The UK is roughly halving the climate aid it allocates to developing countries, when accounting changes and inflation are factored in, according to new analysis by Carbon Brief.
On 19 March, the government announced that the UK would provide “around £6bn” of international “climate finance” over the next three years.
This replaces a previous goal to provide £11.6bn across the 2021-2026 period to help nations in the global south cut their emissions and deal with climate threats.
The new target was reported as a spending reduction of up to 14% compared to recent years, reflecting the UK’s wider plan to cut development aid and spend more on defence.
In fact, Carbon Brief analysis reveals that the cut is far larger in real terms, with the new target worth around 30% less per year once inflation is taken into account.
When also excluding the government’s use of widely criticised “creative accounting” to boost apparent spending, the new pledge is roughly 50% lower than the old one.
The drop in climate finance means that – alongside other major donors – the UK is diverging from an international target, agreed in 2024 at COP29 in Baku, to ramp up climate aid to $300bn a year by 2035.
‘Innovative reforms’
Under the Paris Agreement, the UK and other developed countries committed to provide financial support for climate action in developing countries. This “climate finance” comes from the UK’s wider budget for “official development assistance”.
Successive governments have pledged set amounts of climate finance over five-year periods, supporting everything from solar energy in Nigeria to mangroves in Indonesia.
In 2019, the Conservative government promised to “double” the previous target of £5.8bn for the financial years 2016-17 to 2020-21 and reach a total of £11.6bn between 2021-22 and 2025-26.
The current Labour government inherited this goal in 2024, at a time of geopolitical instability, conflict and threats to global climate action.
Alongside other developed countries, the UK then pledged at the COP29 climate summit in2024 to roughly triple the total amount of global climate finance to $300bn a year by 2035.
With its £11.6bn target expiring in April 2026, the government has been under pressure to set a new goal that would increase climate finance in line with this global ambition.
Instead, since COP29, the UK has announced it will cut overall aid spending to 0.3% of gross national income, compared to the historic 0.7%, to raise money for military spending.
This continues a trend of aid cuts started by the former Conservative government and mirrors similar cuts taking place in other countries. Most notably, the US has virtually eliminated its contribution to international climate finance.
In March, foreign secretary Yvette Cooper finally announced details of how the UK’s headline cuts in overseas aid would impact specific spending priorities between 2026-27 and 2028-29, including climate finance. She said:
“Over the next three years, the UK will spend around £6bn of official development assistance as international climate finance. We will balance support between mitigation and adaptation and maintain a focus on nature.”
This amounts to a clear cut in annual climate-finance spending, even without considering the impact of inflation or accounting changes, as the chart below shows.
Despite Cooper’s pledge to “maintain a focus on nature”, the government also scrapped the “ring-fencing” of funds for nature and forest conservation, as well as the practice of setting five-year goals to provide more certainty to climate-aid recipients.
(The relatively vague “around” £6bn is also notable, given the previous targets were set at precisely £11.6bn and £5.8bn. This could allow the government to ultimately spend less than £6bn.)
The government is also clear that it is shifting its focus to using public development aid to “unlock private investment for development”, framing its overall approach as “innovative development reforms”. Cooper stated that, as well as the £6bn in climate finance:
“We will aim to generate an additional £6.7bn of UK-backed climate and nature positive investments and to mobilise billions more in private finance.”
Cooper described “climate and nature” as two of the government’s four “priority” themes for its dwindling aid spending.
Nevertheless, the international development committee of MPs expressed “deep concern” about the new climate pledge and NGOs called it a “backward step”.
Accounting changes
Media coverage of Cooper’s announcement stated that the new climate-finance target was 13-14% lower than the previous one.
This is based on the difference between average annual contributions out to 2029 under the new pledge – around £2bn – and the £2.3bn average from the previous period.
However, Carbon Brief analysis suggests that this straightforward approach makes the target seem more ambitious than it actually is.
When the £11.6bn target was set in 2019, only specific, climate-related projects funded directly by the UK government counted towards it. Then, in 2023, the Conservative government decided to loosen the criteria for the funds it counted towards the target.
This included relabelling existing support for multilateral development banks (MDBs), humanitarian aid and more private-sector investments as “climate finance”.
This approach – which mirrors that of other climate-finance donors – means the government is now on track to hit the £11.6bn target. (For more details, see Carbon Brief’s previous coverage.)
NGOs criticised this “creative accounting” at the time. Similarly, the UK’s official aid watchdog described the changes as “moving the goalposts”, as they meant the government could meet its target without providing as much new money. Nevertheless, the current Labour government has retained the changes.
The government released a list of specific aid allocations alongside Cooper’s recent announcement, which includes how much it plans to give to MDBs, as well as the UK-owned development body, British International Investment (BII).
Most of this money would not have been counted as climate finance under the old accounting system. Under the new system, a large portion of it will be.
Carbon Brief estimates that £1.7bn of new climate finance over the next three years – roughly 28% of the total – would not have counted as climate finance before the government’s accounting changes.
As the chart above shows, much of the money reclassified as climate aid will derive from automatically counting a fixed share of UK funding for MDBs as “climate-relevant”.
MDBs, including the World Bank and the African Development Bank, are major contributors to global climate finance. Member states, such as the UK, pay money into these banks, which then use their financial resources to support development projects.
Notably, while virtually all of the UK’s traditional climate finance has been provided as grants to developing countries, MDBs provide most of their support as loans. The prevalence of loans in global climate finance is a long-standing point of contention for developing countries.
Including inflation
The second key factor that influences the comparison between the UK’s old and new climate-finance targets is inflation. Experts have highlighted the importance of correcting for inflation when considering long-term finance targets.
This issue is particularly important now, as in recent years there has been significant inflation in the UK and around the world. This means the finance that the UK committed to give back in 2019 would not go as far today as it did then.
Adjusting for this inflation, Carbon Brief estimates that the £11.6bn target would equate to £14.3bn today, using 2021-22 – the start of the £11.6bn target – as the base year.
This means the government would have to pledge £14.3bn over five years – or £2.86bn a year – just to match the spending power of its previous goal. This new goal of £2bn a year is effectively a 30% real-terms cut in annual climate finance from the UK.
As the chart below shows, the previous climate target from five years ago is roughly twice as large per year as the new 2026 target, after correcting for inflation and once accounting changes have been removed.
Of course, ultimately, the government relied on accounting changes to meet the previous £11.6bn target as well.
Nevertheless, this comparison shows the significant backsliding in ambition, from 2021 when the plan was an £11.6bn goal, relying on a narrow range of sources – to a 2026 target that is lower in real terms, while drawing from a wider range of sources.
Global cuts
In 2024, developed countries such as the UK collectively agreed to raise their global climate-finance contributions to $300bn a year by 2035, as part of their Paris Agreement obligations.
This international target replaced the previous goal of $100bn per year by 2020, which was belatedly met in 2022.
While the new target will include large contributions from the private sector and MDBs, there is an expectation that a significant portion of it will still come directly from developed countries.
In this context, it is clear that the trajectory of UK climate finance is going in the wrong direction – falling, rather than increasing
The UK is certainly not alone in this regard. Speaking in parliament, Cooper told MPs that “allies such as Germany, France and Sweden have made similar choices” to cut aid in order to fund military spending.
Very few developed countries – and none of the biggest donors – have officially announced new or updated climate-finance targets for the coming years.
However, analysis by aid organisation CARE International last year concluded that other major climate-finance donors, including Germany and France, will also see their climate finance fall over the coming year, following cuts to their aid budgets.
The most significant drop has come from the US, which has effectively cut its international climate finance from several billion dollars a year to zero, under the Trump administration.
In addition to cutting its overall contribution, the UK is signalling that it will focus less on grant-based climate finance from government spending and more on “unlocking” billions of pounds in private-sector finance for climate action, as well as on “reform of the international development system”.
Such approaches may end up playing a major role in nations hitting the $300bn target by 2035.
However, this is highly contentious, with many developing countries arguing at UN negotiations that developed countries are reneging on their responsibilities to directly “provide” climate finance.
Methodology
The UK has announced that it will spend “around £6bn” on international climate finance between 2026-27 and 2028-29. Alongside this announcement, it released a list of “official development assistance (ODA) programme allocations 2026-27-2028-29”. These include details of “planned multilateral ODA programming” – covering MDBs – and spending on “arm’s-length bodies, private sector investments, subscriptions”, including BII.
Carbon Brief calculated the climate-related shares of core MDB finance – which the UK now counts as climate finance – using the climate shares for each MDB identified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2023. These estimates may be conservative, as MDBs have committed to increasing the shares of their projects that are climate-related.
Carbon Brief calculated the extra BII contributions that the UK will count as climate finance by assuming, based on the most recent BII annual accounts, that 41% of its commitments each year will be climate-related. Previously, only 30% of BII contributions were counted as climate finance, so Carbon Brief assumed the difference between these shares would be additional.
The government has also said it now automatically counts 30% of all humanitarian assistance provided to the 10% most climate-vulnerable countries as climate finance. Based on figures provided to Carbon Brief via freedom of information request, this amounts to roughly 10% of all humanitarian assistance in recent years. The government has said it will “spend approximately £1.4bn each year in the places with the highest humanitarian need over the next three years”. Carbon Brief assumed that 10% of this – £140m each year – would count as climate finance.
To calculate the impact of inflation on the £11.6bn target, Carbon Brief used the UK Treasury’s GDP deflator, with 2021-22 as the baseline year.
The figures in this analysis are estimates based on the data released by the government so far. Climate-finance data is subject to various accounting changes and the final figures – when they are released – are likely to be different.
The post Analysis: UK is ‘halving’ its climate finance for developing countries appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK is ‘halving’ its climate finance for developing countries
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.
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.
The post As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.
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.”
related
Q&A: What change of power in Colombia could mean for world’s fossil-fuel transition
Brazil’s biodiversity pledge: Six key takeaways for nature and climate change
COP30: Could Brazil’s ‘Tropical Forest Forever’ fund help tackle climate change?
Guest post: How Caribbean states are shaping climate legislation
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
This letter is a bit more direct and longer than most of those which I write, but I hope you will be okay with that, because the times seem to call for being plain.
A few weeks ago I got a text message from an old and dear friend —let’s call her Hannah.
I have enough shared life with Hannah that, whenever we talk, the conversation always feels current and effortless, despite gaps of months or even years.
Hannah has been talking with her son — we’ll call him Neil — who is a teenager and doing well in school, but wildly worried about the state of the world, including the imminent trajectory of global warming. Hannah and I don’t text each other other very often, but on this occasion she’s reached out with something visceral:
Neil has challenged me to point him to something hopeful, if I can find it. He says so far no one is showing any will to uphold the Paris Agreement. I am checking in to see how you still manage to have real hope.*
Then, just a few days later, the United Nations Environment Programme Limiting Overshoot report landed, containing the principal finding that it is likely the global temperature will soon exceed 1.5°C.
After that news, and the real time devastation in Nepal, and in the context of the broader state of the world, I found myself having multiple conversations with friends and colleagues about the structure of hope. I want to openly share that after a few of these exchanges, I metaphorically closed the blinds, and wondered how to feel, and what to do, because there is no avoiding the dreadfulness of the news, and what it means for the suffering of people and life on Earth.
But if you are fortunate enough to have time, space and security to do so, then after the darkness, you open the shutters and once again there is light. This is the structure of my innermost resolve.
* * *
Our lives — those of us living on our magnificent earth now — have the greatest possible purpose.
There is virtually no problem that we endlessly clever and creative, human beings cannot solve, when we work together.
And we are not just intelligent and ingenious; we are inherently social, nurturing and brave; capable of the deepest enduring love.
Each of the roughly 12,000 generations of humanity so far has made life possible for those who have followed, through acts of devotion.
Babies have been held and fed. Water and food have been found and shared. Shelter has been built. For 12,000 generations we have held the hands of our children.
Every single one of us was once carried in the arms of another, unable to walk ourselves. It is our thoughtfulness, kindness and care that have seen us through as a species. Sometimes this has been in the most exigent of circumstances, when enough of our ancestors did not give in, faced incredibly difficult things, to somehow make it through.
And so it comes to this. To what we now must do. We must do as 12,000 generations of people did for us.
The struggle to keep global warming to under 1.5 degrees may be over. The battle of return—to get our planet back to safe temperatures at emergency speed and scale — is just beginning. Upon this struggle depends the future of all we care about, and that of all life on Earth. The prospects of the next 12,000 generations are conditioned by our efforts now.
Our work now is to keep the overshoot as low as we can, make it as brief as possible, and do everything within our power to alleviate other pressures on nature. It is to take care of humanity — of one another — in the face of mounting climate and ecological damage. And by these efforts, create the conditions for future flourishing. Every fraction of every degree matters.
What must now be done is hard, much tougher than should have been necessary, because of the vested interests in coal, oil and gas and deforestation, and the failures of decision makers. And while renewable energy has surged, making the case for change much simpler, on the other side of the ledger there’s the reactionary and gangsterist turn of politics and the multiplier effects of wars and mass violence, with the existential destabilisation of big tech looming over all.
There is no sugarcoating the scale of difficulty. But what is necessary remains within our collective power. We must never, for one second, say that returning our planet to flourishing is impossible — many of the obvious solutions already exist; but even where transformation relies on reforms, technologies or capabilities that might sound fanciful, or historical changes that are unprecedented, this can be no barrier to our conviction. After all, much of what we take for granted today as ordinary features of social life, would have been considered impossible by every single generation before us.
The world has not been destroyed by nuclear war; we solved the growing hole in the ozone layer; Antarctica was kept sacrosanct from exploitation. Humanity has collectively triumphed before, and can do so again.
We can find the necessary social and political will to do what is needed because these are endlessly renewable resources. The necessary financial capital exists. Apart from the fossil fuel industry, the greatest barrier we face is to mistakenly concede that what lies before us is insurmountable. It is not.
We must avoid the siren song of fatalism. Because. It. Is. Never. Too. Late.
None of which is to be insensitive to the horrors already unleashed — the deadly and grotesque harm to people, places and species that cannot be undone; or to be blind to the impacts that are coming. But where we have the power to act, we also have the responsibility — and the extraordinary privilege — to do what must be done.
Although she is wounded, our planet is still alive and beautiful beyond all of our comprehension. Hundreds of billions of creatures live and thrive still upon this earth. Nothing has happened until it has happened, and life fights for life. Every beetle, every tree, all the fish in the ocean, the smallest of the geothermal shrimps, the greatest of the whales and the mightiest of the birds — all demand life every second of their existence, so that their species too may have future generations.
No individual has to know how to solve this alone. Indeed, finding some detachment and humility is essential to concentrate on the role that each of us can play.
Hope is not merely a mindset or a story we tell ourselves. Collective power is not abstract; it is what we do, together, applying ourselves to the practical mechanics of change and contestation within society, by being part of the organisations and networks of people that are dedicated to effective strategies. It is why I am so committed to Greenpeace.
Working from without and within, there are opportunities to make rapid change within institutions, governments, businesses and communities to create the social, economic and political momentum for emissions reduction at speed and scale, reminding ourselves always of what remains possible, even if it hasn’t happened yet.
We can return the planet to safer temperatures. We can put technologies back in the service of people and life. We can return to the assumptions that seemed so obvious just one generation ago — that it is both possible, and our obligation, to build a better future for all people, and for life on Earth.
I did write back to Hannah and Neil, to say honestly to a treasured friend and her son, that yes, as a matter of faith, conviction, evidence and strategy, absolutely there is real hope. And this is a pledge not just to Neil and his generation, but to the next 12,000.
Together, we have the power. Together, we cross this bridge through the dark. To secure an Earth capable of nurturing life in all of its magnificent diversity.
We did not choose to carry this historic responsibility, but here we are. And it is so lucky that we are here.
I wouldn’t choose any other time to be here, alive on Earth, with you.
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