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High temperatures caused by climate change are driving an ongoing drought in the Middle East, according to a new rapid attribution analysis by the World Weather Attribution service.

Large parts of Iraq, Iran and Syria have been gripped by an intense drought for years. Low rainfall and high temperatures have caused crops to fail and driven water shortages across the region, pushing millions of people into food insecurity.

The study finds that, between July 2020 and June 2023, climate change made the drought more intense – mainly due to high temperatures that dried out the soil.

In a world without climate change, the dry period would not have even been severe enough to be called a drought, the study notes.

The authors find that climate change also made the event more likely.

In today’s climate, the drought in Iran was a one-in-five year event. However, without the influence of climate change, it would have been a one-in-80 year event.

Meanwhile, in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin that encompasses much of Iraq and Syria, climate change increased the likelihood of the drought from a one-in-250 to a one-in-10 year event.

The analysis shows that droughts of this intensity are “not rare anymore” due to climate change, one study author told a press briefing.

The study highlights that other factors, including conflict, water management and land degradation have also contributed to the severe impacts of the drought.

The Fertile Crescent

Tucked between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Mediterranean Sea, the Fertile Crescent – named for its rich soils – is often referred to as the “cradle of civilisation”. For thousands of years, this Middle Eastern region has been ideal for agriculture, allowing rural communities to cultivate crops and raise animals.

Today, the area is facing a severe multi-year drought driven by high temperatures and low rainfall. “In an already water-stressed region, agricultural practices consume 80%, on average, of freshwater resources,” Rana El Hajj, a senior technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and author on the study, told a press briefing.

As the drought has caused crops to fail, tens of millions of people across Iraq, Iran and Syria are facing the combined impacts of water shortages and food insecurity.

In Syria, where around 70% of the wheat crop relies on rainfall, agricultural production was 80% lower in 2022 than it was in 2020.

The resulting spike in food prices has driven millions of people into poverty and hunger. The World Food Programme estimates that 12.1 million Syrians – more than half the population – are facing hunger, while another 2.9 million people are at risk of becoming food insecure.

In Iraq, the 2020-21 rainfall season was the second driest in 40 years, leading to a 29% and 73% drop in water flow in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, respectively.

In April 2022, the Iraqi ministry of water resources warned that the country’s water reserves had halved since the previous year due to intense heat and low rainfall.

Almost 90% of Iraq’s rain-fed crops – mostly wheat and barley – failed in 2022. One Iraqi farmer called the water shortage a “catastrophic crisis“, explaining that “most of our agricultural lands have been transformed into barren scorching desert lands which lack basic living necessities”.

In Iran, only 180mm of rain fell across the country between September 2021 and September 2022 – a decline of about 24% compared to the long-term average. The drought has led to shortages of drinking water, crop failure and low hydropower output, and many Iranian farmers have been forced to travel to cities to find work.
The low rainfall came as intense heat baked the Middle East. Over the past few years, many regions have faced temperatures above 50C.

Tweet from @extremetemps (Extreme temperatures Around The World). Tweet text: Middle East and Central Asia are under the harshest heat wave in history for this time of the year. In #Iran 51.0C at Omidieh, 50.1C at Abadan, 45.5C at Bam (920m asl). In Turkmenistan 46.7C Uchadzhi, in Uzbekistan 44.7C at Termez, in Tajikistan 43.7C at Isambaj (563m).

Multiyear drought

There are many ways to define drought. Hydrological drought focuses on the amount of rainfall a region receives, while pluvial droughts focus on surface and groundwater flows.

This study investigates agricultural drought, using a measure called the “standardised precipitation evapotranspiration index” (SPEI) – an index used to determine the onset, duration and magnitude of drought conditions in comparison with typical conditions.

Dr Ben Clarke – a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and author on the study – told a press briefing that SPEI gives a measure of available water balance on the land surface.

The study investigates two regions – Iran, and the crescent around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which encompasses large parts of Iraq and Syria.

The map below shows SPEI in these regions over the 36 months between July 2020 and June 2023. The study regions are outlined in grey, with the Tigris-Euphrates river basin on the left and Iran to the right. The areas of darker shading indicate a more severe drought.

SPEI in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin (left) and Iran (right) between July 2020 and June 2023. Source: WWA (2023)
SPEI in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin (left) and Iran (right) between July 2020 and June 2023. Source: WWA (2023)

Over both regions, 2020-23 was the second worst drought on record, the study finds.

Dr Elham Ghasemifar is a researcher in satellite climatology at Iran’s Tarbiat Modares University and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that according to his research, the seasonality of agricultural drought is different across the three countries. Iraq and Iran see the most severe droughts in summer and spring, while Syria sees them in autumn, he says.

Attribution

Attribution is a fast-growing field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme-weather events. In this study, the authors investigate the impact of climate change on drought across Iran, Iraq and Syria.

To put the drought into its historical context and determine how unlikely it was, the authors analysed a timeseries of SPEI for each region. They also use climate models to compare the world as it is today to a “counterfactual” world without human-caused climate change.

The authors find that in today’s climate, which has already warmed by around 1.2C above pre-industrial temperatures due to human-caused climate change, the drought in Iran was a one-in-five year event. Without the influence of climate change, it would have been a one-in-80 year event, they find.

If the planet continues to heat, reaching a warming level of 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, Iran could expect a drought of this severity every other year, the authors add.

The graphic below illustrates these results, where a pink dot indicates the number of years in every 81 that an event like the 2020-23 drought over Iran would be seen at different warming levels.

Expected frequency of drought such as the 2020-23 drought in Iran, at different warming levels. Source: WWA (2023)
Expected frequency of drought such as the 2020-23 drought in Iran, at different warming levels. Source: WWA (2023)

The authors also performed the same analysis for the Tigris-Euphrates river basin in Syria and Iraq. They find that in a pre-industrial climate, today’s climate and a 2C climate, the drought would be expected once every 250, 10 and five years, respectively. These results are shown in the graphic below.

Expected frequency of drought such as the 2020-23 drought in Syria and Iraq, at different warming levels. Source: WWA (2023)
Expected frequency of drought such as the 2020-23 drought in Syria and Iraq, at different warming levels. Source: WWA (2023)

The study shows that droughts such as those recorded in Iran, Iraq and Syria over 2020-23 are “not rare anymore”, Prof Mohammad Rahimi – a professor of climatology at Iran’s Semnan University and author on the study – told a press briefing.

The authors also find that, in both regions, climate change made the drought more intense. Without the influence of climate change, neither event would have even been classified as a drought, the study suggests.

To look more closely at the causes of the drought, the authors also analyse temperature and rainfall trends separately. They find that the change in rainfall was “relatively extreme, but not necessarily affected by climate change”, while the temperatures recorded would have been “virtually impossible” with climate change, Clarke told the press briefing.

This indicates that the drought was caused by “naturally low precipitation coinciding with really, really high temperatures”, Clarke explained.

(These findings are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the methods used in the analysis have been published in previous attribution studies.)

Water insecurity

High temperatures and low rainfall are not the only drivers of water insecurity across Iraq, Iran and Syria. Rajj told the press briefing that other human-caused factors, such as poor water management, land-use change, rapid urbanisation and conflict are also key.

In Syria, more than a decade of war has resulted in underdeveloped irrigation infrastructure, as well as a “devastated economy, damaged infrastructure and increasing poverty”, says the New York Times. Many farmers have also been forced from their lands by shelling, and the the Syrian currency has collapsed to a record low.

Water scarcity is also leading to tension between countries in the Middle East, with many regions building dams or overusing water at the expense of others.

For example, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are Iraq’s primary sources of water, but both rivers originate in Turkey and flow through Syria first. As Turkey and Syria began developing hydropower projects on the two rivers in the 1970s, water flow to Iraq began to dwindle. Today, dams along the rivers have reduced inflow to Iraq by around 30-40%.

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Climate Change

DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? 

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

This week

Absolute State of the Union

‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.

COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.

OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.

SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.

Around the world

  • RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
  • HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
  • BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
  • ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
  • COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
  • SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.

$467 billion

The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.


Latest climate research

  • Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
  • Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
  • Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action

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

Captured

The constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.

Spotlight

Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?

This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.

Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.

Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.

Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:

“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”

Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.

Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:

“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”

Conservative gear shift

For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.

Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.

Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.

Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.

Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:

“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”

Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)

Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:

“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”

But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:

“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”

UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

Global ‘greenlash’?

All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.

At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.

Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.

She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.

Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:

“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”

Watch, read, listen

TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.

RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.

Coming up

Pick of the jobs

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

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

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Pacific nations want higher emissions charges if shipping talks reopen

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Seven Pacific island nations say they will demand heftier levies on global shipping emissions if opponents of a green deal for the industry succeed in reopening negotiations on the stalled accord.

The United States and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to grant final approval to the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero Framework (NZF) in October and they are now leading a drive for changes to the deal.

In a joint submission seen by Climate Home News, the seven climate-vulnerable Pacific countries said the framework was already a “fragile compromise”, and vowed to push for a universal levy on all ship emissions, as well as higher fees . The deal currently stipulates that fees will be charged when a vessel’s emissions exceed a certain level.

“For many countries, the NZF represents the absolute limit of what they can accept,” said the unpublished submission by Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands.

The countries said a universal levy and higher charges on shipping would raise more funds to enable a “just and equitable transition leaving no country behind”. They added, however, that “despite its many shortcomings”, the framework should be adopted later this year.

US allies want exemption for ‘transition fuels’

The previous attempt to adopt the framework failed after governments narrowly voted to postpone it by a year. Ahead of the vote, the US threatened governments and their officials with sanctions, tariffs and visa restrictions – and President Donald Trump called the framework a “Green New Scam Tax on Shipping”.

Since then, Liberia – an African nation with a major low-tax shipping registry headquartered in the US state of Virginia – has proposed a new measure under which, rather than staying fixed under the NZF, ships’ emissions intensity targets change depending on “demonstrated uptake” of both “low-carbon and zero-carbon fuels”.

The proposal places stringent conditions on what fuels are taken into consideration when setting these targets, stressing that the low- and zero-carbon fuels should be “scalable”, not cost more than 15% more than standard marine fuels and should be available at “sufficient ports worldwide”.

This proposal would not “penalise transitional fuels” like natural gas and biofuels, they said. In the last decade, the US has built a host of large liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, which the Trump administration is lobbying other countries to purchase from.

The draft motion, seen by Climate Home News, was co-sponsored by US ally Argentina and also by Panama, a shipping hub whose canal the US has threatened to annex. Both countries voted with the US to postpone the last vote on adopting the framework.

    The IMO’s Panamanian head Arsenio Dominguez told reporters in January that changes to the framework were now possible.

    “It is clear from what happened last year that we need to look into the concerns that have been expressed [and] … make sure that they are somehow addressed within the framework,” he said.

    Patchwork of levies

    While the European Union pushed firmly for the framework’s adoption, two of its shipping-reliant member states – Greece and Cyprus – abstained in October’s vote.

    After a meeting between the Greek shipping minister and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister in January, Greece said a “common position” united Greece, Saudi Arabia and the US on the framework.

    If the NZF or a similar instrument is not adopted, the IMO has warned that there will be a patchwork of differing regional levies on pollution – like the EU’s emissions trading system for ships visiting its ports – which will be complicated and expensive to comply with.

    This would mean that only countries with their own levies and with lots of ships visiting their ports would raise funds, making it harder for other nations to fund green investments in their ports, seafarers and shipping companies. In contrast, under the NZF, revenues would be disbursed by the IMO to all nations based on set criteria.

    Anais Rios, shipping policy officer from green campaign group Seas At Risk, told Climate Home News the proposal by the Pacific nations for a levy on all shipping emissions – not just those above a certain threshold – was “the most credible way to meet the IMO’s climate goals”.

    “With geopolitics reframing climate policy, asking the IMO to reopen the discussion on the universal levy is the only way to decarbonise shipping whilst bringing revenue to manage impacts fairly,” Rios said.

    “It is […] far stronger than the Net-Zero Framework that is currently on offer.”

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    Doubts over European SAF rules threaten cleaner aviation hopes, investors warn

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    Doubts over whether governments will maintain ambitious targets on boosting the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) are a threat to the industry’s growth and play into the hands of fossil fuel companies, investors warned this week.

    Several executives from airlines and oil firms have forecast recently that SAF requirements in the European Union, United Kingdom and elsewhere will be eased or scrapped altogether, potentially upending the aviation industry’s main policy to shrink air travel’s growing carbon footprint.

    Such speculation poses a “fundamental threat” to the SAF industry, which mainly produces an alternative to traditional kerosene jet fuel using organic feedstocks such as used cooking oil (UCO), Thomas Engelmann, head of energy transition at German investment manager KGAL, told the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Investor conference in London.

    He said fossil fuel firms would be the only winners from questions about compulsory SAF blending requirements.

    What is Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)?

    The EU and the UK introduced the world’s first SAF mandates in January 2025, requiring fuel suppliers to blend at least 2% SAF with fossil fuel kerosene. The blending requirement will gradually increase to reach 32% in the EU and 22% in the UK by 2040.

    Another case of diluted green rules?

    Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, CEO of French oil and gas company TotalEnergies Patrick Pouyanné said he would bet “that what happened to the car regulation will happen to the SAF regulation in Europe”. 

    The EU watered down green rules for car-makers in March 2025 after lobbying from car companies, Germany and Italy.

    “You will see. Today all the airline companies are fighting [against the EU’s 2030 SAF target of 6%],” Pouyanne said, even though it’s “easy to reach to be honest”.

    While most European airline lobbies publicly support the mandates, Ryanair Group CEO Michael O’Leary said last year that the SAF is “nonsense” and is “gradually dying a death, which is what it deserves to do”.

    EU and UK stand by SAF targets

    But the EU and the British government have disputed that. EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said in November that the EU’s targets are “stable”, warning that “investment decisions and construction must start by 2027, or we will miss the 2030 targets”.

    UK aviation minister Keir Mather told this week’s investor event that meeting the country’s SAF blending requirement of 10% by 2030 was “ambitious but, with the right investment, the right innovation and the right outlook, it is absolutely within our reach”.

    “We need to go further and we need to go faster,” Mather said.

    UK aviation minister Keir Mather speaks at the SAF Investor conference in London on February 24, 2026. (Photo: SAF Investor)

    SAF investors and developers said such certainty on SAF mandates from policymakers was key to drawing the necessary investment to ramp up production of the greener fuel, which needs to scale up in order to bring down high production costs. Currently, SAF is between two and seven times more expensive than traditional jet fuel. 

    Urbano Perez, global clean molecules lead at Spanish bank Santander, said banks will not invest if there is a perceived regulatory risk.

    David Scott, chair of Australian SAF producer Jet Zero Australia, said developing SAF was already challenging due to the risks of “pretty new” technology requiring high capital expenditure.

    “That’s a scary model with a volatile political environment, so mandate questioning creates this problem on steroids”, Scott said.

    Others played down the risk. Glenn Morgan, partner at investment and advisory firm SkiesFifty, said “policy is always a risk”, adding that traditional oil-based jet fuel could also lose subsidies.

    A fuel truck fills up the Emirates Airlines Boeing 777-300ER with Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), during a milestone demonstration flight while running one of its engines on 100% (SAF) at Dubai airport, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, January 30, 2023. REUTERS/Rula Rouhana

    A fuel truck fills up the Emirates Airlines Boeing 777-300ER with Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), during a milestone demonstration flight while running one of its engines on 100% (SAF) at Dubai airport, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, January 30, 2023. REUTERS/Rula Rouhana

    Asian countries join SAF mandate adopters

    In Asia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Japan have recently adopted SAF mandates, and Matti Lievonen, CEO of Asia-based SAF producer EcoCeres, predicted that China, Indonesia and Hong Kong would follow suit.

    David Fisken, investment director at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, said the Australian government, which does not have a mandate, was watching to see how the EU and UK’s requirements played out.

    The US does not have a SAF mandate and under President Donald Trump the government has slashed tax credits available for SAF producers from $1.75 a gallon to $1.

    Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?

    SAF and energy security

    SAF’s potential role in boosting energy security was a major theme of this week’s discussions as geopolitical tensions push the issue to the fore.

    Marcella Franchi, chief commercial officer for SAF at France’s Haffner Energy, said the Canadian government, which has “very unsettling neighbours at the moment”, was looking to produce SAF to protect its energy security, especially as it has ample supplies of biomass to use as potential feedstock.

    Similarly, German weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall said last year it was working on plans that would enable European armed forces to produce their own synthetic, carbon-neutral fuel “locally and independently of global fossil fuel supply chain”.

    Scott said Australia needs SAF to improve its fuel security, as it imports almost 99% of its liquid fuels.

    He added that support for Australian SAF production is bipartisan, in part because it appeals to those more concerned about energy security than tackling climate change.

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