The concept at the heart of the study is the cost of capital, or CoC: the rate of return that investors and lenders demand to compensate them for the risk of financing a project. This matters enormously because almost every low-carbon technology — wind turbines, heat pumps, electric arc furnaces, carbon capture systems — is capital-intensive. Most of the expense is paid up front, while the benefits, in the form of energy or materials, trickle in over decades. A technology whose costs are dominated by upfront investment is exquisitely sensitive to interest rates and return expectations. Raise the cost of capital by a few percentage points and a wind farm that looked cheap on paper can become uncompetitive against a gas plant, whose costs are spread across years of fuel purchases.

Despite this sensitivity, the integrated assessment models that inform reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have historically assumed a single, uniform cost of capital for all countries, sectors and technologies. The simplification was born of necessity: data were scarce and modelling complexity was already formidable. But it embeds a hidden assumption — that financing a solar project in Eastern Africa costs the same as financing one in the United States. The new research shows just how wrong that assumption is. Drawing on sovereign credit ratings and stock-market risk measures from the widely used NYU Damodaran database, the team calculated financing costs for eight climate-relevant sectors, including electricity, hydrogen production, cement, iron and steel, pulp and paper and food processing. The heterogeneity is striking: the cost of capital for electricity in high-risk regions such as Eastern Africa or Ukraine is roughly three times higher than in the United States. Even within a single low-risk country, sector differences matter — the cost of capital for American steel is about two percentage points higher than for American electricity, a gap equivalent to the difference between power projects in the United States and in India or Indonesia.

The team then fed these differentiated estimates into the IMAGE integrated assessment model, a well-established framework with high geographic and technological resolution that simulates energy systems and industry across 26 world regions through 2100. They ran two scenarios: one with the model’s typical uniform low-risk cost of capital of 5 percent, and one with their dynamic, region- and sector-specific estimates, which also capture how economic growth in developing countries gradually lowers sovereign risk premiums over time. Both scenarios were paired with a current-policies pathway, leading to about 2.8 degrees of warming, and an ambitious pathway that keeps warming well below 2 degrees, in line with the Paris Agreement.

The headline finding is that accounting for real-world financing conditions raises cumulative global mitigation costs through 2100 from 77 trillion to 84 trillion US dollars — an increase of roughly 9 percent. When the researchers decomposed this figure, they discovered that sectoral risk differences alone actually lower mitigation costs slightly, mainly by reducing electricity prices in some low-risk regions. The damage comes overwhelmingly from country risk, which adds about 6 percent to costs, and from the extra climate policy effort needed to compensate for the emissions that expensive capital leaves on the table, adding another 4 percent. In other words, the biggest distortion in decades of climate modelling has not been misjudging how risky the steel industry is — it has been pretending that a power plant in a country with a poor sovereign credit rating can be financed as cheaply as one in Zurich.

The emissions consequences are substantial. Without an endogenous policy reaction, introducing realistic financing costs raises cumulative global CO2 emissions through 2100 by roughly 60 to 70 gigatonnes — more than one additional year of current global emissions — driven overwhelmingly by high-risk regions. Expensive capital pushes electricity systems in those regions away from capital-intensive renewables and nuclear power and toward natural gas, which is less sensitive to financing costs than coal. It also suppresses investment in electricity grids in developing countries, a finding with major implications given that grid expansion needs for net zero are as large as, or larger than, those for power generation itself. And because energy prices ripple through the whole economy, sectors that were never directly modified in the model — transport and heating among them — also emit more, as higher power prices delay the switch from oil to electricity in passenger vehicles and trucking.

Perhaps the most striking results concern green hydrogen. Hydrogen production today is dominated by firms associated with the chemical sector, which carries above-average market risk, and electrolytic hydrogen is fully exposed to electricity prices, which themselves rise when the cost of capital rises. The result: hydrogen costs increase in nearly every region, with increases well above 20 percent in high-risk areas such as Western Africa — precisely the regions often envisaged as future hydrogen exporters. Global hydrogen production via electrolysis drops substantially in the model, while the incumbent technology, natural gas-based steam methane reforming, holds on longer. Cheaper-to-abate alternatives become more CO2-intensive and expensive, and hydrogen loses attractiveness for decarbonizing transport, industry and power, with end-of-century hydrogen usage falling accordingly under the ambitious climate scenario.

Heavy industry tells a similar story. In cement, responsible for about 7 percent of current global CO2 emissions, country and sector risks slow the transition from inefficient standard kilns to modern, efficient kilns equipped with carbon capture and storage, leaving a larger share of unabated production in place by 2100. In iron and steel, which accounts for roughly 8 percent of emissions, higher financing costs entrench the carbon-intensive blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace route, reduce the uptake of carbon capture on both that route and direct-reduced iron production, and squeeze out novel low-carbon processes such as hydrogen-based direct reduction and electrowinning. Industrial carbon capture by cement and steel falls substantially, overwhelmingly because of conditions in high-risk regions. The common thread is capital intensity: the very technologies needed to decarbonize industry are the ones most punished by expensive money.

The geographic redistribution is equally consequential. Mitigation costs rise not only in high-risk regions with persistently poor credit ratings, such as Ukraine or parts of South Asia, but also by 5 to 6 percent in major low-risk economies like the United States and China, as the model shifts cost-effective abatement toward lower-risk regions. In some high-risk parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, the effect is paradoxically reversed: abatement efforts shrink so much that overall abatement costs fall, even as global emissions rise. The study’s authors stress that economic growth in developing countries, while helpful, is unlikely on its own to close the financing gap, because sovereign risk also depends on institutional quality, regulatory stability and debt sustainability — factors that do not scale automatically with GDP.

The policy implications are pointed. Well-designed international climate finance can de-risk investments across all climate-relevant sectors in developing countries, helping to avoid what researchers have called investment traps, yet international mitigation finance remains heavily concentrated in low-carbon electricity generation, leaving grids, hydrogen and heavy industry underserved. The authors also caution that their estimates reflect market conditions rather than any judgment about whether financial markets price risk correctly, and that their model abstracts from sectors such as chemicals and transport finance. But the core message is hard to escape: the world’s climate models have been quietly assuming that money is cheaper than it is, especially where it is needed most. Correcting that assumption makes decarbonization slower, more expensive and more uneven — and makes the case for fixing global financing conditions itself a central piece of climate policy.

Subject of Research: The effect of country- and sector-specific cost of capital differences on global energy and industry decarbonization pathways

Article Title: The impact of financing cost differences on global energy and industry decarbonization

Article References: Waidelich, P., Crassier, C., de Boer, H. S., Tautorat, P., van Vuuren, D. P., & Steffen, B. (2026). The impact of financing cost differences on global energy and industry decarbonization. Nature Climate Change, 16(10), 1178-1186. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02756-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02756-0

Keywords: cost of capital, climate finance, integrated assessment models, decarbonization, renewable energy, green hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, developing countries, sovereign risk, steel industry, cement industry, IMAGE model

The stakes are enormous on the European side of the transaction. Eurostat data show the EU exported 35.1 million tonnes of waste to non-EU destinations in 2023, worth 18.5 billion euros, with 49 percent flowing to non-OECD countries. Exports of recyclable raw materials reached 39.3 million tonnes that year, including 12.2 million tonnes to Türkiye, 5.2 million tonnes to India, and 1.7 million tonnes to Egypt. Used textiles follow a different map: 46 percent of EU used-textile exports went to Africa in 2019, and countries including Ghana, Kenya, Angola, and Benin received very large volumes of second-hand clothing in 2022. Nigeria’s current share is modest, but the 2025 application would lock in a continuing role as a destination for Europe’s discards.

Technically, the case for the imports is not frivolous. Low-cost secondary textiles can lower input costs for Nigerian industry, and refuse-derived fuel genuinely can cut carbon emissions when it displaces fossil fuel in cement kilns, which operate at temperatures high enough to destroy many organic contaminants. Studies of alternative fuel production suggest cement plants using processed waste can shrink their environmental footprint while recovering energy that would otherwise be lost. For a country where cement is a major industry and energy costs are punishing, the economic logic is real. The study acknowledges these benefits directly rather than dismissing them, which is what makes its warnings about regulatory capacity so pointed.

Those warnings center on infrastructure that does not yet reliably exist. The authors identify weaknesses in port inspection, emissions monitoring, laboratory testing, and engineered disposal as the critical vulnerabilities. If imported waste streams are misclassified, contaminated, or diverted to open dumping, the promised benefits evaporate and the burdens land on communities least equipped to resist. Nigeria already generates roughly 32 million tonnes of waste annually, with Lagos alone producing an estimated 13,000 tonnes per day, much of it ending in open dumps. Research at the Solous landfill in Lagos State has documented elevated respiratory and skin disorders among residents living near the site, and studies of dumpsite fires at Olusosun have evaluated chronic pulmonary and neurological effects on nearby populations. Adding heavy-metal and particulate pollution from expanded imports, the study argues, would compound risks for communities already carrying a disproportionate exposure load.

The public health evidence extends beyond dumpsites. Waste pickers in Lagos, who form a large informal workforce sorting discarded materials by hand, face documented livelihood and health challenges. Groundwater contamination near waste dumps and informal recycling operations has been assessed seasonally and found to pose meaningful risks. Cement plants themselves are not benign neighbors: research on topsoil around a mega cement factory in Nigeria has mapped heavy metal contamination, and community health appraisals near cement plants have recorded social and health impacts. The paradox the study highlights is that a policy marketed as cleaner fuel and cheaper raw materials could, without oversight, deepen the very pollution problems it claims to solve.

To structure the decision, the authors lay out four policy pathways. The first maintains imports but ties them to real-time port and emissions monitoring, an option that preserves industrial benefits while demanding sophisticated, continuous verification. The second permits phased imports subject to verifiable environmental safeguards, allowing capacity to build incrementally. The third imposes a time-bound moratorium while Nigeria develops domestic textile-waste recovery and alternative-fuel capacity, betting that locally sourced feedstocks can substitute for imports. The fourth prohibits the two waste streams entirely, prioritizing health protection over industrial cost savings. Each option involves distinct trade-offs among industrial costs, regulatory capacity, administrative feasibility, and health protection, and the study declines to pretend that any of them is costless.

The timing of the analysis is significant. At the time of the article’s final revision in September 2026, the European Commission had published a draft assessment that did not recommend Nigeria for inclusion in the first list of eligible non-OECD countries, citing deficiencies in evidence on treatment capacity, enforcement, inspections, emissions monitoring, and waste-stream-specific management. That assessment independently echoes the regulatory-capacity concerns the researchers identified, though it remains a draft working document that has not been adopted or endorsed by the Commission. Crucially, the authors note, the EU review does not resolve the deeper questions: how benefits and risks would be distributed within Nigeria, what safeguards would be needed if imports continue, and whether locally recovered materials offer a viable longer-term path.

Those distributional questions are where environmental justice theory does its work. Drawing on frameworks from scholars like Robert Bullard and David Schlosberg, and on political ecology’s attention to power in resource flows, the study frames the waste trade not as a neutral market exchange but as a political arrangement that can shift environmental burdens onto vulnerable populations. The history is sobering: Nigeria’s experience with toxic waste dumping at Koko in the 1980s helped catalyze the Basel Convention, and scholars have since described newer, legal forms of waste colonialism operating through regulatory loopholes and economic asymmetry. Civil society organizations in Nigeria condemned the government’s import plan, warning of environmental crisis and urging focus on domestic waste management instead, and the federal government faced sharp public criticism after the application became known.

What distinguishes this analysis is its insistence that the answer is not simply prohibition or acceptance, but conditionality. The authors argue that any future EU-Nigeria waste trade should be tied to demonstrated regulatory capacity, independent verification, transparent cost-benefit disclosure, and meaningful community participation. That last element matters because communities near landfills, cement plants, and ports have historically been excluded from decisions that determine their exposure, a pattern documented in participatory-process failures from Nigeria to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Aarhus Convention’s principles of access to information, public participation, and access to justice offer a template, but implementing them requires institutions with funding and authority, and Nigeria’s environmental regulator has faced persistent capacity challenges.

The broader lesson reaches well beyond one application. As the EU tightens its export rules, dozens of countries will face similar choices about whether to become verified destinations for European discards, and the verification itself becomes the battleground where environmental health is won or lost. Nigeria generates enough of its own textile waste and municipal refuse to feed cement kilns and industrial processes without imports, and Lagos has already moved to ban textile waste at its landfills, suggesting domestic feedstocks are available. Whether the country builds the monitoring infrastructure, laboratory capacity, and enforcement machinery to manage any waste stream safely, foreign or domestic, will determine whether the circular economy becomes a shared project or simply a new geography of slow violence, in Rob Nixon’s phrase, in which the costs of consumption are exported to those with the least power to refuse them.

Subject of Research: Environmental justice and public health assessment of Nigeria's application to import non-hazardous EU waste under the EU Waste Shipment Regulation

Article Title: Environmental justice, public health, and resource politics: assessing Nigeria’s application to import EU waste

Article References: Giwa, A., David, F. A., & Ige, K. M. (2026). Environmental justice, public health, and resource politics: assessing Nigeria’s application to import EU waste. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01149-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01149-1

Keywords: environmental justice, waste trade, Nigeria, European Union, refuse-derived fuel, textile waste, public health, waste governance, Basel Convention, cement industry, waste colonialism, regulatory capacity

The Carbon Majors dataset is the most comprehensive public accounting of industrial carbon dioxide production at the entity level. Rather than attributing emissions to nations or to diffuse economic sectors, it identifies the specific companies and state-owned enterprises whose extraction, refining, and cement manufacturing activities released the greatest volumes of carbon into the atmosphere. Covering more than a century and a half of industrial history, the dataset aggregates the fossil fuel and industry emissions alongside agriculture, forestry, and other land use changes, providing a continuous record that climate scientists can feed directly into Earth system models. This entity-level resolution is what makes the new analysis distinctive: it allows the warming contribution of historically major producers to be isolated and tracked forward in time under different assumptions about the future.

The technical core of the study lies in its use of the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project framework, known as SSP, which defines a set of standardized future emissions trajectories used throughout the climate modeling community. The researchers ran simulations under four of these scenarios, spanning futures from low-emissions pathways consistent with ambitious mitigation to high-emissions worlds of continued fossil fuel expansion. Critically, they also constructed a counterfactual using the intermediate SSP2-4.5 scenario, in which the historical emissions of the Carbon Majors are removed from the forcing record. By comparing the counterfactual world against the real one, the team could quantify precisely how much warming the extracted and combusted carbon of these producers has caused and how much warming it will continue to cause under each future pathway.

The reason historical emissions lock in warming for centuries is rooted in the fundamental chemistry and physics of the carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas: once emitted, a substantial fraction of it remains airborne for hundreds to thousands of years, because the natural sinks that remove it, primarily the oceans and terrestrial biosphere, operate on slow timescales. The ocean absorbs CO2 through air-sea gas exchange, but the surface waters that take it up mix only gradually into the deep ocean, a process that takes centuries to equilibrate. Meanwhile, the carbonate chemistry of seawater limits how much carbon the ocean can ultimately absorb, and weathering of silicate rocks, the only mechanism that removes carbon on geological timescales, operates over tens of thousands of years. The net effect is that a pulse of CO2 emitted today raises atmospheric concentrations and global temperatures for far longer than human planning horizons.

This persistence distinguishes carbon dioxide from shorter-lived climate forcers such as methane, which breaks down in the atmosphere within roughly a decade. For CO2, the warming response to an emissions pulse is approximately proportional to the cumulative amount emitted, and it does not decay away quickly even if emissions cease entirely. The study’s simulations capture this behavior directly: under every one of the four SSP scenarios examined, the temperature anomaly attributable to the Carbon Majors’ historical emissions remains elevated for many hundreds of years into the future. Even in scenarios where global emissions fall sharply or reach net zero, the committed warming from past production does not disappear. It is baked into the trajectory of the climate system, a thermal and radiative inheritance that future generations cannot opt out of.

The magnitude of this inheritance is substantial when viewed through the lens of corporate accountability. The Carbon Majors accounting has previously shown that a relatively small number of entities, roughly a hundred investor-owned and state-owned producers, are linked to the majority of industrial CO2 emissions since the mid-nineteenth century. The new work extends that accounting into the domain of climate consequence, translating tonnes of extracted carbon into degrees of warming and, crucially, into centuries of duration. The counterfactual simulations under SSP2-4.5 quantify the gap between the world as it is and the world that would exist had these producers’ emissions never occurred, a gap that widens through the twenty-first century and then plateaus rather than closing, because the emitted carbon simply persists.

The dependence on future emissions pathways, highlighted in the study’s title, cuts in an important direction. While the warming already committed by historical emissions cannot be undone on human timescales, the simulations show that the additional warming these emissions will cause in combination with future emissions depends on which pathway humanity follows. In high-emissions scenarios, the Carbon Majors’ legacy carbon compounds with ongoing emissions, pushing temperatures further along a trajectory of severe heating. In low-emissions scenarios, the legacy contribution becomes a larger fraction of the total warming, but the absolute temperature outcomes are far less dangerous. The practical implication is that past emissions set a floor, but future choices determine how much higher the ceiling rises. Mitigation decisions made in the coming decades govern whether the centuries-long legacy of these producers is experienced at 1.5 degrees of warming or at substantially higher levels.

The scientific and legal significance of this work extends beyond climate physics. Attribution science of this kind is increasingly relevant to litigation, regulatory policy, and climate finance, as courts and governments seek to assign responsibility for climate damages. By connecting named producers to quantified, persistent warming under standardized scenarios, the study provides a defensible, model-based bridge between historical industrial activity and future climate harm. The fact that the analysis is published open access in PLOS Climate, conducted without specific external funding, and accompanied by a declaration of no competing interests strengthens its utility as an evidentiary resource. The authors, based in the United States, released the underlying emissions visualization under a Creative Commons license, enabling independent verification of the dataset and the scenario comparisons.

For the broader public, the study’s most striking message is one of timescale. Human institutions, corporate strategies, and political cycles operate on horizons of years to decades, while the consequences of carbon extracted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will still be measurably warming the planet in the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh. The coal burned to power Victorian factories, the oil refined through the twentieth century, and the cement poured into the infrastructure of industrialization are all, in a very literal sense, still in the atmosphere, still trapping radiation, and still committed to warming the Earth long after the companies that profited from them have transformed or vanished. Climate models make this inheritance visible and quantifiable, converting an abstract moral argument about intergenerational responsibility into concrete simulated temperatures across a millennium.

The research also underscores why cumulative emissions, rather than annual emissions alone, are the correct metric for climate policy. Because each tonne of CO2 contributes to warming in proportion to the total accumulated stock of carbon in the atmosphere, the historical production records of the Carbon Majors are not merely archival data; they are active components of the present and future climate forcing. The PLOS Climate simulations demonstrate that under every tested future scenario, from aggressive decarbonization to continued fossil expansion, the carbon already extracted by these producers continues to shape global temperatures for centuries. The study thus closes the loop between historical accountability and future climate outcomes, showing that the decisions of a relatively small set of industrial entities, made over 170 years, have committed the planet to a warming signal whose full duration no living person will see end.

Subject of Research: Centuries-long global warming contribution of historical emissions from major fossil fuel and cement producers under multiple future emissions scenarios

Article Title: The historical carbon emissions of major oil, gas, coal, and cement producers will contribute to global warming for many centuries, per simulations under a range of future emissions scenarios

Article References: The historical carbon emissions of major oil, gas, coal, and cement producers will contribute to global warming for many centuries, per simulations under a range of future emissions scenarios. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Carbon Majors, PLOS Climate, climate modeling, SSP scenarios, carbon dioxide, fossil fuel emissions, historical emissions, global warming, carbon cycle, climate attribution, cement industry, centennial warming