China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were unchanged from a year earlier in the third quarter of 2025, extending a flat or falling trend that started in March 2024.
The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) saw CO2 emissions from transport fuel drop by 5% year-on-year, while there were also declines from cement and steel production.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that while emissions from the power sector were flat year-on-year, a big rise in the chemical industry’s CO2 output offset reductions elsewhere.
Other key findings include:
- Power-sector CO2 emissions were flat in the third quarter, even as electricity demand growth accelerated to 6.1%, from 3.7% in the first half of the year.
- This was achieved thanks to electricity generation from solar growing by 46% and wind by 11% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2025.
- In the first nine months of the year, China completed 240 gigawatts (GW) of solar and 61GW of wind capacity, putting it on track for a new renewable record in 2025.
- Oil demand and emissions in the transport sector fell by 5% in the third quarter, but grew elsewhere by 10%, as the production of plastics and other chemicals surged.
After the first three quarters of the year, China’s CO2 emissions in 2025 are now finely balanced between a small fall or rise, depending on what happens in the last quarter.
A drop in the full-year total became much more likely after September, which recorded an approximately 3% drop in emissions year-on-year.
Electricity demand – and associated emissions – have tended to grow fastest during the summer months, due to rapidly rising demand for air conditioning amid hotter summers.
If this pattern repeats, then China’s CO2 emissions will record a fall for the full year of 2025.
While an emission increase or decrease of 1% or less might not make a huge difference in an objective sense, it has heightened symbolic meaning, as China’s policymakers have left room for emissions to increase for several more years, leaving the timing of the peak open.
Either way, China is set to miss its target to cut carbon intensity – the CO2 emissions per unit of GDP – from 2020 to 2025, meaning steeper reductions are needed to hit the county’s 2030 goal.
Finely balanced emissions
China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months, starting in March 2024. This trend continued in the third quarter of 2025, when emissions were unchanged year-on-year.
This picture is finely balanced, however, with contrasting trends in different sectors of the economy underlying the ongoing plateau in CO2 emissions, shown in the figure below.
Emissions from the production of cement and other building materials fell by 7% in the third quarter of 2025, while emissions from the metals industry fell 1%. This is due to the ongoing real-estate contraction, as the construction sector uses most of the country’s steel and cement output.
Emission reductions from steel production continued to lag the reductions in output, which fell 3%. This is because the fall in demand was absorbed by the lower-carbon electric-arc steelmakers, whereas carbon-intensive coal-based steel production was less affected.
China has struggled to increase the share of electric-arc steelmaking despite targets, due to the large capacity base and entrenched position of coal-based steelmaking crowding out the lower-emission producers.
Power-sector emissions were unchanged year-on-year in the third quarter, as strong growth from solar and wind generation, along with small increases from nuclear and hydro, nearly matched a rapid rise in demand.
Emissions from transport fell by 5% over the period, but oil consumption in other sectors grew by 10%, driven by chemical industry expansion. This resulted in a 2% rise in oil consumption overall.
Gas demand and emissions grew by 3% overall in the three-month period, with consumption in the power sector up by 9% and by 2% in other sectors.
The figure below shows how emissions in each of these sectors has changed in the first nine months of 2025, for example, power-sector CO2 output is down 2% in the year so far.
The rapid recent growth of CO2 emissions in the chemical industry is a continuation of recent trends and, as such, the sector’s coal and oil use have both surged in 2025 to date.
The outlook for emissions in the final quarter of 2025 – and the year as a whole – depends on whether further declines in cement, transport and power are enough to offset increases elsewhere.
Solar and wind growth keep power sector emissions flat
In the power sector, China’s dominant source of CO2, emissions remained flat in the third quarter even as electricity demand grew strongly.
Electricity generation from solar and wind grew by 30%, with solar up 46% and wind power generation increasing 11%. With small increases from nuclear and hydropower, non-fossil power sources covered almost 90% of the increase in demand, even as demand growth accelerated to 6.1% in the third quarter, up from 3.7% in the first half of the year.
This is illustrated in the figure below, where the columns show the change in generation by each source of non-fossil power every quarter and the line shows the increase in electricity demand.
Despite a small increase in electricity generation from fossil fuels to cover the remaining 10% of demand growth, power sector emissions stayed unchanged in the third quarter of 2025.
This is because the average thermal efficiency of coal power – the amount of fuel per unit of output – improved slightly, while the share of gas-fired generation increased at the expense of coal.
The figure above shows that the growth in clean-power sources has been covering all or nearly all of the rise in electricity demand in recent quarters, but once again there is a fine balance.
As such, the outlook for the final quarter of 2025 and for power-sector emissions over the years ahead depends on the relative strength of rising demand and clean-power output.
From 2021 to 2025, there has been a marked seasonal pattern in electricity demand growth, with more rapid rises in the summer peak “cooling season”, from June to August.
In these months, residential electricity consumption grew by a striking 13% per year, compared with just 6% during other parts of the year. Industry and service-sector consumption also grew faster in the summer months.
As a result, growth in total power demand has been significantly faster, at 6.8% during the summer months, compared with 4.6% in the rest of the year.
This is due to both increased prevalence of air conditioning and to hotter summers, with the average number of “cooling-degree days” increasing by one third from 2015–16 to 2024–25, as shown in the figure below.
This seasonal pattern implies that electricity consumption might ease off in the final quarter of 2025, which would set a lower bar for clean-power growth to meet or exceed rising demand.
On the generation side, the first nine months of 2025 has seen China adding 240GW of solar and 61GW of wind power capacity. While the rate of new installations has slowed down sharply since May, China is still on track for a new record for the whole year as developers rush to complete projects included in the 14th five-year plan, which finishes at the end of 2025.
China had 181GW of wind and 234GW of utility-scale solar under construction in early 2025, according to the Global Energy Monitor. After the capacity additions in the first nine months of 2025, this leaves 120GW of wind and 123GW of utility-scale solar under construction, much of which is likely to be commissioned this year.
The rate of new wind and solar additions in 2025 to date is shown in the figure below, alongside comparable figures for each year since 2020.
The slowdown in installations in recent months is due to a new pricing system that requires developers of new solar and wind-power plants to secure contracts directly with buyers, instead of being guaranteed the benchmark price for coal power, which was the case until May.
The change in pricing led to a major rush to complete projects faster than originally scheduled, seen in the May 2025 bump in the figure above.
This left few projects to complete in the third quarter, meaning that the current slow pace in installations does not yet reflect the capacity growth that can be expected under the new system.
China’s power-sector emissions have been falling slowly since early 2024, due to the rapid growth of solar and wind power generation. The unprecedentedly large capacity additions have enabled non-fossil power generation to cover electricity demand growth, but only barely.
Any sustained slowdown in solar and wind deployment would mean that power-sector emissions would begin to creep up again, unless electricity demand slows sharply. This is not expected – the State Grid has forecast 5.6% annual demand growth until 2030, compared with 6.1% from 2019 to 2025.
One indicator pointing towards robust ongoing solar capacity growth is that the production of solar cells has continued at or above 2024 levels – even after the slowdown in installations in recent months – growing 8% year-on-year in the third quarter.
The amount of new solar-cell capacity produced in Chinese factories each month, minus exports, has tended to predict new domestic solar installations, with a lag.
However, the outlook for wind and solar growth in China is clouded by a large gap between industry and government expectations for the sector.
The China Wind Energy Association is targeting at least 120GW of wind-power capacity added per year in the next five years, while the China Photovoltaic Industry Association projects 235-270GW of solar added in 2026, rising to 280-340GW in 2030.
In contrast, president Xi Jinping recently announced that China would “strive to” bring the county’s installed solar and wind capacity to 3,600GW by 2035. This implies just 200GW of capacity added per year over the next decade, extending a target set earlier for 2025-27.
The pace of solar and wind deployment under the new pricing system depends heavily on the implementation of the national-level rules at the provincial level, particularly the choice of minimum pricing. Most provinces are yet to finalise their rules and only six provinces have published results from auctions for “contracts for difference” – the key policy instrument under the new rules – so far, with nine more auctions underway.
Meanwhile, the additions of new coal and gas-fired power capacity have accelerated, as the projects started after the government loosened permitting and started to promote coal-fired power projects in 2020 are starting to complete.
The result has been that the utilisation of coal-fired power capacity – the share of hours during which each unit is in operation – has begun to fall significantly, as power generation from coal has declined since April 2024. Utilisation peaked at 54% in the 12 months to February 2024 and fell to 51% in the 12 months to September 2025.
Another 230GW of coal-fired power capacity is under construction. If power generation from coal continues to stay stagnant and if all of this new capacity is added to the system, then utilisation would fall to 43%. This could prompt a rethink of the government’s promotion of coal-fired power projects.
Chemical industry’s runaway growth pushes up oil demand
In the oil sector, there are once again competing factors at work. China’s transport oil consumption has been falling since April 2024, driven in large part by the rapid adoption of EVs.
However, total oil consumption still increased 2% in the year to September, as a 4% fall in transport fuel use was more than offset by an 8% rise elsewhere, dominated by industrial demand.
Consumption fell by 4-5% across each of the three main transport fuels: diesel, used in trucks and other heavy vehicles; petrol, mainly used in cars; and jet fuel.
The reduction in petrol consumption accelerated in October, falling 8% year-on-year, erasing the usual spike seen at this time of year related to the week-long national holiday.
Within industry, the production of primary plastics grew 12% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2025, while the production of chemical fibres grew by 11% and the production of ethylene by 7%. The increase in the output of these products accounts for the entire increase in oil use outside the transportation sector.
These sharp increases in chemical production are shown in the figure below.
One clear driver of the growth in plastics production is import substitution – replacing equivalent products imported from overseas – as well as growing exports.
China is still a net importer of primary plastics by value in 2025 so far, but only just. The value of imports fell by 8% while the value of exports increased by 8% in the first nine months of the year.
The five-year plan for 2021-25 targeted an increase in chemicals production to reduce the imports of key raw materials to less than 40% of demand, with projects launched to meet this target coming online this year.
More recently, the government has encouraged oil refineries to shift from the production of transport fuels to chemicals, in order to adapt to falling demand for oil in transportation. It set a target for the petrochemical and chemical sector’s economic output to grow by more than 5% per year in 2025-26.
The US-China tariff tit-for-tat has added further momentum to import substitution. The US has been China’s largest source of imports of polyethylene – the most widely used plastic in the world – since 2023, but China has expanded its domestic production in response to the trade spat.
Still, the change in China’s net exports of plastics cannot account for more than a fraction of the increase in output volume, however, as estimated based on reported polymer prices. This indicates that growing domestic demand is a major driver of the rapid growth in plastics production.
Packaging is the largest use of plastics in China, with the booming online retail and food delivery industry driving rapid growth.
Express parcel volumes grew 21% in 2024 and 17% through September 2025. The value of the single-use plastic tableware market averaged 21% annual growth from 2017 to 2022 and the revenue of the online food delivery industry is projected to grow 11% in 2025.
The government is taking measures to curb single-use plastics, but these would need to be intensified to fully counteract the growth rates seen in food deliveries and other drivers. The demand for high-performance materials in new manufacturing industries is also a significant driver.
Will China’s emissions peak early or rebound?
After the third quarter of 2025, it is clear that the plateau or slow decline of China’s CO2 emissions that started in early 2024 continues.
Whether emissions increased or decreased marginally in the first three quarters of the year is too close to call, given the uncertainties involved, but a drop in full-year emissions became much more likely after September, which recorded an approximately 3% drop in emissions year-on-year.
Still, either a small increase or decrease in the calendar year of 2025 remains possible and will be ultimately be decided by developments in the fourth quarter.
China’s emissions from fossil-fuel use are highly likely to increase this year, with the increase of coal and oil use in the chemical industry outweighing the reductions in emissions from the power, metals, building materials and transportation sectors. This will be balanced out by a fall in cement process emissions.
What is already clear is that the 2025 carbon-intensity target will be missed, as it would have required absolute emission reductions of 4% or more this year, after slow progress during the earlier years of the five-year period.
This also means that the carbon-intensity target in the next 15th five-year plan for 2026-2030 would need to be more ambitious than the one that China missed during the current period, to close the shortfall to the country’s 2030 intensity target.
China targeted an 18% reduction in 2021-25, but will only have achieved around 12% by the end of this year. It would then need a reduction of around 22-24% in the next five years to achieve its headline climate commitment for 2030, a 65% carbon-intensity reduction on 2005 levels.
Whether emissions fall this year – or not – has high symbolic significance. Having committed to peaking emissions “before 2030”, China’s policymakers have left their specific peaking year open.
China’s new greenhouse gas emission target for 2035, announced by Xi in September, was set as a reduction of 7-10% below an undefined “peak level”, making it clear that policymakers are still planning for – or at least leaving the door open to – a late peak, only just before 2030.
Setting this target from “peak levels” means that the timing and level of China’s emissions peak affects not only the path of its CO2 output in the next few years, but also the size of cuts needed to meet the 2035 goal – and presumably also subsequent targets thereafter.
The target of reducing emissions from “peak levels” could also create an incentive for provinces to increase emissions before the expected peak year, known as “storming the peak” in Chinese.
This incentive could be curbed by the creation of the “dual control” system for carbon intensity and total carbon emissions. The Central Committee of the Communist Party recently reiterated that this should happen during the next five-year period, but the specific timeline is an open question.
If the system is not operational from 2026, with annual carbon intensity and possibly absolute carbon emission targets allocated to provinces, then that could further allow for and incentivise emissions increases in the short term.
At the same time, China has made commitments to peak emissions before 2030, reduce coal consumption gradually during the 2026-30 period and to reduce carbon emissions per unit of GDP by more than 65% by 2030, from 2005 levels.
Meeting the last target – which China has made internationally as part of its 2030 Paris pledge – would require, in practice, that emissions in 2030 are limited at or below their 2024 level, given progress to date and expected GDP growth rates.
Realising these targets, in turn, would require clean-energy growth rates well above the minimum of 200GW of new wind and solar capacity per year, set by China’s 2035 pledge – unless the rate of energy-demand growth sees a sharp and unexpected slowdown.
Beating these minimum clean-energy growth rates would also be necessary if policymakers want to maintain the tailwind that these sectors have provided to China’s economy in recent years.
About the data
Data for the analysis was compiled from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, China Electricity Council and China Customs official data releases, from WIND Information, an industry data provider, and Sinopec, China’s largest oil refiner.
Wind and solar output, and thermal power breakdown by fuel, was calculated by multiplying power generating capacity at the end of each month by monthly utilisation, using data reported by China Electricity Council through Wind Financial Terminal.
Total generation from thermal power and generation from hydropower and nuclear power was taken from National Bureau of Statistics monthly releases.
Monthly utilisation data was not available for biomass, so the annual average of 52% for 2023 was applied. Power sector coal consumption was estimated based on power generation from coal and the average heat rate of coal-fired power plants during each month, to avoid the issue with official coal consumption numbers affecting recent data.
CO2 emissions estimates are based on National Bureau of Statistics default calorific values of fuels and emissions factors from China’s latest national greenhouse gas emissions inventory, for the year 2021. Cement CO2 emissions factor is based on annual estimates up to 2024.
For oil consumption, apparent consumption of transport fuels (diesel, petrol and jet fuel) is taken from Sinopec quarterly results, with monthly disaggregation based on production minus net exports. The consumption of these three fuels is labeled as oil product consumption in transportation, as it is the dominant sector for their use.
Apparent consumption of other oil products is calculated from refinery throughput, with the production of the transport fuels and the net exports of other oil products subtracted. Fossil-fuel consumption includes non-energy use, as most products are short-lived and incineration is the dominant disposal method.
The post Analysis: China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months
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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