Published

8 months ago

September 17, 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

Amazon summit leaves observers ‘frustrated’

MISSING THE TARGET: The fifth summit of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) took place last Friday, with the release of the Bogotá Declaration coming the next day, Agência Brasil reported. The meeting was a “platform to update the commitments of the countries” that share the Amazon rainforest, the outlet said. The declaration “emphasised the urgency of coordinated action against deforestation and biodiversity loss”, but there was an “absence of clearer targets”, which “frustrated” observers and civil-society groups. Agência Brasil also said that the “issue of energy transition and fossil-fuel exploration” was divisive at the summit.

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INDIGENOUS INCLUSION: Ahead of the meeting, Indigenous groups were “demanding that oil be left underground…[and] that the Amazon be declared the world’s first no-go zone for fossil-fuel exploration and exploitation”, EFE Verde reported. According to Stand.earth, the summit “strengthen[ed] Indigenous participation” despite “fail[ing]” to meet the fossil-fuel demands. The summit resulted in the creation of the Amazonian Indigenous Peoples Mechanism (MAPI), which Stand.earth explained “establishes a co-governance structure” for ACTO where each country is represented by both a government and an Indigenous delegate.

FUND THE FACILITY: Another element of the Bogotá Declaration was a pledge to support the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), Climate Home News reported. The outlet added that the declaration “invites” countries to “announce substantial contributions” in order to “guarantee the fund’s quick activation”. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said: “We’re fed up with promises…I want to see who’s going to put up the money to keep the forest standing.” Meanwhile, ((o))eco reported that Brazil saw an 84% increase in international climate finance from 2019-20 to 2021-22, but forests received just 2%.

Wildfires continue to burn

NEW EU RECORD: Wildfires have ravaged more than 1m hectares in the EU in 2025, the largest area since records began in 2006, according to an analysis by Agence France-Presse. The news agency analysed data from the European Forest Fire Information System and found that Spain, Cyprus, Germany and Slovakia have been the hardest hit over the past two decades. Additionally, satellites revealed that wildfires across the Iberian peninsula released 13m tonnes of carbon dioxide this year – six times larger than 2022 levels, El Periódico reported.

HARDEST HIT: Six firefighters died while combatting “devastating wildfires exacerbated by an enduring heatwave” in Spain and Portugal, according to France24. More than 343,000 hectares were “ravage[d]” this year in Spain, setting a new national record, the outlet said. Scientists identified the primary cause of the fires in both countries as an “overabundance of flammable vegetation on abandoned land and authorities’ failure to take preventive measures,” which prompted Spain’s environmental prosecutor to initiate an “investigation into the lack of prevention plans”, Politico added.

US FIRES: Wildfires in California and Oregon led to the evacuation of thousands of homes, the Associated Press reported. In Oregon, the fire began Thursday and “grew quickly amid hot, gusty conditions”, the newswire said. A “sweltering” heatwave has hospitalised people in the western US, it added. Mongabay covered the “scientific standoff” surrounding the “active management” of forests, which consists of using controlled burning and thinning of forests to promote regeneration and resilience. It added that forest managers are “grappl[ing] with the growing effects of climate change”.

News and views

PRIVATE SECTOR CALL: Nature loss will reduce UK GDP by 5% without a “greater effort” from the private sector to halt the decline, the Guardian said. A report from the Green Finance Institute and WWF said that companies in many sectors can receive economic returns from investment in nature. The outlet noted that some businesses “are failing to reform or are unaware of the impact of their actions on nature and the climate”. The report listed suggestions for companies to take action on nature decline.

SOLAR SLOWDOWN: The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it will “heighten scrutiny of some solar and wind projects” on farmland across the country, reported Reuters. The agency said it will stop funding larger renewable energy facilities and will not allow the use of foreign-made solar panels. Inside Climate News said the agency had expressed concern about the possible expansion of wind and solar facilities on productive farmland. However, the outlet cited a 2024 USDA analysis finding that renewables occupy 0.05% of the 897m acres of pasture and cropland in the country.

FISHERY REFORM: Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama signed a “sweeping” fisheries and aquaculture reform act into law last week that the government believes will “ensure sustainability…and better protection for the country’s fishing communities”, according to Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. One provision in the bill is an expansion of the country’s inshore exclusion zone, which prevents industrial trawling ships from encroaching on artisanal fishing grounds. News Ghana reported that the law is “designed to address EU trade sanctions”, which threaten the country’s $425m annual seafood exports.

POLARISED POLICY: A new forest land policy in the Philippines has been touted by officials as a “major shift in forest governance”, but has been questioned by civil society organisations, Mongabay reported. Under the policy, farmers are able to carry out multiple different land uses – including reforestation, ecotourism, conservation and commercial use – in designated forest areas. The secretary of the Philippines’s environment department said the reform is an attempt to “unlock the economic potential” of the country’s forests and scale up sustainable investment. The outlet said that environmental groups warned of the policy resulting in forest degradation, the displacement of Indigenous peoples and greenwashing.

PARAGUAYAN PLANTATIONS: Apple purchased carbon credits associated with the use of agrochemicals harmful to communities on eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay, a joint investigation for Consenso and Climate Tracker revealed. The investigation used documents, field visits and satellite images to show that the forestry company selling these carbon credits does not “comply with agrochemical regulations”. It added that eucalyptus monocultures cover more than 300,000 hectares in Paraguay. Residents have pointed out the risks of wildfire due to “persistent drought” conditions in the country over the past five years. Apple had not responded to the allegations at the time of the investigation’s publication.

Spotlight

Extreme heat could triple lost work hours by century’s end

This week, Carbon Brief covers a new UN-backed report that examines the impacts of climate change on labour productivity and health.

Manual labourers, such as farmworkers and fisherfolk, are “already” being impacted by rising temperatures, according to two UN agencies.

A new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) examined the effects of climate change on heat stress in the workplace and offered technical guidance for employers, workers and policymakers.

The report called occupational heat stress a “global societal challenge”.

It also noted that both the direct and indirect impacts of environmental heat stress will worsen and spread geographically as the world continues to warm.

In a press conference prior to the release of the report, Dr Rüdiger Krech, interim director of the WHO’s environment, climate change and migration programme, said the report offered the “most comprehensive evidence yet on how rising temperatures are harming workers”.

‘Adverse consequences’

In 1969, the WHO published a technical report on the potential health threats of working under environmental heat stress. The report concluded that “knowledge relating to occupational heat exposures is inadequate in many respects”. It recommended several priorities for further research.

The new report updated the 1969 report with decades’ worth of research showing that workplace heat stress “directly threatens workers’ ability to live healthy and productive lives and leads subsequently to worsening poverty and socioeconomic inequality”.

It found that around half of the global population currently experiences “adverse consequences of high environmental temperatures”. Agricultural work is “often regarded as [one of] the highest-risk occupations” for work-related heat illness, it said.

Farmworkers typically work with little or no shade during the hottest hours of the day. Some groups of agricultural workers – such as those who manually spray pesticides or other agrochemicals – face added risk of heat stress due to the protective gear that they must wear.

The report warned that, while several early warning systems are in place to protect people during heatwaves, these systems may not be adequate to protect workers, who differ in their exposure to heat and their ability to adapt.

Raising the risk

The new report also examined the changing risks of occupational heat exposure in the context of climate change.

Citing the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it noted that each additional 0.5C of warming “significantly raises the risk of longer and more severe heatwaves”. The largest relative shifts will take place in the temperate mid-latitudes, but the frequency of dangerous events will also increase in the tropics, which have the “greatest workplace heat stress problems at present”.

Under the emissions scenario that aligns with current national climate policies, the worst-affected countries will face annual work hour losses of up to 11% by the end of the century – up from 2-4% today, the report said.

Previous research has found that 3C of warming could reduce global labour capacity by up to 50%, driving up food prices and requiring higher levels of agricultural employment to make up the shortfall.

Krech told the press conference:

“Protecting workers from extreme heat is not only a health priority, it is essential to building resilient, equal and sustainable societies in a warming world.”

Watch, read, listen

ACCESS ISSUES: Civil Eats covered a group in northern California that works to bridge the gap between emergency-relief organisations and local food-systems workers during emergencies.

DELVING INTO THE DEPTHS: NPR Shortwave addressed the importance of mapping the entire seafloor for “improving human life”, from tsunami alerts through to renewable energy.

CONSEQUENCES IN CALIFORNIA: A California state legislator and the president of the California Farm Bureau wrote in the New York Times how immigration raids on farmworkers increase food waste and drive up prices.
‘MESSY GARDENS’: A CBC News video explored how having a “messy garden” can bring benefits for biodiversity and contribute to mitigating climate change.

New science

A study published in One Earth found that the “planetary boundary” of ecosystem integrity may have already been breached on up to 60% of the Earth’s land surface. Researchers modelled ecological disruption and found that 38% of the Earth is “already at high risk of degradation”.
Research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if global temperatures rise 2.3C above pre-industrial temperatures, soil bacterial and fungal diversity would be reduced by 16 and 19%, respectively. It also found that soil organic carbon would drop by 18% under that level of warming.
Eating a diet of biodiverse, plant-based foods can have “modest benefits” for both sufficient nutrition and environmental health, according to new research published in Nature Food. The study found that diversity of animal-sourced foods was inversely associated with both greenhouse gas emissions and land use.

In the diary

18-29 August: Second session of the preparatory commission for the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction | New York
31 August-5 September: Africa Food Systems Summit | Dakar, Senegal
2-5 September: Subregional dialogue on biodiversity monitoring and reporting | Bangkok, Thailand
14-18 September: International Mountain Conference | Innsbruck, Austria

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 27 August 2025: ‘Frustrating’ Amazon summit; Workplace heat hazards; Record European wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Cropped 27 August 2025: ‘Frustrating’ Amazon summit; Workplace heat hazards; Record European wildfires

Climate Change

DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids

Published

8 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

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

This week

UK, Europe and India battle heatwaves

‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy” temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.

‘BRUTAL REMINDER’: In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.

Around the world

CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg.
NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.

Four million

The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.

Latest climate research

Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances

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

Captured

Map of the UK showing that at least 67 NHS sites have been forced to close due to weather-related flooding since 2021

A Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.

Spotlight

How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economy

This week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.

Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.

In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.

Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.

Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief.

However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.

“We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.

A nascent industry

Solar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.

The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.

Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.

However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.

“Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.

The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.

Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.

Powering rural communities

Many rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.

According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.

A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.

With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.

Watch, read, listen

MOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.

ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.

Coming up

31 May: Colombia presidential elections
31 May-5 June: Global Environment Facility council meeting, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
2-5 June: The Venice Agreement for Peatlands workshop, Kisumu, Kenya

Pick of the jobs

National Oceanography Centre, engagement assistant (external communications) | Salary: £28,254. Location: Southampton, UK
Dangote Industries, decarbonisation specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lagos, Nigeria
City of New York, chief decarbonization officer | Salary: $261,469. Location: New York City
Climate Central, writer and associate editor | Salary: $72,000-$75,000. Location: US (Remote)

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 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids

Climate Change

Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?

Published

9 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.

Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.

Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”

As the Mission 300 initiative advances, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).

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In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, GEAPP’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.

Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. So we want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country.

Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed.

Campaigners in Africa are demanding their governments stop the development of fossil fuels on the continent and embrace the opportunities of renewable energy
(Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)

The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.

Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.

We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.

The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.

Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?

A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that.

So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities.

Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?

A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses.

Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier.

Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?

The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.

Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?

A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.

So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that.

Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?

A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.

Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies

When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable.

To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.

Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.

The post Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?

Climate Change

AI boom means US is now ‘investing more’ in fossil-fuel power than China

Published

10 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

A rapid expansion of data centres across the nation is at the heart of the US tech sector’s plans to continue “dominat[ing]” the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

Annual investment in fossil-fuel power in China and the US, $bn. The figure for 2026 is an IEA estimate, based on current trends. Source: IEA.

The IEA’s latest world energy investment report shows that spending on renewables and electricity grids continues to dominate at the global scale.

In the US, Trump administration policies such as the phase-out of tax credits for renewables has led to the IEA revising its forecast for new wind and solar power downwards.

At the same time, US electricity demand is expected to rise by an average of 2% per year from 2026 to 2030, with data centres contributing half of the overall increase.

This is leading to what the IEA calls an “AI-driven push” to build new gas-power plants in the US, the world’s largest data-centre market and largest gas producer.

Globally, orders for new gas-power plants increased to 130 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 – a 25-year high – and US demand was a “major factor” in this, according to the IEA.

Much of the demand is coming from tech companies in the US seeking to bypass grid connection queues by building “captive” gas-power plants.

As the chart below shows, since the start of 2025 these US captive data centres alone have signed off on more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world – aside from the US itself.

Total value of new gas generation final investment decisions by country, region or use-case, between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, $bn. Source: IEA.

Overall, investment in grid upgrades, power equipment and electricity generation to support the buildout of data-centre infrastructure around the world hit $105bn in 2025, according to the IEA.

This is more than the total invested in the energy sector across the whole of Africa – a continent where more than 600 million people do not have access to electricity.

The IEA notes that strong demand for gas-power plants for data centres in the US – and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East – is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.

The agency also points out that as the tech sector becomes a “major energy investor”, accounting for around 40% of all corporate power-purchase agreements, it is also “underpinning momentum” for emerging clean technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal.