We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
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Key developments
Flooded food baskets
AG EMERGENCY: Flash flooding has destroyed thousands of acres of crops in Punjab, a province that accounts for 68% of Pakistan’s total annual food grain production, Bloomberg reported. Around 60% of the province’s rice crops and 30% of its sugarcane have been lost, according to preliminary estimates by the Pakistan Business Forum. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported that the forum has written to the prime minister to ask the government to declare an “agricultural emergency”. The New York Times spoke to farmers affected by the flooding.
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CROSS-BORDER IMPACTS: In Indian Punjab, at least 148,000 hectares of cropland have been “submerged” by floodwaters, BBC News reported. It continued: “Punjab is often referred to as the ‘food basket’ of India and is a major source for agricultural production, particularly of staples like wheat and rice.” It added that a “quarter of Punjab’s 30 million people depend on agriculture” for their livelihoods. The Guardian spoke to Indian farmers left reeling from the impacts of flooding on their crops. Reuters reported that flooding has driven up the prices of aromatic basmati rice, grown exclusively in India and Pakistan.
CLIMATE ‘VULNERABLE’: In its coverage, Al Jazeera reported that there has not yet been a formal assessment of the role of climate change in the ongoing floods, but it is likely to be a key factor in their severity. It added that Pakistan “ranks among the top 10 most climate-vulnerable nations, but it contributes less than 1% of global emissions”. The Washington Post covered how deforestation has conspired with accelerating glacier melt and harsher monsoon rains to drive worse flash floods in the country.
‘Tropical forests forever’
FLAGSHIP FUND: Brazil is planning to make its Tropical Forest Forever Facility one of two priority initiatives at the COP30 climate summit in the Amazon city of Belém in November, according to a Financial Times report from São Paulo and Brasília. First proposed at COP28 in 2023, the facility aims to leverage finance from developed nations and philanthropic foundations to make protecting tropical forests in developing nations profitable, the Financial Times explained in a second report.
RAISING BILLIONS: A “crucial” aspect of the plan is to “not rely on donations”, the newspaper said, adding: “Instead it would be financed entirely by interest-bearing debt.” It noted that the fund “would become the world’s biggest ‘blended finance’ vehicle if it can get anywhere close to its target size [of $125bn]”. There are 74 developing countries with a total of more than 1bn hectares of tropical forests that could be eligible for the scheme if they can prove that they have an annual deforestation rate of less than 0.5%, the newspaper added.
SUBSIDY REFORM: Meanwhile, Astrid Schomaker, the executive secretary of the UN biodiversity convention, has written to countries urging them to identify subsidies that are harmful to nature in their long-overdue national biodiversity plans and “take concrete implementation action” to reform them. Reducing the amount spent on subsidies harmful to nature by $500bn by 2030 was one of the targets of the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). However, countries have so far done little to identify such spending or conceptualise paths for reform at talks following the agreement of the GBF, Carbon Brief reporting has shown.
News and views
TREATY AHOY?: Two more countries – Cape Verde and Saint Kitts and Nevis – ratified the landmark High Seas Treaty during preparatory meetings last week, Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported. Grenada and Cambodia also ratified the agreement, meaning only four more countries need to officially sign before the treaty can enter into force. Separately, the Philippines “br[oke new] ground” by establishing the 370-acre Bitaug marine protected area, creating a “safe space” for sharks and rays and allowing revenue-sharing from eco-tourism, Forbes reported.
ACT-ING UP: ACT, part of New Zealand’s ruling coalition, called for the country to leave the “broken” Paris Agreement, citing the “real cost to firms, farms and families” from net-zero targets, Radio New Zealand reported. The country’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, pushed back against pulling out from the accord, it added, telling reporters that it would be the “quickest way” to hurt New Zealand farmers and that “competitor countries would like nothing more than to see New Zealand products off their shelves”.
FIRE-PROOFING: In the aftermath of August’s “heatwave-fuelled” wildfires, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced a 10-point plan to prepare the country for climate change, including a “rethink of forest management and land use”, the Guardian reported. Sanchez was quoted as saying: “If we don’t want to bequeath our children a Spain that’s grey from fire and flames, or a Spain that’s brown from floods, then we need a Spain that’s greener.” CBS News reported that two climate activists were arrested for throwing paint at Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia while protesting government “complicity” in the fires, which they attributed to livestock farming.
OCTOPUS ‘PLAGUE’: An unusual explosion in octopus numbers in English waters this summer has left UK shellfish harvesters at a loss, Agence France-Presse reported. A long-lasting marine heatwave gave a boost to octopus populations earlier in the year, delighting some fishers that were able to profit from the boom, but harming others that make a living from shellfish, the newswire said. “The tentacled molluscs are notoriously voracious eaters, hoovering up crustaceans such as crabs and shellfish,” the article explained, adding that many UK crab potters found their traps empty when octopus numbers increased.
JAGUARS RETURN: Jaguar numbers in Mexico have risen by 30% over the past 15 years following a “conservation drive”, the Guardian reported. Based on a census carried out with 920 motion-capture cameras across 414,000 hectares, researchers estimated that there are now 5,326 jaguars in Mexico, the newspaper said. A local expert listed three main reasons for the uptick: “Maintaining natural protected areas where jaguars can roam freely, reducing the conflict between cattle ranchers and jaguars and a publicity campaign that has put the jaguar on the map.”
LEGAL EFFORTS: Four residents of the Indonesian island of Pari are seeking damages from the world’s largest cement producer, the Swiss company Holcim, due to the impact of climate change on their lives, Reuters reported. A hearing was held in the Swiss city of Zug on 3 September, but ended with no decision, according to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Elsewhere, Climate Home News reported on how farmers in Zambia are threatening to sue a Chinese copper company following a “massive toxic spill”.
Spotlight
Grains of truth
This week, Cropped talks to the authors of a new graphic novel about food sovereignty and resilient rice cultures in India’s eastern Indigenous heartlands.
The eastern Indian state of Jharkhand is better known for its rich coal reserves than for its grain.
Unlike India’s breadbasket in the north-west, less than 10% of Jharkhand’s cultivated land is irrigated, making its rainfed paddy highly reliant on a changing Indian monsoon.
In 2022, the state received its lowest rainfall in 121 years.
‘Plastic’ rice
The previous year, many of Jharkhand’s Indigenous villages were among the first to taste the outcome of a new Indian government strategy to combat malnutrition and anaemia: fortified rice.
Essentially, “fortification” involves mixing broken rice kernels and rice powder with nutrients, such as iron and vitamin B12. After being passed through an extrusion machine, these new “grains” are then mixed with regular rice that is distributed to India’s poor under India’s National Food Security Act, the world’s largest and most far-reaching food safety scheme.
According to a three-part investigation by journalist Anumeha Yadav in the Wire, Jharkhand’s Indigenous rice-growing communities were not convinced of the new grain’s benefits, dubbing it “plastic rice” and questioning its effects on their health.
The Indian government attributed farmers’ reactions to a “lack of awareness” and has since expanded the programme.
Yadav’s reportage led to the publication of a new graphic novel, Our Rice Tastes of Spring, illustrated by Bangalore-based studio Spitting Image.
Yadav told Carbon Brief she wrote the novel to document diverse food cultures and as a response to “tech fixes” being promoted to address climate change and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
According to Yadav, there’s widespread consensus that farming methods ushered in by the Green Revolution have made diets cereal-heavy and depleted India’s soils, meaning the “food we’re eating is much, much worse than what even our parents ate”.
At the same time, the industrial agricultural industry – and even some NGOs – are pushing a “tech fix” aimed at India’s poor that “makes money for themselves”, she added.
Drawn from real life
Lead illustrator Sandhya Visvanathan told Carbon Brief she combined Yadav’s photographs – of “life and people as they are” on Jharkhand’s Netarhat plateau – with “painterly” drawings of daily life in a community “whose lives are intertwined with the land”.
While the plot is set in a fictional Indigenous village, the conversations, rituals and rice varieties the book depicts are very real.
For instance, Ranikajal rice grows longer stems as floodwaters rise and iron-rich red Agni-sal grain has stems known to resist even cyclones.
Anumeha warns that many of these varieties – and the creative, traditional knowledge systems associated with them – are at risk of being lost forever, as India promotes and procures input-intensive white rice.
She concluded:
“Many people looked at the images and said: ‘Hey, that seed used to grow here.’ But there’s also a question of dignity and agency here: even farmers know there is corporate interest involved in these saviour[-like] solutions. Someone actually said that to me: ‘The market is not the only principle in our life.’”
Watch, read, listen
SECTS, SOYA AND CATTLE: A new documentary by the Gecko Project investigated the key drivers behind the worst fires on record in Bolivia’s Chiquitano forest.
DURIAN DURIAN: The New York Times profiled “self-described fanatics” of the “odoriferous” durian fruit, who gathered in Puerto Rico to sample durian in a “judgment-free zone”.
SAVING THE ‘FATTEST PARROT’: The Guardian reported on efforts to protect New Zealand’s kakapos, the “world’s fattest parrot”, by vaccinating them against bird flu.
BEGIN AGAIN: A Financial Times column explored how “why veganism lost” out to “influencers and gym bros” pushing protein and how it could regain momentum in the public.
New science
- Human impacts on global marine ecosystems are expected to more than double by the mid-century | Science
- Deforestation accounted for about three-quarters of the reduction in rainfall and surface temperature increase recorded during the dry season in the Brazilian Amazon over the past 35 years | Nature Communications
- Nearly 40% of the world’s transboundary river basins could see conflicts arising from water scarcity in 2041-50, although these conflicts could be mitigated by “proactive measures” | Nature Communications
In the diary
- 18 September: Earthed Summit 2025: Generation Restoration | London
- 19 September: Call for evidence on EU fertiliser product regulation | Online
- 21-28 September: New York Climate Week | New York City
- 24 September: UN General Assembly high-level week climate summit | New York City
- 29 September-1 October: FAO global conference on sustainable livestock transformation | Rome
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 10 September 2025: Flooded ‘food baskets’; Brazil eyes forest finance; Resilient rice appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 10 September 2025: Flooded ‘food baskets’; Brazil eyes forest finance; Resilient rice
In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.
As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.
After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.
Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.
The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas.
International campaign lacks domestic punch
Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.
It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.
Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.
“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”
The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.
President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.
Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.
Single-use plastics ban
To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.
But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs.
Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.
The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.
To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.
Türkiye’s other flagship waste prevention measure is a tax on plastic bags, which led to an immediate drop in usage when introduced in 2019. But, despite rampant inflation, the tax has risen from 0.25TL in 2019 to just 1TL ($0.02), meaning it’s several times less in real terms than in 2019.
“You can’t even buy chewing gum with one lira,” said Gündoğdu. “If you see one lira on the ground, you will not take it. So that’s why it’s meaningless.” Butan added that the government did not invest in creating behavioural changes among the public, such as encouraging them to shop with reusable textile tote bags. “They just put in the tax and they didn’t do the rest,” he said.
Landfills tidied up but still leaking methane
While the amount of waste generated keeps rising, there has been progress in dealing with the waste so that it is at least out of sight. Official statistics suggest more and more of it is being collected and, while the vast majority is still sent to landfill rather than recycled, those landfills are now covered and more advanced than they used to be.
On the outskirts of Ankara, waste management company ITC gave Climate Home News a presentation showing one such transformation. A before image shows what the nearby Mamak landfill looked like in 2006 – a huge open pile of garbage known in Türkiye as a “wild landfill”.
Another image shows what the site looks like now with the rubbish covered up with soil. ITC says that Ankara’s garbage is brought to them on trucks, and sorted into recyclables and biodegradable waste, which is then turned into compost or burned for energy. Waste heat is used to grow blueberries, tomatoes and lavender or to warm shoppers in a nearby branch of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
But despite this progress, satellite observations from Carbon Mapper shows the site is still leaking methane – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Exactly how much is unclear from Carbon Mapper’s limited observations but the nearby Sincan landfill leaks about 1,200 kilogrammes of methane an hour into the atmosphere. Climate Home News analysis suggests this does similar damage to the climate as 73,000 petrol cars. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.
In October, a Guardian investigation showed these methane leaks were happening at landfills across Türkiye and are some of the worst in the world. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) said they were “mind-boggingly large”. Aside from the climate damage, local residents near one Istanbul landfill report a smell so bad they told the Guardian they have to sleep with their windows closed even on hot summer nights.
Waste imports from Europe
Dealing with its own growing waste is difficult enough, but Türkiye also imports mountains of plastic from its European neighbours too. Ever since China restricted waste imports, the European Union has exported more plastic waste to Türkiye than to any other nation by far.
Despite European Commission concerns about how well Türkiye deals with the waste, the trade is expected to grow as an EU ban on exports to non-OECD countries – a category that does not include Türkiye – comes into force on November 21.
The export of waste to Türkiye has seen European countries accused of waste imperialism. Butan and Gündoğdu said Türkiye should ban waste imports. But COP31 President and Turkish environment minister Kurum pushed back on this during a press conference in Trabzon in September.
“You called it waste imperialism,” he said through a translator, but “nobody is forcing anyone” to import waste. He added that handling the waste creates jobs in Türkiye and that it doesn’t matter to the environment where the waste is recycled as long as it is.
But most of Türkiye’s municipal waste is currently not recycled. Turkish official Yıldırım said that the country’s recovery rate is currently around 30%. The most recent statistics available from the EU suggest Türkiye in 2020 had a recycling rate of 12%. The EU country average in 2024 was about 50%.
At the zero waste centre in Ankara, Yıldırım said Türkiye is improving its recycling rate and wants to do even more. The aim, he said, is to reach a rate of 70% by an unspecified date, up there with global frontrunners like Germany.
To achieve that, he said Türkiye is raising awareness of the importance of recycling including through cartoons for children and initiatives for football supporters to collect and redistribute unwanted toys.
As he spoke to journalists, a portrait of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ made from buttons, a sultan made from old plastic straws and a horse and wolf made from metal cogs and screws looked on. “The world is something that has been entrusted to us, and waste is something you steal from the future,” said Yıldırım.
Climate Home News’ travel and accommodation for the trip on which much of this article was reported was funded by the Turkish government.
The post Türkiye pushes “zero waste” at COP31, but is it delivering at home? appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/11/11/turkiye-pushes-zero-waste-at-cop31-but-is-it-delivering-at-home/