Published

1 year ago

December 24, 2024

Alice Rush

In his first – and most likely last – visit to sub-Saharan Africa as US President this week, Joe Biden chose to focus on the planned upgrade of a cross-border railway that is set to take minerals needed for the energy transition out of Central Africa to the coast and on to the United States.

After walking among the cargo containers at Angola’s Lobito port, from where copper and cobalt will be shipped, Biden sat around a wooden table in a food processing facility with the leaders of Angola, Zambia, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the Lobito Corridor Trans-Africa Summit.

He told his African peers that the Lobito Corridor railway project would be a “game changer”, bringing economic growth to Africa and the rest of the world. Currently, copper is transported to the port by road with truckers often stuck in queues for weeks at border crossings, but the railway’s supporters claim it will cut the journey time from several weeks to just days.

The White House said it was announcing over $560 million in new funding this week – including commitments expected to generate at least $200 million in additional private-sector capital – for infrastructure projects along the Lobito Corridor. US investments now total more than $4 billion, it said, adding that with G7 partners and regional development banks, international investment in the Lobito Corridor exceeds $6 billion.

The Lobito Corridor is an old, recently-restored railway which runs from the Angolan coastal port of Lobito 1,344 km to the border town of Luau, where it links with the railway of the cobalt-rich DRC. A coalition of local and Western companies and governments want to extend it to Zambia’s copper mines.

Transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy will require huge amounts of copper to carry electricity and cobalt for batteries. The US and China are competing to source limited supplies of these materials for their electric vehicle manufacturers.

China is helping refurbish the Tazara railway linking Zambia’s Copperbelt province to Africa’s east coast in Tanzania. In Angola yesterday, Biden’s energy and investment adviser Amos Hochstein said that copper and cobalt is “now going to be switching direction on this corridor”.

Local benefits

Speaking after Biden, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said the project, which he drew up with Hochstein in his “dingy office” in Zambia’s capital, is a “huge opportunity” for Africa. He added that the minerals will “make our global economy greener”.

He stressed the importance of linking the railway with the Chinese-built Tazara eastern railway “which will really mean that we can connect our continent” from the west to east coast.

Sitting next to him, the president of neighbouring DRC, Felix Tshisekedi, said the project would create 30,000 jobs, reduce logistics costs, increase export revenues and offer “a strategic alternative to other exportation corridors”.

But of equal importance, he added, is the need to process the copper and cobalt locally before it is exported. “It is imperative that the wealth contained in our ground contribute directly to the well-being of our peoples,” he said through an interpreter.

Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains

Emmanuel Umpula Nkumba, executive director of the DRC-based African Natural Resources Watch (AFREWATCH), agreed, telling Climate Home that Africa has historically exported its raw minerals without benefiting from the finished products. “If this project will do the same, then there will not be a huge difference and we will not win in this transition,” he warned.

In a fact sheet, the White House said the US “is committed to ensuring reliable supply chains by supporting the development of this sector [critical minerals] with environmentally respectful processing so more of the value is captured on the continent”. It said US government support is being provided for a nickel mining and refining project in Tanzania, rare earths mining and refining in Angola, and a “green copper mining” project in Zambia.

Map of the Lobito Atlantic Railway Corridor (Pic: Trafigura)

Troubled railway

The Lobito railway was built by a British company in the early 20th-century and although its developers originally planned that it would reach Zambia’s copper mines, it only ever got as far as Angola’s border with the DRC.

It fell into disuse in the late 20th-century during Angola’s 27-year civil war. Zambian copper was mostly diverted east to Mozambique and then from 1976 on the Chinese-built Tazara Railway to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

In 2015, the Chinese government stepped in and carried out a $2-billion rehabilitation of the Lobito railway. But in July 2022, the Angolan government awarded a 30-year concession to maintain and operate the railway to a consortium of European companies led by Trafigura and Mota-Engil, rejecting a Chinese bid.

The Africa Finance Corporation, owned by private companies and the Nigerian government, has promised to try and mobilise $500 million in finance through various instruments to bring the Lobito railway to Zambia. The US government is aiming for construction of that stretch to start in 2026.

The US government has backed the Lobito project financially, with its Development Finance Corporation (DFC) approving a $553-million loan to improve the Angolan section of the railway and add more carriages to the trains.

Lithium boom: Zimbabwe looks to China to secure a place in the EV battery supply chain

However, with Donald Trump taking over the White House in January, it is unclear whether the Republican president-elect will support the project once in office.

There are pointers that Trump may well continue the project and possibly claim it was inspired by him because it is backed by the reformed Development Finance Corp – America’s development finance institution which, alongside the private sector, funds solutions to challenges facing developing countries and was started during his first tenure. Reuters reported that two government officials who served under Trump say the next US president will likely back parts of the Lobito project.

Asked whether the project was “Trump-proof” on the presidential plane to Angola, White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said: “It’s our fervent hope that as the new team comes in and takes a look at this that they see the value too, that they see how it will help drive a more secure, more prosperous, more economically stable continent.”

(Reporting by Vivian Chime; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The post Biden uses only Africa visit to promote “game changer” railway for copper and cobalt appeared first on Climate Home News.

Biden uses only Africa visit to promote “game changer” railway for copper and cobalt

Climate Change

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Published

18 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Alice Rush

Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.

By David Sun

When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Climate Change

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Published

23 hours ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:

“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.

“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.

“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.

“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.

“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”

-ENDS-

Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library

Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Climate Change

DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case

Published

1 day ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Iran war fallout continues

WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.

SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.

COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”

Around the world

WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.

1%

The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Nearly_750_studies_have_found_that_climate_change_has_made_extreme_events_more_severe_or_likely

Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)

Spotlight

New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.

Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.

The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.

Reductions vs removals

The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.

One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.

When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.

The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.

Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:

“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”

‘Global dialogue’

While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.

Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.

Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:

“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”

Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.

Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:

“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”

While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.

She added:

“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”

Watch, read, listen

COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.

THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.

SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.

Coming up

23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon

Pick of the jobs

International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

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