Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Ceasefire causes oil price drop
CEASEFIRE SLUMP: Following the announcement on Tuesday of a two-week ceasefire agreement between Iran and the US and Israel, oil prices dropped below $96 per barrel, according to the Associated Press. However, price volatility resumed when a Saudi Arabian oil pipeline was hit just hours later, according to Reuters.
CRISIS COMBINED: Reuters and other outlets covered comments made by the International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol to Le Figaro, where he said that the current energy crisis is worse than those of “1973, 1979 and 2022 combined”. It added that Birol said the “world has never experienced a disruption to energy supply of such magnitude”.
POLLUTERS PROFIT: The Guardian covered how the “worst polluters hold [the] world’s future in their hands as they benefit from higher fossil fuel prices”, but it added “global trends favour renewables”. The South China Morning Post reported that, according to experts, the diversification of energy sources is set to accelerate as the war continues to disrupt the world’s energy supplies.
Around the world
- CLIMATE GOALS PERIL: The UK opening new oil and gas fields in the North Sea “would imperil” international climate goals, experts told the Guardian. The warning came as the government pushed back against the speculation that it is set to approve new drilling projects, according to Sky News.
- COP33 CHANGES: The Indian government has withdrawn its offer to host the COP33 climate summit, “following a review of its commitments for the year 2028”, reported Climate Home News.
- ‘LONG-LASTING’ SHOCK: The Financial Times covered comments by EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen that the bloc was bracing for a “long-lasting” energy shock from the Iran war. Reuters reported that five EU countries have called for a windfall tax on energy companies’ profits in response to rising fuel prices.
- US BUDGET CUTS: US president Donald Trump’s 2027 budget proposal included targeting the “green new scam” with substantial cuts to energy and environment programmes, according to the Los Angeles Times.
- AFGHAN FLOODS: Since 26 March, at least 148 people have died and 216 have been injured due to heavy rains, floods, earthquakes and landslides in Afghanistan, reported Reuters.
- PENGUINS ENDANGERED: The “mass drowning” of emperor penguin chicks as sea ice melts due to climate change has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature to declare the species officially in danger of extinction, according to the Guardian.
86,120
The record number of battery electric vehicle sales registered in the UK in March, making up 22.6% of the total car market, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
Latest climate research
- More than a quarter of the world’s population will face more frequent and severe hot-and-dry extreme events by 2100 under current climate policies | Geophysical Research Letters
- Climate change will increase wildfire exposure for nearly 10,000 species by the end of the century | Nature Climate Change
- A variety of climate hazards critically expose up to 30% of southern Africa to “environmental degradation” | PLOS One
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief analysis found that, since the beginning of the Iran war in late February, at least 60 countries have announced nearly 200 emergency energy-saving measures. Around 30 nations, from Norway to Zambia, have cut fuel taxes to help people struggling with rising costs, making this by far the most common domestic policy response to the crisis, said the analysis. Some countries have stressed the need to boost domestic renewable-energy construction, while others – including Japan, Italy and South Korea – have opted to lean more on coal, at least in the short term.
Spotlight
How drag is tackling climate change
This week, Carbon Brief looks at how some drag artists are using their performances to draw attention to climate change
Back in 2005, veteran climate journalist Bill McKibben wrote that “what the warming world needs now is art, sweet art” to help “build a general consciousness about climate change”.
Since then, the topic of climate change has spread to a host of art forms, from literature and music through to comedy and film.
One of the most recent art forms to take up the climate communication baton is drag, with performers using it as a “Trojan horse” to engage with audiences, according to Cheddar Gorgeous, a British drag performer.
‘Joy inspires momentum’
Drag artists around the world have begun to draw attention to the climate movement, using creativity, entertainment and their platforms to engage with their audiences.
In the UK, Cheddar Gorgeous declined a nomination for the British LGBT Awards due to its sponsorship by Shell and has made repeated calls for climate action.
Speaking on the “climate quickie” TEDx podcast, she argued:
“Drag can disrupt the master narratives that dictate our society. I love drag that makes you look at yourself and look at the world in a different way. And that can be deployed in all sorts of exciting ways.”
Drag has a proud history of disruption. As part of a TED talk titled, “Why joy is a serious way to take action”, US drag queen Pattie Gonia provided the audience with some “herstory” about the role of drag within protests. She said:
“Since the birth of the queer rights movement, drag performers and trans people have always been on the forefront of organising and protesting and community building.
“When we had the statistics and the facts on the millions of queer people dying of AIDS, yet no one was joining our fight, drag performers turned pain into joy and, in doing so, welcomed millions more people to fight with us.”
Pattie Gonia is arguably the best-known drag artist to engage with climate change. She is currently touring her environmental drag show “SAVE HER!” and has, according to her website, fundraised more than “$4.7m for LGBTQIA+, BIPOC and environmental non-profits”.
A key part of her message is the need for diversity and inclusion within the climate movement, adding that “our creativity is critical in this climate dilemma”. In her TED talk, she added:
“The problem in the climate movement isn’t just the abundance of carbon; it is the lack of joy. The scientific facts, the doom and gloom, they scare people, they wake them up. But joy is what will get people out of bed every day to take more action.”
Alongside Pattie Gonia, climate conversations are filtering into the wider drag movement, including being a topic repeatedly touched on in the highly successful TV drag contest, RuPaul’s Drag Race.
This ranges from drag artist Asia O’Hara explaining what global warming is in season 10 – telling her fellow contestants: “Bitch, the ice is melting!” – to queens dancing to “97% of scientists and four out of four Drag Race judges agree” that climate change “is real” during a challenge in season 11. (Drag Race host RuPaul Andre Charles has faced criticism for reportedly allowing fracking on his Wyoming ranch.)
Drag is opening up the climate movement to a wider audience, promoting diversity, inclusion and creativity in the space, according to its advocates. For Pattie Gonia, a key part of climate action has to be joy, she added:
“Joy provides an unbelievable opportunity to make the climate movement irresistible. Do not underestimate the power of joy. We deserve more than doom and gloom, because this is the only planet with a Beyoncé on it.”
Watch, read, listen
COOPERATION OVER CHAOS: In the Indian Express, Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, argued that “climate cooperation offers a way out of energy price chaos”.
ELECTRIC WORLD ORDER: On the Polycrisis podcast, Mark Blyth, a professor of international economics at Brown University, and Dr Naa Adjekai Adjei, a non-resident fellow, Africa, at the China Global South Project, discussed “what the US dollar has to do” with energy access in Africa.
‘THE RECKONING’: In the Equator, Mona Ali, associate professor of economics at the State University of New York, explored the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the “end of American hegemony”.
Coming up
- 12 April: Hungarian elections
- 12 April: Peruvian elections
- 13-18 April: World Bank and International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings, Washington, DC, US
- 14 April: IEA Oil Market Report launch
Pick of the jobs
- Global Witness, several climate change jobs | Salary: Varied. Location: London
- London School of Economics, policy fellow – climate, gender and inclusivity | Salary: £53,949-£62,160. Location: London
- Climate Group, senior manager, international policy and advocacy | Salary: £47,160-£49,930. Location: London
- WWF, Nedbank green trust manager | Salary: Unknown. Location: Cape Town or Johannesburg, South Africa
- Greenpeace Australia Pacific, creative producer | Salary: AU$101,272. Location: Australia
- The Fairness Project, climate policy researcher | Salary: $96,000. Location: Remote (US)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 10 April 2026: Worst energy crisis ‘ever’ | India withdraws COP33 bid | Drag artists and climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
A formal petition to the U.S. government calls for sanctions on Chinese seafood imports as it highlights China’s loophole-ridden illegal shark fin trade.
For migrant workers trapped onboard Chinese distant water fishing fleets, cutting the fins off sharks as they writhe violently on rusted decks in the Indian Ocean isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional and lucrative act that marks the start of a bloody half-a-billion-dollar offshore supply chain, tacitly supported by Beijing yet covertly concealed from port inspectors globally.
New data on international climate finance for 2023 and 2024 suggests that wealthy countries are highly unlikely to have met their pledge to double funding for adaptation in developing nations to around $40 billion a year by 2025 amid cuts to their overseas aid budgets.
At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, all countries agreed to “urge” developed nations to at least double their funding for adaptation in developing countries from 2019 levels of around $20 billion by 2025. Funding for adaptation has lagged behind money to help reduce emissions and remains the dark spot even as the data showed overall climate finance rose to a record $136.7 billion in 2024.
A United Nations Environment Programme report warned last year that wealthy nations were likely to miss the adaptation finance target and the data released on Thursday by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that in 2024 adaptation finance was just under $35 billion.
The OECD, an intergovernmental policy forum for wealthy countries, said the increase between 2022 and 2024 was “modest”, adding that meeting the doubling target would require “strong growth” of close to 20% in 2025.
More cuts likely
The OECD’s figures do not go up to 2025, but several nations announced cuts to climate finance last year. The most notable was the abandonment of US pledges to international climate funds by the new Trump administration but the UK, France, Germany and other wealthy European countries also pared back their contributions.
Joe Thwaites, international finance director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said developed countries were “not on track” to meet the adaptation funding goal.
Power Shift Africa director Mohamed Adow said adaptation finance is needed to expand flood defences, drought-resistant crops, early warning systems and resilient health services as the world warms, bringing more extreme weather and rising seas. “When that money fails to arrive, people lose homes, harvests and livelihoods – and in the worst cases, their lives,” he warned.
Imane Saidi, a senior researcher at the North Africa-based Imal Initiative, called the $35 billion in adaptation finance in 2024 “a drop in the ocean”, considering that the United Nations estimates the annual adaptation needs of developing countries at between $215 billion and $387 billion.
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UN General Assembly backs “climate obligations” set by world’s top court
A UN resolution endorses a landmark climate ruling by the International Court of Justice that states should reduce fossil fuels and repair the damage from global warming -
Electrification emerges as COP31 priority
The Turkish COP31 President has called for “a truly global conversation” about shifting the global energy system from fossil fuels to electricity -
UK halves Green Climate Fund contribution, as it spends more on security
After promising £1.6 billion to the UN’s flagship climate fund in 2023, the UK government has now said it will only hand over half as much
If confirmed, a failure to meet the goal is likely to further strain relations between developed and developing countries within the UN climate process. A previous pledge to provide $100 billion a year of total climate finance by 2020 was only met two years late, a failure labelled “dismal” by the UAE’s COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber and many other Global South diplomats.
Missing that goal would also raise doubts about donor governments’ commitment to meeting their new post-2025 adaptation finance goal. At COP30 last year, governments agreed to urge developed countries to triple adaptation finance – without defining the baseline – by 2035.
African and other developing countries have pointed to lack of funding as a key flaw in ongoing attempts to set indicators to measure progress on adapting to climate change.
Speaking to climate ministers from around the world in Copenhagen on Wednesday, Turkish COP31 President Murat Kurum stressed the importance of climate finance. “It is easy to say we support global climate action,” he said, “but promises must be kept.”
He said the COP31 Presidency will use the new Global Implementation Accelerator and recommendations in the Baku-to-Belem roadmap, published last year, to scale up climate finance – and will hold donors accountable for their collective finance goals.
He noted that developed countries should this year submit their first reports showing how they will deliver their “fair share” of the new broader finance goal set at COP29 in 2024, to deliver $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035. They are due to report on this once every two years.
Broader climate finance
The OECD data shows that the overall amount of climate finance – including funding for emissions cuts – provided by developed countries grew fast in 2023 before declining in 2024. In contrast, the amount of private finance developed countries say they “mobilised” increased in both 2023 and 2024, pushing the top-line figure to a record high.
While the OECD does not say which countries provided what amounts, data from the ODI Global think-tank suggests that the 2024 cuts to bilateral climate finance were spread broadly among wealthy nations.
Thwaites of NRDC welcomed the fact that overall climate finance provided and mobilised by developed countries exceeded $130 billion in both 2023 and 2024. He said that this was “well above earlier projections” and “shows that when rich countries work together, they can over-achieve on climate finance goals”.
But Sehr Raheja, programme officer at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, said these figures are “modest” when set against the new $300-billion goal.
“While the headline total figure of climate finance remains alright,” she said, “declining bilateral climate spending raises important questions about the predictability of high-quality, concessional public finance, which has consistently been a key demand of the Global South.”
She also lamented that loans continue to dominate public climate finance and that mobilised private finance is concentrated in middle-income countries and on emissions-reduction measures rather than adaptation projects. “Private capital continues to follow bankability rather than climate vulnerability or need,” she added.
Ritu Bharadwaj, climate finance and resilience researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said the figures painted an outdated picture as climate finance has since declined as rich countries shrink their overseas aid budgets and increase spending on defence.
Last month, the OECD published figures showing that international aid – which includes climate finance – fell by nearly a quarter in 2025. The US was responsible for three-quarters of this decline. The OECD projects a further decline in 2026.
With Thursday’s climate finance report, the OECD is “publishing a victory lap for 2023 and 2024 at almost the same moment its own aid statistics show the funding base eroding underneath it,” Bharadwaj said.
The post New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance appeared first on Climate Home News.
New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance
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