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Extreme heat poses a growing threat to pregnant women and their babies, both before and after birth, the UN climate chief said on Monday, calling it “a new faultline in the global climate crisis, and one which is potentially fatal”. Speaking on the first day of the pre-COP31 meeting in Fiji, where new research was […]
Several major banks that helped set up the UN’s now-defunct Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) in 2021 have since continued to lend money to coal companies, a new report has revealed. Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Deutsche Bank and Santander were heavily involved in the NZBA and the associated Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) […]
Harjeet Singh is the global convenor of the Fill the Fund campaign and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. Julie-Anne Richards is strategic campaign lead for the Make Big Polluters Pay campaign in Australia. This year, a glacier collapse in Nepal’s Himalayan valleys swept away the lives of at least 1,500 people, with […]
This is a republication of October’s edition of The Climate Agenda – a subscriber-only newsletter designed to keep you informed of the key events, negotiations and announcements happening every month. If you want to receive The Climate Agenda straight to your inbox at the start of each month, sign up as a subscriber today. This […]
On the desert shores of the Red Sea, Jordan plans to build a vast desalination plant to send drinking water hundreds of kilometres across its arid interior to the capital, Amman – bolstering climate resilience and reducing the country’s reliance on Israel for the vital resource. As climate change exacerbates water scarcity in Jordan, a […]
Print article Share The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £5.9bn since the start of the Hormuz crisis as a result of record electricity generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis. While gas prices are surging towards levels not seen since the 2022 energy crisis, the UK has been generating […]
This is the first in a series of monthly columns from Climate Home News Editor Megan Rowling. They are exclusively available to Pro subscribers. The deadly flash flood that thundered down Nepal’s Bhote Koshi valley a month ago may have been hard to predict given the complexity of monitoring glacial slopes in the high mountains. […]
Brazil’s environment minister says he is “very optimistic” that the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new rainforest fund to channel private and public finance to developing nations – can meet a key $10 billion funding target this year, and is not at risk from his country’s elections next month. The TFFF, launched by […]
Patrick Schröder is a senior research fellow at Chatham House’s Environment and Society Centre. A climate summit serious about implementation cannot afford to leave major emissions reductions off the table. Yet, that is the risk COP31 faces unless it makes reducing raw material use central to the way countries decarbonise their economies. On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last week, […]
An exceptional El Niño is building. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says it has intensified to very strong levels and is likely to last at least through February 2027. If its current trajectory holds, it could become stronger than anything seen since WMO monitoring began four decades ago. That is bad news for agriculture. El […]
Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu Close ‘Brazil is back’ New Jersey-sized forest Election significance ‘Greenest’ policies Soy moratorium and Brazilian congress An area of Amazon forest roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey has remained standing due to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leadership of Brazil, according to Carbon Brief […]
Print article Share Antarctic sea ice has recorded its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 48 years ago, new data reveals. Provisional data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that Antarctic sea ice hit its annual winter peak on 14 September, with an extent of 17.59m square kilometres […]
Participants at COP31 in Antalya will have a “duty” not to interfere in Türkiye’s internal affairs under the country’s hosting deal with the UN, reviving a clause dropped for last year’s climate summit in Brazil that human rights groups warn could put activists at risk. Türkiye has faced growing criticism from human rights groups over […]
As rising seas submerge growing swathes of land, countries that lose territory should still keep their national boundaries, sovereign rights and UN membership, according to a political declaration adopted at the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday. The declaration, which was championed by climate-vulnerable small island states, affirms “the presumption in favour of […]
President William Ruto of Kenya has called for COP31’s electrification agenda – a flagship initiative to accelerate the electrification of the global economy – to include a push for electric cookers to replace polluting firewood and charcoal. The Turkish and Australian co-hosts of the November summit want governments to sign up to a pledge to […]
Print article Share The latest surge in fossil-fuel prices means it is now up to nine times cheaper in the UK to drive an electric vehicle (EV) than a petrol or diesel car, shows Carbon Brief analysis. Since February, when the US first attacked Iran, the average price of diesel has increased by 38% to […]
Germany wants to stop using fossil fuels in its energy sector by 2045 at the latest, with plans for how to do that set out in the country’s transition roadmap published on Wednesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. The blueprint focuses on electrifying transport, home heating and industry, while […]
UN chief António Guterres called on countries to break their dependency on fossil fuels at a high-level event on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, where COP31 presidents Türkiye and Australia set the tone for November’s climate summit. As the world faces extreme climate impacts turbocharged by a “super El Niño” event […]
A United Nations initiative to ensure everyone on earth is protected by a multi-hazard early warning system (MHEWS) “has made real progress” but “too many people are still left exposed,” according to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. Since Guterres launched the Early Warning Systems for All goal in 2022, the number of countries reporting that […]
The UN has rallied behind plans to accelerate investment in electricity infrastructure in Africa and Southeast Asia, boosting efforts to tackle one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the shift to clean energy. UN boss António Guterres launched the Global Grids Accelerator on the sidelines of the UN Climate Summit in New York on Wednesday. […]
Dharam R Uprety is head of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. The climate crisis didn’t just knock at our doorstep. It has smashed through homes, demolished critical roads, and caused untold grief for millions of Nepali people. It has now been nearly a month since a wall of ice, rock, and water […]
Susana Malcorra is president and founder of GWL Voices and former foreign minister of Argentina. Mary Robinson is a GWL Voices member, former UN human rights commissioner and former Irish president. Earth has just had the hottest August since records began. Wildfires tore through Europe, North America and Asia, killing dozens, forcing hundreds of thousands […]
COP31’s flagship initiative to accelerate the electrification of the world’s economy has been criticised for failing to include a commitment to produce the power from clean energy. Governments that sign the voluntary pledge at this year’s UN climate summit will commit to increasing electricity’s share of total energy consumption to 35% globally by 2035 in […]
The head of the United Nations has called on all countries to deliver plans for phasing out their production and consumption of fossil fuels, as rising oil prices and climate shocks threaten energy and human security. In his farewell speech to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Tuesday, outgoing UN Secretary-General António […]
People around the world have donated almost $90 million to a government-led campaign to help Nepal recover from its recent devastating Himalayan flood, according to a Nepali climate negotiator, even as the UN chief slammed the tiny amount of money in a new fund to deal with such disasters. Individuals and companies from Nepal and […]
Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu Close Nepal’s needs Requests vs pledges ‘Rapid response’ The Nepali government has requested $20m from the UN fund for “loss and damage”, following the devastating floods that hit the country in late August. This amounts to just 0.7% of the $2.7bn it has estimated in “physical damage” to […]
For millions of people around the world, rising sea levels are already reshaping economies, livelihoods and cultures. The world’s oceans are currently rising at a faster rate than at any time in at least the past three millennia, with human influence the “dominant cause” of sea level rise since at least 1970. At the UN […]
Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org; Mads Christensen is executive director of Greenpeace International; and Amitabh Behar is executive director of Oxfam International. On Monday, global petitions with a collective total of more than 2 million signatures were presented to the United Nations, calling on governments to introduce binding mechanisms to make fossil-fuel companies and […]
Governments need to start addressing climate change impacts and nature loss as a threat to national security and manage shocks before they hit rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, Britain’s foreign minister and other leaders told the opening of Climate Week NYC on Monday. Ed Miliband – who was until July the UK’s energy […]
Print article Share This year’s so-called “super El Niño” is entering into record-breaking territory. Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific now equal the previous daily record set in 2015 and will likely keep rising in the days ahead. El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in the Pacific that reshapes weather patterns around […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is set for a bigger role at this year’s UN climate summit, as Türkiye’s COP31 presidency seeks backing for a new pledge on the technology’s energy use. In a statement on Monday, the COP31 hosts said they will launch the Antalya Pledge on AI, which they billed as a “political” commitment on […]
Dola Oluteye, PhD, is a senior fellow in energy and transport policy at the UCL Energy Institute and founder of The Professional African Network Advisory Initiative. At the June 2026 UN Climate Meetings in Bonn, the incoming Turkish COP31 Presidency introduced a headline target for the Action Agenda: raising electricity’s share of global final energy […]
In 2023, under the bright lights of the Expo City Dubai, almost 200 nations adopted an agreement to dramatically alter the world’s relationship with energy. The deal at the COP28 climate summit promised to triple the amount of renewable electricity capacity to at least 11,000 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, and double the rate of energy […]
Lidy Nacpil is the coordinator of Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD). Recent reporting on international climate negotiations has highlighted a sharpening divide within civil society and multilateral diplomacy. A troubling, simplistic narrative has taken root: that the UN climate process is witnessing a binary struggle between defenders of science and those attacking […]
More than 300,000 solar panels and 120 battery containers are helping to power Africa’s largest copper mine with continuous clean energy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as miners turn to solar as an alternative to expensive diesel and energy imports. The project at the Kamoa Copper mine in the south of the DRC, […]
Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio is a senior advisor on adaptation and resilience with the United Nations Foundation and Mattias Söderberg is global climate lead at Danish NGO DanChurchAid. Recent extreme events – from wildfires and heatwaves in Europe to flash flooding following a glacier collapse in Nepal – have shocked and devastated communities, bringing years […]
Despite millions of dollars in grants and technical help for African businesses to power farming and other food production activities with renewable energy, most efforts remain stuck at the early stages because they struggle to find the investors, markets and expertise they need to grow. This was the message from a coalition of global institutions […]
Türkiye and Australia risk losing their credibility as hosts of this year’s COP31 UN climate summit if they keep betting on fossil fuels at home, climate policy experts have warned. As governments are expected to continue fraught talks over how to advance the global transition away from oil, coal and gas in Antalya this November, […]
There is very little authorities in Nepal could have done to prevent the deaths and devastation caused by the flash flood on its border with Tibet in late August, scientists with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group have said. Launching a study that highlighted the role of climate change in causing the glacial rock and […]
Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu Close Flatlining fossils Clean-energy growth matches power demand Which states led the clean-power shift? Fall in oil and gas consumption continues Rapid emission growth from heavy industry continues New investments in coal Outlook for India’s emissions About the data A surge in clean energy has kept carbon dioxide […]
Print article Share Global fossil-fuel emissions are set to fall by around 0.5% in 2026 amid the fallout from the Hormuz crisis, according to Carbon Brief analysis. The US-Iran war has severely disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, causing a spike in oil and gas prices that continues to ripple around the global economy. […]
Print article Share Aviation is on track to be responsible for 80% of the UK’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC). Emissions from flying have more than doubled since 1990 – driven by rising passenger numbers – even as the climate impact of every other sector in the […]
A fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are linked to international trade in goods and services, a new tracker shows, spotlighting a little-studied issue that researchers say should be tackled by the UN climate process. Currently, as part of the Paris Agreement, every country is responsible for counting and reducing the planet-heating emissions that […]
Print article Share All the ambulance services in England experienced some of their busiest-ever days during this summer’s record-breaking June heatwave, according to data obtained by Carbon Brief. In June, temperatures climbed past 37C in parts of the country as authorities declared only the second ever “red” extreme heat warning. Four out of 10 NHS […]
Uncertainty persists over how COP31 will be managed, after Türkiye’s environment minister told journalists this week his country will have the final say at the UN climate conference despite a deal that gave Australia the role of chairing the negotiations in return for withdrawing its bid for the summit. At COP30, the two governments resolved […]
Janet Fleischman is an independent consultant with extensive experience in research, policy advocacy, and narrative storytelling. Jyotsna Uppal is a historian and narrative strategist, who supports individuals and organisations in change processes. Global climate progress sits at the centre of an acute crisis, as the multilateral order that structured international climate cooperation for three decades […]
In a bright, spacious factory on the outskirts of Lagos, young engineers in overalls work their way along the production line, carefully inspecting the shimmery blue solar cells that turn sunlight into electricity. Quality checks completed, the finished solar panels are loaded onto forklifts and taken to a warehouse – ready for delivery to buyers […]
Print article Share Wildfires currently burning large swathes of land in Indonesia are on track to produce emissions on a par with the country’s most-intense fire season this century, according to experts. Data from the Global Fire Emissions Database reveals that, as of 7 September, fires in Indonesia produced 76m tonnes of carbon (MtC) in […]
Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu Close Climate science Net-zero target Energy costs Oil and gas Impacts and adaptation Clean energy Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, has emerged as a major force in UK politics in recent years – pushing anti-net-zero policies, alongside vehement opposition to immigration. The hard-right populist party is currently […]
Print article Share More than 1,000 operations at NHS hospitals were cancelled due to heat during the UK’s record May and June heatwaves, Carbon Brief can reveal. This includes 167 orthopaedic surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements, as well as heart, eye and skin cancer operations. At least 10 emergency surgeries – those for […]