Published

2 years ago

July 31, 2024

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

Key developments

Still at sea

DARK OXYGEN: Scientists discovered “dark oxygen” being produced in the deep ocean, “apparently by lumps of metal on the seafloor”, BBC News reported. The study challenges the “long-held assumption” that oxygen is produced exclusively through photosynthesis, CNN reported. Ocean scientist and lead author Dr Andrew Sweetman “observed the phenomenon time and time again over almost a decade” at several locations in the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific, the outlet added. Canada’s The Metals Company, which partially funded Sweetman’s research, “attempted to poke holes in the study”, according to E&E News, but Sweetman stood by his team’s findings.

O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN: The study created ripples at the ongoing seabed mining talks in Kingston, Jamaica, delegates told Carbon Brief. However, nations negotiating rules to govern the sector are also “face[d with] a critical vote” to decide who will head the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a decision “that could impact the nascent industry for years”, the Guardian wrote. Ahead of “one of the world’s most important elections…you’ve never heard of”, Foreign Policy carried an in-depth interview with Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho. Carvalho is standing for election against the ISA’s current chief Michael Lodge, “who has been criticised for allegedly having cosy ties to eager mining firms”.

RUDDERLESS WORLD: Despite heated talks, the meeting is drawing to a close with mining rules “still far from finalised”, but no mining authorised, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. Malta, Honduras, Tuvalu and Guatemala announced they were joining in the call for a “precautionary pause” on deep-sea mining, taking the number of countries pushing for a moratorium, pause or ban to 31 countries, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Palau’s president lamented: “We are once again at the mercy of powerful external forces, reminiscent of colonial exploitation that scarred our history.” For a detailed breakdown of country positions, evolving science and state of play, read Carbon Brief’s new Q&A on deep sea mining, published today.

UN hunger report

FOOD INSECURITY: Around one in five people in Africa faced hunger in 2023 as “major drivers”, including climate change and conflict, became “more frequent and severe”, a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found. More than 700 million people around the world were undernourished in 2023, the report estimated – an increase of around 150 million people compared to 2019. “Transforming agrifood systems is more critical than ever,” the director general of the FAO, Dr Qu Dongyu, said in a statement. He added that the FAO is “committed to supporting countries in their efforts to eradicate hunger and ensure food security for all”.

AFRICA IMPACTS: Food insecurity is an issue in many parts of the world, “but Africa is at the epicentre of the crisis, with hunger on the rise across the continent”, Context News said in its coverage of the report. East Africa had the highest number of people going hungry on the continent – more than 138 million people in 2023, the outlet noted. Dr David Laborde, director of the agrifood economics division at FAO, told the New Humanitarian that “hunger level remains high, higher than in 2015” – the year that countries adopted the UN sustainable development goals for 2030, which include an aim to end hunger.

DROUGHT: Meanwhile, the prime minister of Lesotho, Sam Matekane, declared a “national food insecurity disaster” as around 700,000 people in the small African country face drought-related hunger, according to the Lesotho Times. The “critical” situation needs “national, regional and international humanitarian intervention”, the president said. Lesotho and other southern Africa countries including Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi were hit by drought in recent months, scorching crops and leaving millions at risk of hunger, the Associated Press reported earlier this year. A rapid attribution study found that the El Niño weather pattern was the key driver behind this drought.

Spotlight

What Venezuela’s election means for the Amazon

In this Spotlight, Carbon Brief looks at what Venezuela’s disputed election results could mean for illegal mining in the Amazon rainforest.

Earlier this week, Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of the Venezuelan presidential election by the “government-controlled electoral authority”, the Guardian reported.

The country’s opposition disputed the results as “fraudulent”, BBC News said, while protests broke out in the country’s capital of Caracas.

Pre-election polls showed Maduro, who has served as Venezuela’s president for the past 11 years, falling behind as “voters express[ed] exhaustion over Venezuela’s economic crisis and political repression”, Al Jazeera said.

According to Mongabay, there was “little room for discussion about environmental issues” in the build-up to the election amid focus on whether the vote would be “anything close to free and fair”. The outlet said that this is “despite the fact that the country has plunged into a crisis so severe that many observers now call it an ecocide”.

Amazon impacts

Venezuela is among the world’s most biodiverse countries and it holds almost 7% of the Amazon region.

In 2022, Mongabay reported that more than 140,000 hectares of primary forest were lost in the Venezuelan areas of the Amazon over 2016-20.

New Scientist also reported in 2022 that pristine forest loss in the Venezuelan Amazon “is estimated to be increasing by around 170% annually” due to “a state-sanctioned boom in gold mining”.

Luis Jiménez, the general coordinator of the Venezuelan conservation NGO Phynatura, believes that Maduro remaining in power would continue the “exponentially accelerated” destruction of the Amazon.

He tells Carbon Brief that mining has impacted “important protected natural areas” in Venezuela, such as the Canaima and Yapacana national parks, which “apart from protecting large, megadiverse forest spaces, are home to 31 Indigenous ethnic groups”.

Jiménez believes another Maduro term would continue this “extractivist economy, which in no way benefits local communities or the rest of Venezuelans”.

Indigenous rights

In 2022, the NGO Human Rights Watch “documented horrific abuses” of Indigenous peoples “by groups controlling illegal gold mines in southern Venezuela, operating with government acquiescence”.

Last year, the Venezuelan government launched a military option to “expel more than 10,000 illegal miners from the Amazon, according to an Agence France-Presse article published in Deutsche Welle.

The article noted that Maduro said illegal mining was “destroying” the Amazon.

On deforestation, Venezuela and Bolivia were the only Amazon countries to not sign a 2021 global pledge to work towards halting deforestation by 2030.

But, in 2022, Venezuela and Colombia proposed relaunching the 1978 Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation, a pact between Brazil, Bolivia, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela to protect the Amazon.

The countries then met for the first time in 14 years last August, committing to act together to prevent the rainforest “from reaching the point of no return” – but stopped short of agreeing on a common target to end deforestation.

Politicians in the US, Chile, Argentina and around the world have cast doubt over the Venezuelan election results, Reuters said. Maduro has allegedly pledged to release the full voting records, a Brazilian government official told Bloomberg, amid continued protests and tension in the country.

News and views

MILKING THE SYSTEM: Big meat and dairy corporations are “mobilis[ing] significant resources to delay and derail progressive environmental legislation”, a Changing Markets Foundation investigation found. An examination of 22 of the biggest meat and dairy corporations across four continents revealed the use of distract, delay and derail tactics, mirroring those of “big oil”. Distraction tactics, such as greenwashing, steer the spotlight away from the lack of climate action, the report said, adding that companies are using “industry-funded academic research to downplay” the sector’s environmental impact. Delay tactics “ask governments to slow down any regulation by claiming that [companies] are already taking voluntary action”. Finally, the “most aggressive” derail tactics focus on political activity, including millions spent on donations and lobbying, the report said.

COP16 THREAT MONITORING: The organising committee of the COP16 UN biodiversity summit, which will be held in Cali, Colombia in October, sought to reassure delegates after online threats from a “dissident rebel group”, reported the Guardian. The organisers reiterated that “the safety and wellbeing of all participants, attendees and collaborators are our top priority”, the newspaper added. This came after threats made by the Central General Staff (EMC) in a post on Twitter that was addressed to Colombian president Gustavo Petro and said that COP16 would “fail”. The threat came during a ceasefire breakdown between the Colombian government and factions of the EMC, which is active near Cali. The organising committee has assured that it is “closely monitoring the situation and working to establish the validity of the [threats] on social media”.

NEW GROUPS: The new European parliament agriculture committee has been formed of “predominantly right-leaning” politicians, Euronews reported. The “heightened political significance” of the committee after EU farmer protests earlier this year “has attracted top-tier MEPs and lawmakers with little ties to the agricultural world”, Euractiv reported. Some “unexpected faces” in the committee formed after the June parliament elections include a “Spanish far-right YouTuber Luis ‘Alvise’ Pérez”. Meanwhile, the bloc’s yet-to-be-announced agriculture commissioner could be Luxembourg’s Christophe Hansen from the European People’s Party, Politico speculated.

BIRD FLU BROILER: Extreme heat may have played a key role in the bird flu outbreak that infected five workers in the US state of Colorado earlier this month, the Guardian reported. The newspaper said the workers, tasked with culling poultry with the virus, became infected themselves, as their protective gear failed to work correctly amid extreme temperatures. CNN said temperatures at the time were above 40C, with large industrial fans being used to try to control the heat. “We understand those large fans…were moving so much air…the workers were finding it hard to maintain a good seal or a good fit either between the mask or with eye protection,” said Dr Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN.

WASTE NOT: Leaders of Pacific Island states have come to an agreement with Japan over the latter’s “controversial” discharge of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, according to the Pacific Islands News Association. Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida assured the Pacific Islands Forum that the practice was being done “in compliance with international safety standards and practices”, while Pacific leaders “emphasised the need for Japan to continue providing sincere and transparent explanations” about the process. However, Prof Robert Richmond, the director of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Kewalo Marine Laboratory, “voiced significant concerns” about the efficacy of the treatment and the monitoring programme that is currently in place, the outlet said.

DAMAGED GOODS: A cattle rancher in Brazil has had his assets frozen in the “largest civil case brought for climate crimes in Brazil to date”, the Guardian reported. Dirceu Kruger will be compelled to pay more than $50m in “compensation for the damage he had caused to the climate through illegal deforestation”, according to the newspaper. The price tag was calculated based on the number of hectares that Kruger was found to have deforested, the average greenhouse gas emissions from damaging the rainforest and a calculation of the “social cost” of carbon. The money will be paid into the country’s climate emergency fund and the rancher will also “have to restore the land he degraded so it can become a valuable carbon sink again”, the outlet said.

Watch, read, listen

CLIMATE FINANCE: Dialogue Earth explored uncertainties around ocean communities being able to access “loss and damage” funding for those impacted by climate change.

US ELECTION: The “record on the environment” of Kamala Harris – US vice president and Democratic frontrunner for the country’s presidential election – was discussed on the NPR Living on Earth podcast.

GROWING PAINS: A feature in Al Jazeera looked at the “uncertain future” for women coffee farmers in the “conflict-ridden” eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

HOT WATER: The Financial Times examined the “dangerous effects of rising sea temperatures”.

New science

Indigenous food production in a carbon economy

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

A new study has revealed that replacing locally harvested foods with imported market substitutes in Canada’s Inuvialuit Settlement region “would cost over C$3.1m [US$2.3m]…and emit over 1,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions” annually. The study modelled the cost of substituting local food harvests with market replacements in the region. The study found that gasoline use would add about “C$295,000 [US$213,611] [to harvesting costs] and result in 315 to 497 tonnes of emissions”, in contrast to the much higher costs and emissions associated with substituting local foods with imports. Disregarding local food systems could, therefore, “undermine emissions targets and adversely impact food security and health in Arctic Indigenous communities”, the study added.

Global atmospheric methane uptake by upland tree woody surfaces

Nature

New research found that tree bark can absorb methane from the atmosphere, meaning that the climate benefits of protecting forests “may be greater than previously assumed”. Researchers measured the methane exchange on tree stems in a range of forests in the Amazon, Panama, UK and Sweden. They found that microbes in bark could help trees to take in between 25-50m tonnes of atmospheric methane each year, with tropical forests taking in the highest levels of methane. The researchers conclude that identifying tree species that can absorb the most methane could help to tackle the global growth of the potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

Cost-effectiveness of natural forest regeneration and plantations for climate mitigation

Nature Climate Change

A new research effort has created global maps illustrating what is likely to be the most cost-effective reforestation method in 138 low- and middle-income countries. To create the maps, the researchers used machine learning to combine data on the likely implementation costs of passive natural regeneration and reforestation through plantations, as well as household survey data on the opportunity costs of reforestation, data on the most suitable tree species to plant in each area and the likely carbon accumulation in each area. The research found that plantations offer the most cost-effective form of reforestation over 54% of the land included in the study, while natural regeneration would be most effective over 46% of the land.

In the diary

9 August: International day of the world’s Indigenous peoples
11-15 August: World Water Congress and Exhibition | Toronto
12-16 August: Working group on benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information | Montreal, Canada

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Antara Basu also contributed to this issue. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org.

The post Cropped 31 July 2024: Deep-sea mining talks; UN hunger report; Venezuela election and the Amazon appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Cropped 31 July 2024: Deep-sea mining talks; UN hunger report; Venezuela election and the Amazon

Climate Change

On the Historic Route From Selma to Montgomery, an AI Cloud Looms

Published

8 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Alice Rush

In this rural Alabama community, some residents can’t flush their toilets. Developers want to build a state-of-the-art data center next door.

By Lee Hedgepeth

HAYNEVILLE, Ala.—When Alabamians marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand voting rights for African Americans, Highway 80 became their path toward freedom.

On the Historic Route From Selma to Montgomery, an AI Cloud Looms

Climate Change

Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming

Published

11 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Alice Rush

The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.

For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.

The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.

This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.

This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.

The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.

Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.

In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.

(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)

Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high

Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.

Glossary

CO₂ equivalent: Greenhouse gases can be expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e. For a given amount, different greenhouse gases trap different amounts of heat in the atmosphere, a quantity known as… Read More

Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.

As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.

This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (yellow), methane (blue) and nitrous oxide (green) over 2000-25. The grey-shaded region represents continuing changes since AR6. Note the different vertical scales for each gas. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.

(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)

The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly

The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.

However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.

Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.

Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.

Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.

But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.

As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.

It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.

The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).

Left: Observed changes in the Earth heat inventory for the period 1971-2020. Right: Estimates of the Earth energy imbalance for successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most recent decade (right). Shaded regions indicate the very likely range (90-100 % probability), while the stars show the CERES (NASA Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) estimates for comparison. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

Global temperature rise

The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.

We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface

temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.

While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.

We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.

This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.

Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system

While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.

Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.

For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.

Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.

Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).

Sea level rise and the energy imbalance

Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.

It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.

Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.

This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.

Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.

This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.

(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)

Left: Global average sea level rise over 1901-2025, relative to a 1995-2014 baseline. Individual timeseries are shown with dashed lines, while the black solid line shows the average (from tide gauges and satellites) used in AR6 and the solid red line shows the 1993-2025 average from satellites. Right: Global mean sea-level rates (in mm per year) for four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade. The shading indicates the very likely range. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

The bigger picture

Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.

A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.

These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.

This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.

However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.

Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.

This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.

The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.

Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.