In 1985, French secret service agents were sent to plant two bombs on our flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, ahead of its journey leading a peaceful anti-nuclear protest.
The evening of 10 July saw a lively atmosphere aboard the Rainbow Warrior as the crew and guests celebrated Steve Sawyer’s birthday. Margaret Mills, another crew member, had baked a birthday cake decorated with a jelly bean rainbow. People mingled and enjoyed drinks and slices of cake.
Little did they know that one of the guests was a French spy, observing all that was taking place to feed back to his colleagues. The spy departed just after 8pm, and at about 8.15pm, the skippers of all the protest yachts going to Moruroa descended into the hold of the Rainbow Warrior for a planning meeting.
Outside, French combat divers were attaching two bombs to the ship’s hull below the water line. The divers had motored across the harbour in an inflatable zodiac dinghy from a secluded launching ramp at Stanley Point, Devonport.
After planting the bombs, the pair escaped by swimming west towards the Auckland Harbour Bridge to be picked up. The pilot of the zodiac motored towards Mechanics Bay to be picked up by a campervan.
Close to midnight, with their guests gone, the Rainbow Warrior’s skipper Peter Willcox and some of the crew went off to bed. The remainder sat around the mess room table, chatting and enjoying the last bottles of beer.
The French agents in a zodiac dinghy motored across from Stanley Point (red) to Marsden Wharf (purple) where the Rainbow Warrior lay. The two divers escaped by swimming towards Auckland Harbour Bridge while the zodiac pilot motored towards Mechanics Bay (blue) to be picked up by a campervan.
The bombers’ strike
Suddenly, a big thud rocked the ship. The lights went out. There was the sharp crack of breaking glass. Then a sudden roar of water. The crew’s first thought was that they had been hit by a tugboat.
Martini Gotje went down below to check that Hanne Sorensen was not in her cabin. Fernando Pereira went down to his cabin to retrieve his camera equipment.
Then, there was a second explosion.
Peter Willcox called for everyone to abandon ship. Within minutes the ship was sunk.
Later, Willcox recalled: “I stood there looking at the boat with all of these bubbles coming out. That’s when Davey said ‘Fernando is down there’. I remember arguing with him, saying no, Fernando has gone to town, that’s what he always did. ‘No’ he said. ‘Fernando is down there’.”
Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira drowned. He had recently celebrated his 35th birthday. His young children would soon have their lives shattered by the news.
The first bomb made a massive hole two metres by three metres wide into the engine room. The second bomb severely damaged the propeller shaft. There may have been more deaths if everyone had been in bed, as metal from the first explosion had penetrated many of the empty cabins. The stunned Rainbow Warrior crew spent the rest of the night in or on the steps of the Wharf Police Station across the road from Marsden Wharf. Their plans for the Rainbow Warrior to lead the anti-nuclear protest flotilla to Moruroa Atoll were over.
Background to the bombing
At the time of the bombing, the Rainbow Warrior was about to lead a group of anti-nuclear testing vessels into the Pacific. To appreciate why the ship was bombed by the French government, it’s important to understand the political environment of the time, and how Greenpeace’s campaign against testing in the Pacific was so significant.
The Rainbow Warrior was about to lead a flotilla of anti-nuclear testing vessels to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia. To appreciate why the Rainbow Warrior was bombed, it is important to first understand how nuclear testing in the Pacific became such a controversial issue.
On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped a new and devastating weapon in the form of an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later it dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. The USA dropped these nuclear weapons to speed up the end of the war against Japan and avoid a costly ground invasion of the Japanese home islands.
But the world had never seen such powerful weapons of mass destruction. Each bomb was more powerful than 10,000 tons of TNT explosive. Entire sections of the cities were totally destroyed and tens of thousands of men, women and children were killed outright or in the days and weeks afterwards. These bombs released radioactive fallout which contaminated the environment. Many people would die later from exposure to radiation. Women gave birth to deformed babies. To this day, historians argue about whether or not such weapons should ever have been used against Japan.
After World War II, tension developed between the USA and the USSR. What became known as the Cold War (1945-1991) began, where the two superpowers and their allies competed to spread their different forms of government across the world.
The USA and the USSR competed to produce the most powerful nuclear weapons in order to ensure their security. Governments now knew that if they launched nuclear weapons at another nuclear power, they would most likely be destroyed by their opponent’s weapons.
The two sides very nearly started a nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Given the fragile post-World War II climate, the nuclear powers became careful not to provoke each other.
The USA, Britain and France sought remote areas to develop their nuclear weapons. Up until the 1960s, atmospheric nuclear tests were carried out in the Pacific by these powers.
The USA used the Marshall Islands. The British used Christmas Island and the Australian outback. France moved its testing programme from Algeria to French Polynesia in 1966. Nuclear devices were suspended by balloons high above the ground and detonated so that scientists could take measurements.
Atmospheric testing meant that radioactive fallout was carried by the wind for vast distances, which contaminated the environment. Significant numbers of people living on nearby islands like Rongelap in the Marshall Islands have since developed cancer. Women have had miscarriages and some have given birth to deformed babies (known as “jellyfish babies”).
From the late 1950s people in many countries became very concerned about the effects of nuclear testing on people and the environment. Many people in the Pacific argued that if the tests were safe, why did the nuclear powers not test in their own countries.
The USA and Britain stopped testing in the South Pacific in the early 1960s. Protest movements started up and the governments of Vanuatu, New Zealand, Australia and others called on France to stop testing at Moruroa Atoll. The French Government refused to stop tests and downplayed the risks.
In June 1972, Greenpeace yacht Vega sailed into the forbidden zone outside Moruroa Atoll to stop the upcoming nuclear test by its presence. This was an extremely dangerous protest action, as the crew could be be exposed to nuclear fallout from the explosion. David McTaggart (the skipper), Nigel Graham and Grant Davidson made blocks to seal the vents, to stop radioactive fallout entering the cabin. It was agreed that if they survived the nuclear blast and shockwave one crew member would expose himself on the deck to start the engine and motor out of the danger zone. After being ordered to leave, McTaggart refused to follow a French naval vessel out of the zone. This resulted in a chase where the Vega was rammed and McTaggart and crew were put in detention. Although the test went ahead, the Greenpeace action raised global awareness about the issue and put pressure on France to stop testing.
The New Zealand and Australian governments took France to the International Court of Justice in 1973 to try to stop the tests. However, France refused to follow the court’s ruling that it should stop testing. Norman Kirk, the New Zealand Prime Minister, sent two New Zealand navy frigates to protest on the edge of the Moruroa testing area.
A flotilla of civilian yachts were also protesting, including the Greenpeace yacht Vega skippered again by David McTaggart. Frustrated by McTaggart’s persistent non-violent protest actions, the French military boarded the Vega, where they severely beat McTaggart and one of his crew. He was hospitalised and lost vision in one of his eyes for several months. The French government tried to say his injuries were from a fall, but a crew member from the Vega smuggled out photos of the beating. This caused outrage in the international media and the French government was left humiliated.
Greenpeace was seen as a group of troublemakers by some members of the French government and military. The French navy found it very difficult to deal with non-violent protesters who would not cooperate. The protests led to the French abandoning atmospheric tests in favour of underground tests during 1974. However, protests at Moruroa continued in the hope that underground tests would also be stopped.
In 1985, Greenpeace sent its ship Rainbow Warrior on a Pacific Peace Voyage. The ship would help to evacuate the people of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands. In 1954, the US tested a nuclear weapon on Bikini Atoll which was one thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The people of Rongelap, 150 kilometres away, were not warned about the test and suffered from the radioactive contamination for decades afterwards. Eventually they asked Greenpeace to help move them to a new, uncontaminated atoll. Once the Rongelapese had been relocated, the ship would sail to Vanuatu and on to New Zealand. From Auckland, the Rainbow Warrior would lead a flotilla of vessels to Moruroa Atoll, in French Polynesia, to protest against the upcoming French nuclear tests.
Why did the French bomb the Rainbow Warrior?
The French government saw its nuclear testing programme as essential for France’s security (even though a nuclear armed world is hardly a secure one). But negative publicity about the testing would put pressure on the French government to stop its programme. It was for this reason that the French government wanted to stop the Rainbow Warrior’s upcoming anti-nuclear protest.
The Rainbow Warrior was a large vessel which could act as a flagship for the smaller protest yachts. French naval vessels would not be able to intimidate it as easily as the other, more fragile yachts. The Rainbow Warrior could carry large amounts of supplies, which meant that it could protest for a long period of time. The communications equipment on board would allow the crew to maintain radio contact with the outside world and send up-to-the-minute reports and photos to international news organisations.
The French navy would find it extremely difficult to deal with the non-violent tactics of the protest vessels. To avoid this, the French secret service DGSE was ordered to launch “Operation Satanique,” where French secret service agents were sent to New Zealand to sink the Rainbow Warrior before it could lead the protest flotilla.
The Aftermath
On 11 July 1985, news spread of dramatic explosions on the Auckland waterfront. Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior had been sunk while moored at Marsden Wharf. One crew member, Fernando Pereira, had been killed. Navy divers who retrieved his body at 4am discovered that the blast came from outside the hull of the ship and a murder enquiry was launched by New Zealand police.
Police investigation
The police had a lucky break. On the evening of 10 July, two members of the Auckland Outboard Boating Club were watching out for people stealing boating equipment. At around 9.30pm, they saw a man in a wetsuit dragging a zodiac ashore after going under the Ngatipi Bridge on Tamaki Drive. The man was picked up by a couple in a Newmans Toyota campervan. One of the men took down the van’s registration number and gave it to the police.
After the bombing, the police were able to follow this lead, and when the couple went to return the van to the Newmans depot in Mt Wellington two days later, the staff delayed them long enough for the police to arrive. The couple were travelling on fake Swiss passports and would eventually be unmasked as French agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur.
French involvement
The French government initially denied any involvement in the bombing. Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur continued to pretend that they were a Swiss couple on honeymoon. Over the following weeks, their story unravelled as their passports were shown to be forgeries. The police gradually uncovered evidence that would show a highly organised operation involving more than ten French agents. For two months the French government continued to deny any involvement.
Under pressure, the French government launched an inquiry to find out if French agents were responsible for the attack. This Tricot Inquiry would state that the agents in New Zealand were only spying on Greenpeace and did not sink the ship. The scandal intensified as the French media published further allegations about French involvement. The French Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, was forced to resign and the head of the French secret service (the DGSE), Pierre Lacoste, was sacked. On 22 September 1985, the French Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, gave a televised address in which he revealed that French agents bombed the Rainbow Warrior and that they acted on orders.
The New Zealand public was outraged that France could carry out such an attack on New Zealand territory. Thousands of New Zealand men had died fighting to defend France during World War I and II and many were angry this was how a former ally was treated. Many New Zealanders were already angry about how France was continuing to test nuclear weapons at Moruroa Atoll. These tests were seen as a threat to the environment and the people of the South Pacific. People argued that if (as the French claimed) the tests were safe, they should be carried out in France.
Greenpeace gained huge sympathy over the bombing, and donations poured in. The fact that New Zealand’s traditional allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, did not condemn France’s actions caused further bitterness. Following this, the New Zealand government pursued a more independent stance in world affairs. In 1987, New Zealand passed the Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act. The bombing cemented nuclear free policies as part of New Zealand’s identity.
The two French agents were found guilty of manslaughter. The New Zealand judge sentenced them each to ten years’ imprisonment on 22 November 1985. The French government wanted its agents returned to France.
In January 1986, New Zealand farm produce exports began to face obstacles in the French markets. The New Zealand government feared that if its exports to the European Community were blocked, the New Zealand economy would be severely damaged. This situation led the two governments to come to an agreement with the help of the United Nations. The agreement, reached on July 1986, led to a French apology, compensation fee and an agreement not to interfere with New Zealand exports to Europe. In return, the agents would serve three years on Hao Atoll in French Polynesia. Many New Zealanders did not like this deal and the nation was outraged when France broke the agreement and brought the two agents back to France within two years.
The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior failed to stop the protests at Moruroa Atoll. Greenpeace gained a huge amount of sympathy in New Zealand and around the world following the bombing, and if anything it had the opposite effect to what the French wanted. Fernando Pereira’s death made many protesters more determined to go and protest at Moruroa. Donations and offers of help continued to flood in. Greenpeace International was able to send its other large ship, The Greenpeace, to lead the protest at Moruroa Atoll.
The Rainbow Warrior’s Peter Wilcox and Grace O’Sullivan boarded the Greenpeace yacht Vega and sailed to Moruroa to protest. They were arrested and deported. Bunny McDiarmid joined The Greenpeace and Lloyd Anderson joined the crew of the yacht Varangian.
The international attention gained from the bombing raised a much deeper awareness around the issue of nuclear testing amongst governments and people around the world. Indeed, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and the resulting international outrage would play a part in the decision by France to end nuclear testing on Moruroa Atoll in 1996.
Arbitration settlement
On 2 October 1987, an international arbitration tribunal sitting in Geneva, Switzerland ordered France to pay Greenpeace US$8.1 million in damages for deliberately sinking the Rainbow Warrior. France agreed to the arbitration after Greenpeace threatened to take France to court in New Zealand. This arbitration settlement was a very significant victory for Greenpeace, as it recognised the organisation’s rights under international law. According to their lawyer, Gary Born, the arbitration showed that “the law was not just something that protected smaller states, it also protected individuals and legal entities like Greenpeace”.
Greenpeace then had the funds to replace the Rainbow Warrior with the ship Rainbow Warrior 2, which would continue the campaign to protect the environment and raise awareness of critical environmental issues around the globe.
The Rainbow Warrior was towed north and scuttled at Matauri Bay. A memorial sculpture overlooks the water. Recreational divers are now able to admire the marine life surrounding the ship, that was used to protect the very creatures that now surround it.
Remembering Fernando
He joined the crew of the Rainbow Warrior to bring his pictures of French nuclear testing to the world. When secret service agents bombed the ship, they killed Fernando Pereira, a man who dedicated his life to peace. A determined photographer, a family man, a Rainbow Warrior – he will always be remembered.
The bombers struck just before midnight on 10 July 1985 as two separate explosions ripped through the hull of the Rainbow Warrior. The second explosion knocked Fernando Pereira unconscious below deck, and as the Warrior swiftly sank, he drowned.
Fernando Pereira, 1950 – 1985
Fernando was born in the town of Chaves in Portugal. As a young man, he fled Portugal to neighbouring Spain to avoid being forced to join the army and fight in the dictator Salazar’s war in Angola. Spain was no safe haven for political refugees at the time, so he travelled for hundreds of kilometres on foot and by hitchhiking until he reached the Netherlands, where he decided to settle. He met and married a Dutch woman, had a family, and pursued his passion for photography.
By 1985, Fernando was a freelance photographer for Greenpeace, and he signed on for the Rainbow Warrior’s six month Pacific voyage. He was a part of the team evacuating the people of Rongelap Atoll, which had been severely contaminated with radioactive fallout following nuclear testing in the region by the USA. His photographs of the evacuation are profoundly moving and showed his professionalism as a photographer.
Evacuation of Rongelap Islanders to Mejato by the Rainbow Warrior crew in the Pacific 1985. (Greenpeace Witness book page 99) The health of many adults and children has suffered as a result of the nuclear fallout from US nuclear tests. The Greenpeace crew took adults, children and 100 tonnes of belongings onboard.
Fernando was a popular crew member who had a great zest for life and a deep conviction for the causes he believed in. If he had not been killed, he would have photographed the protests at Moruroa Atoll.
Three months earlier, he had farewelled his two children in the Netherlands. His daughter Marelle remembers him saying “Just take care of your mom, I’ll do my trip and I’ll be home soon”. She was eight years old. After he left, she went walking in the forest with her brother Paul, who “waved to every plane because that could be the one my dad was in”.
Their innocent young lives would be shattered by the news to come from New Zealand some months later.
“During the summer we went to camp, we were playing a game with a ball with my friends, then one of our teachers came up to me and asked if I could join her because she had something to tell me. My mom was there and I thought that was pretty strange. I did not know what to think of that, so I walked with her to where my mother was sitting with an uncle of mine, but over there I got a strange feeling, I don’t know how to explain that, but I knew something had to be wrong with my dad. It had to be; otherwise my mom would have come over there and talked to me. By the time that I got to my mom she was in tears”.
“The moment that she said he was missing, all the pieces fell together and I cried together with my mom. We packed our bags that afternoon and she took me home. We waited for the news which eventually was of my dad turning up dead”.
Fernando’s Legacy
Marelle and Paul’s lives were changed forever as they grew up without their much loved dad. The French government paid some compensation to his family, but not all of his killers were brought to justice. Twenty years later Marelle gave her view on this.
“What I would like to see happen now… Justice for us, justice for the family if they could tell the truth that would be a beginning, and Mitterrand promising justice at the highest level, if that is justice, letting so many agents escape jail, then that is not justice, not in our eyes and I hope not in the world’s eyes. And, it is never too late for justice”.
The Rainbow Warrior is in Rongelap to assist in the evacuation of islanders to Mejato. Rongelap suffered nuclear fallout in 1954, making it a hazardous place for this community to continue living in. Eyes of Fire: p49
On 10 July 2010, the 25th anniversary of Fernando’s death, a wreath was laid for him. Peter Willcox, the skipper of the Rainbow Warrior on the night of his death, made this tribute to him:
“Fernando did not have to die…We will never forget him. I hope the generations of activists who sail on the new ship will be as determined and as exceptional and as inspired as he was.”
Fernando’s memory remains an inspiration to people who campaign for a green and peaceful future.
In 1995, the Rainbow Warrior II was boarded by French commandos, as it led a further protest against nuclear testing in Moruroa Atoll. When Greenpeace activists were asked for their names, they only gave one: Fernando Pereira.
Declassified NZSIS Report
Supplied to Greenpeace from New Zealand Security Intelligence Service in June 2017, this fifteen page file was declassified in May and provides useful information on the bombing and investigation. From timelines to which French agents involved, this is an invaluable tool for anyone studying the bombing.
Press release from Greenpeace on anniversary of bombing, July 1986
Documentary about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior
The Boat and the Bomb is a 2005 documentary about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.
More resources about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior
Letters
Press release from Greenpeace on anniversary of bombing, July 1986.
Open letter to the French President from French living in NZ, May 1985.
Letter to the French President from Rainbow Warrior, May 1985.
Telegram message from Helen Clark to Greenpeace, July 1985.
Letter from Tim Shadbolt to Greenpeace, aceepting Rainbow Warrior reception invite, April 1985.
Letter to Walter Lini, Prime Minister of Vanuatu from Greenpeace, 1984.
Letter confirming Federation of Labour’s support of Pacific Peace Campaign, April 1985.
Invoice from Mt Eden Borough Council for reception of Rainbow Warrior event, June 1985.
The Pine Island glacier in West Antarctica is one of the fastest-changing glaciers in the world.
Alongside its neighbour, the Thwaites glacier, it is responsible for almost half the sea level rise caused by melting ice sheets in Antarctica.
Scientists know the West Antarctic ice sheet – which includes Thwaites and Pine Island – is retreating because of warm water eroding the ice sheet from below.
But the extent to which this process has been driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to natural variations to the Earth’s climate, remains unknown.
Our study, published in the Cryosphere, looks at how human-caused warming has contributed to the retreat of the Pine Island glacier since pre-industrial times.
The research, the first attribution study of glacier retreat on Antarctica, finds that climate change has been responsible for around 4km – roughly a fifth – of the glacier’s retreat.
The West Antarctic ice sheet
Glaciers are frozen rivers of ice and snow that move slowly over land. They are found at high elevations on mountains and on ice sheets.
There are two ice sheets on Earth – covering Antarctica and Greenland. Both were formed over millennia, as layers of snow compressed into dense ice.
Ice sheets grow and shrink depending on temperature and snowfall conditions. In the past, when global temperatures were much colder than present day, vast ice sheets also covered large areas of North America, Scandinavia and Patagonia.
Today, human-driven climate change is accelerating the retreat of ice sheets. This is contributing to sea level rise and altering the Earth’s climate system by pumping vast quantities of fresh melt water into the ocean.
Our research looks at the Pine Island glacier, which is found on the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet.
It is one of the fastest-melting glaciers in the world. Research has shown it has been responsible for a fifth of net ice loss from the West Antarctic ice sheet, which, in turn, has been responsible for almost all ice loss in Antarctica over the past 40 years.
At the coldest point of the last ice age – the “last glacial maximum” period around 20,000 years ago – the West Antarctic ice sheet was much bigger than it is today. Since then, it has retreated by approximately 500km – roughly the distance from Paris to London.
Most of this retreat took place between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. For the past 10,000 years or so, the ice sheet has been about as big as it is today.
Sediment records beneath the Pine Island glacier reveal that, for hundreds of years until the 1940s, the glacier rested on a seabed ridge that is about 30km ahead of where it sits today.
The sediment records also tell us that the Pine Island glacier started to retreat in the 1940s. This coincided with a strong El Niño event, a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that drives up global temperatures, that brought a large pulse of warm water to the ice sheet.
This is illustrated in the figures below, which shows how the grounding line – the boundary between grounded and floating ice – of the Pine Island glacier shifted between pre-industrial times (red line) and 2015 (bright blue line).
The map on the left shows an aerial view of grounding line retreat from pre-industrial times (red) to 2015 (blue). The graphic on the right illustrates how the grounding line has shifted across a cross-section of the glacier.
Both illustrate how the glacier has contracted.
Climate reconstructions suggest that human-caused climate change only started to increase the amount of warm water reaching the West Antarctic ice sheet in the 1960s.
This indicates that climate change started to affect the melt rate in the region 20 years after the retreat had already been initiated.
In our research, we wanted to find out how important climate change was to the overall retreat since the 1940s.
Attributing ice sheet retreat
Currently, scientists do not know precisely how much of the retreat of the world’s ice sheets – and the associated sea level rise – is due to human-caused global warming.
Through the field of attribution science, the links between climate change and extreme weather and climate events, including heatwaves, wildfires and droughts, are routinely quantified by scientists.
In attribution studies, scientists typically use climate models to simulate the severity or frequency of an event in two worlds. The first is our existing, climate-changed world and the second is a “counterfactual” world that has not been affected by human-caused warming.
By comparing the model runs, scientists can assess how much climate change influenced an event.
To create these two modelled worlds in an Antarctic context, scientists need to run historical models for at least 200 years into the past. This is because ice sheets respond very slowly to changes in the climate, with very small changes year-on-year.
This presents a challenge, given the limited information available about ice sheet change before satellite records began in the 1970s.
To build a picture of the ice sheets prior to this, scientists have to rely on a few, sparse, palaeoclimate records – including sediment records and seafloor imprints – which tell us where ice was present in the past.
Reconstructing Pine Island’s past
To reconstruct the retreat of the Pine Island glacier – and, therefore, determine the role of climate change – we used a combination of physical climate models and machine learning.
First, we ran many simulations of our model under a range of different settings. This included variations in how important processes are represented, such as how the ice moves and interacts with the ocean.
Then, we compared the results of these simulations to modern satellite observations and older sediment records, allowing us to narrow down the settings that were most realistic. This gave us a set of plausible simulations that agreed with the available observational data.
However, to reconstruct the retreat in full, we needed to find all settings of our model that would agree with the observational data.
Because simulations take a lot of time to run, this was not possible.
Therefore, to fill the gaps and find all plausible simulations, we used machine learning to identify relationships between model settings and simulated glacier retreat.
This exercise allowed us to build a good picture of how the glacier actually retreated over the past 250 years. We call this our “reconstructed” scenario.
We then compared the glacier retreat in this reconstructed world with changes that took place in a counterfactual scenario where there had been no human-caused climate change.
In doing so, we were able to quantify the role that warming played in the shrinking of the Pine Island glacier since the 1940s.
Overall, we estimate that warming has been responsible for around 4km – roughly a fifth – of the glacier’s retreat since 1940.
This is shown in the figure below, which shows how grounding line retreat in the reconstructed scenario (blue) is more extreme than projected by the counterfactual scenario (green).
Interpreting the numbers
Our work quantifies, for the first time, the role of climate change in the retreat of a glacier in the world’s ice sheets – directly linking greenhouse gas emissions with glacier decline.
We also find that the Pine Island glacier may have retreated even without climate change, just not as far. This is similar to how extreme weather events, such as drought or extreme rainfall, could still happen without climate change, just with less frequency or intensity.
One of the key challenges in our research arises from not knowing exactly how large the ice sheet was prior to satellite records.
Although the sediment records tell us where the ice was grounded – that is, what its footprint was – they do not tell us exactly how much ice there was.
This means we do not know exactly how to set up our model at the start of the simulations, which leads to uncertainty in our predictions.
Further work is underway to determine exactly how to best set up the simulations for future research.
The post Guest post: Climate change has caused one-fifth of Pine Island glacier retreat appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Climate change has caused one-fifth of Pine Island glacier retreat
Ellen Davies is head of programmes at the African Climate Foundation and is based in Kenya. Wole Hammond is programme officer for adaptation and resilience at the foundation, based in Nigeria.
For generations, African communities have lived on the frontlines of climate disruption, managing erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts and the slow erosion of their livelihoods, which depend on predictable seasons.
When the rains failed across Southern Africa in 2024, it was but the latest chapter of a crisis already long underway. During that season, maize crop failures of 40-80% devastated farming communities in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, where roughly 70% of people depend on rain-fed agriculture. Governments already stretched by debt were forced to raid development budgets, trading long-term growth for emergency relief.
Then came the floods. In early 2026, parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa received over a year’s worth of rain in days. More than 2 million people were affected. In East Africa, drought has displaced nearly 62,000 people in Somalia this year alone, with nearly one in four Somalis now facing acute food insecurity.
This is what climate change looks like on the ground – not parts per million or diplomatic jargon, but whether a school stays open after floods cut off the road, whether a clinic can function in extreme heat, whether a country can still invest in its future when every year brings another disaster bill.
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Africa as a continent contributes the least to global emissions yet bears a disproportionate share of the consequences. Nine of the ten countries most vulnerable to climate change are African. As livelihoods collapse and rural economies fail, migration pressures will intensify, driven by climate change intersecting with poverty, conflict and constrained opportunity.
Chronic under-funding
Europe is only now beginning to experience, in more limited form, what African communities have navigated for decades with far less fiscal space, thinner insurance coverage and fewer resources for recovery. With El Niño conditions confirmed and a “super” version of the naturally occurring weather pattern possible later this year, the pressure is set to intensify further.
In Africa, climate action is fundamentally a development challenge where adaptation and mitigation must go hand in hand. Building a solar grid and flood-proofing the road that serves it are not separate agendas. Yet for too long, the global climate conversation has prioritised mitigation while leaving adaptation – the work of protecting lives, livelihoods and economies in a changing climate – chronically under-funded.
The result is three compounding gaps. A visibility gap: much of Africa’s adaptation work remains under-documented and under-recognised in global climate narratives. A financing gap: capital does not flow at the scale or speed required to the people and institutions best placed to use it. And a decision-making gap: too many solutions are still designed elsewhere and imported into African contexts, rather than backing African-led platforms to scale what is already working.
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Solutions ready for finance
The solutions exist. Rwanda’s green investment fund has mobilised climate finance at national scale through its own systems. Egypt’s Nexus of Water, Food and Energy programme has shown how integrated planning can stretch limited resources across interdependent systems.
Zambia’s Presidential Irrigation Initiative is building climate-resilient food production from the ground up. In Pata, Senegal, a solar irrigation project has unlocked agricultural production and created jobs, demonstrating how integrated investments in water, energy and livelihoods can deliver resilience and development gains simultaneously.
In South Africa, the African Climate Foundation’s work with the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) is supporting district municipalities to assess their climate risks and develop fit-for-purpose Climate Action Plans, building adaptation capacity where it is needed most – at the local level.
These are not pilot projects waiting to be validated. They are working systems waiting for investment.
Closing the gaps requires a decisive shift in posture from global finance, philanthropy and development institutions. It means backing country-led platforms that can prepare, aggregate and finance adaptation projects. It means investing in place-based initiatives grounded in local knowledge.
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It means fostering intra- and inter-continental collaboration, so that lessons from Kigali inform decisions in Nairobi and innovations in Lagos reach communities in Dakar. And it means treating adaptation as core economic infrastructure, not charitable relief.
Invest now for future gains
The economic case is clear. Every dollar invested in climate adaptation returns an estimated four dollars in benefits on average – and up to five in the poorest economies. Under-investment in African adaptation is as economically irrational as it is morally unjust.
The world depends on Africa’s food systems, its young workforce – the majority of the continent’s population is under 25 – and its minerals. Several African countries supply a substantial share of the copper, cobalt and other critical materials underpinning the global clean energy transition.
Drought in Zambia has already shown how climate stress can disrupt hydropower, electricity supply and mining output. A transition that depends on African minerals cannot afford to ignore African climate resilience.
The world can continue to under-fund adaptation and pay repeatedly for emergencies, instability and lost development. Or it can invest now in the people, institutions and systems already doing the work on the ground in Africa, not in solutions imported from elsewhere.
Africa has the agency, the knowledge and the platforms. What it needs is the finance to match. A super El Niño will not wait for consensus to form. Neither, frankly, should we.
The post Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions
Climate Change
DeBriefed 26 June 2026: Heat records broken across Europe | London climate action week | Introducing ‘Project Cosmos’
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Record Europe heat
HOTTEST EVER: The UK broke its temperature record for June twice this week, while France recorded its hottest day ever two days in a row, reported the Guardian. The Times reported that temperatures reached 36.7C in Somerset on Thursday, as the “London Ambulance Service had its busiest-ever day for life-threatening emergencies”.
FRANCE FRYING: French newspaper Libération said that temperatures reached as high as 44.3C in the south-western commune of Pissos on Wednesday. Spain also recorded its highest daily average temperature for June, said BBC News. On Thursday, Switzerland also had its hottest June day, when temperatures reached 37C in four locations, reported SwissInfo.
CLIMATE LINK: CNN covered a rapid analysis from the World Weather Attribution service finding that fossil-fuelled climate change has made this heatwave the most severe and widespread in Europe’s history. Carbon Brief covered the broken heat records, explaining the influence of climate change.
‘Electrifying’ London talks
‘LONDON COOKING’: In a sweltering, packed-out event at London climate action week, UN chief António Guterres quipped that “London is not just calling, it’s cooking”, reported Edie. Guterres also used his address to release a “global call to action on methane” and to call on artificial intelligence companies to reveal their environmental impact and source their power solely from renewables by 2030, said the publication.
‘ELECTRIFY NOW’: Elsewhere, dozens of governments, led by the EU and the UK, committed to throwing “their political weight” behind a rapid electrification of the world’s economy, according to Climate Home News. A high-level summit in London’s Mansion House saw energy ministers and business leaders, joined by Guterres, in “calling for faster action to curb demand for oil, coal and gas by powering homes, industry and transport with clean electricity”.
FOSSIL TRANSITION: At the same event, ministers from Colombia and the Netherlands, the co-hosts of the world’s first summit on transitioning away from fossil fuels in April, unveiled a report on their key takeaways. It comes after the current Colombian government has been ousted by a presidential election defeat to a fossil-fuel-supporting Trump ally. Carbon Brief examined what this could mean for the world’s energy transition.
Around the world
- UK TARGET: The UK parliament has approved its “seventh carbon budget”, aimed at cutting emissions 87% below 1990 levels by 2040.
- TOTAL ACCOUNTABILITY: A French court has ordered oil-and-gas giant TotalEnergies to account for the emissions from the use of its products, following a case brought by a climate NGO, reported Le Monde.
- METHANE RULES: The US, Qatar and other major energy exporters have urged the EU to “rewrite planned methane emissions” rules for oil-and-gas imports, saying that the policy could disrupt fuel supplies to Europe, according to Reuters.
- CHINA MESSAGE: China’s special envoy for climate change, Liu Zhenmin, said at the World Economic Forum that energy shortages triggered by the Iran war should be a “lesson to countries to accelerate their energy transitions”, reported Bloomberg.
- US WEBSITE REVIVED: Former US government workers have “recreated a valuable climate-science website” shut down by the Trump administration last year, said the New York Times.
6,600 animals
The number of livestock that perished in transport during heat in England and Wales from June to August 2025, double the number killed the year before, reported Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Some world regions are experiencing up to 50 additional heat stress days annually, when compared to 1950 | Nature Climate Change
- Projections of national land-use emissions to 2100 suggest the strongest “carbon sinks” will be in China and Indonesia, whereas Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will “dominate global sources” | Nature
- Most carbon-offset projects relying on “avoided deforestation” have “mixed, negligible or negative impacts relative to control areas” | Nature Climate Change
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The UK government’s official climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), has released its latest progress report, emphasising that faster electrification is the best way to secure lower energy bills and stronger energy security. Electrification has shot up the agenda in recent months, with the COP31 presidency calling for countries to back a global goal for 35% of “final” energy to come from electricity by 2035. The text of the CCC’s latest report uses the word “electrification” far more often than previous editions, as shown in the figure above. See Carbon Brief’s in-depth breakdown of the CCC’s latest advice.
Spotlight
Introducing ‘Project Cosmos’
Carbon Brief explains how it built a major new database of climate science research and unveils a new ranking of the 500 most highly cited publications, authors and institutions in climate science.
This week, Carbon Brief launched Project Cosmos – the world’s largest and most complete database of climate change research.
The database features more than 1.8m academic papers, books and reports, capturing the vast body of human knowledge about climate change that has accumulated over more than a century of academic study.
The climate science “universe” is based on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which are recognised as the world’s most authoritative summaries of the latest climate science.
Since its first report was published in 1990, humanity’s knowledge about human-caused climate change has ballooned. The IPCC has published six sets of reports in total – each one longer than the last.
In total, IPCC reports reference more than 100,000 other papers, books and reports. This is the core of our climate science universe. Carbon Brief then built on this core, by looking at four other sources of data. Read more about how the Cosmos database was created here.
Every single publication in the Cosmos database is linked to at least one other through references. Visualising these links reveals a “galaxy” of references.
In the image above, each colour and cluster reveals different topics and densities of research. Explore the galaxy in an interactive map.
Cosmos 500
As part of an initial wave of preliminary analysis to demonstrate the scope of the Project Cosmos database, Carbon Brief has ranked the 500 most highly cited publications, authors and institutions in the database.
The most highly cited climate scientist is Prof Philippe Ciais, who has spent almost four decades researching the planet’s carbon cycle – and the ways in which humans have been impacting its balance. Carbon Brief recently interviewed Ciais in Paris.
The US tops the tables for the most highly cited authors and institutions. Almost half of the 500 most highly-cited authors are from US institutions. This raises particular concerns for the future of climate science, as US climate scientists and institutions are coming under attack under the Trump administration.
Experts from global south countries account for only 4% of all authors in the Cosmos 500. China stands out as the most highly-cited global south country. Meanwhile, only 10% of authors in the Cosmos 500 are women.
There are many possibilities for future avenues of research using the Cosmos database. Over time, the database could be used to reveal, for example, how interest in different areas of climate science has changed over time, plus identify potential knowledge gaps and, thus, opportunities for future research.
Carbon Brief invites researchers – including academics, journalists and analysts – to submit their own proposals for co-authored studies, literature reviews and analytical projects. Proposals should be sent to cosmos AT carbonbrief DOT org.
This spotlight first appeared in Cited, Carbon Brief’s new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free.
Watch, read, listen
‘DOOMSDAY CULT’: OpenDemocracy reported on a “religious cult” spreading climate misinformation in “parliaments” and at “COP summits”.
‘WEDGES’ EXAMINED: ProPublica and Drilled released an investigation into how oil executives worked to influence a climate research paper from Princeton University known as “wedges”.
‘1976 to 2056’: A 30-minute YouTube video from the Met Office had climate scientists explaining how current UK temperatures compare to the infamous 1976 heatwave, and how extremes could worsen by 2056.
Coming up
- 29-30 June: Hamburg sustainability conference, Hamburg, Germany
- 29-30 June: Seventh global conference on climate and sustainable development goals synergies, Bangkok, Thailand
- 29-30 June: 11th annual global conference on energy efficiency, Montreal, Canada
Pick of the jobs
- Drilled, series editor | Salary: $4,000 a month (six-month contract). Location: US
- Met Office, ocean climate science manager | Salary: £54,515-£58,582. Location: Exeter, UK
- Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, research officer (climate science and law) | Salary: £43,277-£55,497. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 26 June 2026: Heat records broken across Europe | London climate action week | Introducing ‘Project Cosmos’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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