The year 2023 saw the coronation at Westminster Abbey of a new king, the mugshot of a former US president and the rebranding of a social media platform to a single letter.
But behind the biggest stories of the year, thousands of studies detailing new research also made the headlines. And climate change and energy were among the topics that received the most attention.
Each year, Altmetric tracks how often research papers from academic journals are mentioned in online news articles as well as on blogs and social media platforms. It then gives each paper a score according to the attention it receives.
Using Altmetric data for 2023, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate- or energy-related papers that were published the previous year.
(The list focuses on peer-reviewed research papers only – commentaries or other papers that are not formally peer-reviewed are not included.)
The infographic above shows which papers made it into the top 10, while the article includes analysis of the full list of 25, including the diversity of their authors and which journals feature most frequently.
The list covers research into the climate projections of a major oil company, the human cost of global warming and the catastrophic failure of breeding penguins – as well as the curious case of the high-scoring paper that received almost no news coverage at all.
Antarctic ice shelves
The most talked-about journal papers of 2023 are again dominated by research relating to Covid-19, continuing the pattern seen in recent years.
For example, the highest-scoring paper of any published in 2023 is a review into the effectiveness of measures to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, such as Covid, swine flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars).
The study’s Altmetric score of 25,730 puts it almost 10,000 points ahead of the second-placed paper, which is also about Covid.
But the top-scoring paper relating to climate is not far behind, landing fourth in the overall list with a score of 13,886.
The study, “Change in Antarctic ice shelf area from 2009 to 2019”, gains the highest score for any climate paper in any of Carbon Brief’s annual reviews by some distance – the previous highest was 7,803 in 2022.
(For Carbon Brief’s previous Altmetric articles, see the links for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.)
The study, published in the Cryosphere, uses satellite observations to produce a dataset of changes in the “calving front” – that is, where icebergs break off – and area of the ice shelves that surround Antarctica between 2009 and 2019. It shows that, overall, the area of Antarctic ice shelves has grown by around 5,300 square kilometres (km2) since 2009, with 18 ice shelves retreating and 16 larger shelves growing in area.
Specifically, ice-shelf area has decreased on the Antarctic Peninsula (by 6,693km2) and in west Antarctica (by 5,563km2), and increased in east Antarctica (by 3,532km2) and on the large Ross and Ronne-Filchner ice shelves (by 14,028km2), the paper says.
The map from the study below shows the growth (blue) and retreat (red) of ice shelves around Antarctica, where the size of the circles indicates the scale of the change from 2009 to 2019.
While the high scores of climate-related papers in previous years have primarily been driven by news coverage, this paper appears in just seven news stories.
As study author Prof Anna Hogg from the University of Leeds explains to Carbon Brief:
“Somewhat unusually, we didn’t put out a press release for the paper as we assumed the scientific community that needed the dataset would make use of it naturally.”
Instead, the paper’s high Altmetric score is principally a result of a huge number of mentions on Twitter – more than 63,000 posts from around 48,000 accounts. (Altmetric includes weightings in its scoring system, so news articles (with a weighting of eight) are deemed to have more impact than tweets (0.25).)
A closer look suggests that the paper has been widely quoted by the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent climate sceptics in an attempt to push back on concerns around climate change and the loss of Antarctic ice. These posts have then been widely retweeted by other accounts.
To see the paper “being used as evidence to suggest that climate change isn’t happening” was a “real surprise”, says Hogg, because the paper “doesn’t make any such statement”.
Specifically, the gains the study identifies in ice-shelf area in east Antarctica do not detract from the risks of retreating ice shelves on other parts of the continent, says Hogg:
“The decrease in ice shelf area in west Antarctica is particularly important as this ice shelf area actively ‘buttresses’ the flow of ice from the ice sheet behind it, which through ice dynamic processes is one of the reasons why west Antarctica is contributing significantly to present-day sea level rise.”
Indeed, the seventh most-talked about paper in 2023 (see below) is a Nature Climate Change study warning that accelerated melt of west Antarctica’s ice shelves is now locked in, even for the most ambitious emissions reduction scenarios. The authors provide this stark conclusion:
“These results suggest that mitigation of greenhouse gases now has limited power to prevent ocean warming that could lead to the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet.”
The misleading way the study has been used by some climate-sceptic social media accounts has been “incredibly challenging”, says Hogg, with the authors unable “to reply to every incorrect tweet” about their work. However, they did find “a fair number” of responses from other accounts “saying that they had read the paper and it didn’t provide evidence against climate change”.
This perhaps shows “open access doing its job”, says Hogg, as the paper was published in an open-access journal and so is freely available for anyone to read. In another high-scoring statistic, the full paper has now been viewed more than 150,000 times on the journal’s website.
ExxonMobil
Landing in second place with an Altmetric score of 8,686 is the review paper, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections”. Published in Science, the study analyses the global warming projections documented and modelled by scientists at the oil major ExxonMobil between 1977 and 2003.
(There is a higher-scoring paper, “The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory”, in the journal BioScience, but it is a “special report” and was not formally peer reviewed.)
The results indicate that “in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully”, the paper says, adding:
“ExxonMobil’s average projected warming was 0.20C ±0.04C per decade, which is, within uncertainty, the same as that of independent academic and government projections published between 1970 and 2007.”
The findings reveal that ExxonMobil “knew as much as academic and government scientists knew” about global warming decades ago. But, the paper adds, “whereas those scientists worked to communicate what they knew, ExxonMobil worked to deny it”.
The study was covered by 823 news stories by 555 outlets, including BBC News, the Associated Press, CNN, Vice, CNBC and Inside Climate News. It was also included in 48 blog posts and more than 13,000 tweets. It is the 12th most talked-about paper on any topic in 2023.
Extreme heat
In third place is the Nature Medicine paper, “Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022”, with a score of 7,821. The study finds that more than 60,000 deaths in the summer of 2022 – Europe’s hottest season on record – were linked to the heat.
Across 35 countries, the highest numbers of heat-related deaths occurred in Italy (18,010 deaths), Spain (11,324) and Germany (8,173), the study says. It also finds that the “burden of heat-related mortality was higher among women”, with 56% more heat-related deaths in women than men, relative to population.
The study was picked up in 943 news stories from more than 650 outlets – the largest number of any paper in the top 25. It was picked up by outlets across Europe, including Sky News and ITV News in the UK, Agence France-Presse in France and Der Spiegel in Germany. Carbon Brief also covered the article in detail.
The widespread coverage was likely to be in part because Europe was experiencing a heatwave dubbed “Cerberus” when the paper was published in July.
Lead author Dr Joan Ballester Claramunt from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health tells Carbon Brief that the paper also “received so much attention from the media because society is increasingly aware of the health risks of environmental factors, and particularly in a context of rapidly warming temperatures”.
Rest of the top 10
In fourth place is, “Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”, which was published in Nature Communications.
The study uses statistical techniques to detect early warning signs of a shutdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of the major current systems in the world’s oceans that plays a crucial role in regulating climate.
While assessments using climate model simulations typically suggest that AMOC is “unlikely” to pass a tipping point within the 21st century, the study says a collapse could occur “around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions”.
(Another paper that also uses observation-based early warning signals to assess the stability of AMOC featured in second place in Carbon Brief’s leaderboard for 2021.)
The paper’s Altmetric score of 6,216 reflects its widespread news coverage, covering 672 stories from more than 500 outlets, including the Washington Post, Politico, El País, CNN and Der Spiegel.
The papers in fifth and ninth place both set out frameworks for assessing “safe” boundaries for the Earth to be a habitable place for humans.
In fifth place with a score of 5,411 is the Science Advances paper, “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”. Providing the latest assessment of the boundaries that were first established in 2009, the paper warns that “Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity”.
The ninth-placed paper, “Safe and just Earth system boundaries”, shares a number of the same authors and sets out to quantify limits for “climate, the biosphere, water and nutrient cycles and aerosols at global and subglobal scales”. When the paper was published in May, Carbon Brief reported on the mixed reaction the paper received from other scientists, including concerns that a “self-selected group of scientists” were defining the “safe space” for the planet.
In sixth place is the Science paper, “Global glacier change in the 21st century: Every increase in temperature matters”, which reveals a “strong linear relationship between global mean temperature increase and glacier mass loss”.
The study projects that glaciers outside of Antarctica and Greenland will lose between 26% and 41% of their collective mass by 2100, relative to 2015, under warming of 1.5C to 4C, respectively. Such a loss would cause 49-83% of glaciers to disappear and see 90-154mm added to global sea levels, the study says.
In seventh place is the Nature Climate Change paper, “Unavoidable future increase in West Antarctic ice-shelf melting over the 21st century”, as mentioned above. The findings, the authors say, present a “sobering outlook” for ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea.
The paper made an appearance in the Science round of Carbon Brief’s annual quiz.
The eighth-placed paper is, Quantifying the human cost of global warming, published in Nature Sustainability. It quantifies this cost in terms of the number of people left outside the “climate niche” in which human civilisation has flourished for centuries.
The study shows that climate change has already put around 9% of people outside this niche, and that, by end-of-century, current policies leading to around 2.7C global warming could leave 22-39% of people outside the niche as well.
Finally, rounding out the top 10 is, “Climate extremes likely to drive land mammal extinction during next supercontinent assembly”, in Nature Geoscience.
The study looks at the prospects for humans and other mammals on Earth based on first-ever supercomputer climate modelling of the distant future. The knock-on impacts of all Earth’s continents eventually converging to form the supercontinent “Pangea Ultima” would see huge amounts of CO2 released into the air through volcanic eruptions, it says.
The resulting global temperatures of up to 75C would, as a headline in the i newspaper put it, “one day wipe out humanity – but not for another 250m years”.
Elsewhere in the top 25
The rest of the top 25 includes a mix of research, including a paper on the impacts of El Niño on economic growth, a study on the environmental impacts of different types of diets and analysis of the amount of global warming still “in the pipeline” by former Nasa scientist Dr James Hansen.
In 14th place is the Nature paper, “Assessing the size and uncertainty of remaining carbon budgets”, which presents an updated estimate of the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5C and 2C.
In a 2022 Carbon Brief guest post, some of the study authors present a similar analysis, concluding that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C could be just 260bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) – the equivalent of around six years of emissions. They add:
“Cutting global CO2 emissions to zero by 2050, in line with limiting warming to 1.5C, would require them to fall by about 1.4GtCO2 every year, comparable to the drop in 2020 as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns around the world, but this time driven by a long-term, structural change of the economy.
“This highlights that the scale of the challenge is immense, no matter the precise figure of the rapidly shrinking carbon budget.”
Antarctic sea ice made headlines around the world both in 2022 and 2023, by setting two consecutive years of record low sea ice extent. In August 2023, researchers published a sobering study in Communications Earth and Environment under the title, “Record low 2022 Antarctic sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins”.
The study finds that melting ice led to widespread “breeding failure” across Antarctic emperor penguin colonies and received widespread media attention. It has been mentioned in 537 news articles, generating headlines such as, “Thousands of penguins die in Antarctic ice breakup”, from BBC News and, “Thousands of penguin chicks killed by early sea ice breakup, study says”, in the Washington Post.
The Guardian, New Scientist and Daily Telegraph were among the other publications that reported on the study. This surge of attention pushed the paper to 15th in the Carbon Brief ranking, with an Altmetric score of 3,551.
Meanwhile, the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change slipped down the rankings this year. After three years in the Carbon Brief’s top 10, this year’s report lands in 20th place with an Altmetric score of 3,191.
The report is an epic annual publication, which reviews vast swathes of literature and has more than 100 authors this year. This year’s report introduced some key new indicators of the links between climate change and human health. It was also the first to include projections on how the indicators might worsen in a warmer world.
The report finds that loss of labour due to heat exposure resulted in a $863bn loss of “potential income” in 2022. The agriculture sector was hit the hardest by the loss of labour, accounting for 82% of losses in least developed countries, the authors add.
Carbon Brief’s coverage of the report highlights this loss of income due to heat stress. The graph below shows effective income losses in 2022 due to heat stress in agriculture (blue) and other sectors (red), as a percentage of GDP, by continent.
One spot below the Lancet report is a Geophysical Research Letters study which warns that climate change is making air turbulence stronger and more frequent. The findings, which were picked up in more than 500 news articles, have worrying implications for aircraft passengers.
Back in 2017, study author Dr Paul Williams wrote a Carbon Brief guest post warning that “the most severe [type of turbulence] – the kind that can launch passengers out of their seats and cause serious injuries – is set to become twice or even three times as common by the latter half of the century”. And a recent Carbon Brief guest post on the fastest jet stream winds – known as “jet streaks” – also forecasts an increase in clear-air turbulence for aircraft passengers.
And in 24th place is the Nature paper, “Glacial lake outburst floods threaten millions globally”, with an Altmetric of 2,991. The study warns that 15 million people globally are exposed to impacts of potential “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). (For more on GLOFs, see Carbon Brief’s guest post from 2020, which explains how lakes formed by melting glaciers around the world have increased in size by 50% over the past 30 years.)
Top journals
This year there is a clear winner for the journal with the most papers featuring in Carbon Brief’s top 25: Science takes top spot with five papers.
Following Science are the three journals of Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications and the Lancet, each with two papers in the top 25.
For the rest of the top 25, the remaining 14 journals appear once each.
All the final scores for 2023 can be found in this spreadsheet.
Diversity of the top 25
The top 25 climate papers of 2023 cover a huge range of topics and scope. However, despite the variety in the climate research the papers present, analysis of their authors reveals a distinct lack of diversity.
In total, the top 25 climate papers of 2023 have more than 440 authors. Carbon Brief recorded the gender and country of affiliation for each of these authors. (The methodology used was developed by Carbon Brief for analysis presented in a special 2021 series on climate justice.)
The analysis reveals that the authors of the climate papers most featured in the media in 2023 are predominantly men from the global north.
The chart below shows the institutional affiliations of all authors in this analysis, broken down by continent – Europe, North America, Oceania, Asia, South America and Africa.
The analysis shows that nine out of every 10 authors are affiliated with institutions from the global north – defined as North America, Europe and Oceania. Meanwhile, only six authors are from Africa and South America.
Further data analysis shows that there are also inequalities within continents. The map below shows the percentage of authors from each country in the analysis, where dark blue indicates a higher percentage. Countries that are not represented by any authors in the analysis are shown in white.
The top-ranking countries on this map are the UK and the US, which together account for almost half of all authors in this analysis (25% and 18%, respectively).
More than half of all researchers from the global south are from China – which accounts for around 6% of all researchers in the analysis.
Meanwhile, only one-third of authors from the top 25 climate papers of 2022 are women. Similarly, only seven of the 25 papers have a female lead author.
The plot below shows the number of male (purple) and female (orange) authors in this analysis from each continent.
The full spreadsheet showing the results of this data analysis can be found here. For more on the biases in climate publishing, see Carbon Brief’s article on the lack of diversity in climate-science research.
The post Analysis: The climate papers most featured in the media in 2023 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The climate papers most featured in the media in 2023
Britain’s new prime minister announced in his first week that he will cut the cost of public transport and electricity, making lower-emission technologies like bus travel, electric vehicles and heat pumps more affordable for voters. But some of the funding for those policies will come from the budget for international climate finance, the government has said, raising concerns about fairness.
Former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham took over from Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader and prime minister on Monday, appointing climate advocates Ed Miliband as foreign and development minister and Miatta Fahnbulleh as climate and energy minister.
On Tuesday, Burnham said his government would cut the value added tax (VAT) households and some small businesses pay on their electricity bills from 5% to zero from October 1, saving households £45 ($60) a year.
On Wednesday, he said the maximum fare bus companies in England can charge for a single journey will be reduced from £3 ($4) to £2 ($2.67) from January 1, 2027. The government said the subsidies to achieve this would be mostly funded by switching money set aside for overseas climate finance projects from grants to loans. It did not give further information in its announcement, while the UK’s transport minister told Sky News the plan is still being worked out.
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The floated changes to the climate finance budget were immediately criticised by groups working on climate justice for developing countries, including Bond, the UK network for NGOs, which described the decision as “disappointing”.
“Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the answer and pitches marginalised communities in the UK against marginalised communities in lower-income and climate-vulnerable countries,” BOND CEO Romilly Greenhill said in a statement. “Climate finance must not worsen the debt burden of countries that are already suffering the worst – and most costly – impacts of a climate crisis they did not cause.”
Hunt for money
Burnham promoted both policies as measures to combat the rising cost of living and “give people breathing space”, with climate campaigners and industry groups noting they are also likely to reduce the UK’s climate-heating emissions by encouraging bus travel and the use of electric vehicles and heating.
But thorny questions remain over how the policies will be paid for. The government said Tuesday’s VAT cut for electricity would be funded by scrapping the previous government’s digital ID programme, but Darren Jones, a former minister involved with that policy, said it had been “unfunded” – a statement that dominated media coverage.
A day later, the government said the new bus fare cap would cost £454 million ($606m). Transport minister Heidi Alexander told Sky News that £54 million would be taken from an under-spend in the budget of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and £400 million would come from changing unspecified international climate finance from grants to loans. The details “still need to be worked through”, she said, adding that the government “had wanted to make an announcement today”.
Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said “climate finance was never meant to be a pot of money that governments raid when they need to pay for domestic spending”.
DESNZ had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. “We’re not wanting to fleece anyone here, and we actually want to maximise the development potential of this money that is available,” minister Alexander said in her TV interview.
Aside from the controversy over their funding, the policies themselves were widely welcomed by climate campaigners. Jess Ralston, energy lead at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), said the tax cut on electricity bills “could help households to switch to electric heat pumps, protecting UK homes from becoming ever more exposed to the whims of Putin and Trump when turning on their gas boiler”.
The last few months have seen global momentum build behind electrification, spurred by the US-Iran war disrupting oil and gas supplies and driving up prices. The Turkish and Australian COP31 presidencies have announced a global target to boost electrification, backed by the European Union, Canada, Philippines, UK and others.
Campaigners call for lower power prices
While reaction to the VAT cut was supportive, some questioned whether £45 a year of savings per household is enough and called for more measures to cut electricity bills.
Friends of the Earth’s energy lead Imogen Dow said those on the lowest incomes should be given cheaper electricity through a “social tariff” and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think-tank – which is close to the Labour Party – said levies on energy bills should be shifted to general taxation.
Matthew Paterson, a politics professor at Manchester University, told Climate Home News that the most effective way to reduce electricity bills is to take on the UK’s private electricity companies, while consumer-oriented measures like the VAT cut are “tinkering around the edges”.
Jarrod Birch, head of policy and public affairs for the EV charging industry association Charge UK, said that while the policy would make home-charging cheaper, people who charge their vehicles at public points will still have to pay 20% VAT. The UK’s tax authority is fighting a court ruling that ordered it to reduce the tax motorists pay on public chargers to the current household rate of 5%.
Further measures will be the responsibility of Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Miatta Fahnbulleh, who is relatively new to politics after a career at left-wing, pro-climate think tanks the IPPR and the New Economics Foundation.
Michael Jacobs, political economy professor at Sheffield University and former adviser to UK Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, said Fahnbulleh would be a “climate advocate” who would continue the “progressive climate agenda” of her predecessor Ed Miliband.
“She’s a very creative policy wonk so I expect there to be lots of policy innovation under her,” he said, “I think she will be looking at new ways to encourage take-up of heat pumps and domestic batteries.”
Aid budget in Miliband’s hands
Despite reports he could be made finance minister, Miliband has been appointed Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Miliband has attended many climate COP meetings over several decades, most recently representing the UK at COP29 and COP30, and has been targeted by the right-wing media for his support for climate action and opposition to new oil and gas drilling in the UK’s part of the North Sea.
In his new role, Miliband will be responsible for the UK’s overseas aid budget including its international climate finance, which the Starmer government had slashed to fund increases in defence spending.
UK cuts support for climate action abroad to fund military instead
Jacobs said he expected Miliband to prioritise climate and development in the UK’s foreign policy and to push Burnham and new finance minister John Healey to reverse Starmer’s aid cuts.
But there are fears Healey could try to cut the aid budget further to fund the military. Healey was a surprise pick for Chancellor of the Exchequer and grabbed headlines when he resigned as Starmer’s defence minister in June over what he saw as insufficient defence spending.
The post Will new UK PM’s green measures at home cause climate finance pain overseas? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Will new UK PM’s green measures at home cause climate finance pain overseas?
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, 22 July 2026 – Greenpeace Netherlands has launched legal proceedings against a multi-billion-dollar global expansion plan by the biggest meat producer in Australia, JBS, in an escalation of climate litigation against the livestock industry.
Greenpeace petitioned a Dutch court to compel the meat giant to disclose information in order to challenge its business policies in court, including a US$6 billion global expansion, for which almost half is earmarked for Nigeria.
Elizabeth Atieno, Food Campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, said: “JBS’ meat empire expanded hand-in-glove with Amazon destruction, colossal emissions, human rights and corruption scandals, all with barely a semblance of transparency. This is the business model it wants to export to sub-Saharan Africa. JBS promises food security, but its expansion in Nigeria risks causing irreversible environmental damage and the displacement of smallholder farmers to line the pockets of wealthy global elites.
“Nigerians know well from the legacy of companies like Shell the destructive impact wrought by unchecked corporate power. As Greenpeace Africa has argued before the African Court of Human Rights, states with jurisdiction over multinationals must hold those corporate actors accountable – wherever they operate in the world. We welcome this bold legal action: the Netherlands and other European states must not be safe havens for corporations like JBS seeking to evade their responsibilities.”
In light of JBS’ longstanding failure to publish accurate and reliable information on its climate, nature and human rights impacts or its expansion plans, Greenpeace Netherlands views accessing this data as a necessary precursor to formal litigation in order to support its case. The case has the potential to be the first climate litigation of this scale against the livestock industry. This could set a major precedent for future legal challenges against the industrial agriculture sector, a major source of global emissions, particularly of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, responsible for 0.5°C of warming since the Industrial Revolution.[1]
JBS, via its subsidiary JBS Foods Australia, is the largest meat and food processing company in Australia. With a weekly processing capacity of over 50,000 cattle, it accounts for almost a quarter of all beef processing in the country, as well as a significant presence in the lamb, pork and farmed fish markets. [2] In 2022, ABC’s Four Corners accused the company of ‘repeatedly failing to protect its workers from horrific injuries.’ [3]
Marieke Vellekoop, Executive Director at Greenpeace Netherlands, said “In a month where JBS has thrown its flagship environmental commitments onto the scrap heap, JBS’ disdain for basic transparency only adds to the impression that this meat giant has something to hide and is desperate to prevent its expansion plans from going public. We were hoping we wouldn’t have to trouble a judge with this matter, but JBS has left us no choice but to seek our right to information through the Dutch courts.
“JBS appears to believe that despite moving to the Netherlands, our rules do not apply to it. This legal action aims to prove it wrong – and lay the ground for a first major climate and nature lawsuit against the dangerous expansion of the global meat industry.“
At the centre of the dispute is JBS’ planned US$ 2.5 billion investment in industrial livestock production in Nigeria.[2] Civil society groups in Nigeria have raised urgent warnings that the aggressive expansion will threaten local food security, drive regional instability, and accelerate ecological degradation. There is no available evidence that JBS has conducted any impact assessments or community consultations in Nigeria, and local efforts to gather more information via Freedom of Information requests have reportedly been ignored.[3]
The escalation to the courts follows the refusal of JBS, the world’s largest meat company, to comply with a formal disclosure demand delivered by Greenpeace Netherlands in April. The environmental group is utilising new Dutch legislation, which grants parties with a legitimate interest the right to demand access to specific corporate data necessary to build litigation against Dutch companies.[4]
Greenpeace Netherlands’ lawyers allege that JBS’ historic business practices and future expansion plans are inconsistent with the company’s climate and biodiversity obligations and represent a breach of its Dutch duty of care, which requires companies to act in line with international human rights law.[5]
If the court rules in favor of Greenpeace Netherlands, it is entitled to seek the required information in the form of documents and from senior JBS figures under oath, raising the prospect of the Batista brothers being forced to testify in Dutch court. JBS reincorporated as a Dutch entity (JBS N.V.) last year to facilitate a dual listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
In April, JBS was forced to temporarily suspend its first annual general meeting since moving its headquarters to Amsterdam after it was disrupted by dozens of Greenpeace Netherlands activists.
Last week, JBS scrapped two flagship commitments to reach Net Zero emissions by 2040 and eradicate deforestation from its supply chain. It also removed any explicit reference to Indigenous lands from all of its current policies. Greenpeace Netherlands is concerned this indicates JBS is seeking to expand unconstrained by the climate, nature and human rights impacts of its business.
–ENDS–
Notes:
[1] The livestock sector is estimated to be responsible for 31% of global methane emissions (more than oil and gas operations). In comparison to CO2, methane is shorter lived (around 12 years) but has a much stronger ability to trap heat in the atmosphere over its lifetime: it has approximately 80 times more climate impact than CO2 when measured over 20 years. This means that changes in methane emissions have a more rapid effect on the climate than changes in CO2. See Greenpeace Netherlands letter to JBS dated 30 April 2026.
[2] JBS Foods Australia, Our Business
[3] ABC, Australia’s biggest meat company JBS is repeatedly failing to protect its workers from horrific injuries, 25 April 2022
[4] JBS announcement
[5] Experts raise concerns over the risks of industrial animal farming (The Sun Nigeria)
[6] Simplification and modernisation of Dutch evidence law (Fieldfisher)
[7] Greenpeace Netherlands petition to Dutch court available here. Media briefing with further details on JBS expansion plans, including in Nigeria, available here.
Greenpeace launches legal challenge against Australia’s biggest meat company
Climate Change
“Next year is too late for regulations”: Beetaloo Energy’s 2GW gas-powered AI data centre a “disaster proposal” destined to cause climate chaos
SYDNEY, Wednesday 22 July 2026 — Beetaloo Energy has secured land from the NT Government for a massive $40 billion “hyperscale” AI data centre near Darwin, which would be powered by 2 gigawatts (GW) of gas power fracked directly from the Beetaloo basin, prompting calls from Greenpeace for urgent federal legislation.
The proposal marks a dangerous escalation in the AI data centre industry’s expansion, which threatens to entrench fossil fuel infrastructure for decades and put immense pressure on the region’s fragile water resources — while continuing to be unregulated.
Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “This disaster proposal for a 2GW gas-powered AI data centre in the NT is a shocking example of the unchecked expansion of hyperscale data centres in Australia. It is also, critically, more evidence for the urgent need for a moratorium on all new data centres until strong, binding regulations are put in place to protect our communities and climate.
“This proposal mirrors the frenzied, unchecked expansion currently wreaking havoc on communities in the US. We are seeing cowboy data centre operators treat Australia like a playground, steam-rolling ahead with projects that would lock down precious water resources and spike emissions, despite the overwhelming community opposition.
“Every day, more councils, communities and environmental groups are joining Greenpeace’s call for a moratorium on data centres, yet as of today there is still no system of safeguards or rules in place to regulate these companies.
“While Beetaloo Energy and the NT Government prepare to bulldoze ahead with this climate and water disaster, the Prime Minister is asleep at the wheel, promising to legislate a vague set of standards next year.
“Next year is too late, and anything less than mandating data centres cover their own energy demand, and then some, with new renewable energy is not enough.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lucy.keller@greenpeace.org
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Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
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