We are only two months into 2026, and a lot has already shifted beneath our feet. In New York, the fourth session of the UN tax committee opened this week with an empty chair. The United States exited the Paris Agreement last month and has signalled a wider retreat from multilateral climate cooperation. While legal arguments continue, the political reality is already here.
For Oman, these talks offer an early glimpse of how the world intends to fund survival as extremes accelerate. Voluntary climate finance has a credibility problem. The gap between grand announcements and actual arrivals has become its own kind of climate risk.
Science is tightening the timeline. A study released this week by the University of Colorado Boulder uses ancient lake sediments to deliver a warning. Tropical land regions can warm far faster than the surrounding oceans during high carbon periods, in some cases approaching twice the rate. Global averages of 1.5°C look polite on a chart. Heat on the ground however is personal. It is a work shift in Muscat that starts before dawn and still feels unsafe by noon. It is a farmer watching water vanish faster than the season suggests. The tropics do not experience warming as a trend line. We experience it as a threat to human endurance.
Tax has entered the climate conversation with force. Negotiators in New York are drafting a new framework and treating polluter pays as a design brief. The debate has moved from whether to tax to how to collect. Proposals include levies on fossil fuel profits and forms of global wealth taxation. Advocates cite $1.7 trillion annually as the scale needed to fund climate loss and damage and close the gap between diplomatic promises and lived reality.
Oman sits in a rare position inside this tension. The nation produces hydrocarbons while living in a region where warming hits harder. Transition requires holding both truths at once, then building a future resilient enough to survive them.
The Sultanate of Oman is already building for this shift. This week, the Oman Net-Zero Centre announced plans to establish a national framework for carbon certification and a digital Carbon Registry. While delegates in New York debate how to tax carbon, Oman is building the infrastructure to price it properly and prove it credibly. A national certification system aligned with international standards can help Omani industries substantiate emissions claims and access finance linked to verified reductions. It also strengthens the market readiness of low carbon exports, including green hydrogen headed to Europe, where documentation and credibility decide whether value is recognised.
The 11th Five-Year Plan launched at the start of this year turns Oman Vision 2040 into programme and reinforces a green economy direction as a national growth strategy. Financial regulation is tightening too. The Central Bank of Oman is pushing institutions to price climate exposure rather than defer it, starting from this year. However, an uncomfortable gap remains.
Scientists measure acceleration today. Negotiators move through sessions and ratification timelines. Revenue takes years to mobilise and distribute and while doing all of this temperature does not wait for fiscal years.
As New York moves towards a draft text, one question deserves to stay in the light. Can money ever move fast enough to meet the heat?
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