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
EU nature, water and farmers
SAVING NATURE LAW: Environment ministers from 11 EU countries made a “last-ditch effort” to rally support for the bloc’s nature restoration law, the Irish Independent reported. The proposed law aiming to restore the EU’s degraded habitats has been in limbo since a final vote was shelved after pushback from several countries in March. The new letter, signed by ministers from Ireland, Germany, France and eight other countries, called on EU ministers to approve the law at the 17 June environment council meeting. The newspaper noted that this is the “last chance” for the law to be signed off in this legislative term. Failure to do so would “fundamentally undermine public faith in our political leadership”, the letter said.
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DUTCH FARMERS: In the Netherlands, the “citizen-farmers” movement party is one member of a newly formed rightwing coalition government, Euractiv reported. The coalition also includes the Party for Freedom, which is led by far-right politician Geert Wilders. The government has pledged to “simplify” EU green rules, tackle the “manure crisis” and re-introduce tax breaks for agricultural fuel, the outlet said. The coalition agreement also “shuts the door on forced livestock cuts, which the previous government considered as a way of cutting nitrogen emissions from animal manure and fertilisers”, Euractiv noted.
LEAVING ON A JET PLANE: Environmental law charity ClientEarth welcomed the Portuguese government’s decision to not build a new Lisbon airport on an “internationally protected nature site”. Previously, NGOs launched a lawsuit against plans to build the airport “on the Tagus Estuary, Portugal’s most important wetland and a crucial safe haven for millions of migratory birds”, the press release from ClientEarth said. The new airport will instead be built on the far side of the River Tagus at a military airfield across from Lisbon, Reuters reported. Soledad Gallego, head of ClientEarth’s Iberian and Mediterranean office, said the government “should be asking itself whether building a new airport at all is in line with its climate goals and in the best interest of the health of people and nature”.
WATER DAMAGE: The EU needs to better protect people and the environment from emerging waterborne diseases and pollution as global temperatures continue to rise, according to a report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) covered by Politico. The outlet listed some of the “looming threats” in the report, including “serious food poisoning from contaminated fish, drug-resistant bacteria emerging from melting permafrost and reindeer populations decimated by anthrax”. The article quotes EEA chief Leena Ylä-Mononen, who said that the EU’s existing climate, water and health policies must be “implemented more broadly and systematically”.
Land grabs threaten farmers
COMPETITION FOR LAND: The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) recently released a report addressing farmland grabbing worldwide. The report found that the largest 1% of farms control 70% of global agricultural land. This consolidation has caused farmers, Indigenous peoples and pastoralists to lose their land, culture and livelihoods, the report said. It also makes it more difficult for young people to access farmland. It has particularly affected central and eastern Europe, Latin America and south Asia. According to the report, the world is facing “overexploitation and exacerbated competition for land around the world”, which could deepen land inequality and rural poverty, drive “the most sustainable forms of agriculture out of business for good” and threaten food security and biodiversity.
‘GREEN’ GRABS: The report found that 20% of large-scale land deals can be classified as “green” land grabs. “Green” land grabbing refers to governments and corporations using global environmental objectives, such as carbon-offseting projects and green energy production, to “usurp” agricultural land and exclude local land users and food producers. Other reasons for land grabs are extractive industries, mega-infrastructure projects and the expansion of industrial agriculture and monocultures. The report called for “building integrated governance of land, environment and food systems to stop green grabbing”. This will be achieved by prioritising community climate and biodiversity action, helping communities map and defend their land and creating “land and agrarian reforms to return land to communities”, IPES-Food concluded.
SCEPTICISM: One of the funds that has financed carbon-offseting projects and clean energy projects is the Bezos Earth Fund, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Guardian reported. The outlet added that the fund aims to donate a total of $10bn by the end of the decade to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. It “has become one of the most influential voices in the climate and biodiversity sector” by having a presence in international negotiations and supporting dozens of NGOs. However, experts consulted by the Guardian cited concerns about the fund’s influence over “critical environmental institutions”, with one telling the newspaper that “there is obviously a risk of a conflict of interest”.
Road to Cali
COP16 PREP: Delegates at a technical meeting held in preparation for the COP16 biodiversity summit later this year “set the stage” for a potential agreement on how the world defines and protects ecologically or biologically significant marine areas, a press release from the Convention on Biological Diversity said. Countries also advanced details of the framework to monitor progress on the global deal for nature agreed at COP15 in 2022. The recommendations from the meeting will be discussed at the upcoming summit in Cali, Colombia in October. Further pre-COP talks on finance and other issues are taking place in Nairobi, Kenya over 21-29 May.
CASH FOR NATURE: Meanwhile, the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund approved new grants worth more than $70m (£55m) for projects across 21 countries, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) said in a press release. This is the second round of preparation grants for projects, which range from strengthening biodiversity corridors in the Philippines to “empowering Indigenous peoples for sustainable development” in Suriname. The fund, which was set up to support the global deal for nature, is financed by six countries so far, including Canada, Japan and the UK, according to the GEF.
News and views
VICTORY FOR ISLAND STATES: The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea found that greenhouse gases constitute marine pollution, in what Reuters described as a “major breakthrough” for small island states at risk of being submerged by rising sea levels due to climate change. The judgement is an “advisory opinion” and was requested by nine Caribbean and Pacific island nations, including the Bahamas, the newswire said. The court said that states are obliged to monitor and reduce their emissions and laid out requirements for environmental impact assessments. For climate activists and lawyers consulted by Reuters, the decision could influence two pending opinions on states’ climate obligations from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice.
FOOD FOCUS: UK prime minister Rishi Sunak put forward a plan to improve food security and boost fruit and vegetable production, the Guardian said. It includes measures to ease planning rules for greenhouses and replace EU horticulture resilience funding. According to Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales, this will do little to restore farmer confidence after a winter of floods and other extreme weather. The Guardian reported that the government has also published its first food security index to assess the country’s ability to produce its own food. It found that the UK produced 17% of its own fruit and 55% of its own vegetables in 2022. The newspaper noted that the government was criticised by policy experts for listing climate change as a “longer-term risk”, rather than a current issue in its index.
LAND SQUEEZE: Following heavy rainfall and floods that have ravaged east Africa since March, the region is at risk of food shortages, Down to Earth reported. The outlet said that there are thousands of acres of croplands affected and thousands of dead livestock in the region. Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia and Burundi were all heavily affected by the floods. Down to Earth also reported that more than 1,465 clean water sources, such as rivers and ponds, have been contaminated, posing a risk to aquatic foods and public health. The outlet added that the World Food Programme and other humanitarian agencies “have expressed concern about disrupted food production”.
‘UNTOLD HARM’: More than 4,000 species are trafficked worldwide, causing “untold harm upon nature”, according to a new report published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and covered by the Guardian. The report found that 40% of around 140,000 wildlife seizures over 2015-21 involved threatened or near-threatened species, including mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. The Guardian said that the UN report also noted that wildlife trade permeates more than 80% of countries and is a “global problem [that is] far from being resolved”. The outlet pointed out that wildlife trafficking is often linked to organised crime and corruption.
ENVIRONMENTAL DATA THEFT: China’s spy ministry accused two foreign NGOs of stealing environmental data “under the guise of research and environmental protection”, the South China Morning Post reported. The Chinese security ministry said those organisations collected geographical, meteorological, biological and other data from China’s nature reserves, which poses “risks and hazards to national security”. According to the outlet, China has “some of the strictest” laws for regulating the activities of NGOs. It added that the security ministry called on the public to report “suspicious activity” to the authorities.
Watch, read, listen
NO BORDERS: An Associated Press video explored how botanists from California and Baja California joined forces to record plant biodiversity along the US-Mexico border.
CLIMATE INSURANCE: The BBC News World Service podcast Africa Daily looked at the “limitations and difficulties” facing farmers insuring themselves against climate disasters.
GARDENING ZONES: NPR mapped the changes in the US agriculture department’s gardening zones, which help people determine which plants might thrive in their region.
DRC MINING: Mongabay investigated the extent of, and response to, pollution from the mining of cobalt and copper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s “copper belt”.
New science
Severe decline in large farmland trees in India over the past decade
Nature Sustainability
India lost more than 5m large farmland trees over 2018-22, a study found. This was partly due to changed farming practices “where trees within fields are perceived as detrimental to crop yields”, the study said. Researchers mapped 600m trees planted on agricultural lands in India and tracked them over the past decade. They found that approximately 11% of large trees disappeared between an earlier period of 2010 to 2018. The findings are “particularly unsettling” as the practice of planting trees on farmland is seen as a “pivotal natural climate solution”, the researchers wrote.
New research found that the western US and southern Mexico have suffered a decline in pollinator species richness over time. In contrast, eastern North America and other cooler and wetter regions saw an increase in pollinator diversity. The researchers analysed four families of bees and butterflies, for which they constructed more than 1,400 species distribution models over two time periods in North America: 1939-79 and 1980-2020. The study concluded that “changes in pollinator diversity appear to reflect changes in climate”, but added that “other factors, such as land-use change, may also explain regional shifts”.
Multi-decadal climate services help farmers assess and manage future risks
Nature Climate Change
Long-term climate projections – those which look more than 20 years into the future – can help farmers better understand future climate risks, according to new research. Researchers introduced 24 Australian farmers to an online long-term climate projection service called “My Climate View” and asked them to evaluate long-term risk management. They found that such a service helped “[reduce] complexity and potentially [reduce] psychological distance” from climate risks in farmers. As farmers are often sceptical of climate change projections – in part because of “their experience in perceptions of inaccurate short-term weather and seasonal forecasts”, the study suggests taking advantage of “the expertise of trusted service providers” to increase confidence in the data.
In the diary
- 21-29 May: Fourth meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Subsidiary Body on Implementation | Nairobi
- 22 May: International Day for Biological Diversity
- 29 May: South Africa general election
- 2 June: Mexico general election
- 3-4 June: Royal Society conference: Innovating agriculture | Online
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 22 May 2024: Farmland ‘grabbing’; Ocean court ‘victory’ for small islands; Pre-COP16 talks appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 22 May 2024: Farmland ‘grabbing’; Ocean court ‘victory’ for small islands; Pre-COP16 talks
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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