Balkan News

The High Representative issued a statement on behalf of the European Union on the humanitarian developments in Gaza.

During the press conference held after at the end of the informal meeting of Heads of State or Government of 13 November 2026, President António Costa presented the main results of the discussions on artificial intelligence and Ukraine.

A civil society protest at COP 31 demands a transition from fossil fuels. Credit: UN Climate Change/Kubilay Ciftci

By Umar Manzoor Shah
ANTALYA, Türkiye, Nov 14 2026 (IPS)

The shift away from fossil fuels is made more difficult by the powerful, often overlooked role of national oil companies. These companies are deeply embedded in their countries’ economies and political systems.

During the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Inter Press Service (IPS) spoke exclusively with Amir Shafaie, Legal and Economic Program Director at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), about the role of state-owned oil companies in the energy transition, the financial risks of continued fossil fuel investments and the policies governments need to adopt to meet global climate goals.

Shafaie said national oil companies produced 54 percent of the world’s oil and half of its gas in 2025. Their share of global production could rise to around 62 percent by 2050 if current trends continue.

Excerpts from the interview: 

Amir Shafaie, Legal and Economic Program Director at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI). Photo: Supplied

IPS: National oil companies account for nearly half of global fossil fuel production. How significant is their role in the global transition away from fossil fuels, and why have they received less attention in climate negotiations?

Shafaie: National oil companies are even more significant than the question suggests. In 2025 they produced 54% of the world’s oil and half its gas, and their share is projected to reach around 62% by 2050. Last year (2025) NOC capital expenditure was around US$240 billion — more than three times what the oil majors spent. So, the pace of the transition away from fossil fuels will be significantly shaped by these state-owned companies.

NOCs are also politically sensitive. They often have a massive role in the national political economy and significant influence over government: they fund national budgets and public services and are often bound up with national identity.

Given their importance, it’s time to stop treating them as a footnote in transition conversations.

They deserve to be a headline.

IPS: What specific steps should national oil companies take to align their business strategies with the global goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C?

Shafaie: There is no single model — NOCs differ widely in mandate and capability — but every NOC needs a deliberate strategy of transformation to navigate the energy transition, and government owners of NOCs need to ensure that is the case.

As a first step, NOCs must stop treating business as usual as a neutral option and start to seriously assess the risks – and opportunities – presented by the global energy transition. Every NOC should test its planned investments against various demand scenarios, including those in which countries meet their climate pledges and oil and gas demand falls — and publish the results. Many projects that NOCs view positively today may not pay back. In 2023, NRGI analysis found that NOCs plan about US$1.8 trillion of upstream spending over the 2023-2032 period and that roughly a quarter, about US$425 billion, of that public money would be lost if oil demand falls in line with governments’ climate pledges.

Moreover, in these assessments, NOCs shouldn’t assume a pivot to gas eliminates risk: demand destruction from the recent crisis, with countries switching to renewables that can be cheaper and less geopolitically volatile, works against that; and there is still a lot of gas and LNG coming on to the market in coming years, so projects will need to be competitive.

Governments and NOCs also need a credible plan for the new business areas NOCs pursue, identifying sectors and technologies in which the NOC holds genuine comparative advantages.

Finally, NOCs are not only commercial entities—in many producing regions they are anchor employers and service providers, and their transformation carries real consequences for workers and communities. Governments and NOCs must anticipate the just transition needs of different regions as NOCs transform.”

IPS: How can governments persuade state-owned oil companies to reduce fossil fuel production while balancing energy security, economic growth and employment concerns?

Shafaie: Balancing these various concerns is not easy, but governments need to weigh all the factors (energy security, economic growth, employment concerns and production plans), not focus on just one or some of them. Governments are also well placed to do this with NOCS.

They own these companies or hold large stakes in them, so this is less about persuading NOCs than about setting a clear policy, including around how much revenue can go back into new oil and gas and requiring investments to be tested against different demand scenarios.

And there is room to balance these factors. The recent energy crisis shows that energy security and energy transition are not opposites: oil dependence is itself a security and cost-of-living risk, and NOCs often end up absorbing the cost, as Pertamina has with subsidised fuel prices.

The challenge also looks different for NOCs in net-importing and net-exporting countries. In net importers such as Thailand, producing more at home offers little protection from world prices, so the energy security gains come from cutting demand and diversifying supply. In large net exporters such as the UAE or Norway, the main risk is volatile revenues, and today’s windfalls are an opportunity to diversify their economies. Many NOCs, including Pemex, Pertamina, NNPC and increasingly Ecopetrol in the case of gas, sit in between and face both challenges at once, so governments need mandates that address both.”

IPS: What risks do continued investments in new oil and gas fields pose to developing countries, particularly in terms of stranded assets, public finances and long-term energy security?

Shafaie: The risks are significant, and they fall on ordinary people in producing countries. Our 2023 analysis finds that if governments meet their existing climate pledges, around a quarter of NOCs’ planned upstream investments for 2023–2032 may never break even. For some — Uganda’s UNOC and Cameroon’s SNH — the figure exceeds 80%.

When a state company’s assets lose value, the hit lands on public balance sheets, leaving less for health, education and diversification. Current high oil prices can mask these vulnerabilities in the short term, but they don’t remove them. The longer-term dynamics from the energy transition are still there. It is particularly important for NOCs and the government to exercise fiscal discipline in the current context, where market signals may lead them to take greater risks. As UN Secretary General Guterres said at COP31 ‘taxpayers should not underwrite investments that lock in fossil fuel dependence’.

IPS: The COP30 roadmap seeks to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. What concrete policy measures, financial incentives and accountability mechanisms are needed to ensure national oil companies become part of this transition rather than obstacles to it?

Shafaie: The Brazil COP roadmap is a significant step forward in taking the “transition away from fossil fuels” from an abstract idea to a basis for national planning. What happens at the national level is what really matters now.

The roadmap rightly asks countries to start now and equitably recognises that what this means in each country will differ, depending on exposure and capacity. The approach looks different in each country and can range from starting the phase-out of licensing and production in rich Global North producers to starting serious transition risk – and opportunity – assessments and associated planning in low- and middle-income producer countries.

The COP30 Presidency Roadmap also rightly recognises the distinctive role of NOCs at the intersection of public revenues, energy security and industrial development. Accordingly, for countries with NOCs, discussions around the NOC’s future should be central from the start if transition plans are to be credible.

International cooperation can also play a vital role in supporting NOC transformations through peer learning around scenario-based planning, disciplined investment decisions, decarbonisation and methane emissions abatement and finance for credible diversification into renewable energy and other business areas.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

Protracted and increasingly regionalized conflicts across Africa are straining existing tools for peacekeeping, peacemaking, and conflict resolution. At the same time, international and regional multilateral institutions face growing challenges related to their credibility, legitimacy, and leverage. From preventive diplomacy to mediation and peace support operations, multilateral actors are finding it increasingly difficult to shape peace processes and their outcomes.

This meeting note summarizes discussions from a retreat organized by IPI, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Amani Africa, and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), in partnership with the African Union (AU). Held as the AU marked twenty years since the creation of its Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development (PCRD) policy, the retreat brought together officials from the AU, the UN, regional economic communities (RECs), and member states.

Key themes from the discussion included the need for the AU to prioritize investing in areas where it can be most effective and the importance of aligning continental and subregional approaches to mediation. Participants also discussed recentering the UN–AU partnership at a more strategic level, ensuring that peace support operations are not deployed without an accompanying political framework, and matching mandates with the means to deliver, including through sustainable AU funding and greater investment in conflict prevention.

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The post Sustaining Peace in Africa: Strengthening Peacemaking and Peace Operations for Conflict Resolution and Post-Conflict Recovery appeared first on International Peace Institute.

Hall has been seeking a US visa in South Africa as other African beauty queens face similar hurdles.

A seal navigates the icy waters of the Antarctic—an ecosystem under mounting pressure from commercial fishing and climate change. Credit: Our Antarctica/Shawn Heinrichs

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 12 2026 (IPS)

On October 30, the 45th annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR-45) concluded in Hobart, Australia. After another year of negotiations without a consensus reached on Antarctic marine protection measures or krill fishing regulations, conservation groups are urging consumers and retailers to boycott all krill products.

Widely regarded as a vital, shared global commons, the Antarctic is home to trillions of krill. A keystone species, krill from the Southern Ocean form the backbone of the polar ecosystem, sustaining nearly every major predator, from seabirds and seals to whales. Antarctic krill possess one of the largest biomasses of any wild animal on Earth, measuring between 379 and 500 million tonnes.

In an exclusive interview with IPS, marine biologist, policy expert, and Antarctic Wildlife Alliance Executive Director Ally Kristan explained that Antarctic krill act as a “tremendous” carbon sink and are critically important for the health of the Southern Ocean. She stressed that the stability of Antarctic marine ecosystems is a major climate driver for the entire globe.

“If you lose krill, you lose the foundation of the entire Southern Ocean food web. So then, all of the predators who feed on krill and the predators who feed on the predators who feed on krill would all be decimated,” said Kristan. “So we do need a healthy Southern Ocean ecosystem, biologically and chemically, to have a healthy climate and to have as much carbon absorbed into these nutrient-rich cold waters of the Southern Ocean.”

Despite their ecological importance, industrial fishing fleets harvest hundreds of thousands of tonnes of krill annually. Given the abundance of krill biomass in the Southern Ocean, Kristan noted that the species is “probably” not being overfished, but the central issue lies with how they are being fished.

She explained that industrial krill fishing is often heavily concentrated in small areas, which can have devastating localized impacts on regional marine fauna. With krill fishing often overlapping with wildlife feeding grounds, polar predators have been increasingly forced to compete with commercial supertrawlers for food.

“Science shows us that the krill fishery and the recovering whale population both probably can’t be supported by krill populations, especially as the climate continues to change,” she said. “Fisheries have a huge compounding impact on all the climate pressures whales are already facing.”

IPS also spoke with Max Bello, an international ocean policy expert and Blue Marine Foundation’s Global MPA Specialist. He underscored the ethical concerns surrounding Antarctic krill extraction, noting that it supplies high-end consumer products, such as omega-3 supplements, pet food, and farmed fish feed, even though viable alternatives exist.

Kristan added that krill fishing has no direct use for addressing human food security. Instead, fleets from wealthy nations in the Global North—primarily Norway and China—exploit this shared global resource to supply high-end markets, risking potentially dire environmental consequences.

She highlighted the commercial market for the luxury Antarctic toothfish—commonly sold under the market name of “Chilean Seabass”—as a key example. Bello echoed these concerns, emphasizing that up to 70 percent of harvested krill goes toward salmon aquaculture, a market “which has proven to be extremely destructive around the entire world, highly polluted.”

Bello stressed that unsustainable krill fishing practices coupled with the Antarctic’s position as an Area Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) set an alarming precedent, with global powers relying on a shared resource to enrich themselves.

“This definitely creates a big question about our governance of the oceans around the world, where we keep seeing wealthy nations and companies that have the technology and resources to exploit an area that belongs to us all,” said Bello. “So that sends a really worrisome message. A message to our nations that we are basically spectators or witnesses of how other countries continue to build wealth out of the destruction of a common resource.”

He added that the exploitation of Antarctic marine ecosystems has ripple effects that go “beyond money” that we all depend on, such as oxygen, biodiversity, and the “stability of our very vulnerable ecosystem.”

Seventeen years after CCAMLR members pledged to implement a comprehensive network of MPAs, only two have been established. In 2024, CCAMLR allowed the expiration of a critical safeguard designed to spread krill catches across four distinct management zones, which has elicited significant pushback from conservation and environmental justice groups.

Ahead of the summit, conservation groups called on governments to implement four marine protection measures: reinstating restrictions separating industrial fishing areas from wildlife feeding grounds, adopting the Antarctic Peninsula Marine Protected Area (MPA), setting a firm roadmap for completing a network of Southern Ocean MPAs, and introducing caps on krill catch limits. None of these calls were answered.

As CCAMLR continues to fail to deliver meaningful action, a growing global initiative has formed to protect Antarctic marine ecosystems by directly challenging consumer support in the markets. During NYC Climate Week in September, oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle and the Antarctic Avengers—a coalition of ocean leaders, policymakers, scientists, and public figures—launched a global boycott of Antarctic krill, urging consumers and retailers alike to reject all krill-derived products.

Several major retailers in the Global North have shown support for this growing movement. In April, Holland & Barrett—one of the United Kingdom’s leading international health and wellness retailers—entirely withdrew from the krill market, ceasing the sale and production of all krill-derived products.

Approximately 94 percent of German drugstores have also announced commitments to cease selling krill products. Two of Australia’s largest supermarket chains—Coles and Woolworths—followed suit. The Antarctic Wildlife Alliance continues to call on American retailers to take similar action.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

BERICHT über den Vorschlag für eine Verordnung des Europäischen Parlaments und des Rates zur Einrichtung des Instruments „Europa in der Welt“
Ausschuss für auswärtige Angelegenheiten
Entwicklungsausschuss
Robert Biedroń, Michael Gahler

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

For Nigerians to feel meaningful improvements, reforms will need to go beyond the promises outlined, analysts say.

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ÄNDERUNGSANTRÄGE 1 - 202 - Entwurf eines Berichts Umsetzung der Gemeinsamen Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik – Jahresbericht 2026
Ausschuss für auswärtige Angelegenheiten
David McAllister

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

Une femme affirme que le directeur d'une agence l'a envoyée faire des séances photo dans la maison de plage du délinquant sexuel.

Des traces de travaux d'excavation et de nouvelles constructions sont visibles sur les images satellites prises en novembre, selon ces mêmes images.

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