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
G7 eyes food progress
ITALY MEETING: The Group of Seven (G7) nations met in Italy last week to discuss a range of issues spanning war and hunger to climate change and energy. The summit saw the seven major economies launch a new initiative for tackling hunger, Reuters reported. Known as the G7 Apulia Food Systems Initiative (AFSI) – named after the Southern Italian region where the summit took place – the proposal aims to “overcome structural barriers to food security and nutrition”, according to a declaration published after the event. According to the newswire, the initiative will focus on low-income countries and support projects in Africa, “one of the top priorities under Italy’s rotating G7 presidency this year”. It added that details of the scheme will be agreed by G7 development ministers in the coming months.
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AFRICA LEFT OUT: Despite having a focus on Africa, agricultural leaders from the continent told Reuters they were not consulted about the new scheme. Ibrahima Coulibaly, president of the West African Network of Peasants and Agricultural Producers, told the newswire: “It is missing family farmers organisations that have not been involved even though small-scale producers will be key to its success.” In African Arguments, Madagascar’s agricultural minister Suzelin Rakotoarisolo Ratohiarijaona was also critical of the lack of involvement of African smallholder farmers in the new scheme, saying: “It’s telling that the Apulia Initiative was developed without their input. If this doesn’t change, it can’t hope to understand or address the daily challenges they face.” He added that the scheme must channel new finance towards grassroots groups and “encourage a shift to more diverse and nature-friendly forms of agriculture”.
‘ZERO’ HARVESTS: The new initiative came as the chief officer of the World Food Programme told BBC News that parts of Africa, as well as the Middle East and Latin America, are now unable to sustain crops due to constant floods and droughts, leaving people completely reliant on humanitarian aid. WFP director Martin Frick told the broadcaster that some of the poorest regions had now reached a tipping point of having “zero” harvests left, as “extreme weather was pushing already degraded land beyond use”. In the east African nation of Burundi, months of heavy rain and flooding has left 10% of all farmland unusable, Frick told BBC News. In the Darfur region of Sudan, cereal crop yields are 78% below the average for the previous five-year average amid drought and civil war, he added.
Food price spikes continue
MULTIPLE CROPS AND CAUSES: Consumers have recently experienced sustained increases in the prices of a range of foods. These price spikes have been attributed to various factors, ranging from climate change and harmful agricultural practices to the international economy and geopolitical tensions. Carbon Brief has just published an article that gathers the views of experts in the agrifood sector on the major causes of this global problem that is already putting pressure on producers, intermediaries and consumers.
CLIMATE-RELATED IMPACTS: Extreme weather events and diseases are hampering harvests and driving up orange prices in Brazil and Florida, Axios reported. The outlet added that in Florida, citrus production has declined 3% on average annually since 2003 and that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the price of oranges globally rose from $2.76 in 2023 to $3.68 in April this year. Prof Andy Challinor, professor of climate impacts at the University of Leeds, told Carbon Brief that “climate change is beginning to outpace us because it is interacting with our complex interrelated economic and food systems”.
CONFLICT REPERCUSSIONS: Dr Rob Vos, director for markets, trade and institutions at the International Food Policy Research Institute, told Carbon Brief that the highest inflation rates have been seen in countries with food systems “disrupted by intensified conflict”, such as Ethiopia, Gaza, Haiti and Sudan. He added that countries with macroeconomic constraints and weak currencies, such as Argentina, Venezuela and Turkey, are also particularly hard-hit. Bloomberg reported that access to agricultural land and workforce reduction due to the war in Gaza has caused Israel’s 29 largest food companies to increase their prices by as much as 30% since January.
UNSUSTAINABLE FARMING: Levi Sucre, coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, told Carbon Brief that overexploitation of land and the use of agrochemicals have increased the demand for fertilisers and the costs of production. For instance, Dr Innocent Okuku, executive secretary of the West African Fertiliser Association, told the Nigerian newspaper Daily Trust that application of fertilisers by smallholder farmers “is getting lower because of the issues around availability and cost”. The most affected are “people with the least resources”, says Sucre. Amongst those “highly vulnerable to food insecurity” are small island developing states, given that less than 1% of their land is devoted to agriculture, 70% of them face the risk of water scarcity and all have lost almost 7% of their agricultural GDP to climate-related disasters, Forbes reported.
Spotlight
Progress on agrifood systems at Bonn
In this spotlight, Carbon Brief explores the progress made regarding agriculture and food security at the recent Bonn climate talks.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) formally addresses issues and works towards solutions in agriculture and food systems through the Sharm el-Sheikh joint work on implementation of climate action on agriculture and food security (SSJW).
When SSJW negotiations ended at COP28 in Dubai, several experts told Carbon Brief that those outcomes had been disastrous, with the only tangible result of the summit being an “informal note”, which “essentially means, ‘we talked, we’ll talk again’”, Teresa Anderson, global climate justice lead at ActionAid, told Carbon Brief at the time.
The major sticking points at COP28 were the subject matter of a series of workshops to be held under the SSJW umbrella and the creation of a “coordination group” to oversee the implementation of the recommendations from those workshops.
‘Surprisingly sensible’
In contrast to COP28, this round of negotiations at Bonn were “surprisingly sensible”, Anderson said. Marie Cosquer, an advocacy analyst at Action Against Hunger, told Carbon Brief that “the vibe was nothing like Dubai” and the “parties started to engage constructively from the beginning”.
To begin with, Cosquer said, a “non-paper” with proposals, circulated by the EU negotiators ahead of the negotiations, allowed parties to react and “slowly became a way forward for consensus”. In addition, the G77 plus China negotiating group – who had advocated strenuously for the coordination group in Dubai – took a less hardline stance on the creation of the group.
The negotiators ultimately agreed upon two workshop topics: one on “systemic and holistic approaches to implementation of climate action on agriculture, food systems and food security” and the other on “progress, challenges and opportunities related to identifying needs and accessing means of implementation for climate action in agriculture and food security”.
Roadmap
The draft conclusions from Bonn also provide a roadmap for the remainder of the SSJW’s mandate, which runs to COP31 in November 2026. It lays out that the online portal, where parties will be able to upload their submissions for each workshop, should be developed over the next five months and presented at COP29 in November.
Clement Metivier, acting head of international advocacy at WWF-UK, said the roadmap was an “important and positive breakthrough”. It represented a “prime opportunity for governments to prioritise systemic and holistic approaches to transforming our food systems and make them healthy, resilient and equitable”, he added:
“There is no time to waste.”
News and views
EU RESTORATION LAW: EU ministers have approved the bloc’s nature restoration law, “despite stiff opposition to the plans and threats by Austria that it would seek to annul the outcome of the vote”, the Financial Times reported. The FT said “last-minute changes of heart from Austria and Slovakia” allowed the law to pass. However, the vote from Austria came from climate minister Leonore Gewessler, a Green party politician, who did not obtain approval from her coalition government partner, the conservative Austrian People’s Party, the FT said. In a letter to Belgium, which is currently holding the EU presidency, Austria’s chancellor Karl Nehammer, from the People’s Party, said Austria’s vote was “unlawful” and that his party would seek criminal charges against Gewessler for “alleged abuse of power”, the FT added.
FLOODS AND FOOD: Flooding in southern Brazil that started last month has caused $2.2bn in damages, including $680m in agricultural losses, according to Brazil Reports. The outlet added that “agribusiness is by far the most affected economic sector”, citing a study that found that the floods could cut agricultural GDP by up to 3.5%. Meanwhile, extreme weather in China is “raising concerns about food security” there, CNN reported. High temperatures and severe drought are impacting the northern part of the country while “heavy rains inundate the south”, the outlet said. It noted that the spring and summer planting seasons have been disrupted in key rice- and wheat-producing regions.
COTTON CROPS: High temperatures are “threatening cotton production” in the world’s fifth-largest cotton producer, Pakistan, Bloomberg reported. Nearly 10% of the total crop in Sindh – “one of the country’s most fertile provinces” – has been damaged by heat already, the outlet added, and “the situation is poised to get worse”. According to the country’s meteorological department, the month of June will bring rapid-onset “flash” drought, which can result in water shortages, wildfire and crop failure. Bloomberg added: “Besides cotton, excessive heat is also affecting sugarcane, exportable fruits like mangoes, citrus, banana and seasonal vegetables like chillies, tomato, potato and some lentils.”
ALGERIA RIOTS: The Associated Press reported that “violent riots erupted in a drought-stricken Algerian desert city last weekend after months of water shortages left taps running dry and forced residents to queue to access water for their households”. In the central Algerian city of Tiaret, “protestors wearing balaclavas set tires aflame and set up make-shift barricades blocking roads to protest their water being rationed”, AP said. It continued: “The unrest followed demands from President Abdelmajid Tebboune to rectify the suffering. At a council of ministers meeting last week, he implored his cabinet to implement ‘emergency measures’ in Tiaret. Several government ministers were later sent to ‘ask for an apology from the population’ and to promise that access to drinking water would be restored.”
Watch, read, listen
MOSQUITOES TO THE RESCUE: NPR reported on how scientists are transporting hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes to Hawaii to try to save their native bird species.
DEEP DIVE: On Last Week Tonight, comedian John Oliver dived into the controversy surrounding deep-sea mining. (Note, unfortunately, this is not available to watch in the UK.)
ANCESTRAL FORESTS: Nautilus chronicled an expedition to Hoh Rainforest in Washington state, “one of the largest old-growth temperate rainforests in the world”.
AFFECTED FISHERMEN: A multimedia story by InfoNile explored the impacts of overexploitation and illegal taxes by militias on fish production in Africa’s Lake Edward.
New science
Communications Earth & Environment
The increasing number of days without sea ice in southern and western Hudson Bay, an inland marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean in Canada, could make the loss of polar bears from this region “inevitable”, even if efforts are pursued to limit future climate change, new research found. The study drew on the latest high-resolution climate models to project the length of the ice-free period in Hudson Bay. The authors said: “Limiting global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels may prevent the ice-free period from exceeding 183 days…providing some optimism for adult polar bear survival. However, with longer ice-free periods already substantially impacting recruitment, extirpation for polar bears in this region may already be inevitable.”
Intensified future heat extremes linked with increasing ecosystem water limitation
Earth System Dynamics
According to a new study, increasing water stress in land ecosystems will likely amplify the effects of extreme heat on people and wildlife globally. The researchers explained that while heat extremes “are mostly introduced by atmospheric circulation patterns”, they can be mitigated by ecosystems, which can provide a natural cooling service through plant transpiration and soil evaporation when there are ample water supplies. However, when water supplies in ecosystems are limited, heat extremes can be amplified, the new research found. The authors said: “We identify hotspot regions in tropical South America and across Canada and northern Eurasia where relatively strong trends towards increased ecosystem water limitation jointly occur with amplifying heat extremes.”
Early-stage loss of ecological integrity drives the risk of zoonotic disease emergence
Journal of the Royal Society Interface
The emergence of new diseases from animals – known as “zoonotic diseases” – is “strongly linked” to human pressures on biodiversity, new research suggested. The study updated the most comprehensive zoonotic emerging infectious disease event database with the latest reported events to analyse the relationship between new outbreaks and human pressures on ecosystems. The authors said: “We found emerging infectious disease risk was strongly predicted by structural integrity metrics such as human footprint and ecoregion intactness, in addition to environmental variables such as tropical rainforest density and mammal species richness.” Emerging infectious disease events “were more likely to occur in areas with intermediate levels of compositional and structural integrity, underscoring the risk posed by human encroachment into pristine, undisturbed lands”, the authors added.
In the diary
- 17-20 June: 67th meeting of the Global Environment Fund (GEF) council | Washington DC
- 18-21 June: ICLEI (Local governments for sustainability) World Congress 2024 | São Paulo, Brazil
- 19-21 June: G20 third climate and environment sustainability working group meeting | Manaus, Brazil
- 24-26 June: Organisational meeting of the Preparatory Commission for the Entry Into Force of the BBNJ Agreement and the convening of the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the agreement | New York City
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 19 June 2024: Why food prices are spiking; Bonn climate talks; Plunging polar bear populations appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus
China and Australia drove global decline in new capacity additions in 2025, but planned production kept growing
To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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