British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.
In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably.
Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.
Internal government documents disclosed in court show civil servants had “low” or “very low” confidence in about half of their planned emissions reductions up to 2037 and “very high confidence” in just a tiny fraction.
UK civil servants rated about half their planned emission cuts as “low” or “very low” confidence
In court, the government’s lawyer said that these categories should not be taken out of context – and that certain measures could be rated “very low confidence” just because it is “early days”.
The risk analysis was put together by unnamed civil servants at the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in 2022 and was supposed to help shape the government’s latest carbon budget delivery plan, aimed at keeping the country on track for net-zero emissions by mid-century.
The plan was published in March 2023 along with a sanitised version of the risks and uncertainties that civil servants foresaw in meeting it.
But the full risk tables were made public this week as environmental campaigners took the government to court, arguing that civil servants did not give then climate minister Grant Shapps enough information to judge whether the UK’s climate plan was sufficient.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BIG WIN YESTERDAY: We’re finally been able to publish the Government’s climate risk tables
TODAY: We’re arguing in court that its refusal to disclose them is in breach of the Climate Change Act
https://t.co/Y1QNveDde1
— Good Law Project (@GoodLawProject) February 21, 2024
Katie de Kauwe, a lawyer for Friends of the Earth, one of the groups bringing the case, said the analysis shows “much of the government’s ‘strategy’ to meet legally-binding climate targets amounts to wishful thinking”.
ClientEarth lawyer Sam Hunter Jones, said: “These risk tables only further prove that the government is choosing to look the other way when it comes to the clear possibility of its climate plans failing.”
Where’s the green fuel?
The government has said it plans to cut 611 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from 2023 to 2037 from international aviation and shipping – about an eighth of its total emissions reductions over those 15 years.
Plans to decarbonise aviation currently rest largely on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), made from plant material called biomass.
Countries draw battle lines for talks on new climate finance goal
But the civil servants privately warned there may not be enough of this biomass required to power the planes.
“Feedstock availability is a key dependency to supply necessary quantities of SAF,” the risk assessment says, adding “increased global demand for biomass could impact the deliverability of these project savings”.
“Zero emission flight technology is at an early stage of development and delivery of this ambition will be challenging,” it notes.
Planes could also – at least in theory – be powered with hydrogen but this may also be in short supply.
The civil servants say “the availability of low carbon hydrogen at scale from 2030 onwards is likely to be critical”.
The government’s plan does not mention strategies to reduce flight numbers or encourage people to travel by train.
Cow super-foods
The carbon budget delivery plan also estimates that the damage done by livestock, particularly cows, burping the potent greenhouse gas methane can be reduced by 4 million tonnes between 2023 and 2037 by giving them special food and not feeding them too much.
But the previously unpublished analysis warns that the emissions savings from this are “uncertain” as the technology is “nascent”. The plan does not include measures to reduce the numbers of ruminants like cows or to promote a move away from meat-based diets.
The most recent summary of climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that technologies that ease pollution from livestock flatulence based on seaweed or algae are “promising” but there are doubts about the environmental side-effects and whether the emissions cuts from using them will be lasting.
The UK government’s plan also relies on technologies that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to contribute 30 million tonnes of CO2 reduction between 2023 and 2037.
Despite Cop28 pledge, France keeps fossil fuel subsidies for farmers
But the civil servants say they are “uncertain” this will be delivered. This is partly because “greenhouse removals technologies have never been deployed at scale, creating inherent uncertainties and risk”, and “additional research and innovation” is required.
These technologies vary but include burning plant material or hydrogen for electricity and capturing the carbon emitted, as well as sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere with direct air capture machines.
In addition, the officials flag concerns about using hydrogen – a gas that doesn’t damage the atmosphere when burned and can be made with carbon-free electricity – to heat homes as an emissions-cutting bet.
“The use of hydrogen for heat is not yet a fully established technology,” they say, adding “there is uncertainty on the carbon savings associated with hydrogen heating policy”.
They do not raise doubts about heat pump technology except with regard to cost and how to heat buildings where pumps are not suitable.
Climate finance fail
Despite cuts to the UK’s development aid budget since the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government has insisted it will deliver on a much-hyped promise to deliver £11.6 billion ($14.7 bn) in climate finance to developing countries between 2021 and 2026. But in the newly released documents, civil servants warn of “material risks” to meeting that commitment.
They blame this on the UK cutting its annual aid spending from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5%, and the redeployment of almost a third of the aid budget to cover the cost of hosting Ukrainian refugees.
This supports the claim made by former environment minister Zac Goldsmith, who resigned in June saying the government had “effectively abandoned” the climate finance pledge, which was “one of the most widely reported and solemn promises we have made on this issue”.
The Guardian newspaper also last year published a leaked government document warning the UK would find it a “huge challenge” to respect the pledge. At that time, the foreign and development ministry said “claims that the international climate finance pledge is being dropped are false”.
Emma Dearnaley, legal director of the Good Law Project, asked: “How can the UK credibly claim to be a world leader in tackling climate change when it is falling behind on its legal commitments to help those who will bear the brunt of it?”
Developing countries have been angered by news on the expected shortfall in Britain’s climate funding. Last June, an African negotiator told Climate Home it was “disappointing”, while Bolivia’s Diego Pacheco said the UK would not be respecting the United Nations climate change convention or the Paris Agreement.
The court hearing finished today, but it is likely to be months before the judge returns a verdict.
The post Revealed: UK civil servants’ secret doubts over climate techno-fixes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Revealed: UK civil servants’ secret doubts over climate techno-fixes
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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