Published

2 years ago

July 3, 2024

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

Key developments

Protecting the Amazon

ILLEGAL FARMING: Illegal cattle ranching is occurring in large areas of Brazil’s Arariboia territory, despite being prohibited on Indigenous lands across the country, a Mongabay investigation revealed. The investigation also found that killings of Guajajara Indigenous people inhabiting the region increased in mid-2023, coinciding with the construction of an unlicensed airstrip near the Buriticupu River. “Our research reveals a pattern of killings of indigenous Guajajara amid the expansion of cattle ranching and illegal logging in and around Arariboia,” Mongabay pointed out.

OTHER THREATS: Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands have already broken records for the number of fires this year, even before the technical start of the fire season, ABC News reported. Speaking to the press, environment minister Marina Silva attributed the fires to human activity, climate change and the prolonged effects of El Niño. At the same time, InfoAmazonia reported on research from the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), which found that climate change has led to increasingly wetter and drier seasons in the city of Manaus, Brazil, at the confluence of the Negro and Amazon rivers. This poses a threat to the food security of riverine communities and has resulted in increased fish and dolphin deaths, the outlet said. It adds that the Amazon river recorded its lowest level since 1902 in October last year, yet it has also had “severe flooding with increasing frequency in recent years”.

AMAZON FORUM: A march by activists and Indigenous leaders from the nine countries of the Amazon region at the Pan-Amazon Social Forum (FOSPA) called for the defence of the Amazon, Inside Climate News reported. The marchers felt “disconnected” from international negotiations, such as the UN summits on climate change and biodiversity, and argued that government talks “have failed”, the article said. The four-day FOSPA meeting “is one of the few spaces for us to have our own dialogues”, said Vanuza Abacatal, the leader of the Quilombola community in Pará, Brazil. Inter Press Service added that those attending the forum agreed to continue defending Amazonian territories from deforestation and other extractive activities. A Pan-Amazonian women’s rights court was also held and revealed a systematic pattern of dispossession of territories suffered by women and their families, the article noted.

Agri climate impacts

KEY CROPS HIT: Extreme weather is delaying crop planting and impacting yields around the world, Reuters reported. “Vast swathes” of farmland in Russia, China, India and parts of the US recently experienced “extremely hot conditions and below-normal rainfall”, the outlet said. Low rainfall forecast for July and August in the “breadbasket” Black Sea region could “stunt sunflower and corn yields”, the newswire noted. Meanwhile, the Financial Times said that sales of olive oil “plunged” in parts of the Mediterranean due to “steep price rises”. The FT added: “Droughts and heatwaves exacerbated by climate change have knocked olive oil output in Spain, the world’s largest producer, as well as other major producing countries such as Italy and Greece, creating a global shortfall.”

INTENSE RAIN AND DROUGHTS: Thousands of agricultural workers are dealing with the aftermath of a “downpour that lasted a week” in El Salvador and other parts of Central America last month, the Inter Press Service reported. The region “suffers almost year after year from the onslaught of extreme rains or prolonged droughts”, the outlet said. One cattle rancher from El Salvador told the outlet that his herd declined from 150 to 40 in recent years due to heavy rainfall and other extremes. Meanwhile, the Guardian looked at the impact of drought on farmers in the Italian island of Sicily, where “the desert is encroaching” and rainfall has dropped by more than 40% since 2003.

WILTING: In India, recent extreme heat and rainfall impacted a range of crops, including flowers. Mongabay reported that flower vendors are selling less as “erratic rain and heat has led to damaged crops and produce being sold for a lesser price”. A flower seller told the outlet: “In recent years, with excessive rain on some days and regular exposure to water, the life span of flowers has reduced from two-three days to one day.” Context News reported on the “double blow” India’s intense heat has on fruit and vegetable sellers – “more of their produce is spoilt, while buyers stay at home and [are] ordering online”.

Spotlight

Denmark’s new agriculture tax

Last week, Denmark proposed plans for a world-first carbon tax on agriculture by 2030.

New Zealand recently scrapped similar plans for a so-called “burp tax” to cut livestock emissions.

In this spotlight, Carbon Brief explains this tax and what it will mean for Denmark’s climate targets. A full article on this topic will be published on Carbon Brief’s website later this week.

How will Denmark’s meat tax work?

Under the plans, landowners will pay a levy based on their emissions from livestock, fertiliser, forestry and the disturbance of carbon-rich agricultural soils, reports the Copenhagen Post.

The effective cost of the tax amounts to 120 Danish kroner (£14) per tonne of CO2 equivalent emitted from 2030, rising to 300 kroner (£34) from 2035 onwards. (As the British Agriculture Bureau explains, the actual costs are higher, but will be reduced by tax breaks.)

The proceeds “are to be pooled in a fund to support the livestock industry’s green transition for at least two years after the tax comes into effect”, says the Guardian.

The tax is just one element of a wider agreement on a “Green Denmark”. This was signed by a Green Tripartite, namely, a three-party agreement between the Danish government, the industry and agricultural sector, and conservation groups.

Danish economy minister Stephanie Lose said the agreement aims to form a “long-term basis for a historic reorganisation and transformation of Denmark’s land and of food and agricultural production”, reports Politico.

Under the agreement, Denmark will convert some agricultural lands to provide more space for nature and biodiversity. It also mandates that the country will set aside carbon-rich lowland soils, pursue afforestation and boost technologies and measures to cut emissions.

All these targets will be financed by a new Denmark’s Green Area Fund, which amounts to 40bn kroner (£4.6bn). Denmark’s government will also use EU agricultural subsidies for technology transition.

The Danish parliament still needs to approve the plan, but Reuters noted that “political experts expect a bill to pass following the broad-based consensus”.

How could this tax help Denmark meet its climate targets?

Agriculture is responsible for around a quarter of Denmark’s greenhouse gas emissions.

A “major part” of these emissions stem from livestock production, according to the country’s most recent national inventory report. The sector also accounts for more than 80% of methane and nitrous oxide emissions, the report says.

Denmark’s climate minister Lars Aagaard said in a statement that agriculture’s high emissions “cannot continue” and that a “great deal of work awaits” to implement the new agriculture measures.

The tax is expected to cut 1.8m tonnes of CO2 in 2030, Bloomberg reports. The proposals will help Denmark meet its 2030 climate goals and “take a big step closer to becoming climate neutral in 2045”, the tax minister Jeppe Bruus said in a statement.

Prof Søren Petersen, a soil microbiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, agrees that the plan “could lead to substantial reductions in agricultural emissions” if implemented correctly. He tells Carbon Brief:

“It is my impression that there is a real interest in promoting climate-smart solutions and developing solutions that achieve real reductions in emissions.”

News and views

DEFORESTATION: EU politicians are “split” after calls to delay the bloc’s upcoming ban on imported goods that can be linked back to deforested land, Reuters reported. The law requiring “companies and traders placing beef, coffee, palm oil and other products on the EU market to prove their supply chains do not contribute to the destruction of forests” is due to take effect this year, Reuters said. Last week, the European People’s Party environment spokesperson, Peter Liese, called for the law to be delayed and scaled back, describing it as a “bureaucratic monster”. Other EU political parties, including the Socialists & Democrats and the Greens, oppose a delay, Reuters said. The US recently asked the EU to postpone the law, a separate Reuters article noted, joining previous calls from Malaysia and Indonesia.

CONSERVATIONISTS’ PROTESTS: Local and international conservation organisations protested that the Republic of Congo’s Conkouati-Douli national park could be at risk after a Chinese company received an oil and gas exploration licence, according to Down to Earth. Conservationists said the exploration permit would damage the environmental health of “the country’s most biodiverse protected area”, home to endangered species such as the western lowland gorilla and forest elephant, and around 7,000 people “whose livelihoods are dependent on the forest”. They criticised that the decision came after the Congolese government signed a $50m forest protection agreement at last year’s COP28.

MARCH FOR NATURE: Thousands of people marched in London on 22 June to “urge” politicians to tackle the UK’s “wildlife crisis”, the Guardian reported. A rally held after the march heard from naturalist Chris Packham and musician Billy Bragg, the newspaper said, adding that actor Emma Thompson also called on politicians to “act now” on climate change. The Wildlife Trusts, one of the charities supporting the march, claimed that more than 60,000 people attended, urging UK political parties to “restore nature now”. The Guardian noted: “Protesters were calm but the placards they held up revealed an undercurrent of frustration and anger.” (UK voters will cast their ballots in a general election tomorrow.)

CHINESE FERTILISERS: China is imposing restrictions on fertiliser exports, especially urea and phosphates, risking a global price surge for essential crop nutrients, Bloomberg reported. The outlet noted that the Chinese government is protecting the domestic grain market due to the threat of extreme weather events impacting crop production and other challenges faced by farmers – including low grain prices and increased costs. Bloomberg added that in 2023 China was the world’s top exporter of both urea and the most used phosphate.

US OLD-GROWTH FORESTS: The US government advanced plans to “restrict logging within old-growth forests that are increasingly threatened by climate change”, the Associated Press reported. The newswire explained that there will be exceptions for tree-cutting to reduce wildfire risks. A government press release labelled the plan as “the most ambitious climate and conservation agenda in history”. The proposed amendment to 128 forest land management plans would use science and Indigenous knowledge to guide conservation and restoration efforts of old-growth forests. These ecosystems offset more than 10% of US annual greenhouse gas emissions and comprise 32m acres, according to the White House.

Watch, read, listen

SAHEL PLAN: A Deutsche Welle video discussed progress on Africa’s “Great Green Wall” project, which was “designed to stop land degradation and desertification”.

RIGHTS: During pride month in June, Dialogue Earth interviewed Aurélien Guilabert, a Mexico City-based activist focused on “both LGBTQ+ rights and environmental protection”.

RISING TIDES: The New York Times spoke to scientists and officials in the Maldives to understand how low-lying tropical islands have not yet been lost to rising sea levels and how “some have even grown”.

GROUNDWATER PROBLEM: Under the Surface explores the decline of EU underground freshwater in this interactive piece.

New science

Conservation Imperatives: securing the last unprotected terrestrial sites harbouring irreplaceable biodiversity

Frontiers in Science

Protecting just 1.2% of the world’s land could save the most rare and threatened species from extinction, a study found. The researchers compared data identifying areas with rare and endangered species with current protected area maps to identify unprotected lands. They found that 16,825 of these unprotected sites around the world should be “prioritised for conservation action over the next five years as part of a broader strategy to expand the global protected area network”. They estimated that it would cost $29-46bn annually over the next five years to conserve these “last unprotected sites harbouring rare, range-restricted and threatened species”.

Ecological disturbance alters the adaptive benefits of social ties

Science

Monkeys became less aggressive and more tolerant towards each other after an intense hurricane in Puerto Rico, according to new research. Hurricane Maria hit the north-eastern Caribbean in 2017, killing almost 3,000 people in Puerto Rico. The hurricane also led to “persistent deforestation”, which reduced shade cover and increased animal “exposure to intense heat”, the study said. The researchers looked at a decade of data on rhesus macaques, a species of monkey, on a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico before and after the hurricane to assess any social behaviour changes. They found that the monkeys showed “persistently increased tolerance and decreased aggression toward other monkeys, facilitating access to scarce shade critical for thermoregulation”.

Threat of low-frequency high-intensity floods to global cropland and crop yields

Nature Sustainability

New research highlighted the “urgency” of protecting cropland in “neglected” areas that experience low-frequency, but high-impact floods. Using satellite imagery and data for 3,427 flood events around the world over 2000-21, the researchers found that flooding affected a larger proportion of cropland area in low-frequency flood areas (4.7%) compared to high-frequency flood areas (1.2%). In addition, the study found that the average losses of wheat and rice were greater in low-frequency flood areas, owing to “the higher precipitation anomalies, soil moisture anomalies and greater crop flooding during their growing seasons”.

In the diary

4 July: UK general election
1-5 July: Fifth Global Dialogue on Sustainable Ocean Development | Bali, Indonesia
15 July-2 August: Second part of the 29th Session of the International Seabed Authority Assembly and Council | Kingston, Jamaica

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

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 3 July 2024: Brazil wetlands blaze; Denmark agri carbon tax; Heat and drought hit crops appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Cropped 3 July 2024: Brazil wetlands blaze; Denmark agri carbon tax; Heat and drought hit crops

Greenhouse Gases

DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?

Published

1 day ago

February 27, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Absolute State of the Union

‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.

COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.

OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.

SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.

Around the world

RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.

$467 billion

The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.

Latest climate research

Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

The constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.

Spotlight

Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?

This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.

Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.

Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.

Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:

“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”

Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.

Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:

“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”

Conservative gear shift

For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.

Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.

Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.

Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.

Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:

“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”

Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)

Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:

“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”

But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:

“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”

UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

Global ‘greenlash’?

All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.

At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.

Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.

She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.

Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:

“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”

Watch, read, listen

TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.

RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.

Coming up

2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
3 March: UK spring statement
4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
5 March: Nepal elections

Pick of the jobs

The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The post DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?

Greenhouse Gases

Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding

Published

2 days ago

February 27, 2026

Alice Rush

The Lincolnshire constituency held by Richard Tice, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of the hard-right Reform party, has been pledged at least £55m in government funding for flood defences since 2024.

This investment in Boston and Skegness is the second-largest sum for a single constituency from a £1.4bn flood-defence fund for England, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

Flooding is becoming more likely and more extreme in the UK due to climate change.

Yet, for years, governments have failed to spend enough on flood defences to protect people, properties and infrastructure.

The £1.4bn fund is part of the current Labour government’s wider pledge to invest a “record” £7.9bn over a decade on protecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from flooding.

As MP for one of England’s most flood-prone regions, Tice has called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.

He is also one of Reform’s most vocal opponents of climate action and what he calls “net stupid zero”. He denies the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed, falsely and without evidence, that scientists are “lying”.

Flood defences

Last year, the government said it would invest £2.65bn on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) schemes in England between April 2024 and March 2026.

This money was intended to protect 66,500 properties from flooding. It is part of a decade-long Labour government plan to spend more than £7.9bn on flood defences.

There has been a consistent shortfall in maintaining England’s flood defences, with the Environment Agency expecting to protect fewer properties by 2027 than it had initially planned.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has attributed this to rising costs, backlogs from previous governments and a lack of capacity. It also points to the strain from “more frequent and severe” weather events, such as storms in recent years that have been amplified by climate change.

However, the CCC also said last year that, if the 2024-26 spending programme is delivered, it would be “slightly closer to the track” of the Environment Agency targets out to 2027.

The government has released constituency-level data on which schemes in England it plans to fund, covering £1.4bn of the 2024-26 investment. The other half of the FCERM spending covers additional measures, from repairing existing defences to advising local authorities.

The map below shows the distribution of spending on FCERM schemes in England over the past two years, highlighting the constituency of Richard Tice.

Map of England showing that Richard Tice's Boston and Skegness constituency is set to receive at least £55m for flood defences between 2024 and 2026 — Flood-defence spending on new and replacement schemes in England in 2024-25 and 2025-26. The government notes that, as Environment Agency accounts have not been finalised and approved, the investment data is “provisional and subject to change”. Some schemes cover multiple constituencies and are not included on the map. Source: Environment Agency FCERM data.

By far the largest sum of money – £85.6m in total – has been committed to a tidal barrier and various other defences in the Somerset constituency of Bridgwater, the seat of Conservative MP Ashley Fox.

Over the first months of 2026, the south-west region has faced significant flooding and Fox has called for more support from the government, citing “climate patterns shifting and rainfall intensifying”.

He has also backed his party’s position that “the 2050 net-zero target is impossible” and called for more fossil-fuel extraction in the North Sea.

Tice’s east-coast constituency of Boston and Skegness, which is highly vulnerable to flooding from both rivers and the sea, is set to receive £55m. Among the supported projects are beach defences from Saltfleet to Gibraltar Point and upgrades to pumping stations.

Overall, Boston and Skegness has the second-largest portion of flood-defence funding, as the chart below shows. Constituencies with Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs occupied the other top positions.

Chart showing that Conservative, Reform and Liberal Democrat constituencies are the top recipients of flood defence spending — Top 10 English constituencies by FCERM funding in 2024-25 and 2025-26. Source: Environment Agency FCERM data.

Overall, despite Labour MPs occupying 347 out of England’s 543 constituencies – nearly two-thirds of the total – more than half of the flood-defence funding was distributed to constituencies with non-Labour MPs. This reflects the flood risk in coastal and rural areas that are not traditional Labour strongholds.

Reform funding

While Reform has just eight MPs, representing 1% of the population, its constituencies have been assigned 4% of the flood-defence funding for England.

Nearly all of this money was for Tice’s constituency, although party leader Nigel Farage’s coastal Clacton seat in Kent received £2m.

Reform UK is committed to “scrapping net-zero” and its leadership has expressed firmly climate-sceptic views.

Much has been made of the disconnect between the party’s climate policies and the threat climate change poses to its voters. Various analyses have shown the flood risk in Reform-dominated areas, particularly Lincolnshire.

Tice has rejected climate science, advocated for fossil-fuel production and criticised Environment Agency flood-defence activities. Yet, he has also called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.

This may reflect Tice’s broader approach to climate change. In a 2024 interview with LBC, he said:

“Where you’ve got concerns about sea level defences and sea level rise, guess what? A bit of steel, a bit of cement, some aggregate…and you build some concrete sea level defences. That’s how you deal with rising sea levels.”

While climate adaptation is viewed as vital in a warming world, there are limits on how much societies can adapt and adaptation costs will continue to increase as emissions rise.

The post Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding

Greenhouse Gases

Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate

Published

3 days ago

February 25, 2026

Alice Rush

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.

Key developments

Food inflation on the rise

DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.

Sign up to Carbon Brief’s free “Cropped” email newsletter. A fortnightly digest of food, land and nature news and views. Sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.

NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.

‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.

El Niño looms

NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”

WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”

CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.

News and views

DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.

Spotlight

Nature talks inch forward

This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.

The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.

The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.

The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.

Money talks

Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.

Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.

Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.

Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).

Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:

“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”

Monitoring and reporting

Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.

Parties do so through the submission of national reports.

Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.

A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.

Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:

“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”

Watch, read, listen

NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.

COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.

HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.

‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.

New science

Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food