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
COP30 nears its end
COP TALK: The COP30 climate summit is entering its final days in Belém – and food, forests and land have all featured across the two weeks of talks. The formal agriculture negotiations track at climate COPs is the Sharm-el-Sheikh joint work on climate action for agriculture and food security (SWJA). Talks, however, came to an abrupt halt last Thursday evening, with countries agreeing to continue discussions on a draft text – with elements ranging from agroecology to precision agriculture – in Bonn next year.
DEFORESTATION ROADMAP: WWF and Greenpeace called for a roadmap at COP30 to end deforestation. There has been a lot of chatter about roadmaps in Belém, with more than 80 countries backing calls for a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels, the Guardian said. Kirsten Schuijt from WWF told a press conference that a similar plan on ending deforestation should include “real actions and ambition to bend the curve on forest loss”. Writing for Backchannel, Colombia’s environment minister Irene Vélez-Torres said: “We need to see the global north come behind a roadmap – and quickly”. (Carbon Brief’s Daisy Dunne has started tracking the countries in favour, such as Colombia.)
CARBON MARKETS: Elsewhere at the talks, nature-based solutions featured in an early draft text of carbon market negotiations. (Carbon Brief’s Aruna Chandrasekhar took a closer look at some of these references.) In addition, the Brazilian presidency launched a global coalition of “compliance carbon markets” on 7 November, which was endorsed by 18 countries.
BIG AG IN BELÉM: More than 300 industrial agriculture lobbyists attended COP30, according to an investigation by DeSmog and the Guardian. This is a 14% increase on last year, DeSmog reported, and larger than Canada’s entire delegation. One in four agricultural lobbyists attended the talks as part of an official country delegation, the outlet noted. Elsewhere, Unearthed found that the sustainable agriculture pavilion at COP30 was “sponsored by agribiz interests linked to deforestation and anti-conservation lobbying”. Brazilian outlet Agência Pública reported that Brazil placed the “billionaire brothers” who own JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, on a “VIP list” at the summit.
TRACKING PROGRESS: A UN report found that while progress has been made towards a global pledge to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030, emissions of the potent greenhouse gas continue to rise. The report said agricultural methane is projected to increase by 4-8% by 2030, but could instead reduce by 8% with methane-reduction measures. Elsewhere, a report covered by Down to Earth found that countries need more than 1bn hectares of land, “an area larger than Australia”, to meet carbon removal pledges.
Indigenous presence in Belém
QUESTIONED PARTICIPATION: Ahead of COP30, Brazil’s presidency had expected the arrival of 3,000 Indigenous peoples in Belém. Indigenous peoples from the Amazon were at COP30 “in greater numbers than ever before”, with 900 representatives granted access to the negotiations, the New York Times reported. However, only four people from Brazil’s afro-descendant Quilombolas communities held such accreditation, Climate Home News and InfoAmazonia reported. A boat journey that took 62 Indigenous representatives across the Amazon river to attend the COP30 was covered by Folha de São Paulo, Reuters and El País.
VARIED DEMANDS: Indigenous leaders arrived in Belém with a variety of demands, including the inclusion of their land rights within countries’ climate plans, the New York Times added. It wrote that land demarcation “would provide legal protection against incursion by loggers, farmers, miners and ranchers”. Half of the group that sailed across the Amazon river were youths that brought demands from Amazon peoples to the climate summit, El País reported. A small Indigenous group from Cambodia attended COP30 to combat climate disinformation and call for ensuring Indigenous rights in forest projects, Kiri Post reported.
FROM BLOCKADES TO THE STREETS: During the first week of COP30, Indigenous protesters blocked the entrance of the conference and clashed with police officers when demanding climate action and forest protection, Reuters reported. Tens of thousands of protesters, including Indigenous peoples, took to the streets of Belém on Saturday to demand climate justice and hold a funeral for fossil fuels, Mongabay and the Guardian reported.
News and views
AGRI DISASTERS: Disasters have driven $3.26tn in agricultural losses worldwide over the past 33 years, amounting to around 4% of global agricultural GDP, according to a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The report assessed how disasters – including droughts, floods, pests and marine heatwaves – are disrupting food production, livelihoods and nutrition. It found that Asia saw nearly half of global losses, while Africa recorded the highest proportional impacts, losing 7.4% of its agricultural GDP.
WATER ‘CATASTROPHE’: Iran is facing “nationwide catastrophe” due to “worsening droughts, record-low rainfall and decades of mismanaged water resources”, Newsweek reported. According to Al Jazeera, the country is facing its sixth consecutive drought year, following high summertime temperatures. The outlet added: “Iran spends 90% of its water on low-yield agriculture in a pursuit of self-sufficiency that exacerbates drought.” BBC News reported that authorities in the country have “sprayed clouds” with salts to “induce rain, in an attempt to combat” the worsening drought.
TRUMP THREAT: The Trump administration will allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s North Slope – home to “some of the most important wildlife habitat in the Arctic” – the New York Times reported. The announcement reverses a decision made during the Biden administration to restrict development in half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the newspaper said. Separately, Reuters reported that the US Department of Agriculture directed its staff to identify grants for termination at the start of Trump’s second administration by searching for “words and phrases related to diversity and climate change”.
FIELDS FLATTENED: Thousands of acres of sugarcane plantations in the Philippines’ Visayas islands were destroyed by Typhoon Tino earlier this month, the Philippine Star reported. Damages to the country’s sugar industry have been estimated at 1.2bn Philippine dollars (£15.5m), it added. Sugar regulator administrator Pablo Luis Azcona told the Manila Times: “We have seen entire fields decimated by Tino, especially in the fourth and fifth districts of Negros Occidental, where harvestable canes were flattened and flooded. We can only hope that these fields will be able to recover.”
FARMS AND TREES: EU countries and the European parliament have provisionally agreed on an “overhaul” of farming subsidies, Reuters reported. The changes would “exempt smaller farmers from baseline requirements tying their subsidies to efforts to protect the environment” and increase their potential payments, the newswire said. Campaigners told Reuters that these changes would make farmers more vulnerable to climate change. Elsewhere, Bloomberg said EU countries are “pushing for a one-year delay” of the bloc’s planned anti-deforestation law – “seeking more time to comply” with the law compared to different proposed changes from the European Commission.
ANOTHER FUND: Brazil is mulling over the creation of a new fund for preserving different biomes, such as the Cerrado, inspired by the Amazon Fund, Folha de São Paulo reported. Discussions are underway between Brazil’s president and the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), according to the newspaper. Separately, the Washington Post reported on how Brazil’s efforts to position itself as a climate leader at COP30 has been undermined by Lula’s approval of new oil drilling in the Amazon and elimination of environmental permits.
Spotlight
Key COP30 pledges
This week, Carbon Brief outlines four of the biggest COP30 initiatives for food, land and forests.
Tropical Forest Forever Facility
Brazil’s tropical forest fund – arguably the biggest forest announcement from this year’s climate talks – was hailed by WWF and others as a “gamechanger” upon its launch almost two weeks ago. Since then, the fund has raised $5.5bn – far below even Brazil’s reduced target of $10bn by next year.
Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, Portugal, France and the Netherlands have all committed to pay into the fund, while Germany has said it will announce its contribution soon. The UK and China, on the other hand, do not plan to pay in.
Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment
This new “landmark” commitment aimed to “recognise and strengthen” the land rights on 160m hectares of Indigenous peoples and local community land by 2030, according to the Forest & Climate Leaders’ Partnership.
It has been backed by 14 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia and the UK.
Relatedly, $1.8bn has been pledged from public and private funding to help secure land rights for Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afro-descendent communities in forests and other ecosystems.
Belém Declaration on Hunger, Poverty and People-Centered Climate Action
Signatories of this declaration committed to a number of actions aiming to address the “unequal distribution of climate impacts”, including expanding social protection systems and supporting climate adaptation for small farmers.
It was adopted by 43 countries and the EU. A German minister described it as a “pioneering step in linking climate action, social protection and food security”.
Belém 4X
This initiative aimed to gather high-level support to quadruple the production and use of “sustainable fuels”, such as hydrogen and biofuels, by 2035.
It was launched by Brazil and has been backed by 23 countries so far, including Canada, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands.
However, the pledge has been “rejected” by some NGOs, including Climate Action Network and Greenpeace, who criticised the environmental impact of biofuels.
Watch, read, listen
FOOD CHAT: Bite the Talk, a podcast by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, explored the “critical intersection of climate change and nutrition”.
TRUE SAVIOURS: On Instagram, the Washington Post published a list of 50 plant and animal species that “have enriched and even saved human lives”.
NO MORE WASTE: A comment piece by the founder of London’s Community Kitchen in the Independent addressed the relevance of food waste to the climate agenda.
FOREST FRENZY: The Financial Times spoke to Amazon climate scientist Prof Carlos Nobre about tipping points and his “zeal for saving the rainforest”.
New science
- Floods led to a 4.3% global reduction in annual rice yield over 1980-2015, with crop losses accelerating after the year 2000 – “coinciding with a climate change-induced uptick in the frequency and severity” of floods | Science Advances
- Loss of African montane forests led to local “microclimate” warming of 2.0-5.6C over 2003-22, diminishing the “temperature-buffering capacity” of the forests | Communications Earth & Environment
- “Prolonged” drought is linked to an increase in conflict between humans and wildlife – especially carnivores | Science Advances
In the diary
- 10-21 November: COP30 UN climate summit | Belém, Brazil
- 22-23 November: G20 leaders’ summit | Johannesburg, South Africa
- 24-29 November: 11th session of the governing body of the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture | Lima, Peru
- 1-5 December: XIX World Water Congress | Marrakech, Morocco
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Ayesha Tandon also contributed to this issue. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 19 November 2025: COP30 edition appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Governments need to start addressing climate change impacts and nature loss as a threat to national security and manage shocks before they hit rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, Britain’s foreign minister and other leaders told the opening of Climate Week NYC on Monday.
Ed Miliband – who was until July the UK’s energy minister – said the growing urgency and severity of extreme weather and related disasters require a shift in thinking, calling on governments to put the issues “front and centre”.
“Climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers – the security community, not just the activist community, the generals, not just the green campaigner,” he told an audience of policy and business leaders.
There is a need to assess risk differently, he added, by embedding climate and nature in national security systems, threat assessments and contingency planning. He also urged countries to pool information because climate shocks can travel fast through supply chains as well as influencing financial markets and migration patterns.
The framing of climate change as a threat to countries’ security and stability is not new, but it has gained greater emphasis as the impacts of global warming are biting harder in places like Europe, which is struggling with more intense heatwaves, drought and forest fires.
In mid-August, Miliband said in a social media post, reflecting on the UK’s hot and dry summer, that he would convene foreign ministers attending the UN General Assembly in late September to discuss how to respond to “this new national security threat” and build a coalition for action. But he did not give further details of that initiative on Monday.
-
Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn
Türkiye and Australia are pushing coal, oil and gas at home with no national timeline for their own fossil fuel phase-out -
DR Congo’s power-hungry mining sector drives record solar surge
As solar deployment rapidly accelerates across Africa, miners in the DRC are driving significant demand for clean energy to replace expensive diesel
Australia calls for unified response
Other leaders in New York also reflected on the growing threat to their societies and economies from climate change impacts and exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his country “understands the dangers of global warming and the urgency of climate action as well as any nation”.
“We have seen it up close – from increasingly intense bushfires and floods, to the damage warming oceans are wreaking on our vulnerable coastlines,” he said in a speech, adding that with a record-breaking El Nino forecast, Australia and Pacific nations are preparing for a potential summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.
With scientific forecasts of worsening impacts now coming to pass, “this means the global community cannot afford to be frozen in time as the world warms around us”, he added. People cannot be left to cope alone, he said, emphasising that as leaders, “we need to come together, to meet the problem head on”.
Australia will lead the negotiations at the upcoming COP31 climate summit, and has brought the existential threat to Pacific countries from sea level rise into the diplomatic limelight. The pre-COP gathering next month will be hosted in Fiji, with a visit by leaders to Tuvalu.
Speaking to Climate Home News in New York, Panama’s environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro said the small Central American country faces hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from drought in the Panama Canal due to El Niño.
The Panama Canal Authority estimates income could be reduced by between $225 million and $400 million due to slower maritime traffic passing through the strait.
“What a great irony,” Navarro said. “Panama being a small, carbon-negative country pays the price for the big carbon-emitting countries.”
Climate investment “critical” to stability
Amina J. Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said there was a need for countries to stick with multilateral approaches to problems including climate change, despite the difficult geopolitical times the world is going through. She added, however, that it “does require your voices. It won’t happen by itself. We have to lean into it.”
The rest of the high-level UNGA week in New York will show the extent to which multilateral efforts to resolve the world’s problems – from climate change to poverty – have top-level support as leaders give their speeches, including the Brazilian and US presidents on Tuesday.
Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and geopolitics with think-tank E3G, said the statements by Miliband and other leaders at Climate Week NYC had underlined the political and government case to integrate climate considerations into security thinking and institutions at the highest level.
“In a world of escalating climate impacts and the record El Niño expected to heighten risks worldwide alongside energy volatility and geopolitical tensions, investing in global climate resilience and the clean energy transition are critical to credible strategies to enhance stability and national security,” she added in a statement.
Suneeta Kaimal from the Natural Resource Governance Initiative (NRGI) said that, while in previous years governments heavily focused their speeches on climate action, this year’s focus on energy security does not change the underlying challenge.
“The fact that the framing has changed from energy transition to energy security doesn’t change the reality that this transition needs to occur in energy systems. It’s just a different framework. It’s a more transactional framework, but it all points to the need for resilience,” she said.
Speaking at the opening session of Climate Week, Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described how her country had reacted to the spiralling costs it faced from the 1970s oil price crisis by investing in a large-scale district heating system fuelled instead by its abundant geothermal energy.
“Resilience wasn’t built while the crisis was happening. It was built in the years after – deliberately, patiently, as a national mission – so that the next shock wouldn’t hit as hard, if at all,” she said.
New COP goal on electrification
Speaking at a separate event on Monday, UN climate chief Simon Stiell pointed to a new voluntary target expected to be adopted at COP31 for 35% of global energy use to come from electricity by 2035 as a strategy that can help cushion countries, families and businesses from fossil fuel supply shocks and rising costs.
At the United Nations, the Turkish COP presidency gave more details of the electrification goal it first announced at the Bonn climate talks in June, including sharing with governments a final text of the pledge it wants them to get behind.
The pledge sets out a global ambition to advance electrification, highlighting the importance of supporting developing countries to identify their grid investment needs and access finance for electrification.
“It is a development strategy, an industrial strategy, a health strategy, and a security strategy,” Stiell said.
The post Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda
Climate Change
Albanese’s NY Climate Week address acknowledges scale of the climate challenge, but fossil fuels notably absent
SYDNEY, Tuesday 22 September 2026 — In response to Prime Minister Albanese’s keynote address at New York Climate Week, Dr Simon Bradshaw, COP31 Lead and climate expert at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“It is encouraging to see Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledging the immediate and profound climate threat to communities in the Pacific, Australia and worldwide, and the need to work together, with bravery and compassion. Now we must match those words with real action to phase out fossil fuels.
“Earlier this month in Palau, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committed Australia to helping accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and defend the crucial goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C — a survival line for Pacific island countries and all those paying the cost of our fossil fuel addiction through worsening floods, fires, drought and sea level rise.
“However, Australia continues to undermine its aspirations for global climate leadership by expanding fossil fuel production. The Albanese Government has approved an astonishing 37 new, extended or expanded coal and gas projects since first elected. Every one of which compounds the threats to our shared security and wellbeing. Remarkably, in his major climate speech in New York overnight, the Prime Minister failed to even mention fossil fuels.
“As our Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen has said, we are in a global fossil fuel crisis. Getting off fossil fuels through transitioning to renewable energy is the quickest pathway to greater security, stability and affordability for all. But right now Australia is throwing more fuel on the fire.
“We are now near certain to overshoot 1.5°C of warming. For the Pacific and Australia alike, this will be measured in more communities torn from their land and homes, and the loss of more people and places we love. There is a path back below 1.5°C of warming, and every fraction of a degree matters, but it will demand all minds and all hearts working together.
Australia fought hard for the privilege to chair the next round of global climate negotiations. The world is crying out for a clear vision and leadership from Australia as we head towards COP31 in Antalya.
“Australia must lead by example at home through an immediate end to new fossil fuel approvals, including rejecting Woodside’s mammoth Browse project. And must ensure that COP31 boosts our shared security by accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels. Get this right, and Australia will emerge as a responsible middle power and force for good in troubled times.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
This year’s so-called “super El Niño” is entering into record-breaking territory.
Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific now equal the previous daily record set in 2015 and will likely keep rising in the days ahead.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in the Pacific that reshapes weather patterns around the world and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
The current El Niño event – which has been underway since June and is expected to last until next year – has been developing faster than any previous event on record.
The strength of an event is tracked using the “Niño 3.4 anomaly”, which measures how much warmer sea surface temperatures in a section of the central Pacific are than average.
As of 19 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region stands at 3.07C, putting it in a statistical tie with the previous record of 3.08C.
Some scientists, using a different baseline for calculating the anomaly, have already called the new record.
Either way, this is remarkable, in part because of how early in the calendar year it is occurring. El Niño typically peaks in the winter months, most commonly in November or December.
Every strong El Niño on record has continued to strengthen after mid-September – and there is every reason to think that this one will as well.
(For more on El Niño, see Carbon Brief’s recent interactive explainer.)
Record territory
El Niño events are typically classed as “weak” when the Niño 3.4 anomaly reaches 0.5C, “moderate” above 1C, “strong” above 1.5C and “very strong” above 2.0C.
For this year’s event, the Niño 3.4 anomaly has now reached 3.07C, which puts it in a statistical tie with the record set on 18 November 2015, set during a “very strong” El Nino event.
The chart below shows how the strength of the current El Niño (red line) is dramatically outpacing both 2015-16 (blue) and another “very strong” event in 1997-98 (light blue).
To analyse the developing El Niño, Carbon Brief followed the convention of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Oceanic Niño index (ONI).
ONI is calculated by subtracting the latest 30-year average temperature in the Nino 3.4 region from daily sea surface temperatures. This approach allows for the most recent years to be compared against the most recent 30-year period. It removes much of the influence of longer-term, human-driven warming from the index.
(While meteorological organisations typically track changes to ONI on a three-month rolling average basis, Carbon Brief’s analysis looked at how the metric is changing on a daily basis.)
If ONI is calculated using a baseline of 1991-2020 then the current El Niño has already set a new record.
Since the start of June, El Niño’s strength has been greater than any other year. In early September in both 1997 and 2015, anomalies were around 1.9C – more than one degree below where they are this year.
An alternative index
There is another commonly used metric – the relative Oceanic Niño index (RONI) – used to study El Niño.
Introduced by NOAA in 2024, the RONI index adjusts for tropical ocean warming linked to human-caused climate change. To do this, it takes sea surface averages in the Nino 3.4 region and subtracts out temperature anomalies observed across the tropical oceans (between the latitudes of 20 degrees north and south).
This approach may better remove the influence of climate change in this specific region, but can also diminish the apparent strength of strong El Niño events, such as the current one, which extend well outside the Niño 3.4 region.
The chart below shows daily RONI values, which are record setting for this time of year, but remain below an all-time daily record set during the 1982-83 El Niño event.
RONI stood at around 2.5C in mid-September, some 0.7C below the 1982 record.
However, that record was set in late December, at the peak of the event.
The 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 events added between 0.5C and 1.9C to their RONI values between mid-September and their peaks.
On track to smash monthly and seasonal records
Because daily El Niño values are noisy, scientists typically turn to monthly or seasonal averages to compare El Niño events.
The latest full calendar month for which data is available – August 2026 – had a Niño 3.4 anomaly of around 2.45C. This is higher than the peak of every prior El Niño event on record except 2015-16 – where the anomaly reached 2.75C – and 1877-78, when the anomaly sat at around 2.7C, based on a reconstruction of sea surface temperatures using sparse ship data.
The figure below shows the monthly evolution of the five strongest El Niño events on record alongside 2026, as well the current forecast from 14 seasonal forecast models.
Taken together, the models project a peak monthly anomaly later this year of around 4.1C, with 80% of the 674 individual model runs falling between 3.4C and 4.6C.
Every single model run peaks above the 2015-16 record. The projected margin over that record, some 1.3C, is larger than the entire gap between the strongest and fifth-strongest El Niño of the past 150 years.
Some caution here is warranted, however. No seasonal forecast system has ever been verified against an event of this size, because none has ever occurred. The models also predicted temperatures slightly warmer than observed this summer, with real-world observations for August coming in around 0.3C below forecasts.
However, all strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter – and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too. If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.
El Nino’s effect on global temperatures typically lags rising ocean temperatures in the Pacific by several months, so most of the impact will be felt in 2027 rather than 2026.
Carbon Brief’s most recent “state of the climate” quarterly analysis found 2026 on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year on record. The next update in early October will examine what a record El Niño means for 2027.
The post Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record
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