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.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Europe focuses on biodiversity
‘WORSE THAN TERRORISM’: Climate change and biodiversity loss pose a more “fundamental threat” to the UK than terrorism or Vladimir Putin, UK foreign secretary David Lammy said in his first major policy address, the Independent reported. Giving a speech at London’s Kew Gardens, Lammy said that climate change and biodiversity loss “may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat”, but they are “more fundamental…systemic…pervasive…and accelerating towards us”, the Independent said. The Financial Times said that Lammy pledged that climate change and biodiversity loss would be “central to all the Foreign Office does”, and that he will create “special representatives” in each area. The Guardian noted this will be the first time the UK has appointed a special envoy for nature.
RISE OF RIBERA: Elsewhere, Teresa Ribera, Spain’s ecological transition minister, has been appointed as EU commissioner Ursula von der Leyen’s second-in-command, with a “vast portfolio” including climate and competition policy, Politico reported. The Guardian said that the “outspoken” Ribera is to become one of six vice-presidents in the incoming EU executive led by von der Leyen, which is expected to start work at the end of the year. Euronews said that green activists have “breathed a sigh of relief” at the appointment.
AGRICULTURE COMMISSIONER: Von der Leyen has also appointed a new agricultural commissioner in Christophe Hansen, a Luxembourg MP from the centre-right Christian Social People’s party, the Irish Independent reported. According to the newspaper, von der Leyen has given Hansen “100 days to prepare a vision for the EU agriculture and food sectors”, tasking him with ensuring they are both competitive and “within the boundaries of our planet”. Portuguese news agency Lusa said that Portuguese farmers have “high expectations” that Hansen will prioritise the needs of agricultural workers. Elsewhere, DeSmog has mapped “Ireland’s powerful farming lobby”.
Australia’s deforestation hotspots
OUTLIERS: A new report from the environment and heritage department of the New South Wales government found that more than 45,000 hectares of native vegetation were cleared in 2022 to make way for farming, infrastructure and other projects. Nathaniel Pelle, a campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation, told the Sydney Morning Herald that Australia is an “outlier among wealthy countries for forest loss”. He added: “Europe has been historically cleared, Canada has been historically cleared, the US and Australia have been historically cleared, but what separates us from them is that we’re still doing it.” Deforestation in the state is “among [the] worst in the world”, the newspaper wrote.
‘ZOMBIE INDUSTRY’: The report showed that land clearing has been on the rise since 2015, when the previous government announced upcoming changes to its land-clearing laws, the outlet said. In a separate article, the Sydney Morning Herald called logging in the neighbouring state of Victoria the “‘zombie’ industry that won’t die”. According to the newspaper, “commercial logging officially ended” on 1 January, but timber mills “continue to process native hardwood timbers” – sourced from private landowners and from the government’s “fuel-reduction” wildfire-prevention strategies. The outlet wrote: “Environment groups say logging is now taking place without proper planning or oversight, leaving threatened species at risk.”
EPA ON THE AGENDA: Despite promises to “develop new nature legislation” and put nature “back on the priority list”, Australia’s Labor government – elected in May 2022 – “has not lived up to…early rhetoric” around nature protection, Adam Morton wrote in a column for the Guardian. Morton noted that the push to create a national environment agency, Environment Protection Australia, “look[s] to be in trouble”, as deals with either the Greens or the Coalition look unlikely. Writing in the Conversation, environmental-law expert Dr Justine Bell-James said: “All this is bad news for our threatened species and sick ecosystems. We know what needs to be done. But our government is showing worrying signs of letting industry and developers control their environmental agenda.”
Spotlight
Humans and polar bears collide at Earth’s Arctic research hub
In this spotlight, Carbon Brief reports from the Earth’s most-northerly human settlement, which is increasingly facing polar bear encounters amid rapid Arctic change.
Ask anyone living and working in Ny-Ålesund – the Earth’s most northern human settlement, located on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean – what they perceive to be the number one threat to their safety and they will each offer the same answer: polar bears.
A little more than 1,200km from the North Pole, the tiny Arctic town of Ny-Ålesund started life as a coal mining district in the early 20th century, but today operates solely as an international climate research hub, hosting about 60 scientists at its busiest time in the summer months.
The vast Arctic wilderness surrounding the town is home to one of the world’s largest permanent polar bear populations.
Protective measures
Ever since Ny-Ålesund’s inception, the company running logistics in the town has implemented strict protocols with the aim of protecting people from polar bears.
The few roads leading out of town are marked with polar bear hazard signs. Nearly every communal building in the town carries posters with instructions of what to do in the event of a polar bear sighting.
When researchers go out into the field to carry out their research, at least one of them must act as a “polar bear guard” – meaning they need to pass shooting practice and carry a rifle in case they need to kill a bear in an emergency.
“We are entering a habitat that is not ours,” Dorothea Moser, an ice cores researcher with the British Antarctic Survey, the UK’s polar research institute, told Carbon Brief. “With polar bear protection, we’re trying to protect both us as researchers and the polar bear.”
As part of the protective measures when out in the field, guards carry binoculars and constantly scan the environment around them. If they spot a bear on the horizon, the research team will immediately leave the area and notify the town.
If a polar bear is spotted within contact distance – the animals can run at speeds up to 25 miles per hour – then researchers will let off a flare in an attempt to scare it away.
“We can defend ourselves with flares, we’re scaring away the polar bear and creating more space between us in a defensive way,” Moser added. “Of course, we also have to carry a weapon, but we hope that we never have to use it. In the past 30 years, we have not had any lethal encounters.”
Rapid change
These strict measures have protected both scientists and bears for decades in Ny-Ålesund, but rapid change in the region could threaten this delicate balance.
Svalbard bears were nearly hunted to extinction in the 20th century. However, a ban was put in place in 1973, which saw numbers recover. Now, the Beaufort Sea subpopulation, which includes Svalbard bears, is considered “stable”.
However, climate change is causing Svalbard’s environment to shift rapidly, with temperatures rising seven times faster than the global average.
Rapid warming has had a devastating impact on sea ice, which blankets the Arctic Ocean in the cooler winter months before shrinking back at the height of summer. As the Earth warms, the extent of the sea ice in summer is becoming smaller every year.
This is a problem for polar bears, which use sea ice to hunt seals, their main source of prey. Research has found that the disappearance of sea ice is forcing bears to search further afield for food, sometimes bringing them closer towards human settlements.
Ingrid Kjerstad, research coordinator at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Ny-Ålesund, which oversees all scientific research in the town, told Carbon Brief that their records show the number of polar bears coming into contact with humans in the region has increased in recent years.
An increase in human-bear encounters is a worry for both researchers and wildlife. Although scientists in Ny-Ålesund have avoided shooting a bear, there have been several lethal incidents involving both human and animal fatalities in Svalbard’s capital of Longyearbyen.
The evidence of more human-bear encounters in Ny-Ålesund is still “anecdotal” and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed science journal, Kjerstad added, but is yet another sign of how rapid environmental change is transforming life at Earth’s northern edge.
News and views
BIODIVERSITY FINANCE: Funding to help developing nations address biodiversity loss grew by more than $4bn in 2022, but mostly in the form of loans, rather than grants, according to new figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported by Climate Home News. The OECD report, which analysed the period from 2015 to 2022, showed that biodiversity funding grew from $11.1bn in 2021 to $15.4bn in 2022. Climate Home News added that the increase came largely from multilateral institutions – mainly development banks – which increased their funding from $2.7bn in 2021 to $5.7bn in 2022, “mostly by offering concessional loans, which are cheaper than borrowing on commercial terms”.
DAM IT: Dams around the world will struggle to cope with increasingly common severe rainfall, “leading to an increased likelihood of failure and risk of catastrophic flooding”, according to two researchers at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. They added that “it is not clear what climate and hydrological data was used to design” most of the world’s dams and spillways. Covering the IHE Delft commentary, Sudanese outlet Dabanga wrote that, due to a lack of preventative maintenance, the Jebel Aulia dam south of Khartoum “may lead to a failed agricultural season” this winter. It added: “A collapse of the dam also threatens people in Khartoum.”
CALI INCOMING: The COP16 nature summit will be a key “political moment and a very important moment for biodiversity”, UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker told a press conference on 23 September. Unlike the previous summit, a number of high-profile politicians are due to attend the upcoming talks in Cali, Colombia – including Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexico’s president-elect, Dr Claudia Sheinbaum. There will also be a “very strong presence” of Indigenous peoples at the talks, Colombia’s environment minister, Susana Muhamad, told the press briefing. Muhamad also called on richer countries to put more money into the dedicated fund to support biodiversity goals. Meanwhile, Carbon Brief has updated its interactive tracker of national biodiversity strategies and action plans to include new submissions.
ECOCIDE RECOGNITION: Vanuatu has renewed its push to recognise “ecocide” – “the severe and reckless destruction of nature” – under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Pacific Island News Association reported. The Pacific nation first proposed the addition of ecocide in 2019, the news outlet said, and its bid received a boost from a 2021 independent expert report that “outlined the legal framework for ecocide”. The article quoted Vanuatu’s UN ambassador, Odo Tevi, who said that existing laws protecting nature “are insufficient” and that the definition should “focu[s] on the severity of the outcome rather than specific prohibited behaviours”.
SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT: Drought in South America is forcing grain shippers “to look for alternatives” as the water level on the Paraná River has dropped precipitously, the Argentine trade publication ArgenPorts reported. Argentine officials noted that while water levels are far below normal at present, the effects of the drought “will not be as cruel and harsh as the one that occurred from 2020 to 2022”. Elsewhere, the “unprecedented drought” in Ecuador has led to “mass power cuts”, forest fires and the declaration of a “red alert” in several parts of the country, according to MercoPress.
Watch, read, listen
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: In Scientific American, science historian Prof Naomi Oreskes argued that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault “illustrate[s] why we need to prevent climate disaster rather than plan for it”.
HISTORY REPEATS: Nigeria’s the Cable examined how a burst dam that displaced 400,000 people in Borno state 30 years ago has flooded once again amid extreme rainfall in the country.
CONTINUED STRUGGLE: Despite legal wins across the world, Indigenous peoples still face evictions from their lands and struggle to obtain the reparations promised to them, a Mongabay investigation found.
PESTICIDE LOOPHOLE: An investigation by Unearthed alleged that companies are exploiting loopholes in France’s landmark pesticide ban to ship growing amounts of harmful chemicals overseas.
New science
- Extreme permafrost thaw could lead to a “rapid intensification” of wildfires in western Siberia and Canada, said research in Nature Communications. Using a wide range of climate simulations, the study found that warming-driven rapid permafrost thaw could lead to “massive soil drying, surface warming and reduction of relative humidity”, which could in turn boost fires.
- Prioritising boosting carbon stores on agricultural land could draw down as much CO2 as global tree-planting by 2050 and provide farmers with hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits, a new Nature Food study found. The authors used an economic land-use model to project how boosting carbon in agriculture could benefit producers and the planet.
- New research in Environmental Research Letters found that the number of heatwave days affecting global cropland will increase nearly 4.5-fold by the end of the century under a medium-emissions scenario. Using observational data and climate models, researchers found “consistent increases” in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves affecting croplands in the future.
In the diary
- 10-30 September: 79th session of the UN General Assembly | New York
- 22-28 September: Climate Week NYC 2024 | New York
- 23-27 September: 20th meeting of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee to the Stockholm Convention | Rome
- 29 September: International day of awareness of food loss and waste
- 1-2 October: Forest Europe ministerial conference | Königswinter, Germany
- 8-10 October: Global Nature Positive Summit | Sydney
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 25 September 2024: Biodiversity loss ‘worse than terrorism’; Human-polar bear conflict; Australia’s ‘zombie’ forestry appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 10 October 2025: Renewables power past coal; Legacy of UK’s Climate Change Act; Fukushima’s solar future
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Renewables overtake coal
‘HISTORIC FIRST’: Renewables have overtaken coal to become the world’s leading source of electricity for the first six months of this year in a “historic first”, BBC News said. The analysis, from the thinktank Ember, found the world generated “almost a third” more solar power in the first half of the year, compared with the same period in 2024, while wind power grew by “just over 7%,” reported the Guardian.
HEAVY LIFTING: According to the report, China and India were “largely responsible for the surge in renewables”, while the US and Europe “relied more heavily on fossil fuels,” the Guardian wrote. China built more renewables than every other country combined in the first half of this year, the newspaper added.
CONTINENTAL SHIFTS: A second report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted a “surge” in global wind and solar capacity by 2030, but shaved 5% off its previous forecast, the Financial Times said. The IEA revealed that India is set to become the second-largest growth market for renewables after China, “with capacity expected to increase 2.5 times by 2030”, Down to Earth reported. The IEA also upped its forecast for renewables in the Middle East and north Africa by 23%, “helped by Saudi Arabia rolling out wind turbines and solar panels”, but halved the outlook for the US, the FT noted.
Around the world
- EV BOOM: Sales of electric and hybrid cars made up “more than half” of all new car registrations in the UK last month, a new record, according to data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers, reported BBC News.
- BANKING COLLAPSE: A global banking alliance launched by the UN to get banks to slash the carbon footprint of their loans and investments and help drive the transition to a net-zero economy by 2050 has collapsed after four years, Agence France-Press reported.
- CUTS, CUTS, CUTS: The Trump administration plans to cut nearly $24bn in funding for more than 600 climate projects across the US, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
- PEOPLE POWER: A farmer, a prison guard and a teacher were among those from the Dutch-Caribbean island Bonaire who appeared at the Hague on Tuesday to “accuse the Netherlands of not doing enough to protect them from the effects of climate change”, Politico reported.
400,000
The number of annual service days logged by the US National Guard responding to hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters over the past decade, according to a Pentagon report to Congress, Inside Climate News reported.
Latest climate research
- Politicians in the UK “overwhelmingly overestimate the time period humanity has left to bend the temperature curve”, according to a survey of 100 MPs | Nature Communications Earth and Environment
- Fire-driven degradation of the Amazon last year released nearly 800m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, surpassing emissions from deforestation and marking the “worst Amazon forest disturbance in over two decades” | Biogeosciences
- Some 43% of the 200 most damaging wildfires recorded over 1980-2023 occurred in the last decade | Science
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The UK’s Climate Change Act, landmark legislation that guides the nation’s response to climate change, is increasingly coming under attack from anti-net-zero right-leaning politicians. In a factcheck published this week, Carbon Brief explained how the UK’s Climate Change Act was among the first comprehensive national climate laws in the world and the first to include legally binding emissions targets. In total, 69 countries have now passed “framework” climate laws similar to the UK’s Climate Change Act, with laws in New Zealand, Canada and Nigeria among those explicitly based on the UK model. This is up from just four when the act was legislated in 2008. Of these, 14 are explicitly titled the “Climate Change Act”.
Spotlight
Fukushima’s solar future
This week, Carbon Brief examines how Fukushima helped to recover from nuclear disaster by building solar farms on contaminated farmland.
On 11 March 2011, an earthquake off the pacific coast of Japan caused 15m-tall waves to crash into the eastern region of Tōhoku, killing 19,500 people and injuring a further 6,000.
In the aftermath, flooding at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant caused cooling systems to fail, leaching radioactive contaminants into the soil and leading to a major nuclear incident.
Some 1,200km2 around the site was restricted and up to 100,000 people were evacuated – in some cases forever.
In the years following, Japan entered a fraught debate about nuclear energy.
In 2010, nuclear power provided 25% of Japan’s electricity, but, in the years following the disaster, its 54 nuclear reactors were taken offline.
Successive governments have fought over reintroducing nuclear power. Today, some 14 reactors are back online, 27 have been permanently closed and another 19 remain suspended. (Japan’s newly-elected prime minister Sanae Takaichi has promised to make nuclear central to her energy strategy.)
Against this backdrop, Fukushima – a prefecture home to 1.8 million people – has emerged as a surprise leader in the renewables race.
In 2014, the Fukushima Renewable Energy Institute (FREA) opened with the twin goals of promoting research and development into renewable energy, while “making a contribution to industrial clusters and reconstruction”.
That same year, the prefecture declared a target of 100% renewable power by 2040.
Contaminated land
“A lot of these communities, I know, were looking for ways to revitalise their economy,” said Dr Jennifer Sklarew, assistant professor of energy and sustainability at George Mason University and author of “Building Resilient Energy Systems: Lessons from Japan”.
Once evacuation orders were lifted, however, residents in many parts of Fukushima were faced with a dilemma, explained Skarlew:
“Since that area was largely agricultural, and the agriculture was facing challenges due to stigma, and also due to the soil being removed [as part of the decontamination efforts], they had to find something else.”
One solution came in the form of rent, paid to farmers by companies, to use their land as solar farms.
Michiyo Miyamoto, energy finance specialist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Carbon Brief:
“The [Fukushima] prefecture mapped suitable sites early and conducted systematic consultations with residents and agricultural groups before projects were proposed. This upfront process reduced land-use conflicts, shortened permitting timelines and gave developers clarity.”
As a result, large-scale solar capacity in Fukushima increased to more than 1,300 megawatts (MW) from 2012 to 2023, according to Miyamoto. Moreover, installed renewable capacity now exceeds local demand, meaning the region can run entirely on clean power when conditions are favourable, Miyamoto said.
Today, aerial pictures of Fukushima reveal how solar panels have proliferated on farmland that was contaminated in the nuclear disaster.
Charging on
Last year, 60% of Fukushima’s electricity was met by renewables, up from 22% in 2011. (The country as a whole still lags behind at 27%.)
And that is set to grow after Japan’s largest onshore windfarm started operations earlier this year in Abukuma, Fukushima, with a capacity of 147MW.
The growth of solar and wind means that Fukushima is already “ahead of schedule” for its 2040 target of 100% renewable power, said Miyamoto:
“The result is a credible pathway from recovery to leadership, with policy, infrastructure and targets working in concert.”
Watch, read, listen
OVERSHOOT: The Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, in partnership with Planet B Productions, has released a four-part podcast series exploring what will happen if global warming exceeds 1.5C.
DRONE WARFARE: On Substack, veteran climate campaigner and author Bill McKibben considered the resilience of solar power amid modern warfare.
CLIMATE AND EMPIRE: For Black history month, the Energy Revolution podcast looked at how “race and the legacies of empire continue to impact the energy transition”.
Coming up
- 12 October: presidential elections, Cameroon
- 13-14 October: Pre-COP, Brasilia, Brazil
- 13-18 October: World Bank Group/IMF annual meetings, Washington DC
- 14-17 October: 2nd extraordinary session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee at the International Maritime Organisation, London
- 15-16 October: Circle of Finance Ministers report
Pick of the jobs
- Buckinghamshire Council, principal climate change officer | Salary: £49,354-£51,759. Location: Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
- Sustainable NI, sustainable business lead | Salary: £60,000. Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
- Dialogue Earth, South Asia managing editor | Salary: £1,875 per month. Location: South Asia
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 10 October 2025: Renewables power past coal; Legacy of UK’s Climate Change Act; Fukushima’s solar future appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The Caribbean region is among the most vulnerable to climate change, despite historically contributing less than half of one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Rising sea levels, extreme heat and more frequent and intense storms – such as the 2024 Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall in Grenada – pose urgent and growing threats to the small island states, coastal nations and overseas territories that comprise the Caribbean region.
With global progress to address climate change still too slow, Caribbean countries are taking matters into their own hands by enacting more robust legislation to help protect against climate risks.
In a new study published in the Carbon and Climate Law Review, we identified 78 climate laws and legally binding decrees across 16 Caribbean states, as well as two constitutional references to climate change and a growing recognition of the right to a healthy environment.
Our analysis suggests that, together, these developments are not only enhancing resilience, but also positioning Caribbean states as influential actors in the global climate arena.
Caribbean climate laws on the rise
Climate governance in the Caribbean has expanded significantly in recent years. In the past decade, countries such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic have embedded climate obligations and programmatic guidelines into their national constitutions.
At the same time, legislative recognition of the human right to a healthy environment is gaining momentum across the region. Six Caribbean nations now affirm the right in their constitutions, while 15 have recognised it through international instruments, such as the UN Council, UN Assembly and the Escazu Agreement, as shown in the figure below.
More recently, there has been a notable rise in targeted, sector-specific climate frameworks that go beyond broader environmental statutes.
Saint Lucia stands out as the only country with a climate framework law, or a comprehensive national law that outlines long-term climate strategies across multiple domains. Meanwhile, several other Caribbean governments have adopted climate-specific laws that focus on individual sectors, such as energy, migration and disaster management.
According to our analysis, more than a quarter of climate-relevant legislation in the region – comprising 21 laws and legally binding decrees – now has an explicit focus on climate change, as illustrated in the chart below.
Our research suggests that this represents an ongoing shift in legislative focus, reflecting changes in how climate legislation is being structured in one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions.
Caribbean nations are also advancing legal reforms to structure and institutionalise climate finance and market mechanisms directly into domestic law, aligned with Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement.
For example, the Bahamas has introduced provisions for carbon credit trading, while Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and Grenada have established national climate financing mechanisms to support mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Some states, including Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis, have incorporated regional bodies such as the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre – the climate arm of the intergovernmental Caribbean community organisation CARICOM – into national frameworks. This indicates an increasing alignment between regional cooperation and domestic law.
In addition to the influx of regulations specifically addressing climate change, Caribbean nations are also legislating broader environmental issues, which, in turn, could provide increased resilience from climate impacts and risks, as shown in the graph above.
Key trends in these types of climate-related laws include the expansion of disaster risk management governance, which addresses national preparedness for climate-induced weather events or related catastrophes. Likewise, energy law is an increasingly prominent focus, with countries including Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines integrating renewable energy and energy efficiency goals into national climate governance.
More broadly, many Caribbean nations have adopted wide-ranging and comprehensive environmental laws, many of which were developed in alignment with existing climate commitments. In combination, these legal developments reflect a dynamic and evolving climate governance landscape across the region.
Proactive vs reactive approaches
Despite general alignment with these broader regional trends, our research reveals distinct developmental pathways shaping domestic climate regulation.
In the eastern Caribbean, for example, we saw both proactive, long-term planning strategies and reactive, post-disaster reforms.
Saint Lucia’s multifaceted approach to climate resilience evolved steadily over the course of more than a decade. During this time, the country developed numerous adaptation plans, strengthened cross-sectoral coordination and engaged in institutional climate reforms in areas such as energy, tourism, finance and development.
More recently, the passage of Saint Lucia’s Climate Change Act in 2024 marked a milestone in climate governance, by giving legal force to the country’s obligations under the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement – making Saint Lucia one of the few small island states to incorporate global climate commitments into domestic law.
Our research indicates that this strategy has not only positioned the country as a more climate-resilient nation, but also solidified its access to international climate financing.
In contrast, Dominica’s efforts evolved more rapidly in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, which destroyed over 200% of the country’s GDP. The storm’s impacts were felt across the country and hit particularly hard for the Kalinago people – the Caribbean’s last Indigenous community – highlighting the role of socioeconomic disparities in shaping climate vulnerability and resilience.
In response, the government passed the Climate Resilience Act, creating the temporary Climate Resilience Execution Agency for Dominica (CREAD).
Beyond establishing an exclusively climate-focused institution, the act aimed to embed resilience into governance by mandating the participation of vulnerable communities – including Indigenous peoples, women, older people and people with disabilities – in shaping and monitoring climate resilience projects.
As noted in a recent statement by the UN special rapporteur on Climate Change, Dr Elisa Morgera, these frameworks underscore the government’s ambition to become the world’s first “climate-resilient nation.”
Although challenges persist, Dominica’s efforts demonstrate how post-disaster urgency can drive institutional change, including the integration of rights and resilience into climate governance.
Uneven progress and structural gaps
Despite significant progress, our research shows that several key opportunities for climate governance across the Caribbean continue to exist, which could enable improvements in both resilience and long-term ambition.
The region’s legal landscape remains somewhat heterogeneous. While Saint Lucia has enacted a comprehensive climate framework law, the rest of the region lacks similar blanket legislation. This includes some states that entirely lack climate-specific laws, instead relying on related laws and frameworks to regulate and respond to climate-related risks.
Other nations have yet to adopt explicit disaster-risk management frameworks, leaving Caribbean populations vulnerable before, during and after climate emergencies. Most have yet to enshrine the right to a healthy environment at the national level.
Our research suggests that outdated legal frameworks are further limiting progress in addressing current climate risks. Because many of the longer-standing environmental laws in the region were adopted well before climate policy became a mainstream concern, some fail to address the nature, frequency and intensity of modern climate challenges, such as sea-level rise, tropical storms, wildfires, floods, droughts and other impacts.
More broadly, many Caribbean climate laws include limited integration of gender equity, Indigenous rights and social justice. As Caribbean nations such as Grenada and the Dominican Republic begin to link climate resilience with these issues, the region has an opportunity to lead by example.
Ultimately, capacity and resource constraints persist as significant barriers to implementation and adaptation.
The Caribbean region faces debt that exacerbates ongoing development challenges, a burden made heavier by the repeated economic shocks of climate-related disasters. Along with regional debt-for-resilience schemes, increased funding from high-emitting countries to support adaptation measures in climate-vulnerable nations – as endorsed under the Paris Agreement – is likely to be critical to ensuring the region’s climate laws can be executed effectively.
Global implications of Caribbean climate law
Our research suggests that Caribbean countries are outpacing other regions in terms of the scope and ambition of their climate laws. This legislation has the potential to serve as a model for climate-vulnerable nations worldwide.
Continuing efforts in the region show that legal frameworks in the field can not only drive resilience, embed rights and strengthen claims to international finance, but also highlight how regional cooperation and diplomacy can enhance global influence.
These findings demonstrate that innovation in climate law need not wait for action from major emitters, but can instead be led by those on the front lines of climate change.
The post Guest post: How Caribbean states are shifting climate legislation appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How Caribbean states are shifting climate legislation
More than 100 countries have cut their dependence on fossil-fuel imports and saved hundreds of billions of dollars by continuing to invest in renewables, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It says nations such as the UK, Germany and Chile have reduced their need for imported coal and gas by around a third since 2010, mainly by building wind and solar power.
Denmark has cut its reliance on fossil-fuel imports by nearly half over the same period.
Renewable expansion allowed these nations to collectively avoid importing 700m tonnes of coal and 400bn cubic metres of gas in 2023, equivalent to around 10% of global consumption.
In doing so, the fuel-importing countries saved more than $1.3tn between 2010 and 2023 that would otherwise have been spent on fossil fuels from overseas.
Reduced reliance
The IEA’s Renewables 2025 report quantifies the benefits of renewable-energy deployment for electricity systems in fossil fuel-importing nations.
It compares recent trends in renewable expansion to an alternative “low renewable-energy source” scenario, in which this growth did not take place.
In this counterfactual, fuel-importing countries stopped building wind, solar and other non-hydropower renewable-energy projects after 2010.
In reality, the world added around 2,500 gigawatts (GW) of such projects between 2010 and 2023, according to the IEA, more than the combined electricity generating capacity of the EU and US in 2023, from all sources. Roughly 80% of this new renewable capacity was built in nations that rely on coal and gas imports to generate electricity.
The chart below shows how 31 of these countries have substantially cut their dependence on imported fossil fuels over the 13-year period, as a result of expanding their wind, solar and other renewable energy supplies. All of these countries are net importers of coal and gas.
In total, the IEA identified 107 countries that had reduced their dependence on fossil fuel imports for electricity generation, to some extent due to the deployment of renewables other than hydropower.
Of these, 38 had cut their reliance on electricity from imported coal and gas by more than 10 percentage points and eight had seen that share drop by more than 30 percentage points.
Security and resilience
The IEA stresses that renewables “inherently strengthen energy supply security”, because they generate electricity domestically, while also “improving…economic resilience” in fossil-fuel importer countries.
This is particularly true for countries with low or dwindling domestic energy resources.
The agency cites the energy crisis exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which exposed EU importers to spiralling fossil-fuel prices.
Bulgaria, Romania and Finland – which have historically depended on Russian gas for electricity generation – have all brought their import reliance close to zero in recent years by building renewables.
In the UK, where there has been mounting opposition to renewables from right-wing political parties, the IEA says reliance on electricity generated with imported fossil fuels has dropped from 45% to under 25% in a decade, thanks primarily to the growth of wind and solar power.
Without these technologies, the UK would now be needing to import fossil fuels to supply nearly 60% of its electricity, the IEA says.
Other major economies, notably China and the EU, would also have had to rely on a growing share of coal and gas from overseas, if they had not expanded renewables.
As well as increasing the need for fossil-fuel imports from other countries, switching renewables for fossil fuels would require significantly higher energy usage “due to [fossil fuels’] lower conversion efficiencies”, the IEA notes. Each gigawatt-hour (GWh) of renewable power produced has avoided the need for 2-3GWh of fossil fuels, it explains.
Finally, the IEA points out that spending on renewables rather than imported fossil fuels keeps more investment in domestic economies and supports local jobs.
The post IEA: Renewables have cut fossil-fuel imports for more than 100 countries appeared first on Carbon Brief.
IEA: Renewables have cut fossil-fuel imports for more than 100 countries
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