Libya is best known for its oil, but a meeting in Tripoli this September pointed to a different energy future. The Renewable Energy Authority of Libya (REAoL), chaired by Abdel Salam Al-Ansari, held talks with a delegation from the Libyan British Business Council (LBBC), led by Peter Millett, a former British Ambassador to Libya. As reported by the Libya Herald, the discussion centred on cooperation and investment opportunities in the country's energy sector. The room was notable for who filled it. Alongside REAoL board members and directors sat representatives of BP, Shell, Glencore, Metlen, KB and John Reid & Sons. That mix of oil majors, a global commodities group and engineering and contracting firms suggests that the conversation was about real projects and real capital, not only about policy aspirations. According to the report, the two sides discussed investment prospects in solar and wind energy, along with energy efficiency, sustainable technologies and knowledge transfer. REAoL used the meeting to present its role, its competencies and its plans for expanding renewable energy across the country. Libya's abundant sunshine and long open coastline make solar and wind natural candidates for that expansion. Perhaps the most striking item on the agenda was electrical interconnection between Libya and Europe. A cable linking North African generation to European grids could turn Libya from a fossil-fuel exporter into a potential exporter of clean electricity, while helping European buyers diversify their own supply. It is an ambitious idea that would demand long-term planning, stable regulation and significant financing, which is exactly why early dialogue with investors matters. The talks also covered coordination mechanisms to support Libya's goal of diversifying its energy sources. The LBBC said planning is under way to continue the conversation in London, giving members the chance to "continue the dialogue around specific projects and take the next steps towards investment and deal-making." Moving from general discussion to named projects is the step that separates a promising meeting from a bankable pipeline. For Libya, the stakes are practical as well as environmental. Reliable electricity supports households, hospitals, water systems and businesses, and a broader energy mix reduces exposure to swings in oil markets and to disruption of any single pipeline or facility. Bringing in foreign technology and expertise, and building local skills through knowledge transfer, can also help the country build lasting capacity rather than depending on imported solutions. Challenges remain. Investors will look for clear rules, secure grid access and dependable counterparties, and interconnection projects cross borders and regulatory systems. A meeting is not a contract, and nothing reported from Tripoli commits any company to build anything. Still, the willingness of established energy players to sit at the table with Libya's renewable energy regulator is a meaningful early sign. WHY IT MATTERS A Libya-Europe power interconnection would be a partnership in the truest SDG 17 sense: North African generation serving European demand, with technology and skills flowing the other way. The Tripoli talks are early, but they put cross-border clean-electricity trade on the table with the companies that could finance it. For readers following Africa's energy transition, Libya is a case worth watching. If the London follow-up produces named projects, the country could become a significant node in a North Africa-Europe clean energy corridor. Source: Libya Herald, 16 September 2026.

For years, a product could carry the word "eco" or "green" on its packaging with almost nothing behind it. As of 27 September, that changes in Italy. A new legislative decree transposing EU Directive 2024/825 — known as the "Consumer Empowerment for the Green Transition" directive — has taken effect, rewriting the rules on how companies are allowed to talk about sustainability, as reported by ANSA's ASviS channel. The directive itself was approved by the European Parliament and Council back in February 2024, but Italy only formalised its own version on 20 February 2026, through Legislative Decree No. 30, which amends the national Consumer Code. The gap between EU approval and national enforcement is exactly the kind of loophole the rules are now designed to close. Why regulators moved The trigger for the crackdown was not abstract. A coordinated sweep by EU consumer authorities in 2020 examined 344 environmental claims made online and found that 37 per cent used vague, unsubstantiated language, 59 per cent offered no accessible evidence to back up what they claimed, and close to half showed signs of being false or misleading outright. Those numbers gave regulators the evidence base to move from guidance to enforceable law. What companies can no longer say Under the new rules, generic labels such as "green," "eco," "environmentally friendly" or "biodegradable" are off-limits unless a company can demonstrate genuinely superior environmental performance to back them up. Claiming a whole product is sustainable because one component — packaging, say — is recyclable is now explicitly prohibited, as is presenting a legally required feature as if it were a voluntary environmental achievement. Misleading colour schemes, leaf icons or imagery that imply a green credential the product does not actually have are also banned outright. The climate-specific provision is arguably the sharpest change. Companies can no longer market a product as "climate neutral," "CO2 neutral" or having "reduced climate impact" purely on the basis of purchased carbon credits or offsets elsewhere in the world. Offsetting itself is not banned — businesses can keep buying credits — but they can no longer imply the underlying product itself now produces fewer emissions as a result. Any future environmental commitment a company makes in its marketing must now come with a public, measurable target, a defined timeline, and independent third-party verification, and voluntary sustainability labels must be tied to a recognised certification scheme or a public authority rather than invented in-house. Enforcement through the Consumer Code Because the directive was transposed directly into Italy's Consumer Code, breaches become a consumer-protection matter rather than a voluntary code of conduct, giving Italian authorities the same enforcement tools they already use against other forms of misleading commercial practice. That institutional weight is what separates this from the patchwork of earlier voluntary ESG-reporting frameworks: a false "climate neutral" label is now, in principle, treated the same way as any other deceptive advertising claim. The bigger picture The change lands at a moment when sustainability claims have become a genuine point of competitive differentiation, which is exactly what made the old, loosely policed language so easy to abuse. By forcing every "green" claim to be provable, timed and independently checked, Italy's implementation of the directive aims to reward companies that have actually invested in cleaner production, while stripping the marketing advantage from those that were merely describing themselves that way. The ban on unverified "climate neutral" labelling is the part worth watching closely. Offsetting has quietly become a way for companies to claim progress without actually cutting emissions from their own operations — closing that loophole doesn't stop offsetting, but it does stop it being mistaken for decarbonisation, which is a meaningful distinction for climate accounting everywhere, not just in Italy.

Happy Sunday! Every year on 27 September the world marks World Tourism Day. It's usually about big numbers: arrivals, flights, hotel beds. This week we'd like to look at something smaller and a lot more fun: the trip you can take this afternoon, without a passport. Autumn is when Malta and Gozo are at their best. The heat has eased, the sea is still warm, the first rains turn the fields green again and the summer crowds are thinning out. That makes it the perfect time for slow travel. What is slow travel? Slow travel means fewer places and more time in each one. You swap rushing and ticking off sights for walking, lingering, talking to people and spending your money where it stays in the community. It's lighter on the planet and kinder to the places we love. It's also far more relaxing. The UN's theme for this year's World Tourism Day looks at how digital tools and AI are reshaping travel. It also warns that algorithms can keep sending everyone to the same few hotspots. Slow travel is the friendly antidote: go where the app isn't pointing. Six gentle ideas for an autumn day out Let the bus or ferry do the driving. Residents with a personalised tallinja card travel free on Malta and Gozo's scheduled buses and on the harbour ferries between Sliema, Valletta and the Three Cities. A ferry across the Grand Harbour is still one of the most beautiful short journeys in the Mediterranean. Walk a little further. Try the clifftop paths around Dingli, the shady trails of Buskett, the Majjistral Nature and History Park near Golden Bay, or one of Gozo's coastal walks. Autumn light makes them glow. Go off-peak and off-map. Pick a village you've never really explored. Visit on a weekday morning, find the parish church, the little square and the bakery, and just sit for a while. Eat local, eat seasonal. Choose family-run restaurants and kiosks, buy from farmers and fishermen where you can, and ask what's in season. Figs, pomegranates and fresh ġbejniet are all fair game. Stay a night on Gozo instead of a day trip. One overnight in a locally owned guesthouse or farmhouse turns a rushed trip into a real break. It also spreads your spending beyond the ferry queue. Bring the family, not the car. Pack a picnic in reusable boxes, fill water bottles before you leave and make the journey part of the adventure. Kids love a bus-and-boat day. Your leave-no-trace checklist Take home everything you bring, and pick up one extra piece of litter if you can. Stick to marked paths, especially on cliffs and garigue, where tiny plants take years to recover. Give wildlife and nesting birds space, and keep noise down in the countryside. Say no to single-use cups, cutlery and bags. Refill instead of buying bottled water. Buy a souvenir made here by someone local, such as lace, pottery or honey. Small trips, big difference Tourism matters enormously to our islands. It brings jobs, keeps traditions alive and shares our culture with the world. When we travel slowly, locals and visitors alike, more of that good stays where it belongs: with the people, places and nature that make Malta and Gozo special. So this week, leave the car keys at home, pick a path you've never walked and take your time. The best view on the island might be one you've driven past a hundred times. Have a lovely, unhurried Sunday.

Speaking to world leaders gathered in New York this week, UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered one of his starker paradoxes yet: renewable energy is expanding faster than at any point in history, and still the planet has never been closer to breaching the temperature limits the world agreed to respect. "Never have renewable energies advanced so rapidly," he told the UN General Assembly. "Never has the planet been so close to crossing the limits it committed to." His message was blunt — growth in clean power is not, on its own, enough. Governments now need to set hard deadlines for phasing fossil fuels out altogether. A widening gap between ambition and emissions Guterres' warning lands against an uncomfortable backdrop. Global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising even as solar and wind installations break records year after year, and the 1.5°C threshold set out in the Paris Agreement is now expected to be breached within years rather than avoided outright. The paradox he described is not new, but the urgency behind it is sharper: with the headline climate target slipping out of reach, simply adding renewables to the grid without retiring fossil generation is no longer being treated as adequate climate policy by the UN's own leadership. What Guterres is asking for The Secretary-General's ask had three parts: specific, dated commitments from governments to phase out coal, oil and gas; continued and accelerated renewable energy expansion; and a deep overhaul of how climate finance is structured, so the money needed for the transition actually reaches the countries and companies that need it. None of the three demands is new on its own, but bundling them into a call for deadlines — rather than the vaguer "ambition" language typical of General Assembly week — marks a pointed shift in tone. Malta's own reckoning For a small, import-dependent state like Malta, that pointed language is worth sitting with. Gas already supplies the majority of Malta's electricity — around 56 per cent on the latest generation figures — with solar contributing roughly 11 per cent and close to a third of consumption arriving via the interconnector with Sicily. Rather than setting a phase-out date for that gas dependency, Malta's own energy strategy currently proposes close to the opposite: extending Enemalta's single-supplier LNG derogation out to 2035, so the existing gas-based system can keep running while the rest of the transition catches up. That is not to say nothing is moving. Malta's National Energy and Climate Plan targets a rise in renewables' share of final energy consumption from 17.2 per cent today to 25 per cent by 2030, backed by a second Malta–Sicily interconnector, offshore floating wind and floating solar pilots, and a fast-growing electric vehicle fleet. Malta has also signed memoranda of understanding with Libya, Tunisia and Egypt to explore Mediterranean interconnection and renewable energy partnerships — a small but concrete example of the cross-border cooperation and financing reform Guterres was calling for on a global scale. The island has committed to climate neutrality by 2050, even though it accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of total EU greenhouse gas emissions. The road ahead The tension here is not unique to Malta: plenty of governments are simultaneously expanding renewables and locking in fossil infrastructure for the medium term, exactly the pattern Guterres was criticising in New York. What his intervention does is remove the excuse that ambition alone counts as progress. For Malta, that means the real test isn't whether renewables keep growing — on current plans, they will — but whether a firm date is ever put on the gas dependency they are meant to replace.

For years, corporate sustainability reports have leaned heavily on a company's own smokestacks and electricity bills: the emissions a business can measure most easily, control most directly, and reduce with the clearest line of sight. Worthington Enterprises, the Columbus, Ohio-based manufacturer of pressure cylinders, HVAC components, metal building products and consumer tools, followed that pattern for years too. Its newly published 2026 Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability Report, covering the fiscal year from June 1, 2025 through May 31, 2026, changes that. For the first time, Worthington has disclosed a full Scope 3 value-chain emissions inventory alongside its Scope 1 and Scope 2 figures. The numbers are a useful reminder of something the sustainability accounting world has argued for years but that rarely gets illustrated this cleanly: for a company that makes things out of steel, the real carbon story is not inside its own walls. What Scope 1, 2 and 3 Actually Cover Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard, which Worthington uses as its reporting framework, emissions are split into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources the company owns or controls, such as fuel burned in its own furnaces, ovens and vehicles. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the electricity, steam or heat it purchases to run its facilities. Scope 3 covers everything else in the value chain — emissions embedded in the goods and services it buys, the transportation of materials to and from its plants, the commuting of its employees, and, further downstream, the emissions generated when customers use and eventually dispose of its products. Scope 3 is optional under many disclosure regimes and notoriously difficult to calculate, which is why a large share of companies that report Scope 1 and Scope 2 each year still leave Scope 3 blank, partial, or several years stale. Worthington's FY26 report is explicit that this is new ground for the company: its own environmental data tables show dashes for Scope 3 in fiscal 2024 and 2025, with a note directing readers to the company's CDP responses for those years instead. In other words, FY26 is effectively Worthington's first true, comprehensive Scope 3 baseline. The Scale of the Gap The scale of what that baseline reveals is striking. Worthington's Scope 1 emissions for FY26 came to 41,848 metric tons of CO2-equivalent, and its Scope 2 emissions came to 45,683 tCO2e on a market-adjusted basis (44,565 tCO2e on a location-based basis, which reflects the average emissions intensity of the regional electricity grids where its facilities sit rather than the specific contracts it holds). Added together, those two scopes — the emissions most companies report first and often report only — total roughly 87,500 tCO2e. Scope 3, by contrast, adds up to approximately 572,500 tCO2e across the ten value-chain categories Worthington disclosed. That means Scope 3 accounts for close to 87 percent of Worthington's total carbon footprint, with direct operations and purchased energy together making up barely 13 percent. Put differently: for every ton of carbon dioxide Worthington's own factories and purchased power produce, its supply chain and product life cycle produce nearly seven more. The single largest line item by a wide margin is purchased goods and services, which Worthington reports at 402,409 tCO2e for FY26. That one category alone is larger than every other emissions source in the company's inventory combined — larger than Scope 1 and Scope 2 together, and larger than the other nine Scope 3 categories combined. It represents roughly 70 percent of Worthington's total Scope 3 footprint and about 61 percent of its entire carbon footprint across all three scopes. For a company whose core business is forming and finishing steel into pressure cylinders, tanks, roofing components and structural products, this is not a surprising result in the abstract — steelmaking is one of the most carbon-intensive industrial processes in the world, and a metals fabricator's biggest climate lever is very often the metal itself rather than the factory that shapes it. What is notable is that Worthington has now put a number on it, and that number dwarfs everything the company measures inside its own operating footprint. Green Steel: A Concrete First Step That context makes one of the report's product-innovation stories read differently than it might on its own. Worthington discloses that it has begun manufacturing pressure cylinders using low-carbon steel produced by ArcelorMittal through a renewable-energy-based process, and that switching to this steel cuts the embedded carbon dioxide emissions of the affected cylinders by 73 percent compared with traditionally produced steel. The report describes Worthington as the first company to manufacture pressure cylinders using this renewably produced steel. Framed in the report primarily as a product and engineering milestone, it also happens to be the clearest lever visible anywhere in the report against the single biggest number in the company's own emissions inventory — the steel it buys. Worthington does not explicitly connect the two in its disclosure; the low-carbon steel initiative sits in the Products section of the report, while the 402,409-tonne purchased-goods figure sits in the Process & Planet section, and the report never draws a direct line between them or quantifies what share of purchased-goods emissions the low-carbon steel program currently offsets. That gap between a genuinely significant product-level decarbonization step and an explicit value-chain emissions strategy is worth noting for anyone reading the report closely: the ingredients for a purchased-goods reduction narrative are there, but Worthington has not yet assembled them into one. A second, related initiative sits alongside the steel story. Worthington's Ragasco composite cylinder business has launched what the report calls the Cylinder Collective, a program to recover and reuse materials from composite gas cylinders at end of life through a thermal recovery process, with a statewide pilot now operating in Connecticut. Composite cylinders are lighter than steel ones and have their own embedded-carbon profile tied to the resins and fibers used to make them; a recovery and reuse pathway for those materials is a direct response to the "end-of-life treatment of sold products" category in the Scope 3 inventory, where Worthington reports 23,768 tCO2e for FY26. The company also discloses that its Ragasco business has begun producing environmental product declarations and offers a carbon footprint calculator for its composite cylinders — the kind of granular, product-level carbon accounting that, if extended across more of Worthington's portfolio, would eventually let the company attach real numbers to initiatives like this one rather than describing them qualitatively. The Rest of the Value Chain The remaining Scope 3 categories round out a picture of a fairly typical durable-goods manufacturer's value chain, once the outsized purchased-goods figure is set aside. "Use of sold products" — the emissions generated when Worthington's customers actually use what the company makes, relevant for products like HVAC components and heating and cooking cylinders that consume energy in the field — comes to 72,673 tCO2e, the second-largest Scope 3 category after purchased goods. Upstream transportation and distribution, covering the movement of raw materials and components into Worthington's plants, adds 22,363 tCO2e. Fuel- and energy-related activities not already captured in Scope 1 or 2 — essentially the upstream emissions of producing the fuel and electricity Worthington itself consumes — contribute 16,969 tCO2e. Employee commuting adds 12,655 tCO2e, investments (a category that typically applies to a company's financial holdings and joint ventures rather than its operations) add 11,035 tCO2e, downstream transportation and distribution of finished products to customers adds 5,082 tCO2e, business travel adds 3,149 tCO2e, and waste generated in Worthington's own operations adds a comparatively small 2,391 tCO2e. Worthington's report notes that five of the fifteen standard GHG Protocol Scope 3 categories — capital goods, upstream leased assets, processing of sold products, downstream leased assets, and franchises — were excluded either because they are not applicable to the business or because they are already captured within other reported categories, a fairly standard scoping decision for an industrial manufacturer of this type. Methodology, Assurance and What's Missing On methodology, Worthington states that it calculated its Scope 3 emissions using primary data where it was available, supplemented by supplier-specific data and standard emissions factors drawn from CDP, the UK's DEFRA database, the U.S. EPA, and environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) models, depending on what was appropriate to each category. That mixed approach — part supplier-reported, part modeled — is standard practice for first-year Scope 3 inventories, since very few companies can get primary, verified data from every supplier and downstream customer in year one. The report references an assurance letter covering its greenhouse gas calculations but does not reproduce that letter's contents or scope within the document itself, so readers cannot tell from the report alone exactly which figures carry third-party assurance and which do not — a common limitation in first-year value-chain disclosures, but one worth flagging for readers who want to weigh the numbers' reliability. What the report does not yet contain is any emissions-reduction target that explicitly covers Scope 3. Worthington's stated climate goals — cutting Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 60 percent from a fiscal 2024 baseline by 2034, and reaching net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2050 — apply only to the roughly 13 percent of the company's footprint it directly controls. The 87 percent of emissions now disclosed as Scope 3 has no comparable target attached to it in this report. That is not unusual for a company in its first year of full Scope 3 disclosure; setting a credible reduction target for value-chain emissions typically requires at least a year or two of consistent measurement to establish a reliable baseline and trend line, which Worthington now has the beginning of. But it does mean the headline decarbonization commitments in this report cover only a small fraction of what the report's own data shows to be the company's actual footprint. Intensity Metrics and Governance Two intensity figures in the report put the absolute numbers in useful proportion. Worthington discloses a combined Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions intensity of 0.063 tCO2e per $1,000 of revenue on both a location-based and market-based basis, alongside an overall energy intensity of 0.895 gigajoules per $1,000 of revenue. The company does not disclose an equivalent intensity figure for Scope 3, and without a stated FY26 revenue figure in the report itself, readers cannot independently translate the 572,500-tonne Scope 3 total into a comparable per-dollar metric — a gap that, once Worthington has a second or third year of Scope 3 data to compare against, would let it show whether value-chain emissions are growing in line with the business, faster than it, or, ideally, more slowly. On the governance side, the report says climate-related financial risk is assessed through Worthington's enterprise risk management system, and credits that process with helping the company avoid roughly $2.2 million in costs over three years, though it does not specify how that figure was calculated or which categories of risk it covers. Inside its own operations, Worthington's Environmental Excellence program — an ISO 14001-based environmental management system paired with software the company calls WEEMS for data collection and incident reporting — is now active at 11 of Worthington's manufacturing locations, with two sites, both in Raufoss, Norway, holding formal ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 certification. That operational infrastructure is what generates the Scope 1 and Scope 2 numbers with reasonable precision each year; nothing comparable yet exists on the Scope 3 side, where the report leans instead on supplier data and modeled emissions factors. Supply Chain Engagement Where the report does show forward motion on the value-chain side is in supply chain engagement infrastructure rather than emissions targets specifically. Worthington describes roughly 300 suppliers engaged annually, with all suppliers covered by some form of indirect data collection and 54 percent engaged directly, including 100 percent of suppliers the company classifies as high-risk — defined as either non-domestic suppliers or those representing the top 80 percent of spend. Domestic U.S. suppliers account for 85 percent of Worthington's supplier spending, a detail relevant to both the company's transportation-related emissions and its broader supply chain risk profile. The report sets a target of implementing a formal Supply Chain Sustainability Management Program by the end of fiscal 2026 and engaging 100 percent of its strategic global supply chain — defined as high-risk and high-spend suppliers combined — by the end of fiscal 2027. One packaging supplier, Veritiv, is highlighted for introducing a recycled-PET packaging solution that the report says reduces both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions during production, achieving 50 to 60 percent recycled content in the plastic packaging it supplies to Worthington. These are the building blocks of a supplier-side decarbonization program, even though the report stops short of quantifying what emissions reduction they are expected to deliver or tying them explicitly to the purchased-goods total. A Pattern Across Heavy Industry Worthington's experience is a useful case study precisely because it is not unusual. Across heavy industry and manufacturing, Scope 3 emissions routinely dwarf Scope 1 and Scope 2 combined, for the same structural reason visible in Worthington's numbers: the carbon cost of producing raw steel, aluminum, plastics and other purchased materials is generally far higher than the carbon cost of cutting, welding, forming and coating those materials into finished products. Disclosure regimes are increasingly catching up to that reality — the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and evolving frameworks from bodies like the ISSB are pushing more companies toward comprehensive value-chain disclosure, and investors and customers alike are starting to ask harder questions about embedded emissions rather than just operational ones. Worthington's decision to publish a full Scope 3 inventory this year, even without a Scope 3 target to match it, puts real numbers on the table that can now be tracked, scrutinized and, in future years, measured against a trend line. The company's CEO, Joe Hayek, frames the broader sustainability program in the report as a matter of "measured momentum" and "steady, meaningful progress, grounded in discipline, accountability and continuous improvement" — language that, applied to the Scope 3 disclosure specifically, describes where Worthington sits today: a first, transparent baseline, a handful of genuinely promising product-level decarbonization initiatives already underway in low-carbon steel and cylinder recovery, and a value-chain emissions target that has not yet been written. What happens over the next two fiscal years will say a good deal about whether this first disclosure becomes the start of a genuine value-chain decarbonization program or stays a one-time accounting exercise. Worthington has already committed to two concrete, dated milestones that touch its supply chain directly: finishing its Supply Chain Sustainability Management Program by the end of FY26, and engaging its full strategic supplier base — the high-risk and high-spend suppliers who between them likely account for a large share of that 402,409-tonne purchased-goods figure — by the end of FY27. Neither milestone is explicitly framed in the report as an emissions target, but both create the data infrastructure a real one would require. A second consecutive year of Scope 3 disclosure would also let Worthington do something it cannot yet do: show whether the number is moving, and in which direction, rather than presenting a single snapshot. For a company whose value-chain emissions are nearly seven times its direct footprint, that trend line, once it exists, may end up mattering more to investors, customers and regulators than any other figure in the report. Why It Matters Worthington's numbers are a useful stand-in for a problem the entire heavy-manufacturing sector shares. Steel, cement, aluminum and other primary materials carry most of the embodied carbon in almost anything built from them, which means a metals fabricator can hit every operational target it sets — cleaner electricity, less waste, safer plants — and still leave the great majority of its footprint untouched. That is exactly what Worthington's own data shows: an 87 percent Scope 3 share against a Scope 1 and 2 target that only reaches the remaining 13 percent. The green steel cylinders are proof this is solvable at the product level, not just a talking point — a 73 percent cut in embedded carbon is real and available today. What is missing is the connective tissue between that kind of innovation and an enterprise-wide strategy: a target, a timeline, and a plan for scaling low-carbon material sourcing across the portfolio rather than one product line. That gap is where the real story is for any hard-to-abate manufacturer reading this report, Worthington included — not whether the technology exists, but whether the strategy will catch up to it.

Kenya is famous for its national parks and wildlife reserves, yet a new regional assessment suggests the country is further from the global conservation target than its reputation might imply. According to the Biodiversity Outlook for Eastern and Southern Africa (BOESA), launched in Nairobi this week by the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), just 13.94 per cent of Kenya's land and 0.59 per cent of its marine area are covered by protected and conserved areas. That places Kenya eighth in the region, as reported by The Standard. The benchmark is Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the so-called 30x30 goal, which commits countries to effectively conserve at least 30 per cent of land, inland waters, coastal and marine areas by 2030. On the outlook's numbers, Kenya would need to add a further 16.06 percentage points of its territory to get there, with barely four years left on the clock. Several neighbours are already well past the line. Seychelles leads the regional table with 68.12 per cent of its land protected, followed by Zambia at 41.27 per cent, Tanzania at 39.95 per cent and Namibia at 39.92 per cent. Botswana, Mozambique and Malawi also rank ahead of Kenya for terrestrial coverage. For Kenya, the report counts 41 protected and conserved areas spanning roughly 82,185 square kilometres, a substantial estate, but one that still falls short of what the global framework asks for. The marine figure is arguably the more striking. At well under one per cent, Kenya's protected ocean area is a fraction of the 30 per cent ambition, despite a coastline whose reefs, mangroves and fisheries support livelihoods from Lamu to Shimoni. BOESA is designed to be more than a league table. It combines maps, scientific data and regional case studies, leans heavily on geospatial analysis and Earth observation, and includes a tracker that monitors each country's progress towards 30x30. RCMRD describes it as a living platform that will be updated with new data and tools over time. Director General Emmanuel Nkurunziza said the aim was to put this information in the hands of policymakers, conservation practitioners, researchers, development partners and communities to advance nature-positive action across the region. That translation from data to decisions was the theme picked up by Sanne Willems, regional partnerships official at the European Union Delegation to Kenya. She observed that many programmes have produced valuable research but often lack "the next step of translating it into policy". The launch ran alongside a regional workshop, held from 22 to 24 September, on integrated landscape-seascape modelling for climate-resilient development, examining how land and marine systems can be planned together to address climate and food-system vulnerabilities. The timing is deliberate. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity meet in Yerevan, Armenia, in October for COP17, which will include the first global review of collective progress under the Kunming-Montreal framework. Kenya and its neighbours will arrive with a clearer, shared picture of where they stand, and, in Kenya's case, a measurable gap that will need concrete plans, finance and community buy-in to close. WHY IT MATTERS Kenya's 16-point gap to 30x30 is not a failure of ambition so much as a test of delivery. With under four years to 2030 and COP17 about to take stock, regional evidence like BOESA gives governments, funders and communities a shared baseline, and removes any room to argue about where the starting line is.

Africa's climate finance shortfall has a number attached to it now, and it is a startling one. Speaking at a United Nations General Assembly roundtable on Sustainable Global Investment, Economic Resilience and Climate Financing, Dr. Kola Adesina, Group Managing Director of Sahara Power Enterprise Group, told delegates that African countries need an estimated $277 billion a year to meet their climate commitments. What the continent actually receives is closer to $30 billion annually — a gap of roughly $247 billion that, left unaddressed, threatens to undercut decades of development gains. The timing of Adesina's intervention was pointed. Climate Week NYC and the UNGA's high-level week have put global investors and government leaders in the same rooms this September, at a moment when foreign direct investment worldwide reached around $1.6 trillion in 2025 and assets tied to sustainable investment strategies have swelled to $16.7 trillion globally. That capital exists. The question Adesina posed to the room was why so little of it reaches the continent that arguably needs it most. Africa's case is not simply about vulnerability, though that is real enough. The continent contributes less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions yet absorbs an outsized share of the consequences — droughts, floods and extreme heat that damage infrastructure, disrupt food systems and displace communities. Adesina's argument, though, was framed less around loss and more around opportunity. "Africa's most pressing challenge is expanding its productive capacity at scale," he said. "We need sustained investment in energy, infrastructure, industry, agriculture, and enterprise development to create jobs, strengthen competitiveness, and support long-term resilience." The scale of that challenge is considerable. Almost 600 million people across Sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity, and the continent faces an annual infrastructure financing gap of between $68 billion and $108 billion — before climate adaptation costs are even factored in. Adesina was explicit that climate finance and infrastructure investment cannot be treated as separate line items: protecting what Africa is building is as urgent as building it in the first place. "Africa requires substantial investment not only to grow, but also to protect the infrastructure, businesses, food systems, and communities that underpin development," he said. Sahara Group's own portfolio was offered as one model of how that dual mandate might work in practice. The company has investments spanning LNG, LPG, gas-to-power infrastructure and logistics, alongside a stated ambition to reach net-zero by 2060 through a combination of gas infrastructure development, renewable energy integration and nature-based solutions — an approach the company positions as pragmatic for economies still building out basic energy access. Adesina's closing message centred on what he called project preparation: the unglamorous groundwork of structuring bankable deals, deepening local-currency financing markets, and building regional collaboration in energy, transport and logistics that makes it easier for global capital to actually land. "Africa's opportunity lies in building resilient prosperity, where investment translates into productive capacity, jobs, reliable infrastructure, and sustainable economic growth that endures for generations," he said. "That is the kind of future sustainable investment and climate financing can help unlock across the continent." Whether that future arrives depends less on whether the capital exists — clearly it does — and more on whether the financing architecture connecting it to African projects gets built. That was the gap Adesina was really pointing to in New York. WHY IT MATTERS: The $247 billion gap between what Africa needs and what it receives in climate finance isn't an abstraction — it's the difference between mini-grids that get built and communities that stay off-grid, between farms that adapt to drought and ones that fail. Sahara's intervention is a reminder that closing this gap is as much an investment-architecture problem as a fundraising one.

The European Commission has approved close to €126 million in grants for three renewable energy projects that share one requirement: none of them could exist without a formal cooperation agreement between two EU member states. Announced on Thursday under the Connecting Europe Facility's cross-border renewables strand, the funding round backs two district heating schemes straddling the German-Polish border and an onshore wind park spanning Latvia and Lithuania — a small but concrete illustration of how the EU is trying to knit its energy transition together at the seams where national grids and heating networks currently stop. The largest single award, about €70 million, goes to Görlitz and Zgorzelec, twin towns split by the Neisse river that already share a market square and, soon, a heating system. The grant will fund a "climate-neutral" district heating network built jointly across the border, replacing what has historically been two separate, fossil-dependent local systems with one shared low-carbon network — the kind of infrastructure that rarely gets built without EU money forcing the cross-border paperwork into existence. A second, smaller German-Polish award of more than €11 million targets a less glamorous but arguably harder problem: taking coal-fired heating out of a working town. In Słubice, on the Polish side, the funding will replace coal-fired units with biomass boilers burning organic material such as wood, while on the German side in Frankfurt (Oder), it begins what the Commission calls the "deep decarbonisation" of the town's existing district heating network. Together, the Görlitz–Zgorzelec and Słubice–Frankfurt projects point to a specific EU strategy: use cross-border grant money to decarbonise district heating in twin towns that share infrastructure but sit on opposite sides of a national border. The third project moves from heat to electricity. More than €44 million has been allocated to an onshore wind park straddling the Latvia-Lithuania border, expected to comprise around 30 turbines generating up to 680 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year once complete — the Commission notes that a single gigawatt-hour covers the annual electricity use of several hundred typical EU households, giving a sense of scale to a project still years from its first turbine. The wind project also lands at a symbolically useful moment. Latvia and Lithuania, together with Estonia, desynchronised their electricity grids from Russia's system and joined the continental European grid in 2025, ending a decades-old dependency inherited from the Soviet era. A jointly built wind park straddling their shared border fits neatly into that broader shift: renewable capacity that reinforces regional energy security as much as it cuts emissions, at a time when the three Baltic states have made grid independence a strategic priority in its own right. None of the three projects qualified for funding on cost or capacity alone. Under the Connecting Europe Facility's rules for cross-border renewables, applicants must show a formal cooperation arrangement between the countries involved and demonstrate that building jointly produces real net benefits — lower costs, shared capacity, or emissions cuts — that neither country could achieve alone. That bar is deliberate: the EU has committed to a binding target of 42.5% renewables in final energy consumption by 2030, with a further 2.5% aspirational, under its revised Renewable Energy Directive, and Brussels sees cross-border projects as a way of squeezing out efficiencies that purely domestic ones cannot. The Commission has already flagged its next call for cross-border renewable energy proposals for November 2026 — meaning this week's three grants are a down payment, not a one-off. Why it matters This is a small grant round by EU budget standards, but it's a useful stress test of the EU's actual strategy for hitting its 42.5% renewables target: build the infrastructure jointly where borders currently split it apart, and require cooperation as a condition of the money rather than a nice-to-have. Görlitz and Zgorzelec, or Słubice and Frankfurt, are the unglamorous proof points — twin towns finally getting to share one clean heating system instead of two dirty ones. If this model works, expect Brussels to lean on it harder in November's next funding round.

Kenya has built one of the cleanest electricity grids in the world, with more than 90 per cent of its power now coming from renewable sources such as geothermal, hydro, wind and solar. It's an achievement that has earned the country international recognition and positioned it as a continental leader in the shift away from fossil fuels. But a new study from Strathmore University argues that clean electricity is only the first chapter of a much longer story. Led by renewable energy scholar Prof Izael Da Silva through the Strathmore Energy Research Centre (SERC), the report, titled "Toward a Carbon-Free Future: Kenya's Leadership in Renewable Energy Transition," makes the case that achieving net-zero emissions will require far more than expanding power generation — it will take stronger policy, greater investment, new technology and closer collaboration across sectors. Kenya's raw potential is enormous. The country has installed about 949 megawatts of geothermal capacity, yet that represents only a sliver of an estimated 10,000-megawatt resource concentrated along the Rift Valley. Wind, hydro and solar hold similarly untapped potential. The challenge, the researchers say, is that transmission and distribution infrastructure hasn't kept pace with generation. Large parts of the country remain poorly connected to the national grid, limiting how many households, businesses and industries can actually benefit from that clean power. And electricity is only one piece of the emissions puzzle. Transport is among Kenya's fastest-growing sources of emissions, manufacturing still leans heavily on fossil fuels, and many households continue to cook with charcoal and firewood. Getting to a carbon-free economy, the study argues, means tackling all of it at once — not just adding more renewable capacity to the grid. Policy coherence is central to that effort. The researchers say investors need predictable, consistent regulatory frameworks, while government institutions need tighter coordination to avoid fragmented rollout of climate and energy programmes. Removing unnecessary barriers to private investment and strengthening accountability in implementing existing policy would help accelerate the transition, the study notes — alongside innovative financing mechanisms and stronger partnerships with development agencies to fund large-scale infrastructure and industrial transformation. Technology has a role to play too. The study points to Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), electric mobility, smart grids and energy-efficient manufacturing as tools that could cut emissions while improving productivity. Battery storage in particular could let Kenya bank excess renewable energy and release it during peak demand, easing reliance on costly fossil-fuel backup power and improving overall grid stability. None of this happens through policy and infrastructure alone, the researchers stress. Universities and research institutions have a growing role in generating locally relevant solutions, while public awareness and behavioural change — from adopting cleaner cooking technologies to embracing electric mobility — will need to complement top-down reforms. Crucially, the study pushes back on the idea that climate action slows economic growth. Instead, it frames decarbonisation as an opportunity: global demand for renewable energy technology, green manufacturing and sustainable construction is rising fast, and Kenya's existing strengths position it to capture a share of that growth if investment in skills and innovation keeps pace. Kenya has already proven that renewable energy can power national development. The question now, as the Strathmore researchers put it, is whether that success can be extended into every corner of the economy — and become the foundation for one of Africa's first truly carbon-free economies. WHY IT MATTERS Most conversations about the energy transition assume the Global North leads and everyone else catches up. Kenya flips that: it's already generating cleaner power than most wealthy nations, and now Strathmore's researchers are mapping what a full-economy transition actually takes. That roadmap — on financing, grid infrastructure, battery storage — is exportable to any country still burning fossil fuels for "reliability."

In the summer of 2026, a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz did what decades of climate diplomacy had struggled to do: it put energy security back at the centre of the conversation about how fast the world should electrify. Tankers rerouted, insurers repriced risk, and governments that import most of their oil and gas found themselves recalculating, in real time, just how exposed they were to a single chokepoint of water. It was in that context — not in the abstract, but in the middle of an actual shock — that the International Energy Agency was asked by Türkiye, holder of the COP31 presidency, and Australia, president of the COP31 negotiations, to produce a special report on where the world's rapid shift toward electricity actually stands, and what it would take to go further. The result, Electrification 2026, was released on 22 September 2026 and discussed the same day at an IEA-COP31 High-Level Energy Transition Dialogue. Its central argument is that electrification has quietly become one of the few tools available to governments that both cuts emissions and reduces exposure to the kind of shock the Strait of Hormuz just delivered. This piece goes deep on that argument, using the IEA's own figures, because it is the part of the report that speaks most directly to the anxieties of the moment: is switching to electricity actually making the world's energy system safer, and if so, what new risks is it introducing in the process. The Oil Already Being Displaced The IEA's starting point is a number that is easy to miss because it describes something that has already happened rather than something projected. Electric cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses now in use around the world are avoiding roughly 2.3 million barrels of oil demand every single day. The IEA offers a strikingly concrete way to picture that figure: it is larger than the volume of oil that was rerouted around the Strait of Hormuz via the United Arab Emirates' Habshan-Fujairah pipeline during the summer 2026 crisis. In other words, the electrification that has already occurred — largely for reasons of cost, air quality and consumer preference rather than geopolitical strategy — is now functioning as a bigger bypass valve for oil-supply risk than the physical pipeline infrastructure built for exactly that purpose. That is not a projection or a modelled scenario. It is, according to the report, the current state of the global vehicle fleet as it exists in 2026. From that current baseline, the report lays out two distinct futures, and the gap between them is the real subject of this piece. Under what the IEA calls its Stated Policies Scenario — essentially, the trajectory the world is on if governments do no more than what they have already committed to — electric cars are set to reach around half of global new car sales by 2035, up from about a quarter today, itself a jump from under one percent in 2015. On that path, electric vehicles alone would remove approximately 10 million barrels of oil demand per day by 2035, a volume the IEA compares to the entirety of Russia's current oil production. That is the outcome of inertia: policies already on the books, extrapolated forward. The second pathway is what the IEA calls the High Electrification Scenario, built around the "35-by-35" target now under discussion at COP31 — raising electricity's share of final global energy consumption from 23% today to 35% by 2035, a level the agency's modelling suggests is cost-effective under 2025 technology prices without heroic assumptions about further cost declines. Under this more ambitious pathway, electric vehicles would avoid around 18 million barrels of oil demand per day by 2035, with roughly four-fifths of that reduction concentrated in countries that import their fuel rather than export it. The financial consequence, in the IEA's accounting, is substantial: fuel-importing nations could cut their annual energy import bills by close to a quarter relative to 2025 levels, worth about USD 400 billion a year at 2025 prices, or more than USD 500 billion a year measured against the higher energy prices seen in 2026. For finance ministries in Europe, Japan, Korea, India and much of Southeast Asia — economies that import the bulk of the oil and gas they burn — that is not a marginal climate co-benefit. It is a balance-of-payments story. A New Kind of Risk: Electricity Security It would be a mistake, though, to read the report as a simple case that more electrification equals more safety, full stop. The IEA is explicit that a system built around electricity swaps one category of energy security risk for a different one, and the report spends an entire subsection, "Electricity security," working through what that new risk profile looks like. The core tension is speed. To hit the High Electrification Scenario, global electricity demand needs to grow by around 1,400 terawatt-hours a year through 2035 — nearly double the pace of growth seen over the past decade, a decade in which demand already grew more than three percent annually, roughly twice as fast as overall energy demand. Feeding that growth safely, the IEA argues, requires grids to expand 40% faster than they did over the past ten years. The warning attached to that figure is blunt: delays in grid build-out would show up as longer queues for new connections, more congestion, more curtailment of generation that is ready but cannot get to market, and rising risk to reliability more broadly. Annual investment in grids has already climbed from USD 315 billion in 2015 to USD 450 billion in 2025, and the report's own numbers imply that pace needs to keep accelerating, not plateau. Storage is the other half of that equation, and the scale of what the IEA says is required is worth sitting with. On the pathway consistent with global net-zero goals, battery storage capacity needs to grow nearly tenfold, from levels already around 100 gigawatts of new capacity added annually in 2025 — itself roughly a hundred times higher than in 2015 — to approximately 2,900 gigawatts of total capacity by 2035. That storage, paired with demand-response measures that shift vehicle charging, heating, cooling and industrial processes away from peak hours, is what the report says has to develop in lockstep with generation and grids if electrification is not simply to relocate today's oil-security anxieties onto tomorrow's electricity system. As the report puts it, secure, reliable and affordable electrification requires low-emissions generation, grids, digital capabilities, storage and other flexibility options to develop together — not in sequence, and not with one lagging badly behind the others. The Cybersecurity Blind Spot Then there is a risk category that has no real analogue in the oil-and-gas era: the cybersecurity of a much more digitally connected energy system. A barrel of oil sitting in a tanker or a storage tank cannot be hacked. A grid full of smart chargers, connected heat pumps, remotely managed batteries and digitally dispatched industrial load increasingly can be, at least in principle, and the report flags this directly, noting that the potential for remote control of digitally connected energy assets is itself a source of risk that makes cybersecurity safeguards a first-order concern rather than an afterthought. This is presented as a genuinely new feature of the energy security landscape, one that has no equivalent in a system organised around physical fuel logistics. Critical Minerals: Trading One Dependency for Another The report's treatment of critical minerals adds a further layer of nuance that is easy to lose in a headline about oil-demand avoidance. Batteries and a number of other electrification technologies depend on critical minerals whose supply chains are, in the IEA's words, characterised by high levels of geographical concentration. That is a real vulnerability, and the report does not minimise it: it explicitly calls for diversified supply chains and a level playing field as one of its recommended actions for governments. But it also draws a structural distinction that is central to the whole argument of the chapter. A disruption to a fuel supply chain stops the equipment that depends on it from functioning, more or less immediately — an oil tanker that cannot reach a refinery means fuel that does not reach a pump. A disruption to a battery or solar panel supply chain does not switch off the electric cars, heat pumps or wind turbines already installed and running; it only constrains how quickly new capacity can be deployed. That is a meaningfully different kind of exposure — a drag on future growth rather than an immediate operational failure — even though it is still, in the report's own framing, a vulnerability that needs active management rather than one that can be assumed away. The report also notes, almost in passing, that electrification technologies increasingly overlap with artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced manufacturing, meaning that building domestic capacity in batteries, power electronics and grid equipment carries strategic value that extends well beyond the electricity sector itself. Winners and Losers: Importers vs. Exporters Geography matters enormously to how this all plays out, and the IEA is careful not to flatten the story into a single global number. Energy importers stand to gain the most from electrification, precisely because they are the ones currently paying for fuel they do not produce. The report calculates that tapping the full economically viable potential for electrification in Europe would lift the region's electrification rate by close to 15 percentage points — the largest gain of any region assessed. The Middle East, by contrast, a net energy exporter where many consumers pay artificially low domestic energy prices, would see a gain of only around 5 percentage points from the same kind of push, reflecting a much weaker built-in economic incentive. That does not mean exporting economies have no stake in the transition; the report argues they have a different one, framing electrification as an opportunity to develop domestic renewable resources and nuclear power, improve efficiency, and gradually rationalise energy pricing that currently masks the true cost of consumption. It is a lower-urgency case, but not a nonexistent one. The Access Gap This Pathway Doesn't Fix The unevenness becomes starker still once the report turns to countries that are not debating how to optimise an already-electrified system but are still working to build one in the first place. Around 730 million people worldwide still lack access to electricity altogether. Per-capita electricity consumption in sub-Saharan Africa averages roughly 200 kilowatt-hours a year, against about 7,000 kilowatt-hours in advanced economies and China — a gap of thirty-five to one that no amount of electric-vehicle policy in Europe will close. Africa's overall electrification rate, at around 12% of final energy consumption, has risen by only about two percentage points since 2000, even as Japan and Korea sit near 33% and China has climbed to roughly 30%. For these economies, the report's framing shifts: the priority is not incremental gains in electric heating or transport but expanding basic access and supporting productive uses of electricity in agriculture and manufacturing — the foundation on which any later electrification of transport or industry would eventually be built. Encouragingly, the report does point to genuine momentum in parts of the developing world: electric vehicle sales in Southeast Asia rose by around 10 percentage points as a share of the market in the first half of 2026 alone, bringing the region roughly into line with Europe's adoption levels, driven partly by dense cities where daily commutes fit comfortably within the range of the electric two- and three-wheelers already on the market, and partly by the added incentive of chronically poor urban air quality. Who Pays, and Who Builds It None of this security architecture is free, and the report is unusually direct about the bill. By its own accounting, 2026 will see around USD 2 trillion spent globally on electrification in the broadest sense — electricity supply and grids account for roughly USD 1.6 trillion of that, with the remaining USD 400 billion going toward end-use equipment such as electric vehicles, heat pumps and industrial electrification. Under the High Electrification Scenario, spending on that end-use side alone needs to roughly triple, to around USD 1 trillion a year by 2035. That is, in effect, the price tag attached to the energy security benefits described above: the import-bill savings and oil-avoidance figures do not materialise without a parallel, and much larger, wave of capital spending on the demand side of the system. The report frames this as broadly self-financing over time, pointing out that average household energy bills are projected to fall by around 15% by 2035 under the High Electrification Scenario, since electric vehicles run at roughly three times the efficiency of combustion engines and heat pumps deliver even larger efficiency gains over the gas or oil boilers they replace. But it does not pretend the up-front burden is evenly distributed. Large one-time purchases — a vehicle, a heat pump, an induction stove — are precisely the kind of cost that lower-income households struggle to finance even when the running-cost savings are clear, which is why the report's recommended actions single out targeted support for up-front investment barriers as a distinct priority rather than an assumption that markets will sort it out on their own. There is a labour dimension to this build-out as well: the electricity sector is already the largest employer in the global energy industry, with employment growth since 2019 outpacing both the wider energy sector and the broader economy, and the report notes that some labour markets are already reporting shortages of the electricians, welders and grid line workers needed to build and maintain the infrastructure this chapter describes. Under the High Electrification Scenario, employment in electrification-related roles could roughly double from current levels — which is as much a constraint to plan around as it is a benefit to celebrate, given how specific and currently scarce those skills are. The Policy Gap COP31 Has to Close All of this leaves the report with an uncomfortable arithmetic problem, one it does not try to soften. Under current policy settings — the Stated Policies Scenario described earlier — global electrification rises to only around 30% by 2035, falling short of the 35% goal now being discussed at COP31, despite the fact that the IEA's own cost analysis suggests roughly 33% is already achievable today on economic grounds alone using 2025 technology and prices. The gap between what is cost-effective and what current policy actually delivers is, in the report's own logic, the real story: it is not primarily a technology problem or a cost problem, but a policy and financing one. The report's ten recommended actions read accordingly less like a wish list and more like a checklist for closing that specific gap — building cross-sectoral electrification strategies rather than treating supply and demand separately, tackling the up-front cost barrier that keeps lower-income households locked into cheaper-to-buy but more expensive-to-run fossil fuel equipment, correcting energy price distortions that still subsidise the fuels electrification is meant to displace, and explicitly building the diversified critical-mineral supply chains and the grid, storage and cybersecurity readiness this piece has traced through the report's energy security chapter. A small number of governments are already moving: France's 2026 plan aims to raise its electrification rate from 27% in 2023 to 38% by 2035; Canada launched a National Strategy for an Electrified Economy in May 2026; and the European Commission's Electrification Action Plan, published in July 2026, sets an indicative target of 46% by 2040. Whether enough other governments follow, in the shadow of the very shock that prompted this report, is the question the IEA has now put squarely in front of the COP31 negotiating table. Why It Matters The electrification story reads very differently depending on where you live. If you're in Europe, it's about insulating yourself from oil shocks and cutting bills. If you're one of the 730 million people with no electricity access at all, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, this entire conversation about EVs and heat pumps is happening several steps ahead of you. Any serious climate strategy has to hold both realities at once — otherwise "energy security" just becomes another advantage that compounds for the countries that already have it.

There is a number in the Honda ESG Report 2026 that quietly dismantles the way most people think about corporate carbon footprints. Honda's direct operational emissions — everything that happens inside its factories, offices and owned vehicles, the Scope 1 emissions that companies most often talk about — accounted for just 0.4% of its total climate impact in the fiscal year ended 31 March 2026. Add the electricity it buys, its Scope 2 emissions, and the combined figure is still only 0.8%. The remaining 99.2% happened somewhere else: in Honda's supply chain, and above all in the hands of the people driving its cars and riding its motorcycles. As the report states plainly, “The majority of our greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to CO2 emissions generated during the use phase of our products.” That single sentence is the story of the 2026 report, and it is the reason a company can decarbonise its own operations impressively while its overall footprint keeps rising. Honda's total greenhouse gas emissions — Scopes 1, 2 (market-based) and 3 combined — rose from 212.51 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in the year ended March 2024, to 226.95 million tonnes a year later, and to 232.38 million tonnes in the year ended March 2026. Roughly 20 million tonnes of additional annual emissions in two years, from a company that is, by most operational measures, moving in the right direction. Understanding how both things can be true at once is the most useful lesson any business can take from this disclosure. The anatomy of a 232-million-tonne footprint Honda breaks its total footprint into the standard three scopes, and the proportions are stark. Of the 232.38 million tonnes reported for the year ended March 2026, Scope 1 direct emissions were 0.892 million tonnes and Scope 2 market-based emissions were 1.04 million tonnes — together 1.93 million tonnes, or that 0.8% sliver. Scope 3, the emissions across Honda's upstream and downstream value chain, came to 230.45 million tonnes. Within Scope 3, one category towers over everything else. Category 11, the “use of sold products,” reached 176.74 million tonnes — 76.1% of Honda's entire carbon footprint on its own. This is the tailpipe: the petrol burned and the grid electricity consumed by every Honda vehicle, motorcycle and power product sold and then used out in the world, counted across its expected lifetime. The infographic distils Honda's 2026 emissions disclosure into one uncomfortable picture: of 232.38 million tonnes of total value-chain CO₂e, 76.1% comes from customers using Honda's products (Scope 3 Category 11) and just 0.8% from Honda's own operations. It tracks product-use emissions climbing across three years (159.39 → 172.68 → 176.74 Mt) and shows Honda roughly halving its 2031 product CO₂-intensity targets — motorcycles 34.0%→15.0%, automobiles 27.2%→13.6%, power products 28.2%→13.4%. All figures are from the Honda ESG Report 2026 (FY ended 31 March 2026). The rest of Scope 3, at 23.1% of the total, is far from trivial in absolute terms even if it is dwarfed by product use. Category 1, purchased goods and services — the steel, aluminium, plastics, electronics and rubber that go into a vehicle — accounted for 41.13 million tonnes. Category 12, the end-of-life treatment of sold products, was 4.32 million tonnes. Category 4, upstream transportation and distribution, rose sharply to 4.03 million tonnes from 2.55 million tonnes two years earlier, and Category 2, capital goods, climbed to 2.17 million tonnes. These are the embedded and logistical emissions of making and moving things at Honda's scale. But they are a rounding note beside Category 11. What makes the 2026 figures more credible than many corporate disclosures is that Honda widened the net rather than narrowing it. The report notes that its coverage of Category 11 emissions was extended from approximately 90% of global sales volume to nearly 100%, and that it switched its calculation methodology to the International Energy Agency's Mobility Model. In other words, part of the reason the numbers look large is that Honda chose to measure more of them, more rigorously. This is worth pausing on, because the easiest way for any company to shrink its Scope 3 total is simply to measure less of it. Honda did the opposite, and its reported footprint grew as a result. Honda also reminds readers of its history here: it says it became the world's first mobility company to disclose not only Scope 1 and 2 emissions but its full upstream and downstream Scope 3, back in August 2012 for the year ended March 2012. The operational success story — and why it barely moves the needle None of this is to say Honda's operational progress is hollow. On its own terms it is genuinely strong. Honda has set an interim target to cut absolute CO2 from its corporate activities — Scope 1 plus Scope 2 — by 46% by the year ending March 2031, against a 2020 baseline. By the year ended March 2026 it had already reduced those emissions by 51.3%, having moved from a 37.7% reduction two years earlier to 47.5% and then past its own 2031 goal five years early. The corporate-activity CO2 figure fell to 2.45 million tonnes. Honda brought its first carbon-neutral factory online in the final quarter of the year ended March 2026 — the Saitama Factory automobile plant — and states its intention to expand carbon neutrality to all its automobile production sites worldwide. It has run an internal carbon price of 15,000 yen per tonne of CO2 at its Japanese sites since 2023 to steer investment decisions. It was named to CDP's climate A-List for 2025, its third consecutive year at the top rating. All of that effort, all of that capital, addresses the 0.8%. This is the uncomfortable arithmetic at the centre of the report, and it is not unique to Honda — it is the structural reality of any company whose products consume energy after they are sold. You can make your factories carbon-neutral, run them on renewable electricity, and price your own carbon internally, and you will have moved less than one percent of your total footprint. The 99% walks out of the gate with the customer. Honda's own operational renewable electricity illustrates the point about scale: its data tables report 1,950 gigawatt-hours of renewable electricity utilised in the year ended March 2026, with a further 134 gigawatt-hours self-consumed, backed by instruments such as a virtual power purchase agreement with Rusutsu Wind. Meaningful, and the right direction — but a lever on the small share of the problem. The only decarbonisation lever that reaches the 76.1% is the product itself. To cut Category 11, Honda has to change what leaves its showrooms: fewer combustion engines, more electric vehicles and hybrids, cleaner fuels, and a grid that is itself decarbonising so that the electricity powering those EVs is low-carbon. This is why product-use emissions and the electrification debate are the same conversation seen from two angles, and it is where the 2026 report becomes genuinely newsworthy. The targets Honda quietly halved Here the report contains an admission that many readers will miss in the density of the tables. Honda revised its product CO2 intensity targets — the reductions it aims to achieve per vehicle in the use phase by the year ending March 2031, against a 2020 baseline — sharply downward. For motorcycles, the target was cut from 34.0% to 15.0%. For automobiles, from 27.2% to 13.6%. For power products, from 28.2% to 13.4%. In each case the ambition was reduced to roughly half of what it had been. In the report's own words, “the targets were revised from 34.0% to 15.0% for the motorcycle business, from 27.2% to 13.6% for the automobile business, and from 28.2% to 13.4% for the power products business. These revisions reflect our reassessment of our powertrain portfolio and product launch plans in response to changes in market conditions and developments in trade policies.” This piece links to three goals that map directly onto Honda's emissions story. Climate Action (SDG 13) is the core: Honda's total value-chain footprint rose to 232.38 million tonnes of CO₂e even as it beat its own operational reduction target, making the gap between "operations" and "responsibility" a climate-governance issue. Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7) is the lever that actually reaches the 76.1% product-use share — cutting those emissions depends on electrification plus a cleaner grid powering the vehicles Honda sells. Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12) frames the rest: life-cycle accounting, product carbon footprints and the end-of-use phase are where an automaker's true impact is measured and owned. The progress against even these softened targets is modest so far. By the year ended March 2026, Honda reports it had reduced motorcycle product CO2 intensity by 1.6% against the 2020 baseline, against the new 15.0% goal; automobiles had reached roughly 12.5%, close to their revised 13.6% target; and power products stood at 2.8% against 13.4%. The automobile business is tracking near its target, but the motorcycle and power-product segments have a long way to travel even against the lowered bar. Honda goes further still. It signals that it will stop using the sales ratio of electrified products as a management indicator altogether. As the report puts it, the company “determined... to shift from using the sale of electrified products as a measurement toward contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions across society as a whole, which is a more fundamental approach,” and it plans to set specific target levels for the year ending March 2036 based on the reduction rate of total greenhouse gas emissions across the entire life cycle, rather than the electrified-sales ratio. There is a defensible logic to this: an electrified-sales percentage tells you how many EVs and hybrids a company sells, not how much carbon those products actually save once the grid, the manufacturing footprint and the vehicle's full life are accounted for. A life-cycle emissions metric is, in principle, more honest and harder to game. But the timing — a shift away from a concrete, trackable EV-sales commitment, arriving in the same breath as halved intensity targets and citing “trade policies” and “market conditions” — will invite the reading that Honda is softening its transition and reaching for a metric that is years away from having teeth. Why measuring the hard 99% is the point Underneath the target revisions, the most important thing Honda did in 2026 was keep counting honestly. It methodically maps its product carbon footprint by breaking roughly 20,000 parts into about 50 constituent material types, and it has adopted the Japanese automotive industry's carbon-footprint guideline and updated emission factors to do so. It ran a full life-cycle comparison of the combustion-engine N-ONE against the electric N-ONE e:. It pursues smaller, unglamorous wins in the parts of Scope 3 it can influence directly — a modal shift of electric-vehicle power-unit components from truck to rail, for instance, cut roughly 700 tonnes of CO2 a year, about 75% for that flow. These are the actions of a company treating its whole value chain as its responsibility rather than drawing the boundary at the factory fence. That distinction — where a company chooses to draw the line around its own accountability — is what this report ultimately illuminates, and it matters far beyond Honda. Why it matters The most valuable thing in Honda's 2026 disclosure is not a success; it is an honest inconvenience. A company reduced the emissions it fully controls by more than half, beat a target five years early, opened its first carbon-neutral factory — and its total footprint still went up, because 99.2% of that footprint was never inside the factory to begin with. For any business trying to understand its own climate responsibility, this is the lesson worth internalising: the emissions you own on paper and the emissions you are actually responsible for are usually two very different numbers, and the gap between them is Scope 3. It is genuinely tempting for a company to report the 0.8% loudly and let the 99% stay quiet. Operational emissions are measurable, controllable and improvable; a renewable-energy contract or a carbon-neutral plant makes for a clean headline. Scope 3 is the opposite — sprawling, partly outside your direct control, dependent on suppliers you don't own and customers you can't follow home, and, when measured properly, embarrassingly large. The path of least resistance is to under-count it, scope it narrowly, or footnote it. Honda's report is useful precisely because it refuses that comfort. It widened its product-use measurement toward 100% coverage, adopted a more rigorous model, and published a number that grew as a result. That takes a kind of discipline that a smaller reduction in a well-chosen boundary would have spared it. The accountability point cuts both ways, though, and this is where scrutiny belongs. Transparency about a rising number is worth little if it becomes a substitute for bending the curve. Honda now has to actually cut the 76.1% — and the same report shows it softening the very targets that govern that share, halving its product intensity goals and stepping back from a concrete electrified-sales commitment in favour of a life-cycle metric that only acquires firm target levels around 2036. Honest measurement and weakened ambition can coexist, and in this report they do. The right response is not to celebrate the disclosure or dismiss the pullback, but to hold both: Honda deserves credit for owning the full scale of its value-chain emissions, and it deserves pressure to treat that ownership as an obligation to reduce, not merely to report. For every other company reading their own footprint, the takeaway is simpler and more demanding than most sustainability communications admit. Ask where your 99% is. If almost all of your climate impact sits in your supply chain or in the use of what you sell, then a decarbonised head office is a start and not an achievement, and the credibility of your entire climate story rests on whether you are willing to measure — and then move — the part that is hardest to control. Honda has done the measuring. The next report is where we find out whether it will do the moving. Figures in this article are drawn from the Honda ESG Report 2026 (Honda Motor Co., Ltd.), covering the fiscal year ended 31 March 2026. Emissions data cover Honda Motor Co., Ltd. and its consolidated subsidiaries.

Conservation in Ghana is getting a decidedly local makeover. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), through its Small Grants Programme, has formally thrown its weight behind 18 civil society and non-governmental organisations working along the Black Volta Basin, in a move designed to repair damaged landscapes while lifting the fortunes of the communities that depend on them. Announced in Kumasi on 13 July, the support spans the Savannah, Bono and Upper West Regions and is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to the tune of $457,000, roughly GH₵5 million. It marks the start of the eighth Operational Phase of the GEF Small Grants Programme in Ghana, which formally began with a grant agreement signing ceremony and an inception workshop bringing all 18 organisations together. The scope is deliberately broad. The funded projects will promote community-based biodiversity conservation, restore degraded landscapes, and strengthen sustainable land and forest management. They will also support climate-smart agriculture, fisheries and food security, wetland and riparian ecosystem restoration, low-carbon livelihoods, and stronger local-to-global coalitions on chemicals and waste. Running from July 2026 to mid-2028, the initiatives are expected to conserve biodiversity, improve food security, enhance climate resilience and open up sustainable income streams for basin communities. This story sits at the meeting point of three Sustainable Development Goals. It speaks most directly to SDG 15 (Life on Land), as the core of the UNDP–GEF programme is restoring degraded landscapes, conserving biodiversity and improving sustainable land and forest management across the Black Volta Basin. It advances SDG 13 (Climate Action) through climate-smart agriculture and projects designed to strengthen the climate resilience of communities exposed to a changing environment. And it embodies SDG 17 (Partnership for the Goals), with UNDP, the Global Environment Facility and 18 local civil-society organisations pooling resources and expertise under an innovative-financing model that treats communities as partners rather than recipients. For UNDP, the significance lies as much in how the money is delivered as in what it funds. Dr Abdul Razak Saeed, Head of Environment and Climate at UNDP Ghana, said innovative financing was reshaping the way development is done. “Innovative financing is transforming the way development is delivered. It is shifting us beyond traditional aid models and positioning civil society organizations as strategic partners that connect communities to sustainable development outcomes and long-term impact,” he said. Through the GEF Small Grants Programme, he added, UNDP was “investing in local leadership and solutions that will continue to deliver environmental and socio-economic benefits for generations to come.” That emphasis on local leadership runs through the whole design. Rather than parachuting in a single large project, the programme channels resources to organisations already embedded in the basin — groups that know the land, the rivers and the pressures on both. Participating organisations will work directly with communities to restore degraded landscapes, protect critical habitats, promote sustainable farming, strengthen ecosystem stewardship and create livelihoods that ease the strain on natural resources. The inception workshop was intended to make that partnership work in practice, grounding participants in project implementation, monitoring and reporting requirements, fiduciary responsibilities and communication guidelines so that delivery stays accountable and transparent. Representing the beneficiary organisations, Mr Louis Kuuyebir, Finance and Operations Manager at the Tuna Women Development Project, welcomed the support and reaffirmed the organisations’ commitment to delivering community-driven environmental solutions. The Black Volta is one of West Africa’s vital river systems, and the landscapes around it have come under mounting stress from land degradation, biodiversity loss and a changing climate. By betting on the people who live alongside it, UNDP and the GEF are wagering that the most durable conservation is the kind communities own themselves. Why It Matters The involvement of the community is key to ensuring that large-scale projects actually succeed. Gone are the days when a one-size-fits-all approach is taken; instead, by roping in local communities, we are ensuring the success of projects like these. People who live along the Black Volta understand its land and water in a way no external programme can replicate, and when they are given ownership — and the financing to act — conservation stops being something done to them and becomes something they drive. That is what makes this model worth watching.