Published

5 months ago

July 2, 2025

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

Roadless rule

ROADLESS RULE NO MORE: The US agriculture department announced last week that it plans to “rescind a decades-old rule that protects 58.5m acres [236,741km2] of national forestland from road construction and timber harvesting”, the Los Angeles Times reported. The “Roadless Rule” has been in place since 2001 and “established lasting protection for specific wilderness areas within the national forests”, the outlet continued. US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins called the rule “outdated”, while environmental groups “condemned the decision and vowed to take the administration to court”, according to the Washington Post.

PUBLIC LANDS PRESSURE: Amid Republican opposition, Utah senator Mike Lee pulled his “controversial proposal” to sell off public lands for housing developments from the “sprawling” domestic policy bill known as the “Big Beautiful Bill”, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. According to Politico, Lee blamed “misinformation” for the provision’s lack of support, even though, “in reality, he faced stiff opposition from western Republicans from states with large public land holdings”. On Tuesday, the Senate “narrowly approved” the bill, which now has to return to the House – where “many members have balked at the Senate’s changes to the measure” – for further approval, the Washington Post said.

BACK ONLINE: The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) is back online following a “months-long shutdown” due to the Trump administration’s “slash[ing]” of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) budget, Devex reported. The publication called the site’s restoration a “welcome development for aid agencies around the world” and noted that FEWS NET is “widely regarded as the world’s most reliable early-warning system for food insecurity”. Updated data is “expected to be available by October 2025”, said a spokesperson for FEWS NET.

Bonn to Belém

FOOD-CLIMATE NEXUS: While “agenda fights”, finance and threats to multilateralism dominated the narrative at Bonn climate talks that concluded last week, food discussions were “potentially productive”, observers told Carbon Brief. The meeting featured the first of two workshops under the Sharm-el-Sheikh joint work on climate action, agriculture and food security – the only dedicated forum for agriculture in UN climate talks. Action Aid’s Teresa Anderson told Carbon Brief: “Agriculture negotiations are now reaping the bitter harvest from Baku. After initial resistance, negotiations resulted in more targeted and potentially useful guidance to at least help identify finance gaps in agriculture.”

SECOND CHANCES: A Down to Earth comment by Indian agricultural economist Smita Sirohi described the workshop as “a “second chance to reframe the debate” around agriculture and climate to ensure more focus on adaptation, not just mitigation. While countries shared their experiences with “systemic and holistic approaches” to integrating climate into national food plans, finance for these approaches was still a sticking point. Anderson added that many governments “[came] to the conclusion that agroecology is the most effective way to achieve multiple climate and development goals”. (For more, read Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of the meeting.)

ENDS WITHOUT MEANS: Adaptation was at the forefront in Bonn. Before the start of the conference, countries “miraculously” narrowed down a list of “indicators” for the global goal on adaptation (GGA) from 9,000 to 490. Key divisions emerged between developed and developing countries on whether to include indicators on “means of implementation” (MOI) – shorthand for finance – as well as language around “transformational” adaptation. The final text invited experts to continue refining GGA indicators to a manageable 100, it included MOI indicators that developing countries viewed as a win.

FOREST FUND: More countries and private-sector groups supported Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Fund during London Climate Action Week, a statement said, but there is currently no funding estimate available ahead of its launch at COP30. Brazil is aiming for “$4-5bn per year for the investment in forests, 20% of that being destined for Indigenous [peoples] and local communities”, the country’s environment and climate minister, Marina Silva, told Carbon Brief at an event last week at the Brazilian embassy in London. Silva added: “It is not donation, it is not charity…We can have a fund that will be remunerating those who protect their forests – be they communities or private owners.” Elsewhere, Brazil and the UN held the first “global ethical stocktake” in London to hear from civil society before COP30.

Spotlight

How extreme weather is impacting India’s ‘food in 10 minutes’ delivery drivers

This week, Cropped’s Mumbai-based reporter Aruna Chandrasekhar spoke to a union leader fighting to hold delivery-app companies accountable for protecting millions of India’s food delivery workers from extreme weather.

Driven by increasing urbanisation, smartphone usage and home-based lifestyles further entrenched by the Covid-19 pandemic, food delivery platforms continue to boom in India.

On any given waterlogged day of the week, Mumbai residents can order iPhone chargers with their okra, or apples from New Zealand, even well after midnight.

But India’s 7.7m delivery workers are having to brave extreme heat and high water in India’s crowded cities – whether on electric mopeds, cycles or horseback – to bring India such items direct to the doorstep.

It begs the question: are food delivery platforms effectively outsourcing climate adaptation to informal gig workers with fewer social protections?

A Nature Cities study published in January found a “significant surge” in lunchtime orders on the hottest days of the year in China’s cities, “reveal[ing] the transfer of heat exposure” from consumers to delivery riders.

Similarly, a study published in Sage last week found that digital technologies are “reshaping food practices in urban India in ways that reinforce existing caste, class and gender hierarchies”.

As temperatures touched 44C this summer, the Telangana state gig and platform workers union (TGPWU) urged citizens to offer a “glass of water” to the thousands of delivery workers battling extreme heat to bring them their food.

According to the International Labour Organisation, delivery workers in India can work up to 82 hours a week, with apps increasingly racing to offer consumers delivery in under 10 minutes.

“Is 10-minute delivery even possible? Can we look at humans as humans and not as robots?” says Shaik Salauddin, TGPWU founder and general secretary of the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers (IFAT), speaking to Carbon Brief. He continues:

“As unions, we can tell workers to rest, but who’s going to pay for their daily bread? But if the aggregators are telling workers to carry hot parcels of biriyani in 46C, bag between their shoulders, wearing a dark uniform: can you imagine the heat and mental stress? And then buildings with 10-15 floors don’t give them access to the lift, when they have less than 10 minutes to deliver.”

Salauddin, who worked as a taxi driver for 10 years, has been fighting for the impact of extreme weather on food delivery workers to be better recognised. Two weeks ago – well into the monsoon – India’s National Disaster Management issued guidelines to recognise delivery workers “as one of the most vulnerable” to heatwaves and to create separate sections for informal workers in city and state heat action plans.

This week, Salauddin is sending out extreme rain alerts on WhatsApp and Telegram. He tells Carbon Brief that he is “tired of the PR” and “superhero” praise heaped on riders risking their lives in record floods by the same delivery platforms that offer little accountability or transparency. He says:

“I tell workers there’s a red alert for extreme rain, open drains are overflowing, your EVs won’t make it, please don’t go out there. In 10 minutes, the apps say: ‘Please come online, we’ll pay you 30% extra as part of rain mode.’ Who do I fight with now?”

To Salauddin, climate change and “just transition” are “big words” that have to be linked to livelihoods and need a far-reaching vision: whether it is subsidies for marginalised castes to buy or retrofit EVs, more charging stations, or even just restrooms for exhausted workers. Governments must engage with unions every three months, he says, not just at the height of summer or monsoon. With the exception of a few states, India’s many gig workers are not formally recognised for social security benefits.

The biggest change, Salauddin says, must come from food delivery apps themselves. He concludes:

“Simply saying that ‘we’re a broker between companies and people, we take our commission and nothing else’ is not a good model. They need to take responsibility for livelihoods, for climate impacts and their emissions. In our nature of work, we should be looking at the future of work – and the future is already here.”

News and views

COUNTING CONTROVERSY: The European climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, may allow EU member states to “count controversial carbon credits from developing countries towards their climate targets”, the Guardian reported. Hoekstra told the outlet that “developing countries were keen to gain EU financing through carbon credits” and that the “possibility of allowing this was ‘potentially very attractive’”. However, the Guardian noted, “green groups are furious” and insist that the EU must “meet its targets domestically”, without the use of overseas carbon offsets.

FUELLING FOOD: Around 40% of petrochemicals are used by food systems around the world, mostly through synthetic fertilisers and plastic packaging, according to a new report. The research, from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), noted that food production and processing accounts for at least 15% of global fossil-fuel use. Action on food systems is “missing” from global agreements to transition away from fossil fuels, the report said. IPES-Food expert, Prof Raj Patel, said in a statement: “Delinking food from fossil fuels has never been more critical to stabilise food prices and ensure people can access food.”

PLANT FUEL: Efforts are underway in Chad to switch to “green charcoal” – a fuel made from plant waste, such as sesame stalks or palm fronds – to prevent further “rampant deforestation”, Agence France-Presse reported. The central African country has lost more than 90% of its forest cover since the 1970s and is “steadily turning to desert”, the newswire said. “Green charcoal” is intended for household uses, such as cooking, as an alternative to cut-down trees. An initiative to produce this fuel, which allegedly emits less CO2 than ordinary charcoal when burned, is backed by the World Bank and the UN refugee agency, added AFP.

G&T DANGER: “Volatile” weather, made “more likely by climate breakdown”, may impact the flavour of juniper berries – the “key botanical” in gin – according to a new study covered by the Guardian. The research, published in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, looked at berries from seven European countries taken across different harvests. “A wet harvest year can reduce the total volatile compounds in juniper by about 12% compared to a dry year. This has direct implications for the sensory characteristics that make gin taste like gin,” the lead study author Dr Matthew Pauley, an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University, told the newspaper.

TREE TROUBLE: The UK missed its tree-planting targets by an area of forest equivalent to the size of the Isle of Wight over the past five years, according to Carbon Brief analysis. New figures showed that 15,700 hectares of trees were planted across the UK in the last year – roughly half of the annual 30,000 hectare target set by the previous government. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have repeatedly not met national targets since 2020, previous data showed. These missed goals amount to more than 36,000 hectares of unplanted forest.

ASIA IMPACTED: According to the World Meteorological Organisation’s State of Climate in Asia 2024 report released last week, Asia is warming twice as fast as the global average, reported the Times of India. Extreme summer heat and reduced winter snowfall “accelerated glacier mass loss” in 23 of 24 glaciers in the central Himalayas and Tian Shan, Down to Earth wrote, with drought in China affecting more than 4.8 million people. Per the report, marine heatwaves “gripped a record area of the ocean”. The north Bay of Bengal region recorded the “second fastest rate” of sea level rise globally after the South China Sea, wrote the New Indian Express.

Watch, read, listen

BLEACHING POINT: Kenyan marine ecologist Dr David Obura spoke to the Guardian about coral reefs that are “flickering out across the world”.

SHADOWY BROKER: The Financial Times looked at the life and death of Samuele Landi, an Italian “telecoms entrepreneur turned fraudster” and carbon-credits broker.

HORNBILL HOUR: The Some Like it Wild Podcast spoke to Dr Aparajita Datta about her research on the “secret life” of hornbills and valuing community knowledge in conservation research.

WOMEN’S WORK: For LitHub, Dr Sarah Boon wrote about “trailblaz[ing]” women scientists who carried out fieldwork in the 1900s.

New science

A new study in Science Advances found that more than half of existing sea turtle hotspots “may disappear by 2050, with many new habitats in high shipping intensity areas” under a high-emissions scenario. “Alarmingly”, the authors added, only 23% of these hotspots are conserved under current marine protected areas.
According to new research in Nature Climate Change, protecting “existing young secondary forests” can remove eight times more carbon per hectare than new tree plantations.
A new study, published in Nature and covered by Carbon Brief, found that six staple crops will face “substantial” yield losses under future climate change – even when accounting for farmers’ adaptation efforts.

In the diary

7-25 July: Second part of the 30th annual session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) | Kingston, Jamaica
7-11 July: Final meeting of the working group on access and benefit-sharing in the Plant Treaty | Lima, Peru
14-23 July: High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development 2025 (HLPF) | New York City
23-31 July: Ramsar Convention on Wetlands COP15 | Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

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 2 July 2025: US public lands under attack; How India’s gig workers are suffering under climate change; Bonn to Belém appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Cropped 2 July 2025: US public lands under attack; How India’s gig workers are suffering under climate change; Bonn to Belém

Climate Change

IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs

Published

10 hours ago

December 5, 2025

Alice Rush

A slower shift to clean energy could leave the world with 1.3 million fewer energy sector jobs by 2035 compared with a scenario in which governments fully implement their green policies, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found.

In its annual World Energy Employment report, the Paris-based watchdog said on Friday that the Current Policies Scenario (CPS), which it reintroduced under pressure from the Trump administration, has “more muted” employment growth than the Stated Policies Scenario.

The CPS sees oil and gas demand continuing to rise until at least 2050 – a scenario that the IEA described as “cautious” and “anchored in enacted laws and measures” and was widely criticised by clean energy experts.

A fast energy transition would spur investment in construction, creating more jobs across the sector. New roles for electricians, building insulators, solar panel and energy-efficient lightbulb installers, and transition mineral miners would more than offset job losses in coal mines, power plants and oil and gas fields, the report found.

Nov 1, 2024

Energy

Plans to turn Europe’s biggest coal mine into a leisure lake prove divisive

Transition experts say repurposing Poland’s Bełchatów mine and power plant for renewables not recreation could bring more jobs, revenue and electricity

Read more
Jul 19, 2024

Energy

Scottish oil-town plan for green jobs sparks climate campers’ anger over local park

The oil and gas industry aims to bring clean jobs to Aberdeen, but it involves paving over part of a much-loved park, igniting a debate on just transition

Read more

Anabella Rosemberg, Just Transition lead at Climate Action Network International, lamented that the clean energy sector is “being undermined at a time when employment creation is of utmost priority”.

“Climate ambition and decent job creation must go hand in hand – but as the recent conversations at COP30 showed, there is a need for both the right targets and just transition strategies to make it happen,” she added.

A more ambitious Net Zero Emissions scenario, aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, would see roughly ten million more energy jobs created than under the CPS, report author Daniel Wetzel told Climate Home News at a press conference.

Bottleneck warnings

The IEA warned that governments must act to train workers for these roles or risk facing shortages of electricians, welders, and grid specialists – a gap that could slow the energy transition and drive up wages and energy costs.

IEA head Fatih Birol highlighted a particular shortage of qualified workers in the nuclear industry, warning that the problem could worsen as the sector’s workforce continues to age. “I hear nuclear is making a comeback, but the interest in the nuclear sector for the jobs is rather weak,” he said.

Laura Cozzi, IEA’s Director of Sustainability, Technology and Outlooks, warned of a shortage of skilled workers in electricity grids. “That is one of the key ingredients why we are not seeing grids ramp up as [they] should,” she said. Over 60 governments pledged at COP29 to improve and expand their grids to enable clean electricity to flow to where it is needed.

Oct 2, 2025

Clean Energy Frontier

Migrant workers building Saudi Arabia’s green future face exploitation, report finds

Heat stroke, long hours and punishment for taking breaks – low-paid foreign workers compare jobs on Saudi renewable energy projects to a prison sentence

Read more
Nov 3, 2025

Clean Energy Frontier

Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries

As EV sales boom in Jordan, a lack of formal infrastructure for dealing with end-of-life batteries is leading to some innovative solutions

Read more

Bert De Wel, Global Coordinator for Climate Policy at the International Trade Union Confederation, celebrated that the energy transition is creating jobs but added that they should be good jobs with decent pay, conditions and union rights. Decent work would attract skilled workers, he added.

The report found that wages in the oil and gas industry have generally risen faster over the past year than in the solar – and especially the wind – sectors. It noted that the oil and gas industry has a “historical tendency to offer highly competitive wages to attract and retain top talent”.

At the COP30 climate summit, governments agreed to set up the Belém Action Mechanism to try and make the energy transition fairer to groups such as workers in the energy industry. It will give trade unions a formal role in shaping just transition policies, for what the ITUC says is the first time.

ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle called it a “decisive win for the union movement and working people across the world, in all sectors but especially those in transition industries.”

The post IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs appeared first on Climate Home News.

IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs

Climate Change

DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out

Published

15 hours ago

December 5, 2025

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Deadly floods in Asia

MOUNTING DEVASTATION: The Associated Press reported that the death toll from catastrophic floods in south-east Asia had reached 1,500, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand most affected and hundreds still missing. The newswire said “thousands” more face “severe” food and clean-water shortages. Heavy rains and thunderstorms are expected this weekend, it added, with “saturated soil and swollen rivers leaving communities on edge”. Earlier in the week, Bloomberg said the floods had caused “at least $20bn in losses”.

CLIMATE CHANGE LINKS: A number of outlets have investigated the links between the floods and human-caused climate change. Agence France-Presse explained that climate change was “producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms”. Meanwhile, environmental groups told the Associated Press the situation had been exacerbated by “decades of deforestation”, which had “stripped away natural defenses that once absorbed rainfall and stabilised soil”.

‘NEW NORMAL’: The Associated Press quoted Malaysian researcher Dr Jemilah Mahmood saying: “South-east Asia should brace for a likely continuation and potential worsening of extreme weather in 2026 and for many years.” Al Jazeera reported that the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had called for “stronger legal and policy frameworks to protect people in disasters”. The organisation’s Asia-Pacific director said the floods were a “stark reminder that climate-driven disasters are becoming the new normal”, the outlet said.

Around the world

REVOKED: The UK and Netherlands withdrew $2.2bn of financial backing from a controversial liquified natural gas (LNG) project in Mozambique, Reuters reported. The Guardian noted that TotalEnergies’ “giant” project stood accused of “fuelling the climate crisis and deadly terror attacks”.
REVERSED: US president Donald Trump announced plans to “significantly weaken” Biden-era fuel efficiency requirements for cars, the New York Times said.
RESTRICTED: EU leaders agreed to ban the import of Russian gas from autumn 2027, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, Reuters said it is “likely” the European Commission will delay announcing a plan on auto sector climate targets next week, following pressure to “weaken” a 2035 cut-off for combustion engines.
RETRACTED: An influential Nature study that looked at the economic consequences of climate change has been withdrawn after “criticism from peers”, according to Bloomberg. [The research came second in Carbon Brief’s ranking of the climate papers most covered by the media in 2024.]
REBUKED: The federal government of Canada faced a backlash over an oil pipeline deal struck last week with the province of Alberta. CBC News noted that First Nations chiefs voted “unanimously” to demand the withdrawal of the deal and Canada’s National Observer quoted author Naomi Klein as saying that the prime minister was “completely trashing Canada’s climate commitments”.
RESCHEDULED: The Indonesian government has cancelled plans to close a coal plant seven years early, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, Bloomberg separately reported that India is mulling an “unprecedented increase” in coal-power capacity that could see plants built “until at least 2047”.

$518 billion a year

The projected coastal flood damages for the Asia-Pacific region by 2100 if current policies continue, according to a Scientific Reports study covered this week by Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

More than 100 “climate-sensitive rivers” worldwide are experiencing “large and severe changes in streamflow volume and timing” | Environmental Research Letters
Africa’s forests have switched from a carbon sink into a source | Scientific Reports
Increasing urbanisation can “substantially intensify warming”, contributing up to 0.44C of additional temperature rise per year through 2060 | Communications Earth & Environment

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

A new target for developed nations to triple adaptation finance by 2035, agreed at the COP30 climate summit, would not cover more than a third of developing countries’ estimated needs, Carbon Brief analysis showed. The chart above compares a straight line to meeting the adaptation finance target (blue), alongside an estimate of countries’ adaptation needs (grey), which was calculated using figures from the latest UN Environmental Programme adaptation gap report, based on countries’ UN climate plans (called “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).

Spotlight

Inclusivity at the IPCC

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to an IPCC lead author researching ways to improve the experience of global south scientists taking part in producing the UN climate body’s assessments.

Hundreds of climate scientists from around the world met in Paris this week to start work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) newest set of climate reports.

The IPCC is the UN body responsible for producing the world’s most authoritative climate science reports. Hundreds of scientists from across the globe contribute to each “assessment cycle”, which sees researchers aim to condense all published climate science over several years into three “working group” reports.

The reports inform the decisions of governments – including at UN climate talks – as well as the public understanding of climate change.

The experts gathering in Paris are the most diverse group ever convened by the IPCC.

Earlier this year, Carbon Brief analysis found that – for the first time in an IPCC cycle – citizens of the global south make up 50% of authors of the three working group reports. The IPCC has celebrated this milestone, with IPCC chair Prof Jim Skea touting the seventh assessment report’s (AR7’s) “increased diversity” in August.

But some IPCC scientists have cautioned that the growing involvement of global south scientists does not translate into an inclusive process.

“What happens behind closed doors in these meeting rooms doesn’t necessarily mirror what the diversity numbers say,” Dr Shobha Maharaj, a Trinidadian climate scientist who is a coordinating lead author for working group two (WG2) of AR7, told Carbon Brief.

Global south perspective

Motivated by conversations with colleagues and her own “uncomfortable” experience working on the small-islands chapter of the sixth assessment cycle (AR6) WG2 report, Maharaj – an adjunct professor at the University of Fiji – reached out to dozens of fellow contributors to understand their experience.

The exercise, she said, revealed a “dominance of thinking and opinions from global north scientists, whereas the global south scientists – the scientists who were people of colour – were generally suppressed”.

The perspectives of scientists who took part in the survey and future recommendations for the IPCC are set out in a peer-reviewed essay – co-authored by 20 researchers – slated for publication in the journal PLOS Climate. (Maharaj also presented the findings to the IPCC in September.)

The draft version of the essay notes that global south scientists working on WG2 in AR6 said they confronted a number of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues, including “skewed” author selection, “unequal” power dynamics and a “lack of respect and trust”. The researchers also pointed to logistical constraints faced by global south authors, such as visa issues and limited access to journals.

The anonymous quotations from more than 30 scientists included in the essay, Maharaj said, are “clear data points” that she believes can advance a discussion about how to make academia more inclusive.

“The literature is full of the problems that people of colour or global south authors have in academia, but what you don’t find very often is quotations – especially from climate scientists,” she said. “We tend to be quite a conservative bunch.”

Road to ‘improvement’

Among the recommendations set out in the essay are for DEI training, the appointment of a “diversity and inclusion ombudsman” and for updated codes of conduct.

Marharaj said that these “tactical measures” need to occur alongside “transformative approaches” that help “address value systems, dismantle power structures [and] change the rules of participation”.

With drafting of the AR7 reports now underway, Maharaj said she is “hopeful” the new cycle can be an improvement on the last, pointing to a number of “welcome” steps from the IPCC.

This includes holding the first-ever expert meeting on DEI this autumn, new mechanisms where authors can flag concerns and the recruitment of a “science and capacity officer” to support WG2 authors.

The hope, Maharaj explained, is to enhance – not undermine – climate science.

“The idea here was to move forward and to improve the IPCC, rather than attack it,” she said. “Because we all love the science – and we really value what the IPCC brings to the world.”

Watch, read, listen

BROKEN PROMISES: Climate Home News spoke to communities in Nigeria let down by the government’s failure to clean up oil spills by foreign companies.

‘WHEN A ROAD GOES WRONG’: Inside Climate News looked at how a new road from Brazil’s western Amazon to Peru has become a “conduit for rampant deforestation and illegal gold mining”.

SHADOWY COURTS: In the Guardian, George Monbiot lamented the rise of investor-state dispute settlements, which he described as “undemocratic offshore tribunals” that are already having a “chilling effect” on countries’ climate ambitions.

Coming up

1-12 December: UN Environment Assembly 7, Nairobi, Kenya
7 December: Hong Kong legislative elections
11 December: Falkland Islands legislative assembly elections

Pick of the jobs

Greenpeace International, engagement manager – climate and energy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Various
The Energy, newsletter editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia (remote)
University of Groningen, PhD position in motivating people to contribute to societal transitions | Salary: €3,059-€3,881 per month. Location: Groningen, the Netherlands

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 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out

Climate Change

Alabama Regulators Approve Two-Year Electric Rate Freeze and Two Solar Projects for a Meta Inc. Data Center

Published

18 hours ago

December 5, 2025

Alice Rush

Critics say the rate freeze will only delay financial burdens on Alabama Power customers while preserving a high profit rate for the utility.

By Dennis Pillion

MONTGOMERY, Ala.—The Alabama Public Service Commission on Tuesday approved a sweeping package of temporary changes they say will keep electric rates steady for the next two years.