Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
California burning
‘MOST DESTRUCTIVE’: At least 10 people have been killed and more than 9,000 buildings have been gutted in wildfires “scorching communities” across Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported in its latest update on Friday. There are multiple fires burning across LA county, including the 15,800-acre Palisades fire that CNN described as the “most destructive fire in LA history”.
INFERNAL LA: LA’s firefighters are struggling with water supplies and are “unaccustomed to fighting multiple blazes at once”, BBC News reported. “There are not enough firefighters in all of LA County to address four separate fires of this magnitude,” LA county fire chief Anthony Marrone told the outlet. The Los Angeles Times said the fires have already caused at least $50bn in losses, which could also threaten hundreds of thousands of Californians who already struggle to “find and keep affordable homeowners insurance”.
TINDERBOX CLIMATE: Many outlets examined the climate “drivers” of the wildfires. The Washington Post said the flames were fanned by a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm. BBC News said that California’s decade-long drought and a four-inch decline in LA’s annual rainfall had left the region dry and so “particularly vulnerable” to the spread of fires. The Guardian cited research finding that climate change has caused a 172% increase in California’s burned area since the 1970s.
Hello, goodbye
CAN’T TOUCH THIS: US president Joe Biden announced a “permanent stop” to new oil and gas drilling across more than 625m acres of US coastal waters, thus protecting 20% of the seabed, the New York Times reported. While Biden called the move a “climate imperative”, the Guardian pointed out that the law does not explicitly allow presidents to “unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without going through Congress”. Alaska, meanwhile, sued the Biden administration over oil and gas drilling leases in the Arctic, Reuters said.
TILTING AT WINDMILLS: In a “lengthy tirade against windpower”, US president-elect Donald Trump pledged that no wind farms will be constructed during his second term, threatening billions of dollars in planned projects, Bloomberg reported. Earlier in the week, Trump criticised the UK government’s energy policy, with a call to “open up” North Sea oil and gas production and “get rid of windmills”, Reuters reported.
HYDROGEN BREAK: After “months of intense lobbying”, the Biden administration finalised rules that “offer billions of dollars in tax credits to companies that make hydrogen”, the New York Times reported. The rules include relaxed criteria for the “struggling sector” to claim tax credits, the Financial Times wrote.
Around the world
- RECORD HEAT: Multiple climate datasets have confirmed that 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, with temperatures breaching 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, BBC News reported. Carbon Brief has all the details in its latest state of the climate” quarterly update.
- ADIEU, TRUDEAU: Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as Canada’s prime minister on Monday, ending a near-decade “of [the country’s] most climate-conscious federal government”, but with a “physically enduring legacy” of oil pipeline expansions, the Narwhal reported.
- MECCA FLOODS: Torrential, unseasonal rain lashed cities in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, with the holy city of Mecca facing the “worst floods”, Down to Earth reported.
- WATER WOES: Last year, water-related disasters claimed more than 8,700 lives, drove 40 million people from their homes and caused $550bn in economic damage, according to the 2024 Global Water Monitor report covered by the Guardian.
- TAPS TURNED: Climate-induced sea level rise will “overwhelm” many of the world’s biggest oil ports, including Houston, Rotterdam and Ras Tanura, according to new analysis by cryosphere scientists who described the threat as “ironic”, the Guardian said.
- BANKS BOUNCED: Bloomberg reported that there are “zero” big Wall Street banks left in the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, after the biggest US bank JP Morgan quit the UN-backed climate coalition weeks before Trump assumed office.
10 days
The time it took for the world’s richest 1% to “burn through” their 2025 “share” of the global “carbon budget” for keeping warming under 1.5C, according to new Oxfam analysis.
Latest climate research
- Arctic marine heatwaves could intensify “on orders of magnitude” during the rest of this century under climate change, posing “major challenges for Arctic ecosystems”, according to new Nature Climate Change research using high-resolution climate models.
- A new study in Science estimated that building materials used in new construction could potentially store 16bn tonnes of CO2 every year.
- New research in Nature Cities found that high-income city dwellers in China were more likely to “order in” food during heatwaves, revealing the “transfer of heat exposure from consumers to delivery riders.”
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The map above uses squares to illustrate 1,682 studies where communities are taking on-ground measures to adapt to climate change, from the islands of Tuvalu to the high mountains of Nepal. These studies were collated as part of the most comprehensive assessment to date of the scientific literature on climate adaptation. Carbon Brief has produced an interactive article based on the database that pulls out some of the key findings and explores global trends.
Spotlight
What listening to crickets reveals about rainforest change
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to scientists studying what sounds from wildlife can reveal about change in an Indian rainforest.
On Christmas night in Coorg (Kodagu) – prime coffee country in India’s Western Ghats biosphere – the rainforest was anything but silent.
The night air – though drier than it should be this time of year – was charged with an electric score of cricks, chirps, trills, hisses, croaks, whoops and whistles.
The Western Ghats is one of the “hottest hotspots” of biodiversity on Earth, hosting 325 globally threatened species. Coorg, on its eastern slopes, is a micro hotspot that receives more than 4000mm of rainfall on average and is the source of the Kaveri river, whose waters are bitterly disputed among the south Indian states seeing increasingly hotter summers and devastating floods.
A short climb reveals physical scars of extreme weather: beyond thick canopies are hilltops bearing gashes from devastating landslides in 2018 that killed 20 people and displaced 18,000.
To understand the less-visible impacts of climate and land-use change on non-human species in Coorg’s dense forests and plantations, sound has emerged as an important tool.
Biodiversity symphony
Bio-acoustics is the science of sounds produced by biological systems and what they react to. Prof Rohini Balakrishnan at the Indian Institute of Science described her work as a “bridge between symphony, cacophony and silence” and said that there are “signatures” of land degradation in sound that photographs cannot capture. She told Carbon Brief:
“When we first came to the Western Ghats 20 years ago to try and actually figure out an entire acoustic community, most people thought we were completely crazy, because nobody had tried anything at that scale.”
Those first years, she said, were “very, very hard” on her team, involving months of fieldwork in forests “full of poisonous snakes, gaur (Indian bison) and some density” of elephants.
The “tech part”, however, has become significantly easier since, with machine learning and algorithmic approaches being trained to look at an entire soundscape and, possibly, to decide if a landscape is degrading. Balakrishnan said:
“When we started, all we had were those little Sony Walkmans and bat detectors. There were no recorders that you could programme and leave outdoors. So it was painful: follow an insect, get a recording. You had to be there doing the recording.”
For Dr Vijay Ramesh, a postdoctoral scientist at the K Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University in New York state, an ongoing question is whether biodiversity can fully return to degraded landscapes that are being actively restored. Acoustics have played an essential role in helping answer that question, with soundscapes failing to detect insects in many restored sites.
“I don’t think we would have got that particular understanding of insects without using audio recorders, because these are all high frequencies we cannot hear,” Ramesh told Carbon Brief.
Cutting through noise
With so many species calling at the same time, isolating individual sounds in a complex noise environment can be a challenge. To Balakrishnan, the rainforest can sound like a Christmas party where “everybody’s screaming and you’re interested in one conversation, one person”.
Rohini and her team spent 15 years working on the “cocktail-party effect”, eventually finding that “what sounds to us like a cacophony actually can be close to silence for an insect”.
Anthropogenic sound often shows up in recordings: sirens still go off at dawn to signal the start of a morning shift for tea plantation workers. Pouring rain can serve as a major “masker” of sound.
While evidence of climate change’s impacts “still needs more long-term monitoring”, Rohini worries about humanity’s ability to “ignore planetary alarm bells”. She concluded:
“[M]echanised noise, traffic or construction…we sort of learn to filter them out, or we live in these artificial worlds we create by putting on headphones. And I feel, in the end, it takes away your ability to listen to your surroundings and to be influenced by it.
“Listening really is a survival skill for our species, but it also gives joy, and I think we are losing that ability to focus on sounds around us and think and ask: ‘What does that mean?’”
Watch, read, listen
BLACK MARKET: Context News interviewed Nigeria’s illegal oil refiners risking everything to meet their energy needs amid soaring fuel prices in the country.
POLYCRISIS NOW: Tim Sahay spoke to the Centre for Science and Environment about what to expect from climate policy in 2025 as the global “polycrisis” unfolds.
OFF THE CHARTS: A long read in the Atlantic examined how “extreme events are taking scientists by surprise” and “outpacing” the predictions of even the “best” climate models.
Coming up
- 14-15 January: UN “high-level retreat” on investing in ocean solutions, Incheon, South Korea
- 16 January: Vanuatu parliamentary elections
- 16-17 January: G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group Meeting, South Africa
Pick of the jobs
- Network of African National Human Rights Institutions, climate justice officer | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi, with travel
- University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, postdoctoral fellows | Stipend: $66,300 with travel and relocation allowances. Location: Philadelphia
- Electrify Britain, director of policy and advocacy | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
- E3G, policy advisor, trade and climate | Salary: £40,500-£45,000. Location: London or Brussels
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 10 January 2025: Los Angeles burns; Trump tilts at ‘windmills’; What cricket chirps reveal about rainforest change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
But a $345 million U.S. verdict against the environmental group hangs over the case.
A lawsuit filed by Greenpeace International against the U.S.-based fossil fuel company Energy Transfer in the Netherlands is moving forward after a Dutch court recently ruled in favor of the environmental organization in rejecting the company’s bid to toss out the case.
Greenpeace’s Dutch Anti-SLAPP Case Against Oil Pipeline Giant Advances
Go behind the scenes with executive editor Vernon Loeb and oceans correspondent Teresa Tomassoni as they discuss the search for heat-resilient coral reefs that are somehow defying the odds to survive a warming planet.
The world has already lost more than half of its coral reefs, and most of what remains is at risk of disappearing in the next 25 years.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Bonn talks close
‘SIDE-STEPPING AND STALLING’: UN climate talks in Bonn have ended in “gridlock”, according to Climate Home News. The outlet reported on the failure to balance developing countries’ need for climate-adaptation finance with “richer nations’ desire to move forward” on emissions cuts. It added that both topics were subject to “rule 16”, meaning no agreement could be reached and work will be pushed to the COP31 summit in Turkey. Inside Climate News quoted UN climate executive secretary Simon Stiell, who said the talks had seen “side-stepping and stalling”.
JUST TRANSITION: One “glimmer of hope” came from negotiations on achieving a “just transition”, reported Euronews. The news outlet said negotiators “made headway on operationalising the Belém-Antalya mechanism”, intended to support people in the shift to a low-carbon economy. However, Politico concluded that much of the focus in Bonn had “shift[ed] to efforts outside diplomatic talks – raising questions about the future of global climate negotiations”.
‘ATTACKING SCIENCE’: Agence France-Presse reported on the EU, Switzerland and “dozens of developing nations” warning of “attacks on science” by a “small group of fossil-fuels interests” in Bonn. Table Briefings explained that “the 1.5C target is increasingly being challenged” and the role of the UN climate-science panel – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – in an upcoming assessment of global climate progress “remains controversial”. See Carbon Brief’s full write-up of the talks for more detail.
US-Iran deal
PRICE DROP: The US and Iran announced that they have reached an interim agreement to halt the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz, reported Bloomberg. Oil prices have fallen, as the “long-awaited deal” began the process of “eas[ing]” the global energy crisis triggered by the conflict, according to the New York Times. The Associated Press noted that high fuel prices will “likely outlast the Iran war”.
‘OIL GLUT’: The Financial Times reported that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast a “glut of oil” emerging next year, if the peace deal holds. The IEA said this would allow countries to build new strategic reserves, as they “review their energy strategies and policies in response to the crisis”, according to Reuters.
‘NEW ERA’: Agence France-Presse reported that oil and gas companies have “few illusions about a return to normal for the Gulf energy industry after more than three months of blockage”. One analyst told the newswire that the war “showed the oil and gas industry that Hormuz risk is no longer just a geopolitical headline”.
Around the world
- OCEAN MONITOR: The Trump administration is “abandoning its plan” to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system key for tracking climate change after a “bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill”, reported the New York Times.
- CORAL HAVEN: The New York Times covered preliminary research, presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya, suggesting there could be three times as many “coral refugia” – where corals are relatively safe from climate change – than previously thought.
- BAD CREDIT: Down to Earth reported that the first carbon credits issued under the Paris Agreement’s new Article 6.4 mechanism are “facing scrutiny over alleged links to institutions controlled by Myanmar’s military junta”.
- OIL BACKTRACK: Reuters reported that oil-and-gas company Equinor has dropped a renewable-energy target and scaled back clean investments, while another Reuters story noted that Shell is selling off its offshore wind assets.
1.1 billion
The number of children facing “at least three overlapping climate hazards”, according to a new Unicef report covered by Agence France-Presse.
Latest climate research
- Including the “permafrost carbon-climate feedback” in climate models increases the chance of exceeding “tipping elements” – such as the Greenland ice sheets, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or Amazon rainforest – by up to 50% | Environmental Research Letters
- The intensity of influenza outbreaks could decline in temperate regions, but increase in tropical areas over the next century, as the climate warms | PNAS Nexus
- European snow cover has declined by 20% for December and January since the start of the industrial era, revealing an “unprecedented ongoing shrinkage of European winters” | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The more than 2m battery electric vehicles (BEVs), 1m “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs) and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are already saving drivers a total of around £3bn a year, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This amounts to savings of more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs for each BEV driver in the UK. The analysis comes amid reports in UK media this week that the government is considering “watering down” its EV sales targets.
Spotlight
Oceans rising at UN climate talks
The state of the world’s oceans is inextricably linked to the changing climate – and many delegates at UN climate talks want to see more focus on this issue, reports Carbon Brief.
Oceans are often described as the world’s “greatest ally” against climate change – absorbing 30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and most of the heat generated by those emissions.
They are also the site of important climate solutions, such as huge offshore windfarms and the shipping industry’s transition to cleaner fuels.
At the same time, the oceans themselves present a growing danger to coastal communities and sea life due to sea level rise, marine heatwaves and ocean acidification.
These diverse issues have led to growing calls within the UN climate process for more focus on oceans. During climate negotiations this week in Bonn – known as SB64 – nations and civil society had a chance to air these views during an “ocean and climate change dialogue”.
‘Elevate action’
Oceans first entered UN climate outcomes in 2019, when the final COP25 negotiated text requested a new “dialogue” on “the ocean and climate change to consider how to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action”.
The following years saw this dialogue established as an annual event. However, the political weight of these discussions has been limited.
COP31 is being co-led by Turkey and Australia, but with Pacific islands playing a supporting role. These small islands sometimes self-identify as “large ocean states”, stressing the ocean’s centrality in their societies.
In Bonn, figures from across the presidency threw their weight behind this issue. Chris Bowen, an Australian minister and incoming COP31 “president of negotiations”, told attendees:
“Australia, Turkey and the Pacific see an important opportunity to elevate ocean-based climate action.”
Strategies and finance
The two-day dialogue in Bonn involved a series of panels, statements and breakout groups.
One of the main topics was how oceans are integrated into national climate plans under the Paris Agreement, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).
Three-quarters of the latest round of NDCs mention oceans, with conservation of “blue carbon” ecosystems the most frequently described action. (Landscapes such as mangroves can both absorb CO2 and protect coastal areas.)
Delegates also discussed alignment with the UN biodiversity process, as well as ocean finance, which currently makes up less than 1% of all climate finance.
(As discussions were taking place in Bonn, country officials also gathered in Mombasa, Kenya for the 11th Our Ocean Conference. Carbon Brief’s associate editor Giuliana Viglione attended the conference and will publish a full summary shortly.)
Developing countries were clear that many of the ocean-related actions in their NDCs would depend on receiving more financial support.
‘Political momentum’
With the backing of the COP31 presidency, delegates were hopeful about where this year’s dialogue could lead.
Charles Hamilton, an advisor for the Bahamas who spoke for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the dialogue, told Carbon Brief that island representatives “are not traveling thousands of miles to just talk and pat ourselves on the back”. He added:
“A dialogue that just remains a dialogue is just more talk – no action.”
Given that, he said “discussions in the dialogue must move into COP decisions and the decisions must be actioned”, noting the importance of finance.
Marina Corrêa, oceans lead at WWF-Brazil, pointed to an upcoming UN climate change Standing Committee on Finance forum as a space to ramp up pressure on ocean finance.
More broadly, she wanted to see the presidencies translate their support into a “leader-level ocean initiative” that could “mainstream” oceans across negotiations.
“We have a really interesting opportunity, in terms of political momentum,” Corrêa told Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listen
‘HOTTER THAN HELL’: An episode of the BBC’s Rare Earth podcast titled “hotter than hell” considered the issue of extreme heat, with input from experts and “people facing up to the hottest temperatures on the planet”.
NOT BROKEN?: John Drake, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, wrote an essay for Aeon – also re-published as a Guardian “long read” – questioning the framing of ecosystems and climate systems “breaking down”.
ON COURSE: On his Volts podcast, US climate journalist David Roberts interviewed UK climate minister Katie White, quizzing her about whether the UK will “stay the course with its climate plans”.
Coming up
- 20-28 June: London climate action week
- 21 June: Colombia presidential runoff
- 24 June: UK Climate Change Committee progress in reducing emissions 2026 report to parliament
Pick of the jobs
- Mongabay, managing editor – Africa | Salary: Unknown. Location: Global
- Contexte, environment reporter – Brussels | Salary: €45,000-€60,000. Location: Brussels
- Climate 200, communications director | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia
- Energy Tracker Asia, energy transition correspondent | Salary: $3,000-$4,000 per month. Location: South-east Asia (remote)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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