At least 20 countries have agreed to end financing for fossil fuel projects abroad, a UK official told CNN, in a deal expected to be announced Thursday.
Another source close to the COP26 climate summit negotiations said that the US was party to the agreement. Officials at the US State Department did not respond to CNN to confirm the country’s involvement.
Several countries had already agreed to end international financing for coal, but this agreement would be the first of its kind to include oil and gas projects as well.
The deal “represents a change in norms that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago,” Iskander Erzini Vernoit, a climate finance expert at think tank E3G, told CNN. “We’ve seen this go from the niche frontier concepts to at the core of the mainstream.”
In a separate announcement, a number of countries — including major coal consumers Ukraine and Chile — pledged to end the use of coal.
Ukraine, Chile, Singapore, Mauritius, Azerbaijan, Slovenia and Estonia are among the 28 countries that have joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which obliges members to stop building new coal projects and phase out coal by 2030 for developed nations, and 2040 for developing countries.
Ukraine, the third largest coal consumer in Europe after Germany and Poland, said it would stop using coal power by 2035, the alliance announced.
Chile, which gets about 20% of its energy from coal, according to the International Energy Agency, said it would bring its current target of 2040 phase-out forward.
The UK government also said 18 countries, including Poland, have made new pledges on their coal phaseout, announcing they would not build or invest into new coal power.
Phasing out coal-fired electricity is one of the most important steps to tackle the climate crisis. COP26 President Alok Sharma said that an agreement on coal phaseout is one of the top goals of the summit.
And the latest outlook by the International Energy Agency said that more aggressive climate action is needed from world leaders, even as the shift to clean energy leads to a decline in the oil industry.
Xi added that China will also increase financial aid for green and low-carbon energy projects for other developing countries.
The production gap report found that the world’s largest economies have funneled more than $300 billion in new funds toward fossil fuel activities since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is more than they have invested toward clean energy alternatives.
“Modeling results show that all three fuels — coal, oil and gas — need to basically have started declining since 2020 in order for us to stay consistent with a pathway that will allow us to be consistent with limiting long-term warming to 1.5 degrees C,” Ploy Achakulwisut, lead author of the report and scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute, previously told CNN. “Continuing to delay action will just make the problem harder.”
CNN Business’s Julia Horowitz contributed to this report.