibility needs to "non-fossil flexibility network needs" to signal a shift away from fossil assets and avoid stranded investments. Ember also calls for greater data transparency, the inclusion of cost-efficiency metrics, and the integration of the FNA into the existing ERAA/NRAA modelling process to better optimize the dispatch between fossil and non-fossil assets.

The document examines how discrepancies between NDC accounting and IPCC standards lead to an overestimation of land-based carbon sequestration, potentially reducing the global carbon budget by 15-18%. It highlights that current NDC pledges for land-based removal involve approximately 1 billion hectares, which the author claims is impossible without threatening food security and biodiversity. Furthermore, the briefing critiques IPCC Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) for ignoring land tenure, human rights, and the declining ability of natural sinks to store carbon under rising temperatures, suggesting that sustainable removal potential is up to 79% lower than IPCC estimates.

The report critiques the GWP* (Global Warming Potential Star) metric, arguing that while it may be useful for specific climate modeling, its application to national or sectoral policy is unfair and scientifically misleading. Unlike the standard GWP, which uses a zero-emission baseline, GWP* evaluates current emissions relative to past levels, potentially rewarding countries with historically high emissions and penalizing developing nations. The authors contend that this approach can be used to justify continued methane pollution, particularly in the livestock sector, and advocate for a 'multi-basket' approach that sets separate targets for short-lived pollutants like methane and long-lived gases like CO2 to ensure equitable and effective climate action.

Carbon Market Watch (CMW) argues for increased stringency in the Article 6.4 mechanism, specifically regarding the permanence of carbon removals and the accountability of project participants. CMW proposes a minimum 100-year monitoring period for removals, the removal of options to cease monitoring based on vague evidence, and the implementation of a reversal risk assessment tool grounded in peer-reviewed science. The response also suggests a fee-based system to fund long-term monitoring and the ability to permanently ban participants who violate human rights or repeatedly cause avoidable reversals.

WRI researchers argue that global wood harvests significantly increase atmospheric carbon, with annual emissions estimated between 3.5 and 4.2 billion tons of CO2e. The document critiques 'netting' approaches that incorrectly label harvests as carbon neutral by offsetting them against unrelated forest growth. It projects a 54% increase in global wood consumption by 2050 and suggests that reducing fuelwood use and increasing plantation growth rates could mitigate these emissions.

The authors challenge a 2021 Natural England update to the 'Carbon Storage and Sequestration by Habitat' review, arguing that it lacks transparency in its review protocols and misrepresents evidence regarding prescribed fire in blanket bog ecosystems.

Carbon Market Watch argues that Article 6.4 methodologies must shift from incremental benefits to transformational activities to avoid eroding climate ambition. The organization advocates for the use of dynamic baseline contraction factors (BCFs) that trend toward zero by 2050, the implementation of 'negative lists' to exclude non-additional or fossil-fuel-linked projects, and the rejection of short-term sequestration activities as offsets due to non-permanence risks.

Reclaim Finance criticizes the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) for its energy sector benchmark, claiming it erroneously labels companies like TotalEnergies, Eni, and RWE as 1.5°C-aligned. The author argues the TPI methodology is flawed because it relies on company declarations rather than capital expenditure plans, ignores scope 3 emission targets, and overlooks the necessity of immediate short-term emission cuts, focusing instead on long-term targets for 2050.

The document critiques a study by Robiou du Pont et al. which claimed that wealthier nations, such as EU members, have made more equitable contributions to Paris Agreement goals than poorer nations like India and China. The authors of the letter contend that the study's methodology is skewed, specifically citing the over-prominence of "grandfathering" as an allocation principle when representing IPCC equity categories.

The authors critique current integrated assessment modelling (IAM), specifically as used in the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15), for being biased toward market-based policies and global cost-optimization while ignoring local priorities and institutional barriers. They propose a 'fit-for-purpose' paradigm where models are selected based on stakeholder-defined questions and indicators, rather than fitting questions to existing models. This bottom-up approach is presented as essential for creating inclusive, voluntary low-carbon transitions, particularly in complex environments like cities and coastal areas. The brief suggests that this shift in process—not necessarily in the models themselves—is required for future IPCC reports and the Paris Agreement's Global Stocktake.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) argues that a CMU study underestimated the environmental benefits of low-meat diets because it failed to account for land-use change, grouped beef with more efficient meats like pork, and modeled 'healthy' scenarios that actually increased total animal-based food intake. WRI asserts that shifting to realistic vegetarian diets can reduce per capita land use and greenhouse gas emissions by approximately half.

The policy brief examines the challenges of developing a robust accounting framework for climate finance under the UNFCCC, following a decision reached at the Paris negotiations. It identifies two competing approaches to accounting: one focused on 'meeting financial obligations' (assessing the effort of developed nations) and another on 'tracking resilient/low carbon finance' (assessing the total scale of global resources). The authors argue that current practices, particularly the OECD DAC Rio marker methodology, fail because they mix these two approaches, leading to overestimations, double counting, and a lack of transparency. The brief recommends that the SBSTA adopt a two-track approach to develop separate accounting systems for each purpose and establish an internationally agreed baseline to verify the additionality of financial contributions.

The authors argue that a fixed effect-based meta-analysis is inappropriate for studying the climate-conflict relationship due to extreme causal heterogeneity across different climatic conditions, conflict types, and spatial scales. While acknowledging a minor coding error, they maintain that the distribution of effects across studies contradicts the claim of a robust, singular aggregate relationship between climate and conflict.