We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
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Key developments
COP30 build-up
FOREST FIX: In the run-up to COP30, Brazil announced that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped by 11% between August 2024 and July 2025, the Associated Press reported. Data showed that almost 5,800km2 of forest was cleared during this time, the outlet said – a “significant drop from the previous year and the lowest level in nearly a decade”. Mongabay noted that deforestation also fell by around 11% in the Cerrado ecosystem in the past year. The Times, meanwhile, assessed global progress on a pledge to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030.
AIMS AND AMBITION: Malaysia and Indonesia, two of the world’s most biodiverse countries, announced updated climate targets ahead of COP30, according to Eco-Business. Malaysia’s new pledge outlined that its greenhouse gas emissions will peak between 2029-34, the outlet reported, while Indonesia’s pledge detailed plans to hit peak emissions by 2030. Antara reported that Indonesia’s environment minister, Hanif Faisol Nurofiq, said “large-scale reforestation” in the land-use sector will be key to achieving these targets.
NATURE TALKS: Elsewhere, intersessional talks for UN biodiversity negotiations failed to agree on a “clear set of recommendations” for the next major round of discussions, to be held in October 2026, Down to Earth reported. Countries focused on a number of topics, including the first global report on progress towards meeting 2030 nature targets. Another Down to Earth article reported on the outcomes of the first meeting of the permanent body for Indigenous peoples, which “ended with recommendations for how this new body will function”, the outlet said. These will be put forward to countries at the COP17 summit in Armenia next year.
Deadly cyclones damage crops
‘HEAVY BLOW’: Hurricane Melissa – “one of the strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded” – tore through several Caribbean nations and dealt a “heavy blow” to fisherfolk and farmers in Jamaica, the Associated Press reported. The island is still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Beryl, causing farmers to “warn of food shortages”, according to the Guardian. The Gleaner, a Jamaican newspaper, wrote that fisherfolk in the country’s largest parish, St. Ann, “credited early and proactive preparations” for averting the loss of “boats, equipment and livelihoods”.
AG SECTOR SUFFERS: The same week, Cyclone Montha “battered” the eastern coast of India, “bringing heavy rain and gusty winds that damaged crops”, Reuters said. It added that the storm killed 120 animals in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh and that the agricultural sector “suffered the highest losses”. According to the Press Trust of India, nearly 80,000 farmers in the state were affected by flooding and damaged crops. One farmer died by suicide “after his cotton and maize crops were damaged” by the storm, Telangana Today reported.
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‘RUN OF DISASTERS’: Earlier this week, Typhoon Kalmaegi killed 66 people in the Philippines, the Guardian reported. Al Jazeera said that the country is still “recovering from a run of disasters, including earthquakes and severe weather events, in recent months”. In the Philippine Daily Inquirer, retired scientist Prof Teodoro Mendoza wrote that the country is “at a crossroads of food fragility and food security”. He called for “rooting strategies in local knowledge, climate adaptation and food sovereignty”.
News and views
CARBON COMMITMENT: Nigeria approved a “new national carbon market framework”, with an aim to “unlock up to $3bn annually in carbon finance”, Carbon Pulse reported. The Premium Times noted that, in addition to the framework, the country approved the operationalisation of a national climate change fund and reinstated funding for the National Council on Climate Change. The newspaper added that Nigerian president Bola Tinubu had “reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to mainstreaming climate action into national development”.
DEGRADATION TRENDS: Around 1.7 billion people worldwide are living in places where human-driven land degradation is leading to falling crop yields, representing a “growing threat to agricultural productivity and food security”, according to a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The annual “state of food and agriculture” report said the large-scale degradation was a “troubling pattern” that “may drive further agricultural expansion into fragile ecosystems” – with implications for climate change and biodiversity loss.
‘DECISIVE WIN’: Argentine president Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party secured a “decisive win” in the country’s midterm elections, Reuters said. Before the vote, Reuters reported that farmers were “renewing their vote of confidence” in Milei for “lowering unpopular export taxes”. In September, Reuters reported that these lowered taxes were increasing soya bean exports to China, particularly in the face of “Washington’s trade war with Beijing”.
LICENCE TO KRILL: Russia “spark[ed a] diplomatic row” after illegally detaining a Ukrainian biologist, the Guardian reported. Russia has accused Dr Leonid Pshenichnov of “high treason” by encouraging restrictions to krill harvesting around Antarctica, which “would harm the economic interests of Russia”, according to arrest documents seen by the newspaper. It added: “This year, for the first time, the amount of krill fished in Antarctic waters reached what scientists believe is an unsustainable level.”
JUST CAUSE: American pop star Billie Eilish announced that she will be donating $11.5m of the proceeds from her upcoming tour to “causes dedicated to food equity, climate justice and reducing carbon pollution”, CBS News reported. Eilish also called for the world’s “ultra-wealthy” to donate more of their money to helping others, the outlet added. Meanwhile, Sir David Attenborough has “urged” people to support an effort to raise £30m to purchase the Rothbury Estate in north-east England, “with plans to boost wildlife, restore bogs and promote nature-friendly farming”, BBC News said.
EEL-EGAL TRADE: Eel trafficking is “Europe’s biggest wildlife crime” – an industry worth about €2.5bn annually – and, combined with “habitat loss, pollution and the climate crisis”, is driving the slippery fish towards extinction, the Guardian said. The newspaper noted that despite international policing efforts – including a European ban on eel exports 15 years ago – the “fish are still ending up on plates around the globe”. In a separate piece, the Guardian reported on “mounting pressure” in Britain to ban mercury dental fillings. The mercury in fillings can be released into the environment after death and subsequently builds up in wildlife, causing detrimental effects.
Spotlight
Betting on trees
This week, Cropped examines Brazil’s flagship new forest fund and what COP30 could mean for nature and climate finance.
The COP30 UN climate talks begin in the heart of the Amazon rainforest next week, but they are not taking place in a vacuum.
The talks in Belém, Brazil come after a year of aid cuts and the fallout from finance negotiations in Baku last year.
The Brazilian COP presidency’s most high-profile solution to address the funding gap has been a new funding mechanism: the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF).
Through the TFFF, Brazil hopes to raise $125bn from donor countries, philanthropists and private investors, reassuring them of returns, while “rewarding” up to 74 tropical forest countries that sufficiently protect their forests.
However, days before the summit, Bloomberg reported that the UK would not be investing in the TFFF and Brazil’s finance minister was quoted saying the fund “could raise $10bn by next year”, less than half the original target.
While 20% of funds raised are supposed to go to Indigenous peoples and local communities, critics warn that TFFF puts investor returns first, with uncertain rewards going to countries and those tasked with preserving forests.
Another concern is that the TFFF is not designed to serve as an official fund for any of the UN’s three treaties – climate, biodiversity and land degradation – forged in Brazil at the historic “Earth Summit” in 1992.
Forest ecologists, meanwhile, worry that the low threshold for defining intact forests is “not scientifically credible” and “would allow payments even where industrial logging is occurring in primary forests”. Others deem the proposed $4 per hectare in rewards as “ridiculous” and not enough to displace intensive agriculture in these forests.
However, TFFF argues that “including forest areas with lower canopy cover does provide an incentive for maintaining these areas”.
But that is not all.
Just as COP28 pushed to include a goal to “triple renewable capacity”, Brazil – the world’s second largest biofuels producer – could ask countries to “quadruple the global use of ‘sustainable fuels’, including controversial biofuels”, reported the Guardian
(For more on biofuels and their climate impacts, see Carbon Brief’s explainer.)
At the same time, biodiversity offsets and carbon credit markets are seeing an additional boost in time for COP30.
Carbon Pulse reported that nine states in the Brazilian Amazon are set to launch a unified biodiversity crediting scheme, while Nigeria has greenlighted its national carbon market framework.
So far, only a third of all countries have submitted new climate pledges for 2035, despite a deadline well in advance of COP30 (although more pledges may roll in at the summit).
Liane Schalatek, a climate finance expert at German policy thinktank Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung tells Carbon Brief that 10 years after the Paris Agreement, “all of the discourse” about finance from developed countries is now around private sector involvement, instead of their legal obligations. She says:
“Seen in this context, [the TFFF] is weakening [the official funds that] we already have. And we’re doing that right at COP30, when we know that not only are NDCs too weak, but even for what developing countries have [pledged so far], they are not going to see the funding. It’s just sad.”
To Frederic Hache, co-founder of the Green Finance Observatory thinktank, the “funding gap narrative is basically a lot of political choices” that avoid tackling the “root drivers” of tropical forest loss. Hache tells Carbon Brief:
“If you say the issue is a lack of funding and the government is powerless, you empower private finance to say they hold a solution, [that] we need to cajole them so that they very kindly agree to participate and help and save us.
“But change diets, shift harmful subsidies and – boom – [this results in] less deforestation for agriculture that is not used to feed humans. That would be a serious political commitment and unlock serious grant money for countries to have the right incentives.”
Watch, read, listen
GREENWASHING GLOSSARY: With agriculture high on the COP30 agenda, DeSmog published a list of “big agwashing” buzzwords to watch out for.
TALKING TRAFFICKING: The Hindu’s In Focus podcast spoke with Vivek Menon – the new chair of the IUCN species survival commission – about the rise of online wildlife trafficking.
SULAWESI POSTCARD: A New York Times interactive feature offered a glimpse into life in the rainforests and reefs of Sulawesi island, off the eastern coast of Borneo.
LOGGING OFF: A Veza News longread looked at logging activities threatening “Nigeria’s last rainforest”.
New science
- Expanding irrigation “substantially decreases” net flows of water from the atmosphere to the land, leading to “enlarged” rates of depletion of terrestrial water and “further aggravating the existing drying trends caused by climate change” | Nature Water
- A literature review found “substantial limitations” in current research surrounding the environmental impacts of farming insects for human or animal consumption | Biological Reviews
- Ammonia emissions – largely resulting from farming – can significantly increase the formation of aerosols in the upper atmosphere, “with potential implications for climate” | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
In the diary
- 10-21 November: COP30 UN climate talks | Belém, Brazil
- 24-29 November: Eleventh session of plant treaty negotiations | Lima, Peru
- 24 November-5 December: COP20 UN talks on the international trade of endangered species | Samarkand, Uzbekistan
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 5 November 2025: Nature finance at COP30; Storms devastate crops; Brazilian deforestation decline appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Scientists have vowed to keep working on the next flagship set of reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), after a political row over the timeline for their release saw its latest session suspended on Friday evening without agreement.
During the weekend, government officials and scientists alike expressed disappointment over the inability to reach a compromise before some delegates from developing countries and small island states had to leave the week-long meeting in Ethiopia to catch flights home.
The disagreement – which has persisted since early 2024 – turns on whether the three key parts of the AR7 assessment should all be published before the conclusion of the UN’s next Global Stocktake of global climate action, which is due to be completed in late 2028.
The IPCC issued a statement after the close of the session, saying that “key agenda items” – the timelines for the three AR7 reports, as well as the IPCC budget – remain open and under discussion. It said the IPCC’s plenary session and its deliberations on the pending agenda “will resume at the earliest opportunity”, giving no further details of when.
IPCC Chair Jim Skea told delegates in closing remarks that recent months had been some of the most turbulent for the climate science panel and that, if there were stronger words than “profound disappointment” he would use them, according to a summary published by the Earth Negotiators Bulletin (ENB). IPCC discussions happen behind closed doors.
IPCC scientists remained committed
In an open letter, issued on Monday, a group of nearly 120 scientists – from a total of 664 AR7 authors – said they “stand committed to continue working to deliver the AR7 reports in a manner that is rigorous, timely and inclusive, in line with our mandate to be policy-relevant”.
“An assessment that arrives after the decisions it is meant to inform cannot serve its purpose,” they emphasised. “The second Global Stocktake in 2028 is such a decision point, and the world should not have to face it without the IPCCʼs latest assessment.”
Europe, small islands and the least developed countries, plus many Latin American and developed nations, want the IPCC to meet this deadline, arguing that the findings from the UN climate science body are irreplaceable in the UN climate policy-making process.
However, around a dozen developing countries plus Russia have argued that the reports should come later in order to allow for greater research input from the Global South – something that, in their view, would make the findings fairer. They also claim that a shorter timeline would put excessive pressure on experts.
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Who shapes climate science? The equity question facing the IPCC
Early completion of the next global climate science assessment reports risks excluding research from the Global South, which is key to ensuring the findings are fair -
Governments that support climate science must stand firm against naysayers
The IPCC is meeting to decide the timing of its next major report, as some countries try to delay it and weaken the case for faster emissions cuts
The most vocal of this group at last week’s meeting were India and Saudi Arabia, according to the ENB summary and a developed country diplomat. Critics see this push for a longer timeline as an excuse to deprive government decision-makers of the latest science and ease pressure on emerging economies to raise their ambition, particularly on cutting emissions.
Commenting on last week’s meeting, France’s ambassador for climate negotiations Benoît Faraco said a broad coalition of developed and developing countries from all five continents, “united in their support for science and the timeline proposed by scientists”, had withstood pressure “from a few countries” seeking to slow down the process of adopting the IPCC reports.
He added that France would not back down and would “continue to fight tirelessly for science, protect the integrity of information, and convince our partners that without the best available scientific data, we will be less effective in tackling climate change and protecting our populations”.
Inclusivity proposal stalled
In a bid to unlock a solution for the AR7 timeline, countries discussed ways to improve the inclusivity of the IPCC’s work. One option put on the table was for the IPCC to expand its funding for delegates from developing countries to attend some or all of its sessions from one to two participants, according to the ENB summary and a delegate speaking to Climate Home News.
That would increase the costs for the IPCC to complete AR7 by up to a quarter, according to an assessment shared by the secretariat. The panel’s budget is under severe strain and its officials have warned that, without additional voluntary contributions, it risks running out of money before it can deliver on this assessment cycle.
Climate Home News understands that some of the IPCC’s traditional donors – which mainly include European countries, Japan and Australia – indicated a willingness to support funding for an additional developing country participant. But without an agreement over the budget or the timeline for the reports, that option was ultimately not adopted.
‘Disappointed and worried’
The three reports are managed by working groups that collate and draw overall findings from the latest scientific studies and data on the physical effects of global warming around the world, how to adapt to it, and pathways for cutting planet-heating emissions in order to meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
Winston Chow, an urban climate professor at Singapore Management University who co-chairs Working Group II on adaptation, wrote in a LinkedIn post that he was “disappointed and worried” for the IPCC authors who have worked “extraordinarily hard” to assess the relevant climate science over the past two years.
He said he shared their concern that “the rigour, time and goodwill they’ve invested are now being put at risk by the Panel’s stalemate”.
As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
For Working Group II, a meeting for 250 experts writing that report is scheduled for January 2027, followed by the approval of a special report on cities and climate change in Singapore next March.
But because the IPCC’s budget has not been confirmed due to uncertainty about the AR7 schedule, travel support for those researchers is at risk, wrote Chow. “If they cannot participate, our assessments will lose vital expertise, perspectives and scientific breadth, and the collective effort of our authors will be undermined,” he warned.
Scientific work continues
Despite the political holdups, he – together with French climate scientist Robert Vautard, co-chair of Working Group 1 – agreed with IPCC head Skea who told the IPCC’s closing session on Friday: “The engine room of the IPCC is working, and it’s healthy.”
Vautard commented in a separate post on LinkedIn after it ended: “The boat is at full steam.” Working groups I and II are due to start revising the first drafts of their reports, while Working Group III on reducing emissions is finalising its first draft which will be out soon, he wrote.
“The most exciting two years of the cycle are ahead, for the authors. The momentum in the engine room is here and now. Trust the engine room!” he added.
The IPCC and some scientists report that progress has been made towards achieving an equitable balance of authors from the Global North and the Global South.
The group of researchers who signed the open letter on Monday noted that “inclusivity is at the heart of how we work”, with author teams bringing together experts from developed and developing countries with diverse backgrounds and at different stages of their careers.
Plea to overcome political differences
The signatories include several scientists from some of the countries opposed to the alignment of all IPCC reports with the Global Stocktake.
“We are committed to an assessment in which the knowledge, experience and priorities of every region are fully reflected, a commitment we share with the leadership of the IPCC.
Equity is built into how our assessment is being drafted,” they added.
They appealed to governments that make up the IPCC “to overcome their political differences and work together as we do as a global scientific community, so that we can deliver the IPCC reports the world needs to hear”.
In a statement published on Monday, IPCC chair Skea said reaching consensus on the schedule for the reports is “vital”. He added that the assessments provide authoritative scientific evidence to inform national climate policies, strengthen adaptation and resilience and support access to climate finance, as well as helping communicate the scale of the climate crisis and the urgency of efforts to tackle it.
The post IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock appeared first on Climate Home News.
IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock
An Lambrechts is a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International with extensive experience in biodiversity-related multilateral negotiations. She is the head of the Greenpeace delegation at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17 happening in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 2022, COP15 delivered the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to halt