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
Amazon affairs
DRY SPELL: Climate change made last year’s agricultural drought in the Amazon around 30 times more likely to occur, according to a new rapid attribution study covered by Mongabay. The El Niño climate pattern “played a much smaller role” than many had assumed, the outlet said. World Weather Attribution scientists analysed data from the Amazon region between June and December last year, finding that both El Niño and climate change “contributed to reduced rainfall” during these months. But climate change “also led to high temperatures, significantly increasing water evaporation from plants and soils”, the outlet added. The report authors “predict that dry spells in the Amazon will become more frequent and harsher” under continued warming, Mongabay said.
CRIME COOPERATION: A $1.8m Amazon rainforest security centre will open in Manaus, Brazil in the coming months, Climate Home News reported. The centre is financed through the Amazon Fund and will “bring together Amazon nations in policing the rainforest, sharing intelligence and chasing criminals”, the outlet said. Climate Home News quoted Humberto Freire, head of the Brazil federal police’s environment and Amazon department, who said the centre will “fight drug trafficking and the smuggling of timber, fish and exotic animals, as well as deforestation and other environmental crimes”. It will also focus on illegal gold mining on Indigenous land, the outlet said.
LAND CONFLICT: Meanwhile, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said the federal government will “help resolve” a land conflict between Indigenous people and farmers that led to the fatal shooting of a tribal leader, Reuters reported. Maria Fatima de Andrade was shot and killed after 200 land owners tried to “evict an Indigenous community” from a farm in the state of Bahia and take the land, which is claimed by the Pataxó tribe, the newswire said. Another leader was also shot and brought to hospital, Reuters said, noting that the incident “underlines years of tensions between Brazil’s Indigenous peoples and agricultural settlers over land rights”. The country’s minister for Indigenous peoples, Sonia Guajajara, said the attack was “unacceptable”, the newswire added.
Offsets scrutinised
EU BAN: Labelling products and services as “climate neutral” or “climate positive” based on the use of carbon offsets will be banned in the EU from 2026, the Guardian reported. Carbon offsets involve a polluting entity, such as an airline, paying for emissions to be reduced elsewhere, such as by preventing deforestation. Companies often use carbon-offsetting to make claims that their products are “net-zero” or “environmentally friendly”, but evidence – previously set out in detail by Carbon Brief – shows these can be exaggerated or misleading. On 17 January, members of the European parliament voted to outlaw the use of terms such as “environmentally friendly”, “natural”, “biodegradable”, “climate neutral” or “eco” without evidence. The European parliament also introduced a total ban on using carbon-offsetting to back up such claims, the Guardian reported. The NGO Carbon Market Watch called the move “a big step towards more honest commercial practices and more informed European consumers”.
GUYANA CREDITS: Elsewhere, the Financial Times reported on Guyana’s plans to generate $3bn from forest carbon offset schemes by the end of the decade. Forests currently cover 85% of the South American country’s land surface, the FT said, with the government estimating they could generate credits representing 19.5bn tonnes of CO2 – more than the annual emissions of China. However, offsetting plans could be put at risk by conflict with neighbouring Venezuela, which has threatened to annex more than half of Guyana’s territory, the FT said. It added that most of Guyana’s forests are in the mineral-rich region of Essequibo, “a tract of Amazon jungle that would be a prime target for Venezuelan loggers and miners in the event of a takeover”.
COOKSTOVE CONTROVERSY: Finally, Heatmap was among several publications covering a new study finding that carbon offset schemes using so-called “clean” cookstoves are “kind of bogus”. Clean cookstove schemes involve the distribution of more efficient cooking equipment, with the goal of cutting reliance on traditional fuels, such as firewood – leading to lower emissions. The study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that cookstove projects have generated, on average, nine times more carbon credits than they should have, Heatmap reported. The research was published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
Spotlight
French farmers and the far right
In this spotlight, Carbon Brief looks at the ongoing EU farmer protests and how far-right political groups could latch on to the outrage ahead of the European parliament elections in June.
Farmers have used tractors to blockade the streets of Berlin, Brussels and Bucharest in recent weeks. Farmers across the EU have been protesting against “competition from cheaper imports”, tightening environmental rules and rising production costs, according to Reuters.
This week, the French farmer protests escalated. Hundreds of tractors blocked off major roads into the country’s capital in what has been dubbed the “siege of Paris” by many media outlets, including BBC News. President Emmanuel Macron is “scrambling to end an escalating political and social crisis”, the Times said.
According to Le Monde, farmers are raising issues around “pesticides, free-trade agreements and wages”. France is an EU agricultural powerhouse, producing huge amounts of meat, dairy and wheat each year.
The nation’s newly appointed prime minister, Gabriel Attal, announced some concessions to farmers, including simplified technical procedures and a “progressive end to diesel fuel taxes for farm vehicles”, the Associated Press reported.
But the two main farmers’ unions said these measures did not go far enough and vowed to continue the protests.
The protests are the “first big test” of Attal’s leadership, Bloomberg noted. And, just months out from the European parliament elections, Euractiv said they are also the “first major political test for EU election candidates in France”.
Ahead of these elections, Politico said that right-wing parties in countries – such as France, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany – are “piggybacking on farmers’ noisy outrage”. Recent polling has suggested that there could be a “sharp turn to the right” in the June vote, Deutsche Welle reported.
Dr Gilles Ivaldi, a politics researcher at Sciences Po who has examined the far right in Europe, said that right-wing groups may use the farmer protests to “boost their electoral support” in France and elsewhere. He told Carbon Brief:
“What we see, particularly in France, is that the far right is seeking to capitalise on public discontent with the impact of the green transition, not only among farmers but also in social groups affected most by the economic cost of environmental policies.”
He said the French far right is “clearly trying to instrumentalise” the farmer protests to “mobilise against the government and the EU”. Sky News said the protests “are being seized upon by various groups”, including Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National party.
But Ivaldi noted that the far right’s EU election focus will mostly remain on topics such as immigration, the economy, the future of the EU and the bloc’s Green Deal. The “main factors” behind a potential right-wing surge will not come from agriculture alone. He added:
“Far-right parties are currently capitalising on the economic crisis and rise in prices, on the immigration issue, particularly growing concerns about the massive influx of refugees in Germany and, more broadly, the many anxieties caused by the war in Ukraine and geopolitical instability.”
News and views
LET’S EAT BALANCED’: A £4m advertising campaign aimed at convincing young people to eat more meat and dairy has been released in the UK, with support from the government, DeSmog reported. Timed to coincide with Veganuary (a popular challenge where people go vegan for January), the “Let’s Eat Balanced” campaign – voiced by British comedian Richard Ayoade – targets cinema screens, TVs, newspapers, social media channels and major supermarkets, DeSmog said. The campaign attempts to communicate the health benefits of eating meat and dairy, which “flies in the face of science”, experts told DeSmog. It was developed by the PR agency Ogilvy, which counts BP as a former client, and is run by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, a UK government-appointed board funded by farmers’ levies.
AT SEA: Chile and Palau became the first countries to officially sign off on the High Seas Treaty, Euronews Green reported. Palau was the first to ratify the treaty governing the sustainable use and conservation of international waters since it was agreed last March, the outlet said. The Chilean senate “unanimously” voted in favour of ratification, which will become official “once it is published in the government’s official journal”. The outlet quoted Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, who said she hopes Palau “inspires” others to “redouble their efforts to ratify the treaty without delay so that it can enter force as soon as possible” once 60 nations sign off.
COLOMBIA FIRES: Colombia, due to host the biodiversity summit COP16 later this year, is currently battling intense fires in the mountains around the capital city of Bogotá, as dozens of other blazes have burned across the country, the New York Times reported. The president, Gustavo Petro, has declared a national disaster and asked for international help fighting the fires amid the country’s hottest January in three decades, according to the publication. It comes after the UN Convention on Biological Diversity announced that six cities in Colombia have expressed interest in hosting COP16. It is not yet clear if the fire emergency could affect Colombia’s ability to host the summit.
TAKE OFF: The world’s first plant using ethanol partly made with corn to produce “sustainable aviation fuel” opened in the US, Bloomberg reported. The $200m facility in Georgia plans to use the ethanol made from “American-grown corn, as well as from advanced technologies”, the outlet said. The facility’s opening spurred industry groups in Iowa – the US state that produces the most corn – to warn farmers and ethanol producers that they risk “missing out on the chance to significantly profit from the developing market for sustainable aviation fuel”, the outlet said. A 2022 study found that corn-based ethanol is likely more carbon-intensive overall than petrol, Reuters previously reported.
HUNT FOR POWER: Climate Home News investigated lithium mining in Zimbabwe, where Chinese companies have “flocked” to secure supplies of the lightweight metal, which is crucial for electric vehicle batteries. Lithium mining “brought the promise of jobs and a better life” for some, the piece outlined, but the country’s “poor progress on establishing robust resource governance” could prevent local communities from “seeing any of the benefits”. The country’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, “aspires to turn Zimbabwe into a battery manufacturing hub” to help “catapult the country into an upper-middle-income economy by 2030”, the outlet said.
CAMBODIA DEFORESTATION: A Mongabay investigation alleged that a vast forested wildlife sanctuary in Cambodia is being put at risk by mining concessions granted by the government to a “timber baron” who has previously been sanctioned over corruption in relation to natural resource extraction. In 2023, the Cambodian government announced a ban on extractive practices inside the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, a “sprawling carbon sink” home to 250,000 Indigenous peoples, according to Mongabay. However, the government made an exemption for companies that had already been awarded contracts, it added. This included the mining company of Try Pheap, “a powerful tycoon and adviser to the previous prime minister”, Mongabay said. Mongabay was unable to make contact with the Cambodian government or representatives of Try Pheap, despite repeated attempts.
Watch, read, listen
TREE GRIEF: Al Jazeera spoke to Palestinians who are grieving the loss of their olive trees, which have long been a symbol of the Palestinian spirit, amid Israel’s assault on Gaza.
HIT THE WAVES: The Climate Question, a BBC podcast, looked towards Northern Ireland and South Korea to see why tidal power is not more commonly used in renewable energy.
TINY WILD CAT: A long read by Mongabay explored how conservationists are working to save the guina, the Americas’ smallest wild cat species, native to Chile and Argentina.
‘BLACK MOSS’: The South China Morning Post examined the Chinese new year staple “fat choy” and how its overharvesting has turned parts of China “into desert”.
New science
Atmospheric CO2 emissions and ocean acidification from bottom-trawling
Frontiers in Marine Science
Bottom-trawling – the fishing practice where nets are scraped along the seabed – could have caused the release of up to 370m tonnes of CO2 between 1996 and 2020, a new study found. As well as being harmful for wildlife living near the bottom of the ocean, bottom-trawling disturbs carbon that was previously locked up for millenia, the researchers said. They used a combination of satellite data tracking fishing events and carbon cycling modelling to examine how bottom-trawling could cause CO2 emissions. The researchers also found that, in heavily trawled seas, the volume of carbon released is likely to be enough to drive ocean acidification – known to be harmful to a range of ocean wildlife, from coral reefs to fish.
Multi-decadal trends of low-clouds at the tropical montane cloud forests
Ecological Indicators
New research suggested that low-cloud cover is declining over tropical montane cloud forests because of climate change, posing an existential threat to these unique mountain ecosystems. The study used climate data to study changes to the proportion of sky covered by cloud cover and other climate variables in 521 tropical montane cloud forests across the world from 1997 to 2020. The researchers found that proportional cloud cover has declined at 70% of these sites, with cloud forests in central and South America and south-east Asia most affected. Decreases in cloud cover were associated with increases in surface temperature and decreases in soil moisture, “revealing that the tropical montane cloud forests’ climate is changing”, the researchers added.
Livestock increasingly drove global agricultural emissions growth from 1910-2015
Environmental Research Letters
Emissions from agriculture in 2015 were more than three times bigger than they were around one century prior, a study found. Scientists developed a dataset of global emissions from the agriculture sector across 10 time periods between 1910 and 2015. They found that agriculture emissions from livestock, soil management and fossil energy inputs “increased continuously” during this time by an overall factor of 3.5, with methane accounting for the majority of these emissions. The study said that reduced emissions intensity, especially for livestock, “partly counterbalanced” the overall rise in emissions to varying degrees. The researchers wrote that the findings “underscore the large potential of reducing livestock production and consumption for mitigating the climate impacts of agriculture”.
In the diary
- 6 February: European Commission to publish 2040 emissions-reduction target recommendations
- 12-17 February: Fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals | Samarkand, Uzbekistan
- 14 February: Indonesian general election
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 31 January 2024: French farmers and the far right; Amazon affairs; EU offsetting ban appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 31 January 2024: French farmers and the far right; Amazon affairs; EU offsetting ban
At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites across the UK have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding over the past five years, a Carbon Brief investigation reveals.
Maternity centres, surgical theatres, a neonatal intensive-care unit and even entire hospital buildings have been disrupted by heavy rainfall or encroaching floodwaters.
Carbon Brief submitted freedom-of-information (FOI) requests to 162 NHS trusts, which show that while many flood-related shutdowns were brief, some lasted for weeks or months.
In total, 148 trusts responded to these requests with reports of 67 flood-related shutdowns, giving detailed data for 30 incidents that resulted in a total of 3,000 days of closures.
Reports of flooding at NHS sites have been on the rise, according to NHS England data.
This comes as the UK experiences wetter winters, with periods of extreme rainfall that are increasingly linked to human-caused climate change.
These floods can exacerbate existing problems in a healthcare system that is already struggling with insufficient funding, old hospital buildings and a backlog of maintenance work.
Indeed, while there have been efforts to make UK hospitals more resilient to extreme weather, one expert tells Carbon Brief that such measures are difficult to implement when these institutions are struggling to keep their “heads above water”.
Rising floods
Floods pose a threat to people’s health, but they also threaten the UK’s healthcare infrastructure. Water can enter hospitals, paralyse ambulance services and damage equipment, placing strain on an already stretched NHS.
NHS records show that the number of flood incidents “caused by external weather events” in facilities across England has doubled since 2021, reaching nearly 400 in 2024-25.
Equivalent data is not available for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, although there have been reports of floods disrupting services across the whole UK.
As global temperatures rise and the atmosphere holds more moisture, UK winters are getting wetter. Attribution studies show climate change has increased the severity of recent rainfall and flooding events – including Storm Eunice in 2022 and Storm Babet in 2023.
There is also a risk of increased flooding when heavy rain hits after periods of intense drought, of the kind seen in recent years.
Environment Agency modelling suggests that a rising share of medical facilities in England will be at risk of flooding due to climate change. It says the share of sites at risk will increase from a quarter in 2024 to a third by the middle of the century.
Despite this apparent threat facing the UK’s healthcare system, there is limited information about the extent to which these floods are already disrupting NHS services.
Closed services
To build a fuller picture of NHS-wide flooding, Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to 162 trusts and health boards – the organisations in charge of health services – across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
They were asked for details of wards, departments or services that had been temporarily or permanently closed due to weather-related flooding, such as river floods or heavy rainfall, between 2021-22 and the start of 2026.
In total, 148 of these bodies responded with details of 67 incidents in which weather-related floods have triggered closures. The map below shows where these incidents were located, from hospital wards in Scotland to an eye unit on the south coast of England.
The 67 flooding-related disruptions reported by NHS trusts and health boards is likely an underestimate. Many trusts told Carbon Brief they did not record such detailed information or that collating it would be too time-consuming.
Nevertheless, the results provide an insight into the kind of risks facing NHS services as weather gets more extreme.
Among the closures were 13 accident and emergency (A&E) departments, urgent treatment centres and minor injuries units. There were also 10 hospital wards, 10 surgical theatres, five maternity units and a neonatal intensive-care unit affected by flooding.
Many trusts did not provide information about how long each closure lasted. However, the 30 incidents where timespans were provided add up to the equivalent of more than 3,000 days – or eight years – of closures across NHS sites.
The infographic below provides a snapshot of some notable closures from the dataset.
The entire Buckland Hospital site in Dover closed for two days in 2025 amid “exceptional rainfall” and flash floods. People seeking radiology, maternity and urgent-care services were told not to visit over the weekend and various clinical services were delayed or cancelled.
The NHS declared a “major incident” in 2021 when flood waters “caused power outages impacting multiple areas” at Whipps Cross Hospital in north-east London – including its maternity service – for four days. Neighbouring hospitals also flooded.
Some closures lasted far longer. In Stroud General Hospital, a surgical theatre was closed for two weeks and an X-ray facility for around two months after storm water overflowed into the building in 2023.
Several NHS trusts stressed that the flooding incidents they reported were localised – often resulting from roof leaks exacerbated by heavy rain – and resulted in minimal disruption. Sometimes, as with a cardiology suite in Cannock Chase Hospital, the service was moved and the trust says patient care was not disrupted.
However, the responses also showed the breadth of damage such events can cause, including rainwater “pouring onto expensive equipment” and floods triggering the long-term relocation of services.
For example, Orchard Cottage, a site that provided care for adults with learning disabilities in Derbyshire, experienced major flooding during Storm Babet in 2023 and was permanently shut down as a result.
Adaptation needs
The UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, a group of UK health organisations, concluded in a report in 2025 that, with flood risks projected to grow, there is an “urgent need for adaptation measures” across the nation’s healthcare facilities.
Government advisors at the Climate Change Committee have highlighted the need for flood resilience in UK hospitals, including flood barriers, waterproofed electricals and built-in redundancy for critical areas, such as theatres, labs and IT equipment.
There have been various measures at both government and NHS level intended to improve the resilience of medical facilities to climate-related hazards.
The UK’s national adaptation programme sets out expectations for NHS England to “adapt NHS infrastructure to extreme weather events”. All trusts must have “green plans” in place, which require climate change to be factored into infrastructure decisions, for example, through the creation of drainage systems or green spaces.
Yet, as it stands, three-quarters of UK doctors say their workplaces are not prepared for the impact of extreme weather and nearly half of healthcare workers report that extreme weather has disrupted NHS services in the past five years.
Many hospitals have outdated infrastructure – often predating the founding of the NHS – which was not designed to cope with climate change. Prof Hugh Montgomery, chair of intensive-care medicine at University College London, tells Carbon Brief:
“The hospitals themselves weren’t built for this weather any more than anything else is really – and of course it’s going to get worse, in an exponential function.”
Many of the FOI responses provided to Carbon Brief identified specific building defects, such as roof leaks, which led to the flooding incidents during periods of heavy rainfall. There is a huge – and growing – backlog of maintenance work at NHS hospitals that was estimated in 2024-25 to need repairs costing £15.9bn.
Chris Naylor, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, a thinktank focusing on health policy, tells Carbon Brief:
“Dealing with some of the backlog maintenance would probably help with climate adaptation as well, because of leaky roofs and all the rest of it. But we do also need to be thinking specifically about climate adaptation within the NHS and making sure there is funding for that.”
Montgomery points out that with trusts “mostly bankrupt” and most hospitals running a deficit, the question remains how to fund such interventions. “They’re struggling to keep their heads above water and they’re losing money,” he says.
Dr Mark Harber, a consultant nephrologist and special adviser on climate change at the Royal College of Physicians, tells Carbon Brief that hospitals at least need to make plans for extreme weather. This is particularly important for patients in need of time-dependent and life-saving treatments, such as kidney dialysis and chemotherapy.
Harber notes that hospitals, supply chains and transport could all be disrupted by floods:
“You have to have plans in place to deal with that, even if the NHS can’t deal with the flooding risk per se.”
Carbon Brief asked NHS England – which is responsible for the majority of the trusts that reported flooding disruption – for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Methodology
The list of incidents reported by trusts can be viewed here.
Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to 120 English NHS trusts that have reported any incidents of flooding since 2021 in NHS England’s Estates Returns Information Collection (ERIC) dataset. This covers around 60% of all English NHS trusts.
Carbon Brief also filed FOI requests with all 42 of the health boards and trusts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which are equivalent to English NHS trusts.
All trusts and health boards were asked for details of wards, departments or services that have been temporarily or permanently closed due to weather-related flooding, such as river flooding or heavy rainfall.
This matches the wording used to describe a flooding event in the ERIC system, which requires the reporting of all flood events “caused by external weather events” that trigger a risk assessment by staff. Such external events are distinct from floods caused by other issues that are not related to the weather, such as burst pipes.
In total, 14 trusts did not respond and many more said they did not hold the data requested. Some trusts provided data, but on further questioning stated that the data they provided covered all flooding events and it was not possible to say which were related to weather conditions. These cases have not been included in the final dataset.
The post Revealed: Floods have forced at least 67 closures at NHS hospitals since 2021 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: Floods have forced at least 67 closures at NHS hospitals since 2021
Adeline Rochet is a programme manager for the Corporate Leaders Group Europe, a business coalition driving the transition to a sustainable, competitive, and resilient economy convened by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL).
Europe’s economy depends on the natural world functioning as it should, but the effects of climate change risk undermining increasingly delicate ecosystems. Talks about the European Union’s next long-term budget miss this fact.
Climate-related losses in the EU have already reached €822 billion since 1980, with a quarter of that damage concentrated in just the past four years. Ecosystems are under increasing pressure: more than 80% of protected habitats are in poor condition, soils are degrading and water stress is rising across the continent.
The latest state of the climate report by the EU’s Earth monitoring service Copernicus confirms this worrying state of affairs: 95% of Europe experienced above-average temperatures in 2025.
Economic exposure to nature-related risk is also growing. Businesses, banks and insurers are beginning to reflect this in their risk assessments.
So, will the policymakers in charge of developing the European Union’s next big budget integrate this vision? We are in the midst of finding out.
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COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans
After promising at COP30 to produce a voluntary global roadmap to stop forest loss by 2030, Brazil provided an update on the consultations this week -
Brazil leads “encouraging” decline in global rainforest destruction in 2025
After hitting a record high in 2024, loss of primary tropical forest dropped by over a third last year, but the world remains way off track for a 2030 goal to halt deforestation
Every seven years, the EU must negotiate a new budget that will help fund priorities over a seven-year-long period. The current one, which runs out next year, is worth more than a trillion euros.
Talks about the next multiannual financial framework (MFF) for 2028-2034 are now getting serious and the initial outline of this new budget shows it will focus on competitiveness, resilience and prosperity.
But, as the European Parliament adopted its negotiating position for the crunch budget talks and EU member states shape their approach ahead of a Council meeting on May 26, it is clear that the positioning of nature within this framework is strategically underestimated.
Why nature impacts economic growth
Back in 2022, France’s nuclear power output was severely affected when heatwaves drove up the temperature of the rivers used to cool atomic reactors, impacting other European countries too. This was particularly poor timing given the energy price crisis triggered earlier that year by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Low river levels caused by drought have also heavily impacted economic activity and growth in countries like Germany, due to the negative effect on inland trade, while degraded fields in the Netherlands combined with heavy rainfall have ruined potato harvests.
These examples show that we cannot detach the health of the European economy from the good functioning of nature.
UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court
Nearly three-quarters of businesses in the eurozone rely directly on ecosystem services such as clean water, fertile soils and pollination. That dependency extends into the financial system, where around 75% of bank lending is exposed to companies dependent on these natural assets.
They entirely underpin supply chains and financial stability across the European economy. If load-bearing ecosystems collapse, businesses not only face disruption in their own operations, but they will also be exposed to failures from suppliers and customers.
This is not just a risk for individual companies, it is a threat for the whole system.
A budget that looks greener than it is
According to the latest proposals for the next MFF, a single 35% climate and environmental target will replace priorities that used to have distinct funding. As it stands, biodiversity has a 10% target, yet spending has struggled to reach even 8%, already showing how easily it is put to one side in practice.
In the new framework, biodiversity is absorbed into a broader category with no separate tracking or visibility. Dedicated instruments are folded into larger funding envelopes, and nature-based investments are placed in direct and distorted competition with industrial projects.
These are often faster to deploy and easier to measure, making them more attractive.
Headline figures reinforce some appearance of ambition, with €587–635 billion allocated to climate and environmental objectives. But since these are aggregated numbers, they do not show how much will reach ecosystem conservation or restoration.
Less visibility, weaker accountability
Biodiversity funding also remains structurally fragile, with around 80% concentrated in agriculture policy rather than supported by a diversified investment strategy.
This shift is structural: nature has been relegated from a defined priority to a mere discretionary allocation, and the governance model reinforces this dynamic.
Webinar: From Santa Marta to Bonn – where next for the fossil fuel transition?
Greater reliance on National and Regional Partnership Plans (NRPPs) moves decision-making into national spending choices, where fiscal and domestic political pressure will likely mean long-term ecosystem investments struggle to compete with short-term economic demands.
The current MFF paints a worrying picture of structural triple risk for nature: reduced visibility, increased competition for funding and weaker accountability.
Nature is critical infrastructure
It is a point worth reiterating: investment in nature offers clear economic returns. Healthy ecosystems drive resilience by reducing exposure to climate damage and supporting local economic activity.
Public finance plays a decisive role in enabling these investments at scale, making budget design a question of risk management and capital allocation.
Nature-based solutions already perform essential economic functions. They regulate water systems, restore carbon sinks, provide a buffer against extreme weather events and support agricultural productivity.
These are characteristics of infrastructure. Energy systems, transport networks and digital capacity are treated as strategic investments because they underpin competitiveness.
Natural systems play the exact same role, so why does the current budget plan not reflect this?
The next EU budget will shape investment for the decade ahead. Its structure will determine how risks are managed and where capital flows. Nature cannot be erased in favour of competing short-term priorities.
In the upcoming negotiations, European leaders still have the option to treat nature as a structural objective and a core asset, supporting Europe’s resilience and long-term competitiveness. But they must act now, before it’s too late.
The post Nature cannot be ignored by Europe’s next big budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/05/25/nature-cannot-be-ignored-by-europes-next-big-budget/
Climate Change
In Florida, an Agricultural Town in Need of an Economic Boost Eyes Hyperscale Data Centers
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INDIANTOWN, Fla.—Carroll McAllister frets over the prospect of a hyperscale data center opening next to the grassy expanse where she grew up, in a shack her father built.
In Florida, an Agricultural Town in Need of an Economic Boost Eyes Hyperscale Data Centers
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