We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here. This is the last edition of Cropped for 2025. The newsletter will return on 14 January 2026.
Key developments
High Seas Treaty enters force
OCEAN BOOST: The High Seas Treaty – formally known as the “biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction”, or “BBNJ” agreement – entered into force on 17 January, following its ratification by 60 states, reported Oceanographic Magazine. The treaty establishes a framework to protect biodiversity in international waters, which make up two-thirds of the ocean, said the publication. For more, see Carbon Brief’s explainer on the treaty, which was agreed in 2023 after two decades of negotiations.
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DEEP-SEA MINING: Meanwhile, the US – which is not a party to the BBNJ’s parent Law of the Sea – is pushing on with an effort to accelerate permitting for companies wanting to hunt for deep-sea minerals in international waters, reported Reuters. The newswire described it as a “move that is likely to face environmental and legal concerns”.
UK biodiversity probe
SECURITY RISKS: The global decline of biodiversity and potential collapse of ecosystems pose serious risks to national security in the UK, a report put together by government intelligence experts has concluded, according to BBC News. The report was due to be published last autumn, but was “suppressed” by the prime minister’s office over fears it was “too negative”, said the Times.
COLLAPSE CONCERNS: Following a freedom-of-information (FOI) request, the government published a 14-page “abridged” version of the report, explained the Times. A fuller version seen by both the Times and Carbon Brief looked in detail at the potential security consequences of ecosystem collapse, including shifting global power dynamics, more migration to the UK and the risk of “protests over falling living standards”.
News and views
- OZ BUSHFIRES: Bushfires continued to blaze in Victoria, Australia, amid record-breaking heat, said the Guardian. A recent rapid attribution analysis found that the “extreme” Australian heat in early January was made around five times more likely by fossil-fuelled climate change.
- MERCO-SOURED: On 17 January, the EU signed its “largest-ever trade accord” with the Mercosur bloc of countries – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay – after 25 years of negotiations, per Reuters. On 21 January, amid looming new US sanctions, EU lawmakers voted to send the pact to the European Court of Justice, which could delay the deal by almost two years, according to the New York Times.
- SOY IT ISN’T SO: Meanwhile, the Guardian reported that UK and EU supermarkets have “urged” traders who had “abandoned” the Amazon soya moratorium to stick to its core principles: “not to source the grain from Amazon land cleared after 2008”.
- WATER ‘BANKRUPTCY’: A new UN report warned that the world is facing irreversible “water bankruptcy” caused by overextracting water reserves, along with shrinking supplies from lakes, glaciers, rivers and wetlands, Reuters reported. Lead author Prof Kaveh Madani told the Guardian that the situation is “extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse”.
- KRUGER UNDER WATER: Flood damages to South Africa’s Kruger National Park could “take years to repair” and cost more than $30m, said the country’s environment minister, quoted in Reuters. Rivers running through the park “burst their banks” and submerged bridges, with “hippos seen…among treetops”, it added.
- FORESTS VS COPPER: A Mongabay report examined how “community forests stand on the frontline” of critical-minerals mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s copper-cobalt belt.
Spotlight
Nature’s coast guard, with backup
This week, Cropped speaks to the lead author of a new study that looks at how – and where – mangrove restoration can be best supported across the world.
Along Mumbai’s smoggy shoreline, members of the city’s Indigenous Koli community wade through the mangroves at dawn to catch fish. Behind their boats, giant industrial cranes whir to life, building new stretches of snaking coastal highway that blot out the horizon.
Mumbai’s mangrove cover is possibly the highest for any major city. With their tangled, stilt roots, mangrove species serve as a natural defence for a city that experiences storm surges and urban flooding every year. These events disproportionately affect the city’s poor – particularly its fishing communities.
This mangrove buffer is being increasingly threatened, as the city chooses coastal roads and other large development projects over green cover, despite protests. But can green and grey infrastructure coexist to protect vulnerable communities in a warming world?
A new global-scale assessment published last week tallied the benefits of mangrove restoration for flood risk reduction, factoring in future climate change, development and poverty.
It advanced the idea of “hybrid” coastal defence measures. These combine pairing tropical ecosystems with modern, engineered defences for sea level rise, such as dykes and levees.
When Carbon Brief contacted lead author and climate scientist Dr Timothy Tiggeloven of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he was in Kagoshima in Japan, home to the world’s northernmost mangrove forests. Why combine mangroves and dykes? Tiggeloven explained:
“Mangroves are like active barriers: they reduce incoming energy from waves, but they will not stop the water coming in from storms, because water can flow through the branches. But wave energy can still be overtopped. So if you reduce wave energy via mangroves and have dykes behind this, they very much have a synergy together and we wanted to quantify the benefits for future adaptation.”
According to the study, if mangrove-dyke systems were built along flood-prone coastlines, mangrove restoration could reduce damages by $800m a year, with an overall return-on-investment of up to $125bn.
It could also protect 140,000 people a year from flood risk – and 12 times that number under future climate change and socioeconomic projections, the study said.
According to the study, south-east Asia could reap the “highest absolute benefits” from mangrove restoration under current conditions. Countries that could see the “highest absolute potential risk reduction” – considering future climate damages in 2080 – are Nigeria ($5.6bn), Vietnam ($4.5bn), Indonesia ($4.3 bn), and India ($3.8bn), it estimated.
Maharashtra – which Mumbai serves as the state capital for – is one of two subnational regions globally that could reap the largest benefits of restoration.
Tiggeloven emphasised that the goal of the study was to examine how restoration impacts people, “because if we’re looking only at monetary terms, we’re only looking at large cities with a lot of assets”, he told Carbon Brief.
A pattern that his team found across multiple countries was that people with lower incomes are disproportionately living in flood-prone coastal areas where mangrove restoration is suitable. He elaborated:
“Wealthier areas might have higher absolute damages, but poor communities are more vulnerable, because they lack alternatives to easily relocate or rebuild, so the relative impact on their wellbeing is much greater.”
Poorer rural coastal communities with fewer engineered protections, such as sea walls, could benefit the most from restoration as an adaptive measure, the study found. But as the study’s map showed, there are limits to restoration. Tiggoloven concluded:
“We also should be very careful, because mangroves cannot grow anywhere. We need to think ‘conservation’ – not only ‘restoration’ – so we do not remove existing mangroves and make room for other infrastructure.”
Watch, read, listen
DU-GONE: A feature in the Guardian examined why so many dugongs have gone missing from the shores of Thailand.
WILD LONDON: Sir David Attenborough explored wildlife wonders in his home city of London. The one-off documentary is available in the UK on BBC iPlayer.
GREAT BARRIER: A Vox exclusive photo-feature looked at the “largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted” to protect Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
‘SURVIVAL OF THE SLOWEST’: A new CBC documentary filmed species – from sloths to seahorses – that “have survived not in spite of their slowness, but because of it”.
New science
- Including carbon emissions from permafrost thaw and fires reduces the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5C by 25% | Communications Earth and Environment
- Penguins in Antarctica have radically shifted their breeding seasons in response to rising temperatures | Journal of Animal Ecology
- Increasing per-capita meat consumption by just one kilogram a year is “linked” to a nearly 2% increase in embedded deforestation elsewhere | Environmental Research Letters
In the diary
- 31 January: Deadline for inputs on food systems and climate change for a report by the UN special rapporteur on climate change
- 1 February: Costa Rica elections
- 2-6 February: First session of the plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution | Geneva
- 2-8 February: Twelfth plenary session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services | Manchester, UK
- 5 February: Future Food Systems Summit | London
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 28 January 2026: Ocean biodiversity boost; Nature and national security; Mangrove defence appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 28 January 2026: Ocean biodiversity boost; Nature and national security; Mangrove defence
Scientists have vowed to keep working on the next flagship set of reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), after a political row over the timeline for their release saw its latest session suspended on Friday evening without agreement.
During the weekend, government officials and scientists alike expressed disappointment over the inability to reach a compromise before some delegates from developing countries and small island states had to leave the week-long meeting in Ethiopia to catch flights home.
The disagreement – which has persisted since early 2024 – turns on whether the three key parts of the AR7 assessment should all be published before the conclusion of the UN’s next Global Stocktake of global climate action, which is due to be completed in late 2028.
The IPCC issued a statement after the close of the session, saying that “key agenda items” – the timelines for the three AR7 reports, as well as the IPCC budget – remain open and under discussion. It said the IPCC’s plenary session and its deliberations on the pending agenda “will resume at the earliest opportunity”, giving no further details of when.
IPCC Chair Jim Skea told delegates in closing remarks that recent months had been some of the most turbulent for the climate science panel and that, if there were stronger words than “profound disappointment” he would use them, according to a summary published by the Earth Negotiators Bulletin (ENB). IPCC discussions happen behind closed doors.
IPCC scientists remained committed
In an open letter, issued on Monday, a group of nearly 120 scientists – from a total of 664 AR7 authors – said they “stand committed to continue working to deliver the AR7 reports in a manner that is rigorous, timely and inclusive, in line with our mandate to be policy-relevant”.
“An assessment that arrives after the decisions it is meant to inform cannot serve its purpose,” they emphasised. “The second Global Stocktake in 2028 is such a decision point, and the world should not have to face it without the IPCCʼs latest assessment.”
Europe, small islands and the least developed countries, plus many Latin American and developed nations, want the IPCC to meet this deadline, arguing that the findings from the UN climate science body are irreplaceable in the UN climate policy-making process.
However, around a dozen developing countries plus Russia have argued that the reports should come later in order to allow for greater research input from the Global South – something that, in their view, would make the findings fairer. They also claim that a shorter timeline would put excessive pressure on experts.
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Who shapes climate science? The equity question facing the IPCC
Early completion of the next global climate science assessment reports risks excluding research from the Global South, which is key to ensuring the findings are fair -
Governments that support climate science must stand firm against naysayers
The IPCC is meeting to decide the timing of its next major report, as some countries try to delay it and weaken the case for faster emissions cuts
The most vocal of this group at last week’s meeting were India and Saudi Arabia, according to the ENB summary and a developed country diplomat. Critics see this push for a longer timeline as an excuse to deprive government decision-makers of the latest science and ease pressure on emerging economies to raise their ambition, particularly on cutting emissions.
Commenting on last week’s meeting, France’s ambassador for climate negotiations Benoît Faraco said a broad coalition of developed and developing countries from all five continents, “united in their support for science and the timeline proposed by scientists”, had withstood pressure “from a few countries” seeking to slow down the process of adopting the IPCC reports.
He added that France would not back down and would “continue to fight tirelessly for science, protect the integrity of information, and convince our partners that without the best available scientific data, we will be less effective in tackling climate change and protecting our populations”.
Inclusivity proposal stalled
In a bid to unlock a solution for the AR7 timeline, countries discussed ways to improve the inclusivity of the IPCC’s work. One option put on the table was for the IPCC to expand its funding for delegates from developing countries to attend some or all of its sessions from one to two participants, according to the ENB summary and a delegate speaking to Climate Home News.
That would increase the costs for the IPCC to complete AR7 by up to a quarter, according to an assessment shared by the secretariat. The panel’s budget is under severe strain and its officials have warned that, without additional voluntary contributions, it risks running out of money before it can deliver on this assessment cycle.
Climate Home News understands that some of the IPCC’s traditional donors – which mainly include European countries, Japan and Australia – indicated a willingness to support funding for an additional developing country participant. But without an agreement over the budget or the timeline for the reports, that option was ultimately not adopted.
‘Disappointed and worried’
The three reports are managed by working groups that collate and draw overall findings from the latest scientific studies and data on the physical effects of global warming around the world, how to adapt to it, and pathways for cutting planet-heating emissions in order to meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
Winston Chow, an urban climate professor at Singapore Management University who co-chairs Working Group II on adaptation, wrote in a LinkedIn post that he was “disappointed and worried” for the IPCC authors who have worked “extraordinarily hard” to assess the relevant climate science over the past two years.
He said he shared their concern that “the rigour, time and goodwill they’ve invested are now being put at risk by the Panel’s stalemate”.
As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
For Working Group II, a meeting for 250 experts writing that report is scheduled for January 2027, followed by the approval of a special report on cities and climate change in Singapore next March.
But because the IPCC’s budget has not been confirmed due to uncertainty about the AR7 schedule, travel support for those researchers is at risk, wrote Chow. “If they cannot participate, our assessments will lose vital expertise, perspectives and scientific breadth, and the collective effort of our authors will be undermined,” he warned.
Scientific work continues
Despite the political holdups, he – together with French climate scientist Robert Vautard, co-chair of Working Group 1 – agreed with IPCC head Skea who told the IPCC’s closing session on Friday: “The engine room of the IPCC is working, and it’s healthy.”
Vautard commented in a separate post on LinkedIn after it ended: “The boat is at full steam.” Working groups I and II are due to start revising the first drafts of their reports, while Working Group III on reducing emissions is finalising its first draft which will be out soon, he wrote.
“The most exciting two years of the cycle are ahead, for the authors. The momentum in the engine room is here and now. Trust the engine room!” he added.
The IPCC and some scientists report that progress has been made towards achieving an equitable balance of authors from the Global North and the Global South.
The group of researchers who signed the open letter on Monday noted that “inclusivity is at the heart of how we work”, with author teams bringing together experts from developed and developing countries with diverse backgrounds and at different stages of their careers.
Plea to overcome political differences
The signatories include several scientists from some of the countries opposed to the alignment of all IPCC reports with the Global Stocktake.
“We are committed to an assessment in which the knowledge, experience and priorities of every region are fully reflected, a commitment we share with the leadership of the IPCC.
Equity is built into how our assessment is being drafted,” they added.
They appealed to governments that make up the IPCC “to overcome their political differences and work together as we do as a global scientific community, so that we can deliver the IPCC reports the world needs to hear”.
In a statement published on Monday, IPCC chair Skea said reaching consensus on the schedule for the reports is “vital”. He added that the assessments provide authoritative scientific evidence to inform national climate policies, strengthen adaptation and resilience and support access to climate finance, as well as helping communicate the scale of the climate crisis and the urgency of efforts to tackle it.
The post IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock appeared first on Climate Home News.
IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock
An Lambrechts is a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International with extensive experience in biodiversity-related multilateral negotiations. She is the head of the Greenpeace delegation at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17 happening in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 2022, COP15 delivered the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. With COP17 starting in Yerevan, we are now halfway to the deadline, and according to the first Global Review of progress, countries are not on track to meet the biodiversity targets, and implementation must accelerate fast.
One of the main findings of the Global Review is that funding falls far short of the scale needed to halt and reverse nature loss. But the crisis facing the world’s biodiversity is not an absolute scarcity of capital – it is a profound public policy distortion.
The global economy currently spends roughly $30 destroying nature for every single dollar invested in its protection. According to a report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a staggering $2.4 trillion is spent in public subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture and water use, while global investment in biodiversity conservation and restoration stands at a mere $220 billion.
Countries urged to ramp up “insufficient” nature policies at COP17
Yet, discussions about how to close the biodiversity finance gap continue to claim that salvation lies in mobilising private capital, scaling offsets and “derisking” investments in nature. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of ecological stewardship and of the global financial architecture.
Biodiversity conservation is not a speculative investment portfolio – it is the foundation of human survival. The health of our planet is a non-monetisable, non-excludable public good. Expecting profit-seeking private capital to protect nature perpetuates the structural drivers of ecosystem destruction in the first place.
But if private market mechanisms cannot save biodiversity, where will the necessary public resources come from?
Money going to the wrong places
The answer lies in recovering the vast public wealth currently drained by cross-border tax abuse, financial secrecy and corporate impunity. Finance and environment ministers meeting in Yerevan must give a strong political signal that, to avert ecological breakdown, countries need to take swift action to reform global tax rules, eliminate harmful public subsidies and cancel unsustainable sovereign debts for the public revenues to end up where they belong.
Extractive sectors such as industrial agriculture, fishing, timber and mining continue business-as-usual, often heavily subsidised by public treasuries, while voluntary carbon and biodiversity offset markets pose a serious risk to nature conservation. Offset schemes have delivered only a negligible fraction of the funding needed to preserve ecosystems, allowing industries to continue with their destructive business-as-usual practices.