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
New Zealand’s parliament has adopted a controversial new law blocking a whole avenue of climate litigation and shutting down its most advanced corporate lawsuit, which has been blamed by the government for shaking business confidence and investment.
The Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill, expected to take effect in the coming days after it is formally signed by the Governor-General, prevents all current and future civil claims for climate loss or harm under tort law.
Justice minister Paul Goldsmith said last week that the aim was to give businesses “certainty around their climate change obligations”, noting it would not alter the government’s responsibilities under the Climate Change Response Act 2002 nor business obligations under the Emissions Trading Scheme.
“Our response to climate change is best managed by the Government at a national level and not through piece-meal litigation in the courts,” he added in a statement.
Such litigation, he said, “risks developing a new regime that contradicts the framework Parliament has already enacted” to tackle climate change.
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Experts say that despite dismissing the lawsuit, the ruling sets a precedent by confirming that climate science can establish legal liability for the damage caused by emissions
Goldsmith singled out a key domestic climate lawsuit brought by Northland iwi leader and activist Mike Smith against six big companies: dairy firms Fonterra and Dairy Holdings, energy firms Genesis Energy and Z Energy, New Zealand Steel and coal mining firm BT Mining. A seventh original defendant, Channel Infrastructure, was dropped after it permanently decommissioned its Marsden Point oil refinery.
Smith argued that these companies had caused him harm under public nuisance and negligence law, as well as a third breach of a duty to cease contributing to climate change that has yet to be tested domestically. He did not seek financial compensation, instead asking for the companies to immediately stop emitting or contributing to net greenhouse gas emissions.
In one of the most advanced corporate climate accountability lawsuits in the world, a trial had been scheduled for April 2027 after the Supreme Court unanimously allowed the case to continue.
Corporate lobbying in the shadows
Smith described the passing of the bill as “deeply concerning”, particularly as it coincided with the Supreme Court hearing another of his climate lawsuits. In that case, Smith v Attorney-General, he argues that the government’s response to climate change and its impacts on Māori communities in particular breaches rights to life and culture.
“That timing raises profound questions about the separation of powers and the rule of law,” said Smith. “Whatever one’s view of the merits of these cases, it is deeply troubling when parliament intervenes to remove a legal pathway while the courts are actively considering fundamental questions about climate responsibility, rights and the crown’s obligations.”
The bill – which says that no person (including the government) can be found liable in tort for emissions-related climate change effects – followed major lobbying efforts by the companies defending themselves in Smith’s lawsuit. They outlined a proposed legal amendment in a briefing note to the government in 2024.
The centre-right government has been fiercely criticised over its lack of transparency in relation to this lobbying activity. The national ombudsman recently found that the Prime Minister’s Office effectively withheld information requested by the Environmental Law Initiative about meetings, discussions and conversations regarding Smith’s case.
Green groups fail to stop bill
The bill sparked huge concern among environmental campaigners in New Zealand and elsewhere. Greenpeace Aotearoa called it a “shocking abuse of executive power” and the vast majority of submissions to a parliamentary inquiry said it should be rejected.
But in the end, it was adopted with little resistance, moving relatively smoothly through parliament, passing its third reading by 67 votes to 53. Sam Bookman, climate law lecturer at Melbourne Law School, told Climate Home News he was not surprised by this, given that the coalition government has a secure majority.
A complaint has been made to the UN special rapporteur on climate change and human rights by Smith, the National Iwi Chairs Forum Pou Tikanga and youth coalition Climate Clinic Aotearoa over what they see as the government’s heavy-handed approach. Smith is also challenging the new law in yet another lawsuit.
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Bookman thinks it “very unlikely” that such a challenge will succeed, noting that New Zealand’s constitution is firmly anchored in parliamentary sovereignty.
But the expert in climate law does not see the bill as the end of legal action in the country, noting that New Zealand has a “sophisticated climate litigation landscape with a growing number of specialist and experienced lawyers and NGOs”.
The country is also approaching its next general election in November, and some opposition parties have pledged to restore access to the courts if elected.
Amanda Larsson, global project lead on agriculture for Greenpeace International, said: “This law deserves to be tested, and I strongly encourage the international climate litigation community to unite and help defend New Zealanders’ fundamental right to hold polluters accountable before this becomes a global blueprint.”
Copycat legislation on the rise
New Zealand’s move is part of a small but growing legislative effort to shut down climate litigation around the world.
In the US, Republican politicians introduced legislation in the House and Senate in April that would shield fossil fuel firms from climate liability lawsuits. Similar laws have already been passed at state level in Tennessee, Utah, Iowa and Louisiana.
The German state of Bavaria has put forward a similar proposal to the Federal Council, aiming to block private climate claims as well as the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments imposing such liability. There are also proposals to limit available remedies and actions in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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Bookman said he expects more efforts to counter climate damages litigation and advised plaintiffs to think about how to respond, including drawing on broader support in opposing them.
“Even though it’s very hard for plaintiffs to win these types of cases, companies are very eager to avoid the expense, embarrassment and political accountability that come even with unsuccessful lawsuits,” he said.
The post New Zealand moves to protect business with law curtailing climate litigation appeared first on Climate Home News.
New Zealand moves to protect business with law curtailing climate litigation
Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is the Executive Director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), an Indonesia-based economic think tank. Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the Director of the China-Indonesia desk at CELIOS.
Indonesia produces around 60% of the world’s nickel, a metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) – more than any other country in the world. But in 2026, the government sharply reduced how much of its nickel can be extracted from the ground.
Production quotas were reduced by around 40% this year compared to 2025. Weda Bay, the largest nickel mine on Earth, had its allowance cut by more than 70% and exhausted its full-year quota by the end of May, halting mining entirely; it cannot resume large-scale extraction until next year unless regulators grant an extension.
The policy has sparked a vivid debate in Indonesian policy circles: how can the country shift its strategy from a decade of mining vast quantities of cheap nickel to producing a high-value and low-carbon material that the rest of the world wants for EV batteries.
The cuts aren’t a silver bullet to clean up Indonesia’s nickel industry, whose smelters are powered by coal – the most polluting fossil fuels. But alongside stricter enforcement of environmental rules, it is one side of efforts to produce more sustainable nickel for a premium.
Restricting Indonesia’s nickel output
Production quotas were introduced to stop the collapse of nickel prices because of oversupply in the market. Prices had fallen more than 40% in 2023 alone and kept sliding as Indonesian supply kept growing, hitting a four-year low of around $13,900 a ton in late 2025.
Critics called the recent tightening of production quotas proof that Indonesia’s nickel strategy has failed, arguing that the industry shouldn’t need to throttle its own output to survive. But when assessed against what the policy was supposed to do – push up nickel prices – it has worked. Prices jumped to $20,000 a ton in May, the highest since 2024.
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Chinese industry groups representing companies that have invested billions to mine and refine the country’s nickel were furious, warning Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto that the cuts put $50 billion worth of investment at risk. But much of that Chinese capital is sunk into smelters and processing plants built specifically to run on Indonesian ore, and cannot simply be moved elsewhere. That gives Jakarta more room to hold its ground than the warning suggests.
Stronger environmental enforcement
Since the start of the year, Indonesia’s forestry task force has seized more than four million hectares of land from mines and plantations operating illegally in protected forests, collecting over two trillion rupiah ($113 million) in fines.
This included 148 hectares seized from Weda Bay for lacking a forestry permit. The share of nickel produced from illegal small-scale mining also fell from about a quarter in 2022 to roughly 10% by 2024.
The crackdown responds to serious environmental damages in the nickel industry. On Obi Island, a waste pond collapsed after heavy rain in June 2025, flooding three villages and killing a resident. Internal company tests found chromium-6 – a carcinogen – in the water, in quantities far above the legal limit. The footprint of another mine near Raja Ampat, which is home to some of the world’s richest coral reefs, grew 60-fold in just eight years.
The market is responding to early cleanup efforts. Low-carbon nickel now sells for a real premium, roughly $18,800 to $19,300 a ton compared with $17,900 to $18,300 otherwise, as carmakers seek to source cleaner materials to comply with the European Union’s new emissions rules for imports.
In turn, this is incentivising the industry to do more to green its operations. Vale Indonesia’s smelter in South Sulawesi now runs almost entirely on hydropower, for example.
None of this addresses coal use, however. Major Indonesian nickel producers still emitted an estimated 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023. Indonesia may be cracking down on illegal mining and rewarding cleaner producers but it is still running its mines on the dirtiest fuel available.
Unequal benefits
For Indonesia to truly benefit from producing cleaner and high-value nickel, it needs to reap the economic benefits too. Although the industry has boosted the country’s economic growth, the reality on the ground tells a different story.
Konawe in Southeast Sulawesi is home to a major smelting complex. Growth in the district jumped from 6% to 22% between 2015 and 2023, driven almost entirely by the nickel industry, according to a study by the Lowy Institute study. At the same time, poverty levels increased slightly and unemployment remained unchanged.
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In Halmahera, another epicentre of the nickel industry, spending by the poorest fifth grew just 5% between 2019 and 2022, compared with 28% for the wealthiest fifth, according to a separate study.
Part of the reason for this inequality is the system for transferring mining royalties to district authorities where the mines are located. In theory, they are entitled to the largest share. But in practice, payments are delayed, companies routinely dispute what they owe and royalties are pooled and distributed across a larger area.
The Natural Resource Governance Institute has found that decentralisation handed local governments power to approve new mines faster than they could build their capacity to manage them. Higher output raises national income on paper, but local governments remain constrained by fiscal rules and infrastructure costs that scale with mining.
None of this makes the 2026 quota cuts a mistake. Indonesia has every right to defend its pricing power over a resource it controls. But limiting extraction isn’t going to fix underlying issues around environmental enforcement and revenue-sharing. That requires rules that are consistently enforced, royalties that reach communities living by the mines, and a plan to wean smelters off coal.
The post Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry appeared first on Climate Home News.
Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry
Climate Change
Risk of “catastrophic” oil spill reaching Kimberley coast found in Woodside’s Scott Reef gas drilling plans
SYDNEY, Monday 24 August 2026 – New analysis of Woodside modelling released by Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Environs Kimberley has revealed the oil and gas corporation’s plans to drill at Scott Reef could cause an oil spill up to 30 times bigger than the 2009 Montara disaster, impacting the Kimberley coastline and reaching as far as Indonesia.
The new analysis details the “catastrophic” oil spill risk put to environmental regulators for approval by Woodside in its Browse to North West Shelf Project (Browse) plans, the worst-case scenario being a blowout directly below Scott Reef, polluting whale migratory pathways and covering isolated turtle nesting ground with oil condensate.
An FOI application (F348) revealed the federal environment department (DCCEEW) asked offshore oil and gas regulator NOPSEMA to look into the oil spill risk in 2025. NOPSEMA’s response to the application refused access to its report, and one document shows DCCEEW sought further advice this year.
Greenpeace and Environs Kimberley are calling on the Federal Government to publicly release the NOPSEMA report given the risk of an uncontrolled release of oil condensate from directly below Scott Reef.
Hannah Schuch, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Woodside is aware that drilling at Scott Reef risks a massive oil spill that would have severe, far-reaching consequences. It appears environmental regulators are aware too.
“The state and federal governments need to take this risk from Woodside’s drilling plans seriously, as they could end up allowing the worst oil spill in Australian history.
“The pygmy blue whales that migrate up and down the WA coast with their newborns each year could be swimming and feeding in toxic, oil-slicked water. Woodside’s proposal to drill at Scott Reef is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, and the WA and federal governments have one surefire way to prevent catastrophe — reject Browse.”
Martin Prichard, Executive Director at Environs Kimberley, said: “A catastrophic oil spill by Woodside would be disastrous not just for marine life in the area but also for the Kimberley’s $500 million tourism industry.
“The state and federal governments will see five marine parks on the Kimberley coast included in the risk area of a catastrophic Woodside oil spill.
“The Montara oil spill was disastrous for West Timor with the toxic oil destroying seaweed farmers’ livelihoods. The Kimberley dodged a bullet with Montara, we were lucky the spill didn’t head our way. Myself and a crew flew over the Montara oil spill and followed it as far as we could. It was like a scene from a disaster movie.”
After the WA Environmental Protection Authority deemed Browse “unacceptable” due, in part, to oil spill risk, Woodside submitted a mitigation plan based on technology that has never been used “in anger”, a weakness stated in an independent expert review of the plan.
Professor Richard Steiner, independent oil spill expert, said: “A large offshore spill is impossible to effectively contain or recover. Historically, only 2-6% of total spill volume is recovered and the ecological injury from the release of toxic hydrocarbons in the sea can be severe, extensive, and long-term.
“Here in Alaska, government research concludes that several marine populations injured by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, including whales, fish, and seabirds, are still not recovering today, 37 years later. We should expect similar long-term ecological impacts in Western Australia if there were to be a major oil spill. The only sure way to avoid the risk of a catastrophic marine oil spill is to not develop oil and gas projects in marine environments.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Emma Sangalli on emma.sangalli@greenpeace.org or 0431 513 465
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