Published

2 years ago

August 14, 2024

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

Key developments

Wildfires resurfaced

PANTANAL FIRES: Climate change made the wildfires that scorched the Pantanal wetlands earlier this summer 40% more intense, according to a new rapid attribution study covered by Carbon Brief. Around 2,500 fires occurred in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands in June 2024. The World Weather Attribution service found that “the month was the hottest, driest and windiest year in the 45-year record”, creating conditions that were highly conducive to wildfires. Separately, Reuters reported on a new study that found that fires, logging and “other forms of human-caused degradation, along with natural disturbances to the Amazon ecosystem, are releasing more climate-warming CO2 than clear-cut deforestation”.

EXTENDED IMPACT: In North America, 90 large fires burned nearly 4.5m acres across the US during the first days of August, the New York Times reported. The “devastating wildfires” spread ash and smoke “over large swathes of the continent…destroyed homes and charred through thousands of acres of farms and forests”, the outlet added. Particularly dry, hot weather affected the western US and caused four wildfires across Colorado, leaving one person dead and forcing hundreds of people to evacuate, according to the Washington Post.

BEYOND AMERICAN CONTINENT: On the other side of the ocean, wildfires swept Athens, where thousands of residents were evacuated as fires crossed into suburbs and flames rose up to 25 metres, BBC News reported. According to the outlet, June and July were “the hottest on record” for the European country, while Greece’s civil protection minister has “warned that extremely dangerous weather would continue”. Meanwhile, Algeria’s north-eastern Kabylie region has experienced blazes since last Friday, Agence France-Presse reported. The newswire added that homes, olive groves, hen coops and beehives were engulfed by flames. Most of the wildfires are now under control, a civil defence official said.

Offsets up in smoke

UP IN SMOKE: The Park fire – one of the “largest wildfires in California’s history” and is still blazing – destroyed around 45,000 acres of trees enrolled in the state’s carbon-offsetting programme, the Financial Times reported. According to analysis by the not-for-profit research firm Carbon Plan, cited in the story, buyers of credits included oil refining, power and lumber companies. The story also pointed to an unsold “buffer pool” of credits meant to replace losses to “credited trees” from wildfires, drought or pests. California authorities told the FT that the buffer was “quite sound”. But Carbon Plan scientist Dr Grayson Badgley said that the pool needed updating to “reflect the realities of fire risk” and that the state “should stop approving carbon credit projects in risky wildfire regions”.

STOLEN CREDIT: Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, warned international buyers of carbon credits to be “vigilant” after police uncovered “allegedly fraudulent emissions-offset schemes on stolen land in the Amazon”, the Financial Times wrote. Silva said the issue was a “serious problem” and “could damage the credibility [and] integrity of this mechanism”, the story added. Separately, Bloomberg reported that a key oversight body is set to review carbon offsets generated from forestry projects “in the coming months”, after it found methods to assess renewable energy credits to be “insufficiently rigorous”.

FOREST THINNING: Meanwhile, scientists writing in the Conversation cautioned against the Australian forest industry’s plans “to remove trees from native forests, potentially including national parks, and claim carbon credits in the process”. They pointed to Forestry Australia’s “problematic proposal” that “purports to reduce environmental impacts, but still produce wood products”. It does so through a method known as “adaptive harvesting”, which involves forest thinning, or practices such as delaying logging until trees are older. The group’s acting president, William Jackson, responded to the piece, saying that forest thinning would be “conducted for ecological reasons, cultural values or fire management or other reasons” and that he “disagrees with the view that thinning makes forests more fire prone”.

Spotlight

Joshua trees are flowering more frequently due to climate change

This week, Carbon Brief explores a new study, published in Ecology Letters, looking at the impacts of climate change on the Joshua tree, a type of yucca plant that is native to California and other parts of the south-western US.

Climate change is causing Joshua trees – the iconic plant that dots the landscape of the south-western US – to flower more frequently, a new study has found.

Despite the plant’s importance as a keystone species in the Mojave Desert and other parts of the south-west, many studies of climate impacts on Joshua trees lack nuance – in part due to the resources needed to collect field data.

Using a machine-learning model trained on crowdsourced images from the biodiversity platform iNaturalist, researchers were able to examine the impacts of climate change on the trees since 1900.

The lead author of the study told Carbon Brief that “there’s a lot of potential” to use the team’s newly developed methods to study the impacts of climate change on other flora.

Beyond binary

Much of the existing work looking at climate change impacts on Joshua trees is based on so-called “distribution models”, Prof Jeremy Yoder, an evolutionary biologist at California State University, Northridge, told Carbon Brief.

These models are based on identifying the climatic factors that are closely associated with the presence or absence of a particular species. Then, he explained, researchers can “take a future climate projection and ask where conditions will look like places where we know Joshua trees are today”.

In the new study, instead of simply looking at the distribution of the species, the researchers modelled the flowering of the trees – using specific weather data to draw connections between a flowering year and the climatic conditions leading up to it.

Using this model, they were then able to “hindcast” previous instances of Joshua tree flowering. They matched up their predicted flowering with historical botanical collections, field notes and even newspaper reports and found that they “line up pretty well”.

By taking the hindcast as a whole, the team could then explore how climate change has affected Joshua tree flowering over the past century and a quarter. Yoder told Carbon Brief:

“That’s concretely new information that we did not have about Joshua trees before.”

Flowering frequency

Overall, the researchers found a “slightly rising frequency” in the flowering of Joshua trees over the past 123 years. The flowering was most closely related to year-to-year variability in rainfall.

But increased flowering on its own might not necessarily be beneficial to the trees. “Flowering is just the first step in regenerating Joshua tree woodland,” Yoder said – meaning that more frequent blooms will not necessarily result in a growing population. While a flowering Joshua tree may produce thousands of seeds in a year, those seeds will result in just a few seedlings.

Then, it’s “an even smaller subset of seedlings that start to get to something closer to an established tree over a couple of years”, he said. And some of the conditions that seem to be influencing the flowering frequency – such as contrasts in year-to-year rainfall – are “probably not good for seedling survival”.

Beyond the scientific result, Yoder is excited by the potential for further applications of the hindcast modelling. He told Carbon Brief:

“Hopefully this is something that folks can use to start to get that richer view of what climate change is doing to natural populations.”

News and views

SKYROCKETING: Researchers have warned that the current H5N1 bird flu outbreak “could reach Australia this spring”, according to the Guardian. Australia has thus far remained bird-flu-free since the strain emerged in 2020. Although some researchers think the island’s virus risk “is low” due to the country being outside the “flyways of migratory ducks and geese, [which are] the main hosts of bird flu viruses over long distances”, others say “there is still a risk, and we need to be ready for it”. Mongabay also covered the bird flu transmission, highlighting that it is the “fastest-spreading, largest-ever outbreak” and has infected “hundreds of species pole-to-pole”. The outlet reported that the virus has spread to at least 485 bird species and 48 mammals and that “the risk to humans [is] rising”.

WHEAT STOCKS: Iraq’s wheat harvest surged more than 20% this year due to a combination of “extraordinary” rainfall and improved irrigation, Bloomberg reported. The outlet added that the harvest “marked a second year of self-sufficiency in the grain” for Iraq. Meanwhile, France is facing “one of the worst harvests in the last 40 years”, according to the French agriculture ministry, as reported by Politico. The country – which is the EU’s largest producer of soft wheat – “experienced a very wet planting season last year and not enough sun in the spring and early summer”. Farmers’ unions in France are seeking governmental assistance, the outlet said.

SEABED SHAKE-UP: Leticia Carvalho was elected the new head of the International Seabed Authority, Australia’s ABC News reported, where she “will be the first woman, first oceanographer and the first representative from Latin America to serve in this position”. Carvalho unseated the incumbent secretary-general, Michael Lodge, who has presided over the ISA since 2016. The New York Times noted that Lodge “has been a polarising figure at the seabed authority” and has faced accusations that he “was too closely aligned with the mining industry”. Prior to the election, Foreign Policy Magazine profiled Carvalho and her proposed approach to the ISA.

COCA PROBLEM: Colombia’s programme for substituting coca crops in favour of legal alternatives “is failing to achieve its goals due to design, implementation and security issues”, Mongabay reported. The outlet pointed out that coca leaf growers and pickers “haven’t received the agreed technical or financial support from the government”, resulting in lower incomes and forcing them to engage in other activities, such as illegal mining, to survive. The programme was created one year after the 2016 peace deal between Colombia’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the outlet said. It added that a recent UN assessment of the programme found that coca production has actually increased 13% between December 2021 and December 2022.

NEW SEEDS ON THE BLOCK: On 9 August, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi launched 109 “high-yielding, climate-resilient” seed varieties at three experimental plots in New Delhi, Livemint reported. Among these was a rice variety “ideal for coastal saline areas” and a wheat variety “tolerant to terminal heat”, it added. Another Livemint long-read looked at the impact of climate change on tur dal – India’s second most consumed legume – finding that dal prices soared “by a staggering 60% between July 2022 and July 2024”. Meanwhile, an Economic Times analysis found that food inflation in India “has remained above 6% since July 2023, driven mostly by vegetables”. Overall inflation climbed to 5.1% in June this year with “most of the pressure…coming from rising food prices”, Bloomberg reported.

Watch, read, listen

‘DEFORESTATION MAFIA’: Inside Climate News delved into the legal battle to save Argentina’s Gran Chaco forest from corruption and deforestation.

‘THINKING LIKE BEARS’: NPR’s Short Wave podcast addressed what scientists are doing to conserve grizzly bears in the US – including “thinking like bears”.

VULNERABLE SCIENTISTS: A Nature career feature explored the mental health issues that rainforest scientists experience while watching “the ongoing destruction of the forest[s]”.
REASONS TO WINE: In his Bloomberg column, David Fickling wrote about how a warming climate “could play havoc” with grape vines and imperil future wine production.

New science

Summer monsoon drying accelerates India’s groundwater depletion under climate change

Earth’s Future

New research found that changes in India’s summer monsoon, alongside warmer winters and increased demand, are driving “rapid depletion” of groundwater. Using satellite data, on-the-ground observations and a hydrological model, scientists observed that India’s groundwater declined substantially over 2002-21. They attributed the reduction in groundwater to “reduced groundwater recharge and enhanced pumping to meet irrigation demands” amid lower rainfall. They concluded: “Groundwater sustainability measures including reducing groundwater abstraction and enhancing the groundwater recharge during the summer monsoon seasons are needed to ensure future agricultural production.”

Highest ocean heat in four centuries places Great Barrier Reef in danger

Nature

Heat extremes in the sea containing the Great Barrier Reef over January-March in 2024, 2017 and 2020 were the “warmest in 400 years”, according to a new study. Using a multi-century reconstruction of sea surface temperature data on the Coral Sea on the Australian coast along with climate model analysis, the researchers highlighted the “existential threat” that human-caused climate change poses to the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem. Without “urgent intervention”, the researchers wrote that the reef risks “experiencing temperatures conducive to near-annual coral bleaching” in future. They noted: “In the absence of rapid, coordinated and ambitious global action to combat climate change, we will likely be witness to the demise of one of Earth’s great natural wonders.”

Marine heatwave-driven mass mortality and microbial community reorganisation in an ecologically important temperate sponge

Global Change Biology

The 2022 marine heatwave in Fiordland, New Zealand – the “strongest and longest” to occur there – killed more than half of the marine sponges living there, a new study revealed. The researchers analysed the impacts of the marine heatwave – which had a maximum temperature of 4.4C above average and lasted for 259 days – on a particular photosynthetic sponge. They suggested that what killed marine sponges was not bleaching – which affected more than 90% of the sponges – but the high temperatures killing their tissues directly. The research concluded that the remaining sponges “had mostly recovered from earlier bleaching”, probably due to a microbial community shift as an “adaptive response”.

In the diary

12-16 August: Meeting of the working group on benefit-sharing from digital sequence information | Montreal
26-30 August: Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting | Tonga
28-29 August: EU Dialogue on national biodiversity strategies and action plans | Brussels

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

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 14 August 2024: Worldwide wildfires; Offsets up in smoke; Joshua tree spotting appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Cropped 14 August 2024: Worldwide wildfires; Offsets up in smoke; Joshua tree spotting

Greenhouse Gases

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

Published

7 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Alice Rush

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

2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
3 March: UK spring statement
4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
5 March: Nepal elections

Pick of the jobs

The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil

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.

The post DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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

Greenhouse Gases

Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding

Published

9 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Alice Rush

The Lincolnshire constituency held by Richard Tice, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of the hard-right Reform party, has been pledged at least £55m in government funding for flood defences since 2024.

This investment in Boston and Skegness is the second-largest sum for a single constituency from a £1.4bn flood-defence fund for England, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

Flooding is becoming more likely and more extreme in the UK due to climate change.

Yet, for years, governments have failed to spend enough on flood defences to protect people, properties and infrastructure.

The £1.4bn fund is part of the current Labour government’s wider pledge to invest a “record” £7.9bn over a decade on protecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from flooding.

As MP for one of England’s most flood-prone regions, Tice has called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.

He is also one of Reform’s most vocal opponents of climate action and what he calls “net stupid zero”. He denies the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed, falsely and without evidence, that scientists are “lying”.

Flood defences

Last year, the government said it would invest £2.65bn on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) schemes in England between April 2024 and March 2026.

This money was intended to protect 66,500 properties from flooding. It is part of a decade-long Labour government plan to spend more than £7.9bn on flood defences.

There has been a consistent shortfall in maintaining England’s flood defences, with the Environment Agency expecting to protect fewer properties by 2027 than it had initially planned.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has attributed this to rising costs, backlogs from previous governments and a lack of capacity. It also points to the strain from “more frequent and severe” weather events, such as storms in recent years that have been amplified by climate change.

However, the CCC also said last year that, if the 2024-26 spending programme is delivered, it would be “slightly closer to the track” of the Environment Agency targets out to 2027.

The government has released constituency-level data on which schemes in England it plans to fund, covering £1.4bn of the 2024-26 investment. The other half of the FCERM spending covers additional measures, from repairing existing defences to advising local authorities.

The map below shows the distribution of spending on FCERM schemes in England over the past two years, highlighting the constituency of Richard Tice.

Map of England showing that Richard Tice's Boston and Skegness constituency is set to receive at least £55m for flood defences between 2024 and 2026 — Flood-defence spending on new and replacement schemes in England in 2024-25 and 2025-26. The government notes that, as Environment Agency accounts have not been finalised and approved, the investment data is “provisional and subject to change”. Some schemes cover multiple constituencies and are not included on the map. Source: Environment Agency FCERM data.

By far the largest sum of money – £85.6m in total – has been committed to a tidal barrier and various other defences in the Somerset constituency of Bridgwater, the seat of Conservative MP Ashley Fox.

Over the first months of 2026, the south-west region has faced significant flooding and Fox has called for more support from the government, citing “climate patterns shifting and rainfall intensifying”.

He has also backed his party’s position that “the 2050 net-zero target is impossible” and called for more fossil-fuel extraction in the North Sea.

Tice’s east-coast constituency of Boston and Skegness, which is highly vulnerable to flooding from both rivers and the sea, is set to receive £55m. Among the supported projects are beach defences from Saltfleet to Gibraltar Point and upgrades to pumping stations.

Overall, Boston and Skegness has the second-largest portion of flood-defence funding, as the chart below shows. Constituencies with Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs occupied the other top positions.

Chart showing that Conservative, Reform and Liberal Democrat constituencies are the top recipients of flood defence spending — Top 10 English constituencies by FCERM funding in 2024-25 and 2025-26. Source: Environment Agency FCERM data.

Overall, despite Labour MPs occupying 347 out of England’s 543 constituencies – nearly two-thirds of the total – more than half of the flood-defence funding was distributed to constituencies with non-Labour MPs. This reflects the flood risk in coastal and rural areas that are not traditional Labour strongholds.

Reform funding

While Reform has just eight MPs, representing 1% of the population, its constituencies have been assigned 4% of the flood-defence funding for England.

Nearly all of this money was for Tice’s constituency, although party leader Nigel Farage’s coastal Clacton seat in Kent received £2m.

Reform UK is committed to “scrapping net-zero” and its leadership has expressed firmly climate-sceptic views.

Much has been made of the disconnect between the party’s climate policies and the threat climate change poses to its voters. Various analyses have shown the flood risk in Reform-dominated areas, particularly Lincolnshire.

Tice has rejected climate science, advocated for fossil-fuel production and criticised Environment Agency flood-defence activities. Yet, he has also called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.

This may reflect Tice’s broader approach to climate change. In a 2024 interview with LBC, he said:

“Where you’ve got concerns about sea level defences and sea level rise, guess what? A bit of steel, a bit of cement, some aggregate…and you build some concrete sea level defences. That’s how you deal with rising sea levels.”

While climate adaptation is viewed as vital in a warming world, there are limits on how much societies can adapt and adaptation costs will continue to increase as emissions rise.

The post Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding

Greenhouse Gases

Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate

Published

2 days ago

February 25, 2026

Alice Rush

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.
Subscribe for free here.

Key developments

Food inflation on the rise

DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.

Sign up to Carbon Brief’s free “Cropped” email newsletter. A fortnightly digest of food, land and nature news and views. Sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.

NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.

‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.

El Niño looms

NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”

WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”

CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.

News and views

DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.

Spotlight

Nature talks inch forward

This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.

The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.

The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.

The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.

Money talks

Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.

Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.

Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.

Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).

Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:

“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”

Monitoring and reporting

Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.

Parties do so through the submission of national reports.

Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.

A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.

Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:

“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”

Watch, read, listen

NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.

COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.

HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.

‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.

New science

Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food