A Chinese representative said Wednesday that negotiations on the details of a global carbon trading market are ongoing at the United Nations climate change conference or COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, after negotiators ratified a key framework following years of deadlock.
COP29, formally known as the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is taking place in Baku on Nov 11-22. Negotiators are gathering in the Azerbaijani capital city to discuss strategies for reducing carbon emissions, achieving carbon neutrality, and advancing the transition to green technologies.
On the first day of the conference, negotiators from almost 200 governments struck a final deal on Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement to create a new structure for a global carbon market led by the UN.
Under Article 6.4, an integrated and global carbon mechanism will be established, overseen by a UN body for the trading of emissions mitigation units created globally by various projects. These include how to validate, verify and issue credits.
Talks are underway, involving the authorization and transfer of emission reduction indicators, as well as the corresponding registration system. The negotiations atmosphere is better than in previous years, said Wang Jijie, a negotiator of the Chinese delegation at COP29.
"If we can finish discussing all these issues this year, most of the technical problems will be solved relatively well. From my personal point of view, at least for now, everyone is working towards the goal of completing the negotiations, and this year's negotiation atmosphere is indeed better than in previous years, so this also provides a basic condition for us to achieve such a positive result in the final conference," Wang said. Experts said that if the international carbon trading system passes in its entirety, billions of U.S. dollars are set to be pumped into carbon markets, especially in developing countries where many carbon-credit programs are based.
The establishment of an international carbon market is a complex issue, involving the balance of interests among countries, the allocation of emission reduction responsibilities, and the formulation of trading rules. Although some progress has been made, there are still some details that need to be resolved in the following years.
UN-led global carbon trading negotiations go into details
Honor's humanoid robot, Lightning, which swept the 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on Sunday, is a natural extension of years of accumulation in consumer electronics technology, said its developers.
A leading smart device provider in China, Honor independently developed the model, which dominated the podium at the event as it was used by all three teams whose autonomous navigating robots ran the fastest times.
At the Honor factory in Pingshan District in Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province, where robotics engineers developed Lightning. They said the robot's body design incorporates a simulation system that, through artificial intelligence algorithms, can iterate nearly 30,000 design schemes of varying sizes over three months. Complete and mature systems are also in place for battery, communication, and reliability verification.
"We built a simulation lab from scratch. For the robots, we digitize the entire design and put it into a computer. We have our own material library, which can meet the force, thermal, and chemical property demands for each component, under different environments and speeds. We've accumulated about 1000 kinds of materials. For example, if there's a risk with the robot's neck, we just need to change the material code from 001 to 002. Now, through our simulations, we only need one day to perform parallel calculations on 10 different designs, before creating a mold and verifying it in the lab," said Li Zheng, a senior engineer at Honor.
An autonomous robot capable of completing a half-marathon involves a complete industry chain, with core components including high-precision sensors, LiDAR, motors, operating systems, and control algorithms. The development of robotic marathoners have driven an increasing number of component enterprises to get involved.
Manifold, a tech firm established by newly-graduated PhDs, has developed a 3D spatial memory module, which can model an environment in real time and transform it into images that robots can understand. They said several robots running the half-marathon this year adopted their solution.
"Our device can operate within a one-kilometer tunnel with an error margin of only tens of centimeters. For robots, especially in the absence of GPS, this allows them to accurately determine their location. The underlying technology is a multi-sensor fusion technology that we developed in-house," said Qin Youming, CEO and founder of Manifold.
The Beijing Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center set up a training camp for the marathon event. Many university students came a month ahead of the event to develop and debug their technologies and algorithms based on open-source robot bodies, databases, and training platforms.
"These high-quality databases and highly open-source control algorithms are actually very helpful to us. We no longer need to build the house from the ground up, but can skip the most basic part," said Sun Jingyu, a student from Shandong University.
"Through this racing event, I believe we can make our robots more reliable and stable, while also supporting high-dynamic, high-load movements. This is crucial for robots' future application in both industrial, commercial and domestic scenarios," said Guo Yijie, head of the innovative humanoid department and the Marathon project of Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.
Engineers share development story behind Beijing humanoid half-marathon champion model
