Article Contents
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
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Key developments
Heatwave scorches European agriculture
‘PUSHED TO THEIR LIMITS’: The record-breaking heatwave that swept through much of western and central Europe in recent weeks had myriad impacts across the continent, reported Carbon Brief. Martin Lines, chief executive of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, explained: “Prolonged high temperatures place huge stress on livestock, dry out soils and reduce crop resilience, all while putting more pressure on nature.” The Times noted that “refrigerated warehouses were pushed to their limits” by the high temperatures.
POULTRY PROBLEMS: “At least several hundred thousand poultry” perished in France due to the extreme temperatures, the head of a French poultry-industry group told Reuters. A separate Reuters article said that “cows and pigs were suffering from heat stress” in Belgium, “which has raised concerns about milk and meat production”. Meanwhile, UK government data obtained by Carbon Brief showed that “twice as many animals died due to heat stress en route to slaughterhouses” amid record heat in 2025, compared to 2024.
FIRE AND ICE: The heatwave also had widespread impacts on the natural world. A wildfire scorched 200 hectares of moorland in Derbyshire, reported the Times. Derbyshire’s fire service said: “The ground is tinder dry and the slightest spark…could soon escalate to a major incident.” Agence France-Presse reported that “Swiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice”, noting that this is the “second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as ‘glacier-loss day’”.
UK 2050 farm plan
FARM CHANGES: The UK government launched a 2050 “farming roadmap” for England, setting out aims to make agriculture more resilient to climate change, increase domestic food production and boost nature recovery. The plan is “full of ambition”, but “falls short” on action and delivery, said National Farmers’ Union president Tom Bradshaw in a statement. Meanwhile, the government also announced £47m in funding for peatland protection and restoration schemes.
FOREST LOSS: UK companies may soon be required to “check that their supply chains are free from products linked to illegal land clearances”, reported the Times. The government revived plans for anti-deforestation rules for products such as soya, palm oil, cocoa and rubber, said the newspaper. The rules will initially target goods linked to illegal deforestation, but later move to a “blanket ‘deforestation-free’ standard”, it noted, adding that similar plans in the EU have been repeatedly delayed.
FRAUGHT FUND: UK energy secretary Ed Miliband was “poised to announce” a £400m commitment to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, but the plan was “shelved over ‘optics concerns’” amid a “bitter row over defence spending”, said the Times. Meanwhile, one of Europe’s oldest and largest trees died after “becoming stressed by a series of hot, dry summers”, reported the Guardian. The Major Oak, which has grown in England’s Sherwood Forest “for at least 1,000 years”, did not produce leaves this year, said the newspaper.
News and views
- OCEAN ACTION: The Our Ocean Conference concluded in Mombasa, Kenya, with more than 300 voluntary commitments from governments, civil-society groups, non-governmental organisations and others, said Carbon Brief. Observers told the outlet that “these pledges must now be backed up by action”.
- HOT SEAS: Record-high global ocean temperatures in June could lead the world to “uncharted territory”, said the Financial Times. Meanwhile, the Independent reported that a species of sea star thought to be extinct was found off the coast of California.
- EU PLANS: The European parliament approved rules to allow the use of gene-edited plants, marking a “major shift” in the EU’s approach to modified crops, reported Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Grilled, a new investigative newsletter, said the EU is “considering an overhaul of how it measures methane emissions from livestock”.
- BRAZIL BLAZES: Last year, fires caused a “significant spike in forest loss” across three areas in Brazil home to Indigenous peoples living in “voluntary isolation”, according to Mongabay. Indigenous leaders told the outlet that fire “affects their productive practices and destroys the biodiversity and vegetation they depend on”.
- DISCLOSURE DISPARITY: The Biodiversity Footprint Company analysed the climate- and biodiversity-related disclosures of “120 of the world’s largest listed companies”. It found that “companies disclose roughly two-thirds of assessed climate information, yet less than one-20th of the equivalent biodiversity information”.
- FRUITLESS: Fruit growers across the US south-western state of Utah “are reporting near-total harvest losses”, reported High Country News. It noted that a warm, dry winter, followed by a “record-breaking spring heatwave”, led orchards to bloom early, but the crop was then “devasta[ed]” by a “series of April freezes”.
Spotlight
‘Up and running immediately’: what’s next for the High Seas Treaty
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, about the High Seas Treaty (also known as the agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction, or BBNJ). This interview was conducted at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Carbon Brief: What connects BBNJ and climate change?
Rebecca Hubbard: The high seas cover half of the planet, or two-thirds of the global ocean. The ocean is essential for many things, including producing oxygen, absorbing carbon and absorbing the enormous amount of excessive heat we’ve produced as a result of burning fossil fuels. The ocean, including the high seas, cannot perform its critical climate-regulating role without healthy populations, without being healthy, and – at the moment – the high seas are not protected.
In fact, only around 1% of the high seas are protected and they’re under immense pressure from shipping, fishing, pollution [and] climate change – both heating and acidification. The High Seas Treaty, for the first time ever, gives us the legal framework to be able to protect the high seas. By being able to protect and better manage the high seas, we are assuring its critical role in protecting us from the worst of climate change.
CB: What were your hopes or expectations coming into this conference?
RH: My hopes were that we would get strong engagement and leadership from African states in the High Seas Treaty and we have seen that, which is really fantastic. There’s been a lot of support, a lot of leadership from African governments on the treaty and on their ambitions to not just complete their ratification processes, but to also start looking at creating marine protected areas. They want to be engaged and involved in leading and delivering those processes and I think that’s really exciting. It’s a great opportunity for the whole world. We can really get some exciting collaborations.
CB: What has been missing from the conversation here?
RH: I actually don’t think much has been missing, because I think there’s been a lot of different conversations. There’s been conversations around the need for finance to implement the treaty and this is something that’s common across all multilateral environmental agreements – certainly no stranger to the climate process. We’re going to need this huge amount of resources to implement the treaty. Where is that money coming from?
CB: We’ve got almost exactly six months until COP1 [the first Conference of the Parties for the High Seas Treaty scheduled for January 2027]. What needs to happen between now and then?
RH: We need as many more countries to ratify as possible. We hope that well over 100 countries will be party to the agreement by COP1, so that they can be at the decision-making table. We need countries to really prepare for that COP, so that they’re ready to really efficiently make the decisions founded off all of the work that we’re done through the PrepCom [preparatory commission] meetings [and] so that we can get the rules of procedure and the subsidiary bodies that are going to be essential to an effective implementation up and running immediately.
There is so much to do and we do not have time to waste with circular negotiations, rehashing resolved issues. We also need countries to continue to prepare for implementation, particularly back in their capitals – establishing inter-ministerial committees, so that you have a cohesive and united approach from governments that reflects a whole-of-government approach. That’s what’s going to be essential for effective implementation.
Watch, read, listen
‘ELEPHANT MARSH’: Mongabay delved into the knock-on effects of a 2023 cyclone on farming households living in Malawi wetlands.
REEF RESILIENCE: In bioGraphic, journalist Claudia Geib explored the unexpected resilience of a coral reef in Miami that is home to some critically endangered species.
TRUMP VS ALGAE: The Guardian Science Weekly podcast discussed the causes of algal blooms, in light of the green algae saga at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington DC.
FRAUGHT FARMING: A century-old state law protects the water rights of just a handful of users on the Deschutes River at the expense of the region’s farmers, said Oregon Public Broadcasting.
New science
- Growing oil crops, such as oil palm and coconuts, potentially caused the long-term loss of 1.5% of global plant and animal species between 1995 and 2020, with largest impacts in the tropics | Nature Food
- “Climate-smart agriculture” is improving household resilience in Ethiopia, but scaling its benefits requires addressing “local realities and inequalities” | Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change
- Drought has been linked to “abundance declines” and range shifts in 40% of 37 birds species living in the deserts of the western US | Conservation Letters
In the diary
- 1-3 July: UN Food and Agriculture Organization global conference on “smart farming” | Rome (webcast available)
- 13-31 July: Meeting of the International Seabed Authority assembly and council | Kingston, Jamaica
- 14 July: Launch of the “state of food security and nutrition in the world” report | New York City
- 27 July-1 August: Scientific and technical subsidiary body meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity | Nairobi, Kenya
The post Cropped 1 July 2026: Heatwave scorches Europe | UK 2050 farm plan | What’s next for the High Seas Treaty appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.