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, COP31 host Türkiye laid out proposals to accelerate emissions cuts in the next decade. Its plans include global goals to increase the share of recycled products in material use to at least 15% (up from 6.9% in 2025) and halve waste generation by 2035.

COP31 offers an opportunity to connect efforts to improve material circularity with stronger national climate commitments and mitigation pathways. But these targets could be a lot more ambitious.

The case for circularity

The Paris Agreement cannot be delivered through cleaner electricity alone. We must also reduce the emissions that are embedded in the way we extract resources, manufacture products, build infrastructure and dispose of waste.

Circularity principles are pivotal to credible mitigation pathways: designing technologies and products to last, repairing and reusing them, and reducing demand for virgin resources.

The scale of the opportunity is striking. A recent European Environment Agency review found that adopting such principles could deliver average global emissions reductions potential of 52% in the waste sector against a business-as-usual scenario, 48% in construction and buildings, 28% in transport and mobility, 26% in industry and 24% in agriculture.  

These figures make a compelling case for raising circularity ambitions across the economy, offering the promise of far more than better recycling bins.

In fact, recycling minerals used in cleantech equipment, for example, illustrate the extent of the emissions savings available. The carbon footprint of minerals and metals recovered from secondary sources is up to 80% lower than those produced from new mining and processing, according to the International Energy Agency.

A major EU-funded project estimates that recovered materials could substitute up to 56% of Europe’s primary critical raw material requirements by 2050, provided they achieve the necessary quality. The main takeaway goes beyond Europe: yesterday’s products can become tomorrow’s strategic resources while mitigating climate change.

In this light, a target to increase the share of recovered material use to 15% isn’t enough.

The evidence-based Circularity Gap Report found a 17% target by 2032 is possible and could unlock additional emissions reductions amounting to several gigatonnes of CO2.

Reducing material demand

A higher circularity metric is only part of the answer, however. An economy can increase its recycling rate at the same time as extracting more primary materials if total material demand keeps growing.

The tougher issue governments need to address is identifying what reductions in primary material use are needed.

The Circularity Gap Report uses an indicative benchmark of eight tonnes of virgin materials consumed per person annually. This is already being translated into policy: Germany’s 2024 circular economy strategy aims to reduce primary resource consumption, with the German Federal Environment Agency identifying six to eight tonnes per person as an ambitious target.

Reducing primary material demand will require a closer integration of energy and resource policies. Efficient EVs charged with solar power can complement better public transport and walkable cities, while batteries designed to be repaired and reused for stationary energy storage before being recycled will reduce the materials footprint of transport and clean energy services.

Coordinated infrastructure development and urban planning can prevent unnecessary overbuild, while renovating existing building stock reduces demand for new steel, cement and aluminium, which are emissions-intensive to produce. Connecting industrial waste heat to district heating networks can further reduce energy demand and emissions.

What governments should agree at COP31

COP31 can translate this approach into three concrete commitments.

First, governments should agree a stronger circularity ambition, supported by material-footprint indicators and milestones. The presidency should seek recognition of these priorities in negotiated outcomes, alongside concrete delivery partnerships under its COP31 Action Agenda.

Second, countries should include quantified circular economy measures in their updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and implementation plans. Such measures should include reuse, material efficiency and circularity targets, as well as transparent estimates of emissions savings that avoid double counting across sectors. By the end of 2025, countries had developed 101 national circular economy roadmaps and action plans, yet these often remained disconnected from their NDCs.

Third, climate finance should support the delivery of circular solutions such as material recovery at scale, investments into circular critical mineral value chains beyond mining, developing a circular plastics economy, and designing buildings and cities that support material reuse. Developing countries need technology, affordable finance and support to deliver these ambitions, including for the informal workers whose livelihoods depend on recovering and recycling materials.

The test for COP31 is to reach an agreement that can start the transformation of our production and consumption systems and how they are financed.

A headline circularity target will achieve little without policies that address absolute resource demand and deliver measurable emissions cuts. But COP31 offers an opportunity to make circularity a central element of climate policy, with targets strong enough to matter and institutions equipped to deliver them.

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COP31 must aim higher to cut emissions from the use of materials  

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 Niño – a naturally occurring weather phenomenon – can scramble rainfall patterns across the world, bringing drought to some regions and floods to others. And this time it is unfolding against the backdrop of a significantly hotter climate, with farmers already contending with unreliable growing seasons, extreme heat and less predictable rainfall because of global warming.

El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027

We are seeing the consequences already. In Sri Lanka, drought linked to El Niño has dried wells and reservoirs and cut into crops and farmer incomes. Indonesia is experiencing its worst wildfire season in 11 years, with prolonged drought and extreme heat exacerbated by El Niño. And in Peru, authorities are preparing for the opposite extreme: intense rains, flooding and landslides which the national civil-defence agency says could affect around 1.2 million people.

These impacts will multiply as El Niño intensifies.

And yet, just as the risks to food production are rising, the money available to help farmers withstand them is shrinking.

10% funding decline in 2024

A forthcoming analysis from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that climate-related development finance for agrifood systems is moving in the wrong direction. In 2024, the latest year for which data is available, it fell by 10 percent compared with a 2 percent overall decline. The sectors that put food on our tables — crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries — received just 5 percent.

Yet this is precisely the moment when climate investment in agriculture needs to grow, not shrink. It can help communities adapt, build resilience and protect food security, while unlocking larger flows of public and private finance. Agriculture feeds us, supports the livelihoods of well over a billion people, and is often the first sector hit by drought, floods and extreme heat. Cutting that investment now is a false economy.

One failed harvest can plant the seed for the next crisis, forcing farmers to eat the seed they have saved for planting, sell livestock or tools, or take on debt. It can also deepen food insecurity, disrupt supply chains and drive up prices, showing up months later in supermarket aisles far away.

Comment: A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready?

The Central American Dry Corridor, stretching through much of the region, shows both how exposed farmers are, and what investment can do. Based on an analysis of 41 years of satellite observations, FAO finds that some crop and pasture areas there face more than a 50 percent chance of agricultural drought over the coming months.

About half of Central America’s 1.9 million producers of maize, beans and other basic grains live in the Dry Corridor. Many grow food both for sale and for their own families. When a harvest fails, they lose both income and dinner.

El Salvador project conserves water and soil

In El Salvador, which lies within the Dry Corridor, more than 50,000 farmers have adopted practices to better withstand drought and increasingly unreliable rainfall through RECLIMA, a project financed by the Green Climate Fund and implemented by FAO in partnership with the government of El Salvador. It has substantial national co-financing, including from the country’s Environmental Investment Fund.

El Niño can intensify El Salvador’s annual mid-season dry spell, known as the canícula, turning it into a longer, harsher drought just as maize needs water most.

For María Cristina Corvera de López, a second-generation farmer in rural Nahualapa, adapting means changing how every drop of rain is captured and used. She plants trees alongside her crops to provide shade and minimise evaporation and uses simple irrigation channels and a homemade drip system to conserve water. Instead of burning stalks, leaves and husks after harvest, as generations before her did, she turns them into mulch to hold moisture in the soil.

“The effects of climate change are a constant challenge,” she says. But the new techniques have made her farm more resilient to El Niño as well. Where she once harvested about 50 bags of maize per acre, she now gets around 80, even during droughts. It’s enough to feed her family and sell the surplus.

Managing risk now cuts future costs

Together, these adaptations can mean the difference between losing a crop and getting through a dry season with enough food, seed and income to plant again. They are also the result of climate finance invested before disaster strikes.

RECLIMA shows what that kind of adaptation investment can buy. Adaptation accounted for 45 percent of climate-related development finance to agrifood systems in 2024, and multilateral development banks are directing more agricultural finance towards resilience. That shift reflects a growing recognition that adaptation is a form of risk management, not just a development cost.

We need much more of it. The same investments that help farmers withstand El Niño also enable them to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future. Cutting investment in the people who produce our food just as climate risks intensify does not save money. It simply pushes a much larger bill into the next harvest, the next food crisis, and the next El Niño.

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As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers

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 analysis.

Lula beat Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election to become president of the nation that is home to nearly 60% of the Amazon rainforest.

Forest loss surged during Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency and dropped sharply under the left-wing Lula, with Amazon deforestation likely to hit its lowest level on record this year.

Now, as another presidential election approaches, Lula is facing off against Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, whose “anti-environmental” policies are similar to his father’s.

Carbon Brief’s analysis suggests that at least 20,000 square kilometres (km2) of deforestation has been avoided since Lula took office and prioritised Amazon protection.

The analysis is based on modelling by an international research team of an alternative scenario in which Brazil’s flagship forest code legislation was not enforced – a proxy for Jair Bolsonaro’s leadership.

Experts tell Carbon Brief that this estimate is likely “conservative” and that actual deforestation under Bolsonaro could have been “much higher”.

With Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro tied in the polls, the upcoming election is expected to significantly shape the level of environmental action in the world’s fourth-largest emitter, whose emissions are largely driven by deforestation.

‘Brazil is back’

When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil between 2019 and 2022, he championed the nation’s powerful agribusiness sector and oversaw an unprecedented increase in Amazon deforestation.

Bolsonaro weakened regulations, slashed federal agency budgets and empowered illegal activities in the Amazon, while attacking Indigenous and environmental groups.

This meant that the forest code – Brazil’s flagship legislation that requires landowners to preserve and restore forest on their property – was not properly enforced.

After Lula’s presidential victory in 2022, he promised to target “zero deforestation” by 2030, telling the COP27 UN climate summit that “Brazil is back”.

Lula rolled back Bolsonaro’s wave of deregulation and reinstated a deforestation “action plan”. Led by celebrated environmentalist Marina Silva, the environment ministry scaled up enforcement and policing activities in the Amazon.

As a result, annual deforestation in the Amazon has more than halved from 11,594km2 per year in 2022 to 5,731km2 in 2025.

Data from August 2025 to July 2026 – the timespan used in government records – is yet to be released, but preliminary satellite alerts put the deforestation figure at 2,874km2.

While the final figure is likely to be higher, experts still think Amazon deforestation in 2026 could hit its lowest level since records began in 1988.

New Jersey-sized forest

Compared to a scenario in which Bolsonaro won in 2022, Carbon Brief analysis suggests that at least 20,000km2 of Amazon forest remains standing today due to Lula’s leadership.

This area – roughly the size of Wales, Belize, Slovenia or the US state of New Jersey – is indicated by the grey area in the chart below.

This analysis is based on a 2023 study on the role of nature-based solutions in Brazil’s pathway to net-zero emissions. This was a refined update of a 2018 study that used the same GLOBIOM-Brazil model, from researchers at the University of Oxford, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

It is based on a comparison of forest code implementation with a “baseline” scenario in which the code is not enforced, reflecting the kind of weak governance seen under the Bolsonaro administration. (See Carbon Brief’s 2022 article for more details of this modelling.)

Dr Aline Soterroni, a University of Oxford researcher who led the 2023 analysis, tells Carbon Brief that the reversal seen under Lula “shows how quickly deforestation can respond to political will”.

However, she stresses that the modelling of the “no forest code” scenario is “relatively conservative”, with deforestation remaining high but not rising.

Deforestation in this scenario – used here as a proxy for a Bolsonaro election win – is tempered by slower demand growth for Brazilian beef and soy, says Soterroni. She notes that the scenario also does not capture the potential for illegal forest clearing in response to weak governance.

Indeed, some experts anticipated in 2022 that a Bolsonaro victory would send deforestation rates rising to near-record levels.

Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, tells Carbon Brief that if Bolsonaro had won in 2022, “we have reason to believe [this would have resulted] in much higher rates than during his first term”.

Angelo says the “political signal” would likely have driven an “explosion of wildcat mining” and illegal deforestation in the Amazon. He also points to efforts – including by Flávio Bolsonaro – to formally dismantle the forest code in the Brazilian congress, during Jair Bolsonaro’s first term.

Soterroni notes that deforestation rates did not immediately drop following Lula’s election, as suggested by modelling of a full “forest code compliance” scenario. She says this reflects the “gradual and imperfect process” of restoring and enforcing the law.

Nevertheless, she tells Carbon Brief:

“The key message from our modelling is the contrast between these trajectories: weak environmental governance keeps deforestation substantially higher than full implementation of the forest code. That message remains relevant today.”

Election significance

With Jair Bolsonaro in prison for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election, his son Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator for Rio de Janeiro, is standing against Lula in the upcoming contest for president.

There are 13 candidates, but Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula are by far the frontrunners and are currently neck-and-neck in opinion polls.

If Lula wins, experts say he is likely to continue with the “zero deforestation by 2030” agenda that has already had a pronounced impact on forest loss.

As the chart below shows, periods when Amazon deforestation fell in recent history all occurred during Lula’s three terms as president.

In contrast, experts say Flávio Bolsonaro, a climate sceptic who has indicated he will continue his father’s political agenda and favour agribusiness and mining, will likely drive a surge in deforestation. Angelo tells Carbon Brief:

“At the risk of sounding alarmist, I’ve been saying that Lula’s re-election is the only thing standing between us and a wide destruction of the Amazon.”

A Bolsonaro win would be a “tremendous disaster”, says Dr Patricia Pinho, deputy science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, adding:

“I don’t think we can afford four years of increasing deforestation [and] violence against Indigenous peoples.”

Dr David Lapola, an ecologist focused on Amazon research at the University of Campinas in Brazil, says he believes deforestation “would certainly rise” and Brazil’s climate and deforestation goals “would be thrown in the trash bin”. He tells Carbon Brief:

“The Bolsonaro administration in the 2019-2022 period showed that the deconstruction of environmental policies and institutes can be done very, very quickly.

“In a matter of a few months, they can destroy what has been constructed over decades of environmental policy and activism in Brazil.”

‘Greenest’ policies

Lula has the “greenest” policy proposals of Brazil’s six top-polling presidential candidates, according to analysis by the Climate Observatory.

The analysis identifies 16 “positive and detailed” environmental commitments in Lula’s proposals, including reaffirming his “zero deforestation by 2030” goal.

Flávio Bolsonaro, on the other hand, has one positive environmental commitment and seven “clearly anti-environmental” proposals.

The right-wing politician has committed to zero “illegal” deforestation by 2029. However, he has also previously led an attempt to change the forest code, opening up large tracts of previously out-of-bounds forest for legal clearance by extractive industries.

Given this, Angelo tells Carbon Brief that he is sceptical about the 2029 pledge.

“The only way you can trust him on this is to think that he is going to revoke the forest code and make all illegal deforestation legal.”

Lula is also the only major candidate to list a clear target for cutting national emissions, sticking with Brazil’s existing goal to cut emissions by 59-67% by 2035, compared to 2005 levels.

Overall, the Climate Observatory notes that climate change and environmental issues “are off the radar for most candidates”, who are instead focusing on the economy and security issues.

Pinho adds that deforestation and the Amazon have not been at the “forefront” of this election, compared to 2022.

If Bolsonaro wins, up to 95% of the Amazon would fall under the leadership of right-wing national governments – including those in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – reported Mongabay. It noted that presidents in all these nations “explicitly favour agribusiness and mining over environmental conservation”.

If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round of Brazil’s election on 4 October, a runoff will take place on 25 October, as has happened at every presidential election since 1998.

Soy moratorium and Brazilian congress

Other factors will also play a role in future deforestation in Brazil, regardless of the next president.

One is the effective end of the Amazon soy moratorium. This is a voluntary agreement signed by companies committing to not buy soya beans grown on land in the Brazilian Amazon that was deforested after 2008.

Conservation organisation WWF’s international director general, Kirsten Schuijt, previously described it as the “most impactful voluntary supply chain policy ever implemented”.

However, major grain traders withdrew from the agreement earlier this year, effectively bringing it to an end. Pinho describes this move as a “huge destruction” of Brazil’s environmental protections.

Research shows the moratorium prevented around 18,000km2 of deforestation in its first decade of operation from 2005-16.

In contrast, a 2026 study estimated that the end of the moratorium could result in 14,000km2 of additional deforestation in the Amazon by 2036.

Alongside choosing a new president on 4 October, Brazilian voters will elect state governors and members of congress, which will also factor into future environmental impacts.

Right-leaning parties, including the far-right Liberal Party linked to the Bolsonaros, currently hold half the seats of the two chambers of congress.

This has led to conflict between lawmakers and Lula. For example, in 2025, congress bypassed Lula’s veto of several aspects of a controversial piece of legislation dubbed the “devastation bill”.

Pinho says that the potential for a right-wing congress and president would be “devastating for the environmental and climate agenda”.

Lapola notes that a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency “would consolidate the view in Brazil that environmental protection is solely a matter of political preference, and not a crucial need of all people”. He adds:

“Land pillage, destruction of precious biodiversity and scorning of Indigenous peoples simply cannot be a nation’s project in the 21st century. We have got to be smarter than that, for sure.”

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The post Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022 appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022