UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced new measures to cut energy bills alongside a “pay-per-mile” electric-vehicle levy as part of Labour’s second budget.
The policy changes are expected to cut typical household bills by around £134 per year, amid intense political scrutiny of energy prices and a government pledge to reduce them.
This cut is achieved through a combination of moving a portion of renewable-energy subsidies from bills to general taxation and ending a support scheme for energy-efficiency measures.
Reeves has also retained a long-standing freeze on fuel-duty rates on petrol and diesel, albeit with a plan to “gradually” reverse the extra cuts introduced under the previous government.
With fuel-duty receipts set to fall as people opt for electric vehicles, the government has also laid out its plan for an “electric vehicle excise duty” from 2028, to replace lost revenue.
The government has also announced new “transitional energy certificates” to allow new oil and gas production at or nearby to existing sites, as part of its plan for the future of the North Sea.
Below, Carbon Brief runs through the key climate- and energy-focused announcements from the budget.
- Energy bills
- Electric vehicles
- Fuel duty
- North Sea oil and gas
- Nuclear, ‘green finance’, critical minerals and rail
Energy bills
The chancellor used her budget speech to announce two major changes that will cut dual-fuel energy bills for the average household by £134 per year from April 2026.
The first is to bring the “energy company obligation” (ECO) to an end, once its current programme of work wraps up at the end of the financial year. This will cut bills by £63 per year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of the forthcoming energy price cap, which will apply from 1 January 2026.
The second is for the Treasury to cover three-quarters of the cost of the “renewables obligation” (RO) for households, for three years from April 2026. This will cut bills by £70 per year.
The total impact for typical households – those using gas and electricity – will be to cut bills by an average of £134 per year over the three-year period to April 2029.
(As explained in footnote 77 of the budget “red book”, this rises to an average of £154 per year, when including households that use electric heating and are not connected to the gas grid. This figure is then rounded to £150 per year in government communications around the budget.)
Notably, given the political attention on energy prices, this three-year period of discounted bills runs through to just before the next general election, which must be held by August 2029.
There has been furious debate over the past year over the causes and the most effective solutions to the UK’s high energy bills. A Carbon Brief factcheck published earlier this year showed that it was high gas prices, rather than net-zero policies, which has been keeping bills high.
Nevertheless, a politicised debate has continued and there has also been increasing attention on the factors that will put pressure on bills in the near future, such as efforts to strengthen the electricity grid.
At the same time, the advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) has repeatedly advised the government that it should make electricity cheaper, as so much of the UK’s climate strategy depends on getting homes and businesses to use electricity for heat and transport.
The changes in the budget will go some way to addressing this.
Carbon Brief calculations show that they would cut unit prices for domestic electricity users by around 4p per kilowatt hour (kWh) – roughly 16% – from 28p/kWh under the next price-cap period from the start of 2026, down to around 23p/kWh.
However, the red book says the government wants to further “improve” the price of electricity relative to gas, often referred to as “rebalancing”. It explains:
“The government is committed to doing more to reduce electricity costs for all households and improve the price of electricity relative to gas…The government will set out how it intends to deliver this through the ‘warm homes plan’.”
Under ECO, which has been in place since 2013, utility firms must install energy efficiency measures in fuel-poor homes, funded by a levy on energy bills.
It replaced two earlier schemes, known as CERT and CESP, with reduced funding after then-prime minister David Cameron reportedly told ministers to “get rid of the green crap”. This shift coincided with a precipitous decline in the number of homes being treated with new efficiency measures.
The ECO scheme has been hit by a series of scandals, with a recent National Audit Office report citing “clear failures” in its design, resulting in “widespread issues with the quality of installations”.
Pre-budget media reports had speculated that the government would pay for ongoing energy efficiency initiatives after scrapping ECO, using funding from the forthcoming “warm homes plan”. This speculation had suggested that subsidies for heat pumps would be cut as a result.
Instead, the budget includes an extra £1.5bn of funding for the warm homes plan, to cover the additional cost of taking over from ECO. (The total cost of ECO was around £1.7bn.)
Adam Bell, head of policy at the consultancy group Stonehaven and the government’s former head of energy policy, tells Carbon Brief that, while this £1.5bn is not the total cost of ECO, the scheme had been “terribly inefficient”. He adds that a government-run alternative that tackles home upgrades on an area-by-area basis was “likely to be cheaper”.
Contrary to much pre-budget speculation in the media, the chancellor did not reduce the already-discounted 5% rate of VAT on energy bills. Nor did she scrap the “carbon price support”, a top-up carbon tax on electricity generators.
Finally, the budget red book says that the government “recently confirmed” an increase in the level of relief for certain industrial users, from electricity network charges.
It says that, in total from 2027, the “British industrial competitiveness scheme” will cut electricity costs for affected businesses by £35-40 per megawatt hour.
Electric vehicles
The budget confirmed the introduction of a new “pay-per-mile” charge for electric vehicles, to raise more than £1bn in additional tax revenue by the end of this decade.
It has long been expected that fuel-duty receipts will begin to fall as electric vehicles start making up a rising share of cars on the road.
In its report accompanying the budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts a decline to around half of current levels in the 2030s in real terms, before falling to near-zero by 2050.
As such, the new charge on EVs will help maintain road infrastructure, the budget states. The “red book” notes that the new tax will see EV drivers paying a “fair share”. It adds:
“All vehicles contribute to congestion and wear and tear on the roads, but drivers of petrol and diesel vehicles pay fuel duty at the pump to contribute their fair share, whereas drivers of electric vehicles do not currently pay an equivalent.”
The electric vehicle excise duty (eVED) will come into effect in April 2028 at a rate of 3p per mile for battery electric vehicles and 1.5p per mile for plug-in hybrid cars, according to the OBR report.
The budget red book says this will mean the average driver of a battery electric vehicle paying “around £240 per year”. This is roughly half of the rate of fuel duty paid per mile by petrol and diesel car owners. (See: Fuel duty.)
(EVs will remain significantly cheaper to run than their combustion-engine equivalents. According to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, EVs would still be £1,000 cheaper to run per year than petrol equivalents, even after the new eVED charge.)
Currently, there is no equivalent to fuel duty for electric vehicles. Excise duty was brought in for EVs for the first time in April 2025, costing £10 for the first year and then rising to a standard rate of £195 per year – an increase announced in last year’s budget.
The introduction of the eVED is expected to raise £1.1bn in 2028-29 and £1.9bn in 2030-31, dependent on electric-vehicle uptake in the coming years.
The revenue generated by the eVED will “support investment in maintaining and improving the condition of roads”, the budget adds, with the government committing to £2bn in annual investment by 2029-30 for local authorities to repair and renew roads.
A consultation will be published seeking views on the implementation of eVED, the budget notes. It adds that there will be no requirement to report where or when the miles are driven, or to install trackers in cars.
The OBR report states that the additional charge of the eVED “is likely” to reduce demand for electric cars, due to increasing their lifetime costs.
Overall, it estimates that there will be around 440,000 fewer electric car sales across the forecast period relative to its previous forecast.
New support for EV buyers and manufacturers also announced in the budget could help offset 130,000 of this impact, the report notes.
This includes a boost to the electric car grant, which was launched in July and currently offers up to £3,750 off eligible vehicles.
The budget announces an increase of £1.3bn in funding for the programme, as well as an extension out to 2029-30.
Additional measures include an increase in the threshold at which EV owners have to pay the “expensive car supplement” from £40,000 to £50,000 from April 2026. This is expected to cost the government £0.5bn in 2030-31, the OBR notes.
The government will delay changes to “benefit-in-kind” (BIK) rules for employee car-ownership schemes until April 2030. This is a continuation of a policy announced in Reeve’s first budget as chancellor in 2024, which delayed the previously planned increase in BIK rates to 9% per year for electric vehicles by 2029, instead increasing them to just 2% per year out to 2029-30.
EV manufacturers will see the research and innovation Drive35 programme extended, with a further £1.5bn allocated to the project to 2035. This takes total funding for the project to £4bn over the next 10 years, according to the government.
Beyond the vehicles, the budget includes investment for EV charging infrastructure – also partly funded through the eVED revenues, it notes – with an additional £100m allocated. This builds on the £400m announced in the spending review in June.
Additionally, funding will be allocated to local authorities to support the rollout of public chargepoints, a consultation will be launched on permitting rights for cross-pavement EV charging and a 10-year 100% business-rates relief for eligible EV chargepoints will be introduced.
Fuel duty
Former Conservative governments repeatedly cancelled inflation-linked increases in fuel duty – a tax paid on petrol and diesel – every year since 2010.
Fuel duty was cut by an additional 5p per litre in 2022 by then-Conservative chancellor Rishi Sunak in response to the energy crisis.
Successive freezes in fuel duty have substantially increased the UK’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by lowering the cost of driving and, therefore, encouraging people to use their cars more and low-carbon transport options less.
Last year, Reeves opted to maintain the existing freezes and cuts introduced by her predecessors.
In the new autumn budget, she has once again announced a freeze on fuel-duty rates for an additional five months from April until September 2026.
Beyond that, the government says the 5p additional cut introduced in 2022 will be reversed – “gradually returning to March 2022 levels by March 2027”. However, the planned increase in fuel-duty rates in line with inflation for 2026-27 will be cancelled.
Then, from April 2027 onwards, the government says that fuel-duty rates will increase annually to reflect inflation.
In total, the 16 years of delays to expected increases in fuel duty rates – plus the “temporary” 5p cut – will have cost the Treasury £120bn by 2026-27, compared to the expected rise in line with inflation from 2010 onwards, according to the OBR.
Increasing fuel duty is very unpopular. However, research by the Social Market Foundation thinktank suggests persistent freezes have “done little for average Brits”, with the wealthiest in the country disproportionately benefiting.
Meanwhile, the government is also responding to the long-term decline in fuel-duty receipts “as more people choose to switch to cleaner, greener electric cars” by introducing a new per-mile charge on electric-vehicle use from 2028. (See: Electric vehicles.)
North Sea oil and gas
Much of the environmentally focused coverage previewing the budget centred on government plans to allow for new oil and gas production on or near existing field sites in the North Sea.
This was formally announced in the North Sea future plan, a 127-page document outlining the government’s approach to put the region “at the heart of Britain’s clean energy and industrial future” and “deliver the next generation of good, new jobs”.
(The plan was published in response to a consultation held earlier this year on the North Sea’s future, involving nearly 1,000 responses from stakeholders, including oil and gas companies and environmental groups.)
The future plan outlines that the North Sea is an ageing oil and gas basin, “much more so than other areas of the world”, and that production has been “naturally declining over the past 25 years”.
It includes the chart below, showing past and projected oil and gas production.
It adds that the decline of the basin caused direct jobs in oil and gas production to fall by a third between 2014 and 2023, according to official statistics.
The plan also has a section on the UK’s “proud history” of international climate leadership.
It notes that the UK is committed to the Paris Agreement, which has the aim to keep global warming to well-below 2C, while pursuing efforts to keep it at 1.5C, by the end of the century.
It continues:
“Scientific evidence from the International Energy Agency, UN Environment Programme and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that new fossil fuel exploration risks exceeding the 1.5C threshold. The IPCC warns that emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure alone could surpass the remaining global carbon budget, reinforcing the urgency to phase out fossil fuels.”
The plan says that the UK “now has the opportunity to lead in clean energy”, which “is both a national and global imperative”.
With this backdrop, the plan reaffirms Labour’s manifesto commitment to not issue any new oil and gas licences.
However, the plan says that the government will introduce “transitional energy certificates” to allow new oil and gas drilling on or near to existing fields, as long as this additional production does not require exploration.
An analysis by the North Sea transition charity Uplift found that the amount of oil and gas that could be produced by such certificates is “relatively small”.
It suggested that new discoveries within a 50km radius of existing productions contain just 25m barrels of oil and 20m barrels of oil equivalent of gas.
(By comparison, the Rosebank oil field, which is currently seeking development consent from the government, would produce nearly 500m barrels of oil and gas equivalent in its lifetime.)
In a footnote on page 36, the plan says that these certificates will have no effect on the process for giving development consent to new oil and gas projects.
Last year, Carbon Brief reported that several large oil and gas projects are currently seeking development consent from the government.
Because they already have a license, these projects are able to get around Labour’s policy on not issuing any new oil and gas licenses and still seek final approval.
However, a landmark legal case in 2024 means that all of such projects, including Rosebank, will now have to present the government with information about how much emissions will come from burning the oil and gas they plan to produce, before they can be approved.
Responding to today’s budget news, Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, said that the “government is right to end the fiction of endless drilling”, but should “put an end to all new fields, including the huge Rosebank oil field”.
The North Sea future plan also says that the government will change the objectives of the North Sea Transition Authority, the government-run company that controls and regulates offshore oil and gas production.
Before the change, the NSTA was in the awkward position of being responsible for both ensuring the oil and gas sector reaches net-zero and maximising the economic recovery of oil and gas reserves from the North Sea.
Now, the government wants the NSTA to balance three objectives: to “maximise societal economic value”; support the energy secretary in meeting net-zero goals; and consider the long-term benefits of the transition for North Sea workers, communities and supply chains.
In addition, the North Sea future plan also announces that the government will establish the “North Sea jobs service”, a national employment programme offering support for oil and gas workers seeking new opportunities in clean energy, defence and advanced manufacturing.
Nuclear, ‘green finance’, critical minerals and rail
The section in the budget about “investing in the UK’s energy security” largely focuses on the government’s plans for nuclear power.
At the last spending review, the government announced £14.2bn of investment in the planned Sizewell C nuclear-power plant in Suffolk.
The plant is set to be supported under the “regulated asset base” (RAB) model, which levies an extra charge on consumer energy bills to support the cost of the development. OBR analysis concludes this will generate £0.7bn in receipts in 2026-27, doubling to £1.4bn in 2030-31.
The budget also says the prime minister is issuing a “strategic steer” on the “safe and efficient delivery” of nuclear developments through “proportionate regulation and stronger collaboration”.
It says the government will additionally issue an “implementation plan”, within three months, in response to the recently published report on nuclear regulation. It says it will “complete implementation within two years”.
The government has also updated its “green financing framework”, which sets guidelines for the type of expenditures that can raise funding from investors under the UK’s green financing programme. It has now added nuclear power to the list of eligible expenditures.
Other climate-related measures mentioned in the budget include regional funding, such as £14.5m for a new low-carbon industrial centre in Grangemouth, Scotland, and support for “critical minerals, renewable energy and marine innovation” in Cornwall.
This builds on the government’s “critical mineral strategy” released last week, which specifically highlights Cornwall as a site of “mineral wealth”, where mining for lithium, tin and tungsten is being undertaken.
The government has also announced a one-year freeze on rail fares, which it states could save commuters taking expensive routes “more than £300 per year”.
The post UK budget 2025: Key climate and energy announcements appeared first on Carbon Brief.
China and India have declined to back any of their old United Nations carbon credit projects seeking to sell offsets under the new UN market, driving a cull of nearly three-quarters of applicants, analysis of official data shows.
Only 415 out of more than 1,500 projects and programmes hoping to move from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to the new carbon market set up under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement won the approval of their host governments by the 30 June deadline – a crucial step in transitioning them.
The two Asian giants, home to two-thirds of all applicants, account for the bulk of the exclusions. Brazil, the other heavyweight of the CDM era, took the opposite path, approving nearly all of its projects in a last-minute rush that leaves it with the largest number of activities still in the running to sell credits under the new mechanism.
Carbon market watchers have long regarded the CDM, set up under the Kyoto Protocol which has now been largely replaced by the Paris Agreement, as largely discredited for failing to drive real emission cuts. They also warned that letting its projects live on could dent confidence in the mechanism’s successor.
-
EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says
The country’s top climate envoy says he discussed using cookstove carbon credits with TotalEnergies, which is working to expand the use of LPG cooking in Africa
If all projects seeking transition had been successful, they could have flooded the market with up to more than 900 million credits generated with largely outdated rules, according to UN estimates. One credit is equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) and 900 million tonnes is similar to Japan’s annual emissions.
‘New era’
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said the failure of most projects to clear the hurdle sent a significant signal that carbon trading had entered a new era. “The system is trying to remove some of the hot air that had inflated it in the past,” she told Climate Home News.
“The lack of transition is the biggest contribution that Article 6 has made to climate yet,” she added, arguing that leaving “zombie credits” in the market creates confusion, especially for buyers that might not realise these units have lost their value.
Among the schemes that failed to win government approval are nine programmes promoted by fossil fuel companies over a decade ago to subsidise the construction of gas plants in the Global South, which Climate Home News has previously reported on.
Fossil fuel firms seek UN carbon market cash for old gas plants
But one of them, supporting the Ressano Garcia gas plant in Mozambique, could still profit from the new market after the country’s government granted its approval on deadline day itself.
Brazil leads projects transition
Established in 1997 under the Kyoto Protocol, the CDM allowed rich countries to meet part of their climate obligations by financing emission-cutting projects in poorer ones. It drew widespread criticism over its patchy human rights record and for failing to deliver promised climate benefits. Backers of the Article 6.4 market say it is a higher-integrity successor.
CDM projects were given a route back into the new mechanism under certain conditions at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, when governments agreed the rules for the Paris Agreement market.
Project developers had until the end of 2023 to apply and host governments were originally given until the end of 2025 to grant approval. But, after requests from many developing countries for an extension, at COP30 in Belém countries agreed to push the deadline back six months to the end of June.
Brazil was the single largest beneficiary of the decision, with all of its 92 approvals coming during the extension window. Hydropower plants, landfill gas schemes and wind farms make up the bulk of the South American country’s surviving portfolio, and hydro is the single most common project type in the global transition pipeline.
Peru greenlit the move of nearly a dozen hydropower plants, Thailand backed a batch of biogas and waste-to-energy schemes, and Mexico squeezed all of its approvals – including a controversial industrial gas project – into the final week. African nations including Zambia, Malawi and Ethiopia backed programmes aiming to switch households to cleaner cooking stoves, which have the potential to generate millions of offsets and are set to be the biggest source of credits among the surviving projects.
Long way from selling credits
Securing government support does not mean a scheme can now automatically sell credits under the Article 6 mechanism. Developers are required to submit additional documentation by the end of 2026 demonstrating that their programmes respect the mechanism’s stricter rules on environmental and social safeguards and on the risk of emission cuts being reversed. The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the mechanism’s regulator, has the final say on which projects are allowed into the market.
Those that make it through can sell credits for emission reductions achieved between 2021 and 2025 under the old CDM methodologies, with some adjustments aimed at preventing the creation of excess credits not backed by real emission cuts. For reductions achieved from 2026 onwards, projects will need to switch to new methodologies, which the regulator is currently developing.
So far, 30 programmes have completed the process, and only two cookstove projects in Myanmar have been formally approved to issue credits.
Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the activities in Myanmar over its ties to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and allegations of “massively” overstating its climate impact.
The company behind the scheme said its engagement with authorities “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta, while disputing the calculations underpinning the claim that too many credits had been issued.
The post Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub appeared first on Climate Home News.
Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub
Climate Change
Debriefed 17 July 2026: UK ‘firewave’ | Fossil-fuelled heat deaths | London’s Natural History Museum spotlights climate
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Heat and firewaves
‘FIREWAVE’: Wildfires ravaged Europe and North America this week. France utilised water-dumping planes collecting from the Seine to contain a fire in the Fontainebleau forest near Paris, according to the Associated Press. The Financial Times reported that the UK has had “25 non-consecutive days with temperatures of 30C or more, including nine days above 34C”, creating a “firewave” and putting pressure on emergency services. Meanwhile, an “orange haze from Canada wildfires” could be “seen in Ontario and northern US”, said BBC News.
‘NEW NORMAL’: Climate events previously seen as extreme are becoming the “new ‘normal’”, said the Met Office, in a report on the UK’s climate. While last year was the UK’s hottest on record, rising temperatures mean it is expected to be surpassed in the next few years, reported Reuters. Liz Bentley, head of the Royal Meteorological Society, told the Guardian that “climate change has been described by scientists for many years but is now increasingly being felt by the UK population in their own homes and communities”.
Around the world
- ELECTRIFYING PUSH: The European Commission has announced a target for electricity to account for 46% of energy consumption across the bloc by 2040, reported Carbon Pulse. The commission has also made plans to adapt its emissions trading system to “bring relief to industry”, it said.
- FALLING OIL: The International Energy Agency said that global oil demand is expected to decline this year for the first time since 2020, reported the Associated Press.
- US ROLLBACKS: Trump cuts to clean energy support “led to the cancellation or delay of $83bn in investment across hundreds of projects”, reported Reuters. The Trump administration has also changed environmental law to allow development in the habitats of endangered species, according to CNN.
- BURNHAM BEGINS: Incoming UK prime minister Andy Burnham is preparing to announce new North Sea drilling “within days of taking office”, said Bloomberg. Carbon Brief looked at 28 statements that Burnham has made about climate change and fossil fuels.
- DRY JULY: Drought in Uganda led to significant crop losses and at least 16 deaths from starvation, said BBC News.
- ON AI: Australia planned to implement restrictions on energy and water usage for datacentres “amid [an] AI boom”, said the New York Times.
38%
The drop in Brazilian Amazon deforestation in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, reported Al Jazeera.
Latest climate research
- The area of land burned by wildfires in Africa each year has reduced due to a shrinking dry season | Geophysical Research Letters
- Most people do not distinguish between climate adaptation and mitigation when thinking about tackling climate change | Climate Outreach
- An “effort-sharing framework” has been developed to support progress towards the Paris Agreement | 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
Carbon Brief explained how more than 1,000 heat-related deaths in England and Wales during May and June were attributed to climate change, accounting for almost half of all heat-related deaths experienced during those months. The article also unpacked the different methods for estimating heat deaths around the world.
Spotlight
Natural History Museum exhibits climate change
This week, Carbon Brief interviews Meaghan Macdonald, senior project and programme manager for London’s Natural History Museum, about their first permanent climate-themed exhibition, Fixing Our Broken Planet.
Carbon Brief: Why are programmes such as Fixing Our Broken Planet so important?
Meaghan Macdonald: One of the main things we’re trying to achieve with Fixing Our Broken Planet is to place the museum as a convener of conversations around the planetary emergency…trying to bring together the different groups of people who need to be involved in this conversation in order to work together to find a solution.
And we find that a lot of the people who come into the gallery weren’t necessarily coming here to see it; they come across it, which is a really great way to engage people who may not have been engaged in that discussion previously.
CB: How does the exhibition engage and inspire visitors?
MM: A driving force for this exhibition is that you are dealing with a subject matter that can be quite disheartening, and one of the things that we were very careful about is to try to make sure that woven throughout the scientific data… is a sense of hope… to enable people to feel empowered to make a difference.
We were able to do things like our “what you can do” labels, which give an example that people can take away with them. We also have “conversation starters”, which is a digital screen that asks people a series of questions related to the planetary emergency. Things like: “Should we mine the deep sea to power the green economy?”…And there’s no right or wrong answer.
We [also] set out very specifically to…forefront the science that’s happening here. We know from multiple studies from thinktanks and organisations that people actually trust our scientists the most.
CB: The museum has set out a goal to “create advocates for the planet”. What does this mean? How does it relate to the exhibition and the museum’s wider climate action?
MM: The aim of the museum is to get to a place where both people and the planet thrive. Being a library of the natural world, it is our duty to be standing up for it and to help people find their way, fighting for nature’s side.
In order to create those advocates, the aim of the [exhibition] and the wider advocacy programmes at the museum is to try to find ways to bring all these people [individuals, policymakers, industry, scientists] together.
We have the wider programme with Fixing Our Broken Planet. We have Generation Hope…a free graphic panel version of our display in the gallery that we have been able to get into a number of venues in Bangalore…the very long-standing and beloved wildlife photographer of the year [exhibition]…our urban nature movement…[and] an initiative that we are doing with the Department for Education called the National Education Nature Park.
Watch, read, listen
STUBBORN HOPE: For the Conversation, climate scientist Prof Peter Stott argued that researchers need to “talk more about the very worst-case scenarios” and the possibility for action.
EXTREME: Vox’s the Gray Area podcast spoke to New York Times journalist David Wallace-Wells about the possibility of a “Godzilla” El Niño.
RESPONSIBILITY: For Climate Home News, two researchers from the Center for International Environmental Law explored how “major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed”.
Coming up
- 13-31 July: Meeting of the International Seabed Authority assembly and council, Kingston, Jamaica
- 17-19 July: 3rd International Conference on Environment and Sustainable Development, London
- 19 July: Presidential election, São Tomé and Príncipe
Pick of the jobs
- Zero Carbon Analytics, research lead | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote
- Met Office, ocean climate scientific manager | Salary: £54,515-£58,582. Location: Exeter
- National Trust, land use and nature delivery partner | Salary: £44,499. Location: Newcastle or York
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post Debriefed 17 July 2026: UK ‘firewave’ | Fossil-fuelled heat deaths | London’s Natural History Museum spotlights climate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Recent weeks have seen a flurry of reports from public health authorities and scientists that estimate the deaths caused by Europe’s record-breaking summer heatwaves.
In France, the national public health agency reported 2,025 excess deaths over the week where the heatwave peaked in June.
Authorities in Germany and Netherlands put the excess death toll during the same seven-day period at 5,753 and 533, respectively.
An analysis from climate scientists in Carbon Brief found that France saw more than 2,700 heat-related deaths over 17 days in June.
Separate research estimated there had been 2,700 heat-related deaths in the UK’s May and June heatwaves – 42% of which had been caused by human-caused climate change.
There are a number of methods for how academics and governments tally deaths caused by extreme heat, each with their own advantages and drawbacks.
Here, Carbon Brief looks at the different ways scientists and public health authorities have calculated the death toll of Europe’s record-breaking summer heat.
- How established is the science of calculating heat deaths?
- What are the different approaches to counting heat deaths?
- What do the latest figures show for Europe’s May and June heatwaves?
- What are the pros and cons of the ‘excess deaths’ method?
- What are the pros and cons of the ‘statistical modelling’ method?
How established is the science of calculating heat deaths?
Economists and epidemiologists have been studying the relationship between heat and mortality for nearly a century.
A pioneering study published in 1923 by geographer Ellsworth Huntington and economist Margaret Justin that looked at mortality data for New York City over 1882-88 found that deaths increased rapidly as temperatures rose above 17C.
As global temperatures have risen in response to human-caused carbon emissions, scientists have increasingly sought to understand how warming could impact mortality.
The study of mortality caused by specific heatwave events dates back a few decades, with a 1995 heatwave in Chicago among the earliest events to be studied in detail.
Over the past decade, a growing number of studies have gone a step further, by estimating the number of deaths caused by a specific heatwave event and then attributing a percentage or number of those deaths to human-caused climate change.
Carbon Brief covered the first study of this type, which was published in Environmental Research Letters in 2016 and focused on a 2003 summer heatwave that caused tens of thousands of deaths across Europe.
The study estimated that 506 of the 735 summer fatalities in Paris and 64 of the 315 in London were a result of human influence on the climate.
More recently, a study in Climatic Change found that 27% of deaths in a 2018 heatwave in Zurich, Switzerland were linked to human-caused climate change and a paper in Science Advances estimated that 11-15% of deaths in a 2021 heatwave in British Columbia were attributable to global warming.
Dr Christopher Callahan, assistant professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, tells Carbon Brief this type of “two-step” study has “really exploded” in recent years:
“It is really only in the last five to 10 years that we have seen this, partly because it does require interdisciplinary expertise. You need people who know how to run the epidemiological models and you need a climate analysis of the counterfactual [world] without climate change, which is its own effort.”
What are the different approaches to counting heat deaths?
A central challenge in estimating deaths from a heatwave is that heat is rarely recorded as the primary cause of death on death certificates.
However, exposure to high temperatures has wide-ranging effects on the human body, including the strain of keeping cool. This effort places pressure on the heart and kidneys.
As a result, heat extremes can worsen health risks from chronic conditions and cause acute kidney injury. Researchers have linked heat to increased mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as dementia and Alzheimer’s.
As a result, public health authorities and scientists cannot depend on death certificates for a full count of heat-related deaths. They instead estimate heat deaths using a number of different approaches, each with assumptions baked into their calculations.
Dr Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, who researches methods for calculating excess mortality due to extreme events at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College, tells Carbon Brief there is “no ground truth” when it comes to tallying heat-related deaths:
“We don’t know what the heat-related deaths are, so we rely on different models to describe the picture.”
This makes the study of deaths from heatwaves similar to those from air pollution, he says:
“This sort of health-impact assessment has been done for years on studies related to deaths from air pollution, which have the same problem. Air pollution, until very recently, was not recorded on death certificates.
“[However], for air pollution, the [scientific] literature is much larger, so no one questions that air pollution is toxic and kills. This sort of messaging for heat is more recent.”
There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to calculating deaths during a heatwave.
The first involves counting the number of excess deaths relative to a period in the past.
This method – often referred to as an “excess deaths” approach – looks at how many people died during a particular time period compared to a baseline period where there was no heatwave.
To do this, public health authorities and researchers rely on official death figures reported by country authorities.
The heat death tolls published in recent weeks by public health agencies in Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands relied on this approach.
(For more, see: What are the pros and cons of the ‘excess deaths’ method?)
The second method uses long-term mortality data to understand the statistical relationship between temperature and mortality in a given place. The model that emerges can be used to infer the number of deaths from a heatwave in that place.
In a rapid analysis published this week, researchers at Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the Met Office used this approach to estimate that the May and June heatwaves in the UK caused the deaths of 2,700 people.
Dr Callahan – working with Prof Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University – used this method to estimate that more than 2,700 people had died in France over a 17-day period in June in an analysis for Carbon Brief.
(For more: see: What are the pros and cons of the ‘statistical modelling’ method?)
The majority of the figures released in the wake of Europe’s June heatwave have relied on these two methods.
There is a third way to calculate heat deaths, which is to look at official counts of deaths attributed on death certificates to heatstroke.
Callahan tells Carbon Brief that the “death-certificate coding” appears to have fallen out of favour in Europe – which he says is a “smart move” given that it does not provide a “full accounting”.
Nevertheless, some public health authorities are still using this method. For example, in the wake of the heatwave in the US earlier this month, public health data showed 29 people in New Jersey and three people in New York had died from “heat-related illnesses”.
Scientists tell Carbon Brief the excess deaths and statistical modelling approaches both have advantages and drawbacks. These are explored below.
What do the latest figures show for Europe’s May and June heatwaves?
The table below shows the death numbers that have been reported by governments and researchers for Europe’s May and June heatwaves, including the approach used to reach the figures.
It suggests that multiple countries in Europe experienced more than 1,000 heat-related deaths during the late June heatwave, with authorities in Germany counting more than 5,000.
Meanwhile, the EuroMoMo mortality monitoring system estimated there were more than 10,500 excess deaths across 27 countries during the June heatwave.
| Reported | Source | Country / region | Dates | Days | Deaths | Link | Approach |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28/06/2026 | Public Health France | France | 22-27 June | 6 | 1,000 | santepubliquefrance.fr | Excess deaths |
| 29/06/2026 | World Health Organization | Europe | 21-28 June | 8 | 1,300 | x.com/DrTedros/status | Excess deaths |
| 01/07/2026 | Carlos III Health Institute (MoMo) | Spain | 1-30 June | 30 | 1,033 | dw.com | Excess deaths (all-cause and temperature-attributable) |
| 02/07/2026 | National Institute for Public Health and the Environment | Netherlands | 22-28 June | 7 | 480 | rivm.nl | Excess deaths |
| 03/07/2026 | Public Health France | France | 22-28 June | 7 | 2,025 | santepubliquefrance.fr | Excess deaths |
| 07/07/2026 | Chris Callahan/Andrew Dessler | France | 12-29 June | 18 | 2,766 | carbonbrief.org | Statistical modelling |
| 08/07/2026 | Chris Callahan | Europe | 15-28 June | 14 | 13,975 | zenodo.org | Statistical modelling |
| 08/07/2026 | Sciensano | Belgium | 18 June – 1 July | 14 | 1,747 | brusselstimes.com | Excess deaths |
| 09/07/2026 | Robert Koch Institute | Germany | 22-28 June | 7 | 5,120 | rki.de | Statistical modelling |
| 13/07/2026 | Met Office/LSHTM/Imperial | England and Wales | 22-27 June | 6 | 2,183 | drive.google.com | Statistical modelling |
| 13/07/2026 | Met Office/LSHTM/Imperial | England and Wales | 24-26 May | 3 | 553 | drive.google.com | Statistical modelling |
| 13/07/2026 | EURO Mo/Mo | 27 European countries | 22-28 June | 7 | 10,650 | reuters.com | Excess deaths |
| 07/07/2025 | National Institute for Public Health and the Environment | Netherlands | 22-28 June | 7 | 577 | archive.ph | Excess deaths |
| 14/07/2026 | Germany Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) | Germany | 22-28 June | 7 | 5,753 | destatis.de | Excess deaths |
In most instances, Carbon Brief has linked to the figures published by public health authorities, where numbers were first reported. In some instances, figures were released on dashboards or webpages that are updated weekly. In these cases, Carbon Brief has linked to media reports or archived web content.
What are the pros and cons of the ‘excess deaths’ method?
The excess deaths approach looks at how many more people died during a particular time period compared to a baseline period of the same length.
For instance, on 14 July, Germany’s federal statistics agency, Destatis, published figures showing Germany saw 32% more deaths than the average in the week of 22-28 June, which was dominated by the heatwave.
Specifically, the agency said that 23,932 deaths had been recorded that week, compared to an average of 18,179 in that calendar week across the years 2022-25.
This suggests there were 5,753 excess deaths during the heatwave week. (This was a slight increase from preliminary Destatis figures released a week earlier, covered by Bloomberg.)
The Netherlands similarly calculates excess deaths by comparing death figures against an average of deaths in a similar period during unspecified “previous years”.
Data published by the country’s National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) shows that, during the week of 22-28 June, an estimated 3,626 people died in total in the northern European country.
This is 577 more deaths than the 3,049 expected at that time of year, it said. (This is a slight revision upwards from the 480 excess deaths reported on 4 July by NL Times based on preliminary figures from NVIM.)
Callahan says that the excess deaths approach has the benefit of being rapid and relatively uncomplicated:
“It is something that public health authorities can put out fairly quickly without having to run a fancy model and do coding like the academic scientists do. It is a short-term, high-impact, rapid estimate of mortality.”
The drawback to the approach is that it is impossible to decipher what percentage of these “all-mortality” excess deaths are, in fact, heat-related.
Imperial College’s Konstantinoudis notes that the public often “feels more comfortable” with the excess deaths approach over the statistical modelling approach because the data it is using – the official death numbers – is based on real-world data.
However, he stresses that excess deaths figures are based on a series of assumptions, including the reference period picked by researchers and how the numbers are interpreted.
Statisticians and researchers have to make a series of decisions, including what period to use as a comparative baseline. For example, the baseline period could be the week before a heatwave, the same week a year before – or an average of the same week across multiple years in the past. If averaging mortality of a similar period across a number of previous years, they must decide how much “weight”, or influence, each year should have.
They must also decide how to account for spikes in deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic years, as well as the gradual rise in average temperatures due to global warming.
During the pandemic, many governments and the World Health Organization (WHO) used the excess deaths approach to count deaths. The WHO said this metric was more “comparable” and “objective” than relying on national reports of Covid-19 deaths, given that different countries used different criteria for this classification.
A notable example of how assumptions can skew excess death figures came during this period, when the WHO estimated in 2022 that Germany had seen 195,000 excess deaths over two years of pandemic.
However, after statisticians and epidemiologists pointed out the assumptions in the model were not suited to Germany’s demographics, the WHO retracted the figure and eventually reduced it to 122,000 and then later to 102,000.
Konstantinoudis explains:
“Covid taught us that it is complicated. Depending on the different assumptions used in the excess-mortality approach, you get different results…There is a scientific basis, but we should acknowledge the assumptions.”
What are the pros and cons of the ‘statistical modelling’ method?
In the statistical modelling approach, researchers use models to determine the specific relationship between mortality and temperature for a particular location and then apply it to temperatures observed during a heatwave.
This allows them to estimate the overall number of deaths that were caused by a heatwave.
Previous research has revealed that, in most places of the world, there is a U-shaped response of mortality to temperature – where deaths increase rapidly in cold or hot conditions as daily maximum temperatures depart further from an “optimum temperature”.
For example, research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025 found that mortality rates in France rise as daily maximum temperatures move away from approximately 20C. This is shown in the chart below.
Indiana University’s Callahan say this approach allows scientists to “formally establish a relationship between the temperature and the mortality”, adding:
“If you do these calculations right, you can credibly say your entire estimate of mortality is heat-related.”
Prof Antonio Gasparrini, biostatistician and epidemiologist at LSHTM, explains the method relies on “timeseries models that apply relatively sophisticated statistical methods in which you ‘smooth’ trends occurring in time, so you control for long-term trends and seasonality”.
He says that these models also allow researchers to “remove” trends affecting mortality that are unrelated to heat – for instance, the impacts of the pandemic. They can also “add” other information, such as around how air pollution combines with heat to threaten vulnerable populations.
Gasparrini adds:
“What statistical modelling can bring is that it is more refined. It can link specific temperatures to specific impacts rather than just looking at the event [in the whole]. And also, it can be localised – [data] can be stratified at a fine scale and we can look at impacts at different scales.
“So, it is more informative. But, at the same time, of course, it’s based on more assumptions than the [excess deaths approach] and, of course, needs to be checked and compared.”
The approach depends on a number of judgment calls from scientists and statisticians, including the years picked to underpin the model and how to capture the lag in deaths in the days and weeks after a heatwave event.
They must also decide at what threshold to start counting deaths – in other words, whether to count all deaths above the “optimum temperature” or set a higher, more extreme value – and whether and how to account for any adaptation to heat extremes that may have been put in place in the study area.
A benefit of the statistical modelling approach is that it opens the door for being able to attribute a specific number of deaths to human-caused climate change.
By applying the temperature-mortality curve to both the temperatures of the recent heatwave and a counterfactual world without climate change, scientists can estimate what proportion of estimated deaths only occurred because the world is warming.
For instance, Imperial College, LSHTM and Met Office researchers found that 59% and 38% of heat-related deaths in the UK’s May and June heatwaves, respectively, could be attributed to climate change. Their findings are shown in the chart below.
Some climate-sceptic commentators have argued that modelled estimates are hypotheses and should therefore be treated with caution.
On 13 July, climate-sceptic news website GB News covered a blog post by Oxford academics that argued the figure that 2,700 people had died in the UK’s May and June heatwaves was not reflected in the provisional “all-mortality” data put out by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). Quoting the blog, GB News said:
“Modelling tells us nothing. Models explore possibilities; surveillance tells us what happened. When the two disagree, our instinct should be to investigate the data rather than simply trust the model.”
However, Imperial’s Konstantinoudis – who worked on the models behind the 2,700 figure – says it is important to await the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA)’s annual heat mortality report before arriving at any conclusions. He explains:
“While we are entirely clear that our current findings are modelled estimates, this methodology has consistently delivered comparable results to the UKHSA’s own official analyses of observed deaths for past heat events.”
(The UKHSA report will include updated figures and estimate excess deaths from heat based on specific periods of heat in different regions, whereas the provisional ONS figures cover all national deaths during a full-week period.)
Konstantinoudis says both the excess deaths and statistical modelling approaches have been the subject of extensive peer-reviewed scientific study and can provide a “holistic view of what is happening” when used together.
Studies that have compared statistical modelling approaches for estimating heatwave deaths with excess death figures in the UK have found they yield broadly similar results.
The post Q&A: Europe’s May and June heatwave deaths – and how they were counted appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Europe’s May and June heatwave deaths – and how they were counted
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