Following a “landslide” Labour win in the UK general election, attention is turning to the new government’s next steps.
Climate and energy were key parts of Labour’s election campaign and manifesto, with a range of policies it will now look to enact. This ranges from zero-carbon power by 2030 and reforming the planning system, through to decarbonising heat and developing adaptation policy.
Carbon Brief has asked a range of policy experts, academics and campaigners what they think is the incoming government’s top priority for meeting UK climate targets.
These are their responses, first as sample quotes, then, below, in full (some entries have been edited for length and clarity):
- Charles Oglivie: “To tackle the myriad of…challenges facing the UK, No 10 will have to make some quick, difficult choices about how to manage Whitehall.”
- Adam Bell: “Delivering at the pace required involves spending the kind of political capital that only a landslide win can offer.”
- Jan Rosenow: “We now need to tackle the other 80% of our energy use and focus on decarbonising heating and transport.”
- Juliet Phillips: “Labour will need to hit the ground running to fulfil its clean power mission.”
- Federica Genovese: “The top political priority in the first six months is to credibly form the coalitions of supporters willing to shift gears on the energy transition.”
- Rachel Solomon Williams: “There is very little time in which to transform the economy.”
- Bethan Laughlin: “Adaptation must be integrated into all government policy decision-making processes.”
- Dr Nina Skorupska CBE: “We need delivery forces not more task forces.”
- Jenny Bird: “Deliver an adaptation programme that is fit for purpose.”
- Andrew Sissons: “The UK is a long way behind where it needs to be on heating and it will be very hard to meet future carbon budgets without a rapid turnaround.”
- Caterina Brandmayr: “The UK should help raise ambition globally by submitting an ambitious and credible 2035 NDC.”
- Tessa Khan: The government “needs to stop locking in our dependency on fossil fuels by rejecting any new oil and gas projects”.
- Rebecca Williams: “The priority should be unblocking investment in offshore wind.”
- Linda Kalcher: “The clean power by 2030 goal is ambitious, but a smart economic and security choice.”
- Sam Hall: “Crucially, the new government must urgently rebalance levies from electricity to gas.”
- Ben Nelmes: “The UK needs a motoring taxation that is fit for the day when 100% of the cars on the roads are fully electric.”
Charles Ogilvie
Former strategy director of COP26 and senior strategic counsel to COP28; former Conservative special advisor on energy and climate policy
To tackle the myriad of linked domestic and international challenges facing the UK, No 10 will have to make some quick, difficult choices about how to manage Whitehall.
Their top priority on day one should be establishing an integrated, programmatic approach to delivering on the climate mission; to ensure that DESNZ (the Department of Energy Security and Net-Zero) is not held up by cross Whitehall logjams – especially around domestic planning, land use, and industrial strategy; and that the Treasury and FCDO (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) are integrated into a strategic approach that leverages UK domestic leadership and investments to effectively shift the world faster, whilst generating co-benefits in trade, development and influence.
Time is of the essence as many of the manifesto promises will be tough to deliver in a single parliament. No 10 will have to think hard about what to prioritise early on, in order to prove to the country that the inevitable compromises needed in the short term will deliver the promised wins.
Adam Bell
Director of policy, Stonehaven
Labour’s first priority must be getting the structures they need to deliver their 2030 power decarbonisation ambition in place before anything else. Delivering at the pace required involves spending the kind of political capital that only a landslide win can offer.
Carving out exemptions from the planning system for energy infrastructure – which their target will require – must be a key first step.
Setting up a cross-government committee to deliver, chaired by the prime minister, should happen within the first few weeks. And getting the necessary outline of legislation into the king’s speech before parliament rises is essential.
Jan Rosenow
Director at Regulatory Assistance Project
The UK has made great strides with decarbonising its electricity. We now need to tackle the other 80% of our energy use and focus on decarbonising heating and transport.
The new government can do this by rebalancing energy prices making electrification an attractive proposition to people and industry. We also need clarity on the role of hydrogen and an ambitious plan for rolling out heat pumps.
Juliet Phillips
Programme lead, UK energy team, E3G
Labour will need to hit the ground running to fulfil its clean power mission – quickly making decisions on the scale of the next renewables auction round, taking actions to unclog the planning system and setting up GB Energy.
They mustn’t forget the less sexy, but equally important, cleantech solutions that will be needed to get the UK off fossil gas, including demand side flexibility, long-duration energy storage and green hydrogen.
Labour will also need to quickly get to grips with how they can turn around the sluggish delivery of retrofit schemes. The locally-led retrofit schemes are currently massively under-delivering, returning vast sums of unspent money back to the Treasury. Labour will need to listen to installers and local authorities to understand where the current pinch-points are and how these can be quickly addressed.
Federica Genovese
Professor of political science at University of Oxford
In my opinion – and recall that I am a political scientist – the top priority is not focusing on single climate targets. The top political priority in the first six months is to credibly form the coalitions of supporters willing to shift gears on the energy transition, which of course will come with adjustment costs.
Bad news: there are *many* actors that need to be brought into this coalition, most of which have already suffered from unjust energy transitions of the past (eg polluting industry workers) or that fear the costs of any adjustment (fossil fuel companies). Convincing these actors will require building trust and, simply put, money.
Good news: we will have a new government with both a broad initial support and more technocratic takes (less populism at the top). The new government needs to capitalise on these circumstances and make climate targets an embedded product or the new economic growth model it wishes to forge.
Rachel Solomon Williams
Executive director, Aldersgate Group
Focus on delivery and stability – there is very little time in which to transform the economy.
It’s vital that the new government focuses on delivery, rather than on crafting new policies. Policy work is well advanced on a range of important climate issues, such as green finance, emissions trading and power market reform. In these areas (and others), what’s needed now is clear prioritisation, decision-making and resourcing rather than extensive further consultation.
This should all be supported by a clear governance structure, which combines central leadership with mature collaboration with businesses, regional and local government and civil society.
Bethan Laughlin
Senior policy specialist, Zoological Society of London
Urgent action is required to prioritise climate adaptation and resilience to protect citizens, property, food systems, health and the environment from growing climate shocks. Adaptation must be integrated into all government policy decision-making processes with effective, ambitious, implementable and well-funded strategies.
Appointing a climate adaptation and resilience minister to sit across Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) and DESNZ is crucial for ensuring political attention, budget allocation and civil service resources.
Investment in nature-based adaptation approaches also offers cost-effective, high-impact action, providing adaptation and mitigation benefits alongside a wide range of societal and economic co-benefits.
Dr Nina Skorupska CBE
Managing director of the Renewable Energy Association
Unblock the infrastructure and planning requirements for the renewable energy national, regional and local developments by establishing the NESO (National Energy Systems Operator) as quickly as possible and bang the energy and environmental regulators heads together to make sure their purposes and responsibilities are aligned and resources to regulate properly; we need delivery forces, not more task forces.
There are enough “recommendations” out there that make good common energy and net-zero sense, including accelerating the REMA (review of electricity market arrangements) solutions. All done by mid 2025 to have a fighting chance for net-zero by 2030.
Jenny Bird
Campaign manager, Grantham Institute, Imperial College London
Deliver an adaptation programme that is fit for purpose.
Climate change is already making UK extreme weather events more likely and more intense; the 2022 heatwave and winter storms earlier this year being two examples.
The third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3) “falls far short of what is needed” according to the Climate Change Committee. Strengthening adaptation action should be a top priority for a government that is seeking to deliver security and stability for people, communities and the economy.
We need to see a greater level of ambition, combined with a more strategic approach to managing complex climate risks, interdependencies between different sectors and our exposure to impacts elsewhere in the world (through global supply chains and other means).
Andrew Sissons
Deputy director, Nesta
A lot of attention will be focused on decarbonising electricity, but the real challenge will be on buildings. The UK is a long way behind where it needs to be on heating and it will be very hard to meet future carbon budgets without a rapid turnaround.
The government needs a new approach. It needs to quickly rule out hydrogen for heat and clarify its plans on phase-out dates. It must make heat pumps more affordable, aiming for lifetime cost parity with boilers and rebalancing electricity levies. And it needs to build new state delivery capacity, with a new national heating agency and stronger local institutions.
Caterina Brandmayr
Director of policy and translation, Grantham Institute
With countries due to submit new nationally determined contributions (NDCs) ahead of COP30, it is vital to scale up action to put the world on track to deliver on the Paris Agreement’s goals.
The UK should help raise ambition globally by submitting an ambitious and credible 2035 NDC, alongside a strengthened 2030 NDC – setting out clear policies to deliver on the COP28 commitment of “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, stronger plans on adaptation, aligned with the new framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation and an ambitious climate finance contribution.
The UK should also champion ambitious, evidence-based climate policy at fora such as the G7, G20, the UN general assembly and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and it should be at the forefront of global efforts to scale up finance for climate action.
Tessa Khan
Executive director, Uplift
The UK government must ensure that we accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels and that the transition is fundamentally fair, including through more affordable energy and good jobs.
As a first step, it needs to stop locking in our dependency on fossil fuels by rejecting any new oil and gas projects, building on its commitment to reject new licensing. Further, it needs to introduce processes, policies and investment so that the workforce and communities that have strong ties to the oil and gas sector benefit from the transition away from oil and gas production.
Lowering bills will take time, but short-term steps can be taken to help struggling households. This includes protecting vulnerable households by extending the warm homes discount, reducing energy debt and reforming standing charges.
Rebecca Williams
Chief strategy officer, Offshore Wind, Global Wind Energy Council
It’s exciting to see the Labour party elected with a clear mandate to accelerate climate action and renewable energy. The priority should be unblocking investment in offshore wind.
Sending this strong signal on renewables will help the UK regain its position on international climate leadership, which is now focused on how to deliver the global tripling of renewables by 2030. The UK has been underperforming against its peers in this arena for quite some time, failing to make the most of its huge advantage when it comes to offshore wind.
The Global Wind Energy Council is looking forward to working with Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband to see the UK retake its climate leadership crown.
Linda Kalcher
Executive director, Strategic Perspectives
The UK can reinforce its international leadership on power decarbonisation again and return as “best in the class” among the G7. The clean power by 2030 goal is ambitious, but a smart economic and security choice. It can lower the energy bills for households and businesses, as well as reduce the UK’s import dependence.
Electrification has untapped potential – in the transport, heating and industry sectors. Only fossil-free power can enable these sectors to actually decarbonise. Renewables are the cheapest and fastest clean power source to build domestically. There is untapped potential ranging from community energy to offshore wind parks.
With the G7 struggling to wean itself off fossil fuels, the time is right for the UK to step up and show how a clean power sector can be achieved by 2030.
Sam Hall
Director, Conservative Environment Network
Labour’s stated top priority is power sector decarbonisation by 2030 through accelerated planning decisions. But the biggest climate policy gap in Labour’s manifesto was on how to decarbonise home heating. If we’re going to get on track to meeting our climate goals, wean ourselves off imported gas and deliver permanently lower energy bills, this arguably should be the top priority.
The previous government’s enhanced boiler upgrade scheme (BUS) has helped to drive the uptake of heat pumps in recent months and is an essential part of the policy mix. But confirmation of the clean heat market mechanism, extensions to permitted development rights for heat pumps, an extension of BUS funding in the spending review, and new mechanisms to unlock more private investment in retrofit and reforms to the retail energy market will also be needed.
Crucially, the new government must urgently rebalance levies from electricity to gas, to end the penalty on lower-carbon electricity and to encourage electrification, while protecting lower-income households reliant on gas boilers.
Ben Nelmes
Chief executive, New AutoMotive
The top climate priority for this government to maintain momentum on UK emissions reductions will be to start seeing reductions from road transport emissions. Carbon emissions from road transport have been stubbornly flat in recent years, but significant reductions are required to meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets, 2023-27 and 2028-32 respectively.
Labour went into the election promising to restore the 2030 phase-out date for petrol and diesel vehicles, which had been the last government’s approach until September 2023. Between 2030 and 2035, new cars and vans can be sold if they have significant zero emission capability, which was envisaged to permit the sale of some plug-in and full hybrids during that time. Clarifying exactly what hybrids may be sold during this time is necessary to provide the car industry with clarity around the government’s plans.
Restoring certainty about cross-channel trade in electric vehicles is vital to the automotive industry transition in the UK, and must be an urgent priority for the UK government.
The government should take the experience with EU exports as a salutary lesson in the risk of having our EV exports hit by tariffs, and be very cautious about following Brussels and introducing tariffs on Chinese EVs.
The UK needs a motoring taxation that is fit for the day when 100% of the cars on the roads are fully electric, and the best time to act is now while there is a relatively small number of BEV cars around. Rather than seeking to find ways to simply replace revenue, the government should start by deciding what its transport strategy is for the UK, the role of vehicles in our economy and society, and a weighing exercise taking into account private and public costs and benefits.
The new Labour government has inherited a commitment without a plan: the UK needs to find a way to phase-out sales of fossil fuelled HGVs by 2035, yet there is no emissions standard or ZEV mandate to make this ambition a reality. The UK risks falling behind the EU, which has a new scheme for HGVs.
Misinformation and myths about electric vehicles are still deterring some consumers from considering the technology, despite the growing number of electric cars and vans on UK roads. The last government closed down the Go UltraLow campaign, which was supported by the automotive industry, and which sought to give consumers information about electric and low-emission cars on offer. The government should consider steps to make more factual and impartial information available to consumers about making the switch to electric vehicles.
The post Experts: What is the Labour government’s top priority for meeting UK climate targets? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Experts: What is the Labour government’s top priority for meeting UK climate targets?
The Pine Island glacier in West Antarctica is one of the fastest-changing glaciers in the world.
Alongside its neighbour, the Thwaites glacier, it is responsible for almost half the sea level rise caused by melting ice sheets in Antarctica.
Scientists know the West Antarctic ice sheet – which includes Thwaites and Pine Island – is retreating because of warm water eroding the ice sheet from below.
But the extent to which this process has been driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to natural variations to the Earth’s climate, remains unknown.
Our study, published in the Cryosphere, looks at how human-caused warming has contributed to the retreat of the Pine Island glacier since pre-industrial times.
The research, the first attribution study of glacier retreat on Antarctica, finds that climate change has been responsible for around 4km – roughly a fifth – of the glacier’s retreat.
The West Antarctic ice sheet
Glaciers are frozen rivers of ice and snow that move slowly over land. They are found at high elevations on mountains and on ice sheets.
There are two ice sheets on Earth – covering Antarctica and Greenland. Both were formed over millennia, as layers of snow compressed into dense ice.
Ice sheets grow and shrink depending on temperature and snowfall conditions. In the past, when global temperatures were much colder than present day, vast ice sheets also covered large areas of North America, Scandinavia and Patagonia.
Today, human-driven climate change is accelerating the retreat of ice sheets. This is contributing to sea level rise and altering the Earth’s climate system by pumping vast quantities of fresh melt water into the ocean.
Our research looks at the Pine Island glacier, which is found on the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet.
It is one of the fastest-melting glaciers in the world. Research has shown it has been responsible for a fifth of net ice loss from the West Antarctic ice sheet, which, in turn, has been responsible for almost all ice loss in Antarctica over the past 40 years.
At the coldest point of the last ice age – the “last glacial maximum” period around 20,000 years ago – the West Antarctic ice sheet was much bigger than it is today. Since then, it has retreated by approximately 500km – roughly the distance from Paris to London.
Most of this retreat took place between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. For the past 10,000 years or so, the ice sheet has been about as big as it is today.
Sediment records beneath the Pine Island glacier reveal that, for hundreds of years until the 1940s, the glacier rested on a seabed ridge that is about 30km ahead of where it sits today.
The sediment records also tell us that the Pine Island glacier started to retreat in the 1940s. This coincided with a strong El Niño event, a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that drives up global temperatures, that brought a large pulse of warm water to the ice sheet.
This is illustrated in the figures below, which shows how the grounding line – the boundary between grounded and floating ice – of the Pine Island glacier shifted between pre-industrial times (red line) and 2015 (bright blue line).
The map on the left shows an aerial view of grounding line retreat from pre-industrial times (red) to 2015 (blue). The graphic on the right illustrates how the grounding line has shifted across a cross-section of the glacier.
Both illustrate how the glacier has contracted.
Climate reconstructions suggest that human-caused climate change only started to increase the amount of warm water reaching the West Antarctic ice sheet in the 1960s.
This indicates that climate change started to affect the melt rate in the region 20 years after the retreat had already been initiated.
In our research, we wanted to find out how important climate change was to the overall retreat since the 1940s.
Attributing ice sheet retreat
Currently, scientists do not know precisely how much of the retreat of the world’s ice sheets – and the associated sea level rise – is due to human-caused global warming.
Through the field of attribution science, the links between climate change and extreme weather and climate events, including heatwaves, wildfires and droughts, are routinely quantified by scientists.
In attribution studies, scientists typically use climate models to simulate the severity or frequency of an event in two worlds. The first is our existing, climate-changed world and the second is a “counterfactual” world that has not been affected by human-caused warming.
By comparing the model runs, scientists can assess how much climate change influenced an event.
To create these two modelled worlds in an Antarctic context, scientists need to run historical models for at least 200 years into the past. This is because ice sheets respond very slowly to changes in the climate, with very small changes year-on-year.
This presents a challenge, given the limited information available about ice sheet change before satellite records began in the 1970s.
To build a picture of the ice sheets prior to this, scientists have to rely on a few, sparse, palaeoclimate records – including sediment records and seafloor imprints – which tell us where ice was present in the past.
Reconstructing Pine Island’s past
To reconstruct the retreat of the Pine Island glacier – and, therefore, determine the role of climate change – we used a combination of physical climate models and machine learning.
First, we ran many simulations of our model under a range of different settings. This included variations in how important processes are represented, such as how the ice moves and interacts with the ocean.
Then, we compared the results of these simulations to modern satellite observations and older sediment records, allowing us to narrow down the settings that were most realistic. This gave us a set of plausible simulations that agreed with the available observational data.
However, to reconstruct the retreat in full, we needed to find all settings of our model that would agree with the observational data.
Because simulations take a lot of time to run, this was not possible.
Therefore, to fill the gaps and find all plausible simulations, we used machine learning to identify relationships between model settings and simulated glacier retreat.
This exercise allowed us to build a good picture of how the glacier actually retreated over the past 250 years. We call this our “reconstructed” scenario.
We then compared the glacier retreat in this reconstructed world with changes that took place in a counterfactual scenario where there had been no human-caused climate change.
In doing so, we were able to quantify the role that warming played in the shrinking of the Pine Island glacier since the 1940s.
Overall, we estimate that warming has been responsible for around 4km – roughly a fifth – of the glacier’s retreat since 1940.
This is shown in the figure below, which shows how grounding line retreat in the reconstructed scenario (blue) is more extreme than projected by the counterfactual scenario (green).
Interpreting the numbers
Our work quantifies, for the first time, the role of climate change in the retreat of a glacier in the world’s ice sheets – directly linking greenhouse gas emissions with glacier decline.
We also find that the Pine Island glacier may have retreated even without climate change, just not as far. This is similar to how extreme weather events, such as drought or extreme rainfall, could still happen without climate change, just with less frequency or intensity.
One of the key challenges in our research arises from not knowing exactly how large the ice sheet was prior to satellite records.
Although the sediment records tell us where the ice was grounded – that is, what its footprint was – they do not tell us exactly how much ice there was.
This means we do not know exactly how to set up our model at the start of the simulations, which leads to uncertainty in our predictions.
Further work is underway to determine exactly how to best set up the simulations for future research.
The post Guest post: Climate change has caused one-fifth of Pine Island glacier retreat appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Climate change has caused one-fifth of Pine Island glacier retreat
Ellen Davies is head of programmes at the African Climate Foundation and is based in Kenya. Wole Hammond is programme officer for adaptation and resilience at the foundation, based in Nigeria.
For generations, African communities have lived on the frontlines of climate disruption, managing erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts and the slow erosion of their livelihoods, which depend on predictable seasons.
When the rains failed across Southern Africa in 2024, it was but the latest chapter of a crisis already long underway. During that season, maize crop failures of 40-80% devastated farming communities in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, where roughly 70% of people depend on rain-fed agriculture. Governments already stretched by debt were forced to raid development budgets, trading long-term growth for emergency relief.
Then came the floods. In early 2026, parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa received over a year’s worth of rain in days. More than 2 million people were affected. In East Africa, drought has displaced nearly 62,000 people in Somalia this year alone, with nearly one in four Somalis now facing acute food insecurity.
This is what climate change looks like on the ground – not parts per million or diplomatic jargon, but whether a school stays open after floods cut off the road, whether a clinic can function in extreme heat, whether a country can still invest in its future when every year brings another disaster bill.
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Africa as a continent contributes the least to global emissions yet bears a disproportionate share of the consequences. Nine of the ten countries most vulnerable to climate change are African. As livelihoods collapse and rural economies fail, migration pressures will intensify, driven by climate change intersecting with poverty, conflict and constrained opportunity.
Chronic under-funding
Europe is only now beginning to experience, in more limited form, what African communities have navigated for decades with far less fiscal space, thinner insurance coverage and fewer resources for recovery. With El Niño conditions confirmed and a “super” version of the naturally occurring weather pattern possible later this year, the pressure is set to intensify further.
In Africa, climate action is fundamentally a development challenge where adaptation and mitigation must go hand in hand. Building a solar grid and flood-proofing the road that serves it are not separate agendas. Yet for too long, the global climate conversation has prioritised mitigation while leaving adaptation – the work of protecting lives, livelihoods and economies in a changing climate – chronically under-funded.
The result is three compounding gaps. A visibility gap: much of Africa’s adaptation work remains under-documented and under-recognised in global climate narratives. A financing gap: capital does not flow at the scale or speed required to the people and institutions best placed to use it. And a decision-making gap: too many solutions are still designed elsewhere and imported into African contexts, rather than backing African-led platforms to scale what is already working.
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Solutions ready for finance
The solutions exist. Rwanda’s green investment fund has mobilised climate finance at national scale through its own systems. Egypt’s Nexus of Water, Food and Energy programme has shown how integrated planning can stretch limited resources across interdependent systems.
Zambia’s Presidential Irrigation Initiative is building climate-resilient food production from the ground up. In Pata, Senegal, a solar irrigation project has unlocked agricultural production and created jobs, demonstrating how integrated investments in water, energy and livelihoods can deliver resilience and development gains simultaneously.
In South Africa, the African Climate Foundation’s work with the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) is supporting district municipalities to assess their climate risks and develop fit-for-purpose Climate Action Plans, building adaptation capacity where it is needed most – at the local level.
These are not pilot projects waiting to be validated. They are working systems waiting for investment.
Closing the gaps requires a decisive shift in posture from global finance, philanthropy and development institutions. It means backing country-led platforms that can prepare, aggregate and finance adaptation projects. It means investing in place-based initiatives grounded in local knowledge.
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It means fostering intra- and inter-continental collaboration, so that lessons from Kigali inform decisions in Nairobi and innovations in Lagos reach communities in Dakar. And it means treating adaptation as core economic infrastructure, not charitable relief.
Invest now for future gains
The economic case is clear. Every dollar invested in climate adaptation returns an estimated four dollars in benefits on average – and up to five in the poorest economies. Under-investment in African adaptation is as economically irrational as it is morally unjust.
The world depends on Africa’s food systems, its young workforce – the majority of the continent’s population is under 25 – and its minerals. Several African countries supply a substantial share of the copper, cobalt and other critical materials underpinning the global clean energy transition.
Drought in Zambia has already shown how climate stress can disrupt hydropower, electricity supply and mining output. A transition that depends on African minerals cannot afford to ignore African climate resilience.
The world can continue to under-fund adaptation and pay repeatedly for emergencies, instability and lost development. Or it can invest now in the people, institutions and systems already doing the work on the ground in Africa, not in solutions imported from elsewhere.
Africa has the agency, the knowledge and the platforms. What it needs is the finance to match. A super El Niño will not wait for consensus to form. Neither, frankly, should we.
The post Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions
Climate Change
DeBriefed 26 June 2026: Heat records broken across Europe | London climate action week | Introducing ‘Project Cosmos’
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Record Europe heat
HOTTEST EVER: The UK broke its temperature record for June twice this week, while France recorded its hottest day ever two days in a row, reported the Guardian. The Times reported that temperatures reached 36.7C in Somerset on Thursday, as the “London Ambulance Service had its busiest-ever day for life-threatening emergencies”.
FRANCE FRYING: French newspaper Libération said that temperatures reached as high as 44.3C in the south-western commune of Pissos on Wednesday. Spain also recorded its highest daily average temperature for June, said BBC News. On Thursday, Switzerland also had its hottest June day, when temperatures reached 37C in four locations, reported SwissInfo.
CLIMATE LINK: CNN covered a rapid analysis from the World Weather Attribution service finding that fossil-fuelled climate change has made this heatwave the most severe and widespread in Europe’s history. Carbon Brief covered the broken heat records, explaining the influence of climate change.
‘Electrifying’ London talks
‘LONDON COOKING’: In a sweltering, packed-out event at London climate action week, UN chief António Guterres quipped that “London is not just calling, it’s cooking”, reported Edie. Guterres also used his address to release a “global call to action on methane” and to call on artificial intelligence companies to reveal their environmental impact and source their power solely from renewables by 2030, said the publication.
‘ELECTRIFY NOW’: Elsewhere, dozens of governments, led by the EU and the UK, committed to throwing “their political weight” behind a rapid electrification of the world’s economy, according to Climate Home News. A high-level summit in London’s Mansion House saw energy ministers and business leaders, joined by Guterres, in “calling for faster action to curb demand for oil, coal and gas by powering homes, industry and transport with clean electricity”.
FOSSIL TRANSITION: At the same event, ministers from Colombia and the Netherlands, the co-hosts of the world’s first summit on transitioning away from fossil fuels in April, unveiled a report on their key takeaways. It comes after the current Colombian government has been ousted by a presidential election defeat to a fossil-fuel-supporting Trump ally. Carbon Brief examined what this could mean for the world’s energy transition.
Around the world
- UK TARGET: The UK parliament has approved its “seventh carbon budget”, aimed at cutting emissions 87% below 1990 levels by 2040.
- TOTAL ACCOUNTABILITY: A French court has ordered oil-and-gas giant TotalEnergies to account for the emissions from the use of its products, following a case brought by a climate NGO, reported Le Monde.
- METHANE RULES: The US, Qatar and other major energy exporters have urged the EU to “rewrite planned methane emissions” rules for oil-and-gas imports, saying that the policy could disrupt fuel supplies to Europe, according to Reuters.
- CHINA MESSAGE: China’s special envoy for climate change, Liu Zhenmin, said at the World Economic Forum that energy shortages triggered by the Iran war should be a “lesson to countries to accelerate their energy transitions”, reported Bloomberg.
- US WEBSITE REVIVED: Former US government workers have “recreated a valuable climate-science website” shut down by the Trump administration last year, said the New York Times.
6,600 animals
The number of livestock that perished in transport during heat in England and Wales from June to August 2025, double the number killed the year before, reported Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Some world regions are experiencing up to 50 additional heat stress days annually, when compared to 1950 | Nature Climate Change
- Projections of national land-use emissions to 2100 suggest the strongest “carbon sinks” will be in China and Indonesia, whereas Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will “dominate global sources” | Nature
- Most carbon-offset projects relying on “avoided deforestation” have “mixed, negligible or negative impacts relative to control areas” | Nature Climate Change
(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 UK government’s official climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), has released its latest progress report, emphasising that faster electrification is the best way to secure lower energy bills and stronger energy security. Electrification has shot up the agenda in recent months, with the COP31 presidency calling for countries to back a global goal for 35% of “final” energy to come from electricity by 2035. The text of the CCC’s latest report uses the word “electrification” far more often than previous editions, as shown in the figure above. See Carbon Brief’s in-depth breakdown of the CCC’s latest advice.
Spotlight
Introducing ‘Project Cosmos’
Carbon Brief explains how it built a major new database of climate science research and unveils a new ranking of the 500 most highly cited publications, authors and institutions in climate science.
This week, Carbon Brief launched Project Cosmos – the world’s largest and most complete database of climate change research.
The database features more than 1.8m academic papers, books and reports, capturing the vast body of human knowledge about climate change that has accumulated over more than a century of academic study.
The climate science “universe” is based on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which are recognised as the world’s most authoritative summaries of the latest climate science.
Since its first report was published in 1990, humanity’s knowledge about human-caused climate change has ballooned. The IPCC has published six sets of reports in total – each one longer than the last.
In total, IPCC reports reference more than 100,000 other papers, books and reports. This is the core of our climate science universe. Carbon Brief then built on this core, by looking at four other sources of data. Read more about how the Cosmos database was created here.
Every single publication in the Cosmos database is linked to at least one other through references. Visualising these links reveals a “galaxy” of references.
In the image above, each colour and cluster reveals different topics and densities of research. Explore the galaxy in an interactive map.
Cosmos 500
As part of an initial wave of preliminary analysis to demonstrate the scope of the Project Cosmos database, Carbon Brief has ranked the 500 most highly cited publications, authors and institutions in the database.
The most highly cited climate scientist is Prof Philippe Ciais, who has spent almost four decades researching the planet’s carbon cycle – and the ways in which humans have been impacting its balance. Carbon Brief recently interviewed Ciais in Paris.
The US tops the tables for the most highly cited authors and institutions. Almost half of the 500 most highly-cited authors are from US institutions. This raises particular concerns for the future of climate science, as US climate scientists and institutions are coming under attack under the Trump administration.
Experts from global south countries account for only 4% of all authors in the Cosmos 500. China stands out as the most highly-cited global south country. Meanwhile, only 10% of authors in the Cosmos 500 are women.
There are many possibilities for future avenues of research using the Cosmos database. Over time, the database could be used to reveal, for example, how interest in different areas of climate science has changed over time, plus identify potential knowledge gaps and, thus, opportunities for future research.
Carbon Brief invites researchers – including academics, journalists and analysts – to submit their own proposals for co-authored studies, literature reviews and analytical projects. Proposals should be sent to cosmos AT carbonbrief DOT org.
This spotlight first appeared in Cited, Carbon Brief’s new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free.
Watch, read, listen
‘DOOMSDAY CULT’: OpenDemocracy reported on a “religious cult” spreading climate misinformation in “parliaments” and at “COP summits”.
‘WEDGES’ EXAMINED: ProPublica and Drilled released an investigation into how oil executives worked to influence a climate research paper from Princeton University known as “wedges”.
‘1976 to 2056’: A 30-minute YouTube video from the Met Office had climate scientists explaining how current UK temperatures compare to the infamous 1976 heatwave, and how extremes could worsen by 2056.
Coming up
- 29-30 June: Hamburg sustainability conference, Hamburg, Germany
- 29-30 June: Seventh global conference on climate and sustainable development goals synergies, Bangkok, Thailand
- 29-30 June: 11th annual global conference on energy efficiency, Montreal, Canada
Pick of the jobs
- Drilled, series editor | Salary: $4,000 a month (six-month contract). Location: US
- Met Office, ocean climate science manager | Salary: £54,515-£58,582. Location: Exeter, UK
- Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, research officer (climate science and law) | Salary: £43,277-£55,497. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 26 June 2026: Heat records broken across Europe | London climate action week | Introducing ‘Project Cosmos’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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