Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
This week
Hottest year on record
RISING TEMPERATURES: There is a greater than 99% chance that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. The analysis combined multiple temperature datasets to conclude it is “virtually certain” that this year will be the hottest for millennia. After a cooler start to the year, the past four months have seen truly exceptional global temperatures, surpassing prior monthly records by large margins, according to the analysis.
MYSTERY HEAT: Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the Washington Post that “it is indeed hard to give a good and informed answer to why this is happening – possibly for the first time”. Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor who undertook the analysis, wrote in the New York Times that the ”acceleration” in warming “means that the effects of climate change we are already seeing – extreme heatwaves, wildfires, rainfall and sea level rise – will only grow more severe in the coming years”.
Fossil fuels under fire
ONE VOICE: The European Union has agreed to push for the “phase out” of all fossil fuels at the upcoming COP28 climate summit in Dubai in late November, Reuters reported. This could set up the bloc “to be one of the most ambitious negotiators” at the summit, according to the newswire.
FIGHTS FUELLED: Climate Home News reported that “negotiators from Africa and India have set out separate plans to push developed countries to do more to move away from fossil fuels” at the summit. Meanwhile, Axios reported that the host of the talks, UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber, has called for “a responsible phasedown of unabated fossil fuels”.
LOSS AND DAMAGE: Elsewhere, the Financial Times reported that countries are at odds over how to run the “loss and damage” fund agreed at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last year, which was widely viewed as a historic step forward for climate justice. According to the FT, representatives from the negotiating bloc of G77 nations plus China, a large coalition of developing countries, were “considering abandoning” discussions underway in Aswan in Egypt amid a push from the US to allow the World Bank to be in charge of the fund.
Around the world
- BRAZIL DROUGHT: The Amazon river’s water level fell to its lowest in more than a century, leaving boats stranded and cutting off food and water supplies to remote villages, CNN reported.
- GREEN BELT: According to Xinhua, Chinese president Xi Jinping said the country will double down on green development “as one of the major steps to support the joint pursuit of high-quality belt and road cooperation”. (The belt and road initiative is China’s major infrastructure venture involving many developing nations across Asia and Africa.)
- UK HEAT: The UK’s National Infrastructure Commission has urged the government to phase out gas boilers and spend billions on rolling out heat pumps, the Daily Telegraph reported.
- CLIMATE STALEMATE: Russia’s opposition to holding the COP29 climate summit in an EU nation in eastern Europe next year has “left nations scrambling to find an alternative in time to organise the massive global event”, Reuters reported.
- OIL AND GAS DASH: The secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Haitham Al Ghais, said Africa should be allowed to use its oil and gas to fight energy poverty, “a position often repeated by the fossil fuel industry to increase oil production on the continent”, Reuters reported.
£492bn
How much global investment in electricity grids is needed annually by 2030, if national climate targets and reliable power supplies are to be achieved, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) covered by the Guardian.
Latest climate research
- The world may have reached a “global irreversible solar tipping point”, where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets – even without any further climate policies, a new paper in Nature Communication suggested.
- A new analysis in Climate Policy discussed ways to better integrate the perspectives of livestock keepers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda in indicators for tracking climate adaptation, which tend to be limited to government documents only.
- Limiting global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels would leave the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the US “highly exposed to “stranded assets”, especially coal plants”, a new paper in Nature Communication found.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Toxic algae on UK’s largest lake
Lough Neagh – a lake in Northern Ireland that is larger than the country of Malta – has been plagued by blue-green algae that can negatively impact humans, plants and animals. The image above shows the blooms visible from Copernicus satellite imagery on 4 September. The green swirls of algae are particularly noticeable on the eastern side of the lake. Scientists told Carbon Brief that agricultural nutrient runoff and climate change are the main roots of the problem – and that there is no “silver-bullet” solution.
Spotlight
A young activist’s campaign to save Africa’s vanishing Lake Chad
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to young Nigerian climate activist Adenike Oladosu about her work to raise awareness about the rapid disappearance of Lake Chad.
The discussion of climate change is not a priority in many African countries, but it is driving some of the most striking upheavals across the continent. One example is the shrinking Lake Chad, which has been linked to conflict and migration in the Sahel. Once the world’s sixth-largest lake, it has shrunk by around 90% since the 1960s.
Adenike Oladosu learned about Lake Chad’s precarious state while researching herdsmen-farmers conflicts as a university student in Nigeria’s middle-belt region. She was surprised that an issue usually framed as an ethnic war was essentially a fight for depleting resources.
Inspired by the likes of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, Oladosu decided to begin a Fridays for Future climate strike in Abuja, Nigeria’s political capital. She printed climate signs and stood alone at busy intersections; she also went to schools and churches. Soon, other young people joined her.
“The world needs to know about Lake Chad, because it doesn’t affect Nigeria alone, it affects the country around, including Niger, Chad and Cameroon,” Oladosu said. “My understanding is the fact that if you don’t know that a problem exists, you can’t solve it. Understanding that a problem exists is the first step towards solving the problem itself.”
On Twitter, Oladosu is relentless about campaigning for the restoration of Lake Chad. And she believes awareness about the issue is growing. In November 2022, on the campaign trail, Nigerian president Bola Tinubu promised to “recharge” the lake.
Earlier this year, as a fellow of the “planetary scholar and artists in residence” programme at the Justus Liebig University in Germany, Oladosu used remote-sensing technologies to observe and present the lake as a threatened space, raising more awareness about “the planetary dimensions of the crisis.”
For Oladosu, the shrinking of Lake Chad is also an issue of climate justice, which is connected to human rights. As of August 2023, more than six million people were living as displaced persons in the Chad basin, according to the UN. If Lake Chad was in Germany, she questioned, would it have shrunk by 90%?
Ahead of COP28, Oladosu joined the ONE campaign team in October to lobby for African priorities at the EU parliament in Brussels. For her, the restoration of Lake Chad should be one of the issues to take centre stage at the climate summit. She told Carbon Brief:
“If Lake Chad dries out it could become a battlefield for terrorists. If we want to achieve peace and security in the region, recharge Lake Chad in order to strengthen the livelihood in the region. This could be done through climate finance. Also, Lake Chad isn’t just an economic issue, it is a cultural site that unites. This is a decade of ecosystem restoration, Lake Chad should not be left behind.”
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE WRECK: On the podcast Inherited, storyteller Mo Isu traced the repetitive cycle of loss and rebuilding in the rural Niger Delta region of Nigeria as the country weathers extreme seasonal flooding.
LOOKING BACK: Grist examined the historical link between environmental disasters and societal collapse.
GREENWASHING: The New Yorker reported on how a major carbon offsets firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that “weren’t real”.
Coming up
- 22 October: Argentina general election
- 23-27 October: Latin America and the Caribbean Climate Week 2023, Panama City, Panama
- 24 October: IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2023
Pick of the jobs
- Climate Home News, editor | Salary: £50,000-70,000. Location: Remote
- China Dialogue Trust, regional social media editor (Africa) | Salary: $580 per month. Location: Africa
- Diocese of Norwich, net-zero carbon officer | Salary: £35,000-£40,000. Location: Norwich, Norfolk
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 20 October 2023: Earth’s hottest year ‘for millennia’; Countries set out stall on fossil fuels; Saving shrinking Lake Chad appeared first on Carbon Brief.
But a $345 million U.S. verdict against the environmental group hangs over the case.
A lawsuit filed by Greenpeace International against the U.S.-based fossil fuel company Energy Transfer in the Netherlands is moving forward after a Dutch court recently ruled in favor of the environmental organization in rejecting the company’s bid to toss out the case.
Greenpeace’s Dutch Anti-SLAPP Case Against Oil Pipeline Giant Advances
Go behind the scenes with executive editor Vernon Loeb and oceans correspondent Teresa Tomassoni as they discuss the search for heat-resilient coral reefs that are somehow defying the odds to survive a warming planet.
The world has already lost more than half of its coral reefs, and most of what remains is at risk of disappearing in the next 25 years.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Bonn talks close
‘SIDE-STEPPING AND STALLING’: UN climate talks in Bonn have ended in “gridlock”, according to Climate Home News. The outlet reported on the failure to balance developing countries’ need for climate-adaptation finance with “richer nations’ desire to move forward” on emissions cuts. It added that both topics were subject to “rule 16”, meaning no agreement could be reached and work will be pushed to the COP31 summit in Turkey. Inside Climate News quoted UN climate executive secretary Simon Stiell, who said the talks had seen “side-stepping and stalling”.
JUST TRANSITION: One “glimmer of hope” came from negotiations on achieving a “just transition”, reported Euronews. The news outlet said negotiators “made headway on operationalising the Belém-Antalya mechanism”, intended to support people in the shift to a low-carbon economy. However, Politico concluded that much of the focus in Bonn had “shift[ed] to efforts outside diplomatic talks – raising questions about the future of global climate negotiations”.
‘ATTACKING SCIENCE’: Agence France-Presse reported on the EU, Switzerland and “dozens of developing nations” warning of “attacks on science” by a “small group of fossil-fuels interests” in Bonn. Table Briefings explained that “the 1.5C target is increasingly being challenged” and the role of the UN climate-science panel – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – in an upcoming assessment of global climate progress “remains controversial”. See Carbon Brief’s full write-up of the talks for more detail.
US-Iran deal
PRICE DROP: The US and Iran announced that they have reached an interim agreement to halt the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz, reported Bloomberg. Oil prices have fallen, as the “long-awaited deal” began the process of “eas[ing]” the global energy crisis triggered by the conflict, according to the New York Times. The Associated Press noted that high fuel prices will “likely outlast the Iran war”.
‘OIL GLUT’: The Financial Times reported that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast a “glut of oil” emerging next year, if the peace deal holds. The IEA said this would allow countries to build new strategic reserves, as they “review their energy strategies and policies in response to the crisis”, according to Reuters.
‘NEW ERA’: Agence France-Presse reported that oil and gas companies have “few illusions about a return to normal for the Gulf energy industry after more than three months of blockage”. One analyst told the newswire that the war “showed the oil and gas industry that Hormuz risk is no longer just a geopolitical headline”.
Around the world
- OCEAN MONITOR: The Trump administration is “abandoning its plan” to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system key for tracking climate change after a “bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill”, reported the New York Times.
- CORAL HAVEN: The New York Times covered preliminary research, presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya, suggesting there could be three times as many “coral refugia” – where corals are relatively safe from climate change – than previously thought.
- BAD CREDIT: Down to Earth reported that the first carbon credits issued under the Paris Agreement’s new Article 6.4 mechanism are “facing scrutiny over alleged links to institutions controlled by Myanmar’s military junta”.
- OIL BACKTRACK: Reuters reported that oil-and-gas company Equinor has dropped a renewable-energy target and scaled back clean investments, while another Reuters story noted that Shell is selling off its offshore wind assets.
1.1 billion
The number of children facing “at least three overlapping climate hazards”, according to a new Unicef report covered by Agence France-Presse.
Latest climate research
- Including the “permafrost carbon-climate feedback” in climate models increases the chance of exceeding “tipping elements” – such as the Greenland ice sheets, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or Amazon rainforest – by up to 50% | Environmental Research Letters
- The intensity of influenza outbreaks could decline in temperate regions, but increase in tropical areas over the next century, as the climate warms | PNAS Nexus
- European snow cover has declined by 20% for December and January since the start of the industrial era, revealing an “unprecedented ongoing shrinkage of European winters” | Communications Earth & Environment
(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 more than 2m battery electric vehicles (BEVs), 1m “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs) and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are already saving drivers a total of around £3bn a year, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This amounts to savings of more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs for each BEV driver in the UK. The analysis comes amid reports in UK media this week that the government is considering “watering down” its EV sales targets.
Spotlight
Oceans rising at UN climate talks
The state of the world’s oceans is inextricably linked to the changing climate – and many delegates at UN climate talks want to see more focus on this issue, reports Carbon Brief.
Oceans are often described as the world’s “greatest ally” against climate change – absorbing 30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and most of the heat generated by those emissions.
They are also the site of important climate solutions, such as huge offshore windfarms and the shipping industry’s transition to cleaner fuels.
At the same time, the oceans themselves present a growing danger to coastal communities and sea life due to sea level rise, marine heatwaves and ocean acidification.
These diverse issues have led to growing calls within the UN climate process for more focus on oceans. During climate negotiations this week in Bonn – known as SB64 – nations and civil society had a chance to air these views during an “ocean and climate change dialogue”.
‘Elevate action’
Oceans first entered UN climate outcomes in 2019, when the final COP25 negotiated text requested a new “dialogue” on “the ocean and climate change to consider how to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action”.
The following years saw this dialogue established as an annual event. However, the political weight of these discussions has been limited.
COP31 is being co-led by Turkey and Australia, but with Pacific islands playing a supporting role. These small islands sometimes self-identify as “large ocean states”, stressing the ocean’s centrality in their societies.
In Bonn, figures from across the presidency threw their weight behind this issue. Chris Bowen, an Australian minister and incoming COP31 “president of negotiations”, told attendees:
“Australia, Turkey and the Pacific see an important opportunity to elevate ocean-based climate action.”
Strategies and finance
The two-day dialogue in Bonn involved a series of panels, statements and breakout groups.
One of the main topics was how oceans are integrated into national climate plans under the Paris Agreement, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).
Three-quarters of the latest round of NDCs mention oceans, with conservation of “blue carbon” ecosystems the most frequently described action. (Landscapes such as mangroves can both absorb CO2 and protect coastal areas.)
Delegates also discussed alignment with the UN biodiversity process, as well as ocean finance, which currently makes up less than 1% of all climate finance.
(As discussions were taking place in Bonn, country officials also gathered in Mombasa, Kenya for the 11th Our Ocean Conference. Carbon Brief’s associate editor Giuliana Viglione attended the conference and will publish a full summary shortly.)
Developing countries were clear that many of the ocean-related actions in their NDCs would depend on receiving more financial support.
‘Political momentum’
With the backing of the COP31 presidency, delegates were hopeful about where this year’s dialogue could lead.
Charles Hamilton, an advisor for the Bahamas who spoke for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the dialogue, told Carbon Brief that island representatives “are not traveling thousands of miles to just talk and pat ourselves on the back”. He added:
“A dialogue that just remains a dialogue is just more talk – no action.”
Given that, he said “discussions in the dialogue must move into COP decisions and the decisions must be actioned”, noting the importance of finance.
Marina Corrêa, oceans lead at WWF-Brazil, pointed to an upcoming UN climate change Standing Committee on Finance forum as a space to ramp up pressure on ocean finance.
More broadly, she wanted to see the presidencies translate their support into a “leader-level ocean initiative” that could “mainstream” oceans across negotiations.
“We have a really interesting opportunity, in terms of political momentum,” Corrêa told Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listen
‘HOTTER THAN HELL’: An episode of the BBC’s Rare Earth podcast titled “hotter than hell” considered the issue of extreme heat, with input from experts and “people facing up to the hottest temperatures on the planet”.
NOT BROKEN?: John Drake, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, wrote an essay for Aeon – also re-published as a Guardian “long read” – questioning the framing of ecosystems and climate systems “breaking down”.
ON COURSE: On his Volts podcast, US climate journalist David Roberts interviewed UK climate minister Katie White, quizzing her about whether the UK will “stay the course with its climate plans”.
Coming up
- 20-28 June: London climate action week
- 21 June: Colombia presidential runoff
- 24 June: UK Climate Change Committee progress in reducing emissions 2026 report to parliament
Pick of the jobs
- Mongabay, managing editor – Africa | Salary: Unknown. Location: Global
- Contexte, environment reporter – Brussels | Salary: €45,000-€60,000. Location: Brussels
- Climate 200, communications director | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia
- Energy Tracker Asia, energy transition correspondent | Salary: $3,000-$4,000 per month. Location: South-east Asia (remote)
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 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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