Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Africa’s second climate summit
‘NOT CHARITY’: At the second Africa climate summit held in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia this week, leaders “chastised developed nations for failing to honor [climate finance] pledges” and said they will “tap the private sector” to help fill the gap, Bloomberg reported. In a joint statement, African leaders said that providing climate finance is “a legal obligation and not charity, as anchored in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Paris Agreement”, according to the outlet.
SOLUTIONS CENTRED: Climate Home News reported that Ethiopian president Taye Atske Selassie told the closing ceremony on Wednesday the summit had repositioned Africa “not as victims of a crisis it never created but as a global centre for climate solution, renewable energy and green growth”. The outlet added that the joint leaders’ declaration called for “strengthened and sustained support” to scale up African-led climate initiatives, such as the 8,000km Great Green Wall across the Sahel and the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative.
Around the world
- ‘SILLY’: Chris Wright, the climate-sceptic US energy secretary, has dismissed the impacts of climate change as “not incredibly important” and described the Paris Agreement as “silly”, reported the New York Times. Elsewhere, the group of “climate contrarians” behind Trump’s misleading climate report have been “disbanded” following a lawsuit challenging their appointment, CNN reported.
- CHINA BOOM: The world’s fossil-fuel use could begin to drop by 2030 as a result of China’s “rapid adoption of renewables and its increasing reliance on electricity”, Bloomberg reported, citing a new study by thinktank Ember.
- NDC INDECISION: EU member states are still “wrangling” over the bloc’s overdue 2035 climate target, “with no sign of agreement”, according to a leaked draft text seen by the Guardian.
- TRADE SPOTLIGHT: Brazil plans to propose a new forum for governments to discuss how climate policy affects trade at the next World Trade Organization meeting next week, according to Reuters.
- UK PUBLIC POLLED: In a frontpage story, the Times covered new polling it commissioned, reporting that the number of people who think the dangers of global warming are exaggerated has increased by more than 50% in the past four years, from 16% to 25%. [Polling experts have criticised the framing of the Times coverage, noting that a large majority of the public still back net-zero.]
£797 million
The record amount of UK climate aid spent on nature last year – largely due to an increase in spending on carbon offsets, according to new Carbon Brief analysis.
Latest climate research
- Disadvantaged communities in the US are eating more sugar as temperatures rise | Nature Climate Change
- Videos of climate scientists making personal appeals for climate action were more likely to motivate viewers to act if the messengers were “older, male [and] attractive” | PLOS One
- Carbon-credit purchases for major airlines often come at the expense of funding other decarbonisation measures | Nature Communications
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A new study used “extreme event attribution” to assess the impact of climate change on all 21st-century heatwaves that were classified as “major disasters”. It found that global warming linked to the world’s biggest 180 oil and gas companies made all 213 heatwaves analysed more intense and frequent. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the heatwaves would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused global warming. The paper, covered by Carbon Brief, analysed 213 heatwaves over 2000-23 that were recorded in the EM-DAT database of “major disasters” . These heatwaves are shown in the map above.
Spotlight
How scientists can tackle net-zero backlash
This week, Carbon Brief asks climate scientists attending a summit at the University of East Anglia, UK how researchers can better combat net-zero misinformation.
It comes as the UK’s right-wing political parties and press are increasingly making misleading claims about net-zero.
Asher Minns, executive director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia
The whole discourse around net-zero has become something that it was never intended to be. It’s a quite specific scientific concept that came out of the IPCC 1.5C report, following up on [the] Paris [Agreement], so it actually has quite a specific definition, but it has actually become a phrase that is being used really just to mean “removing CO2” or “saving energy”, even. It’s become this kind of huge term across public, across media, across policy, that everybody can just pin what they mean to “net-zero” without actually referring to what it actually is, which is absolute zero emissions, getting CO2 out of the atmosphere. The fact that there is a government department called “net-zero” isn’t great for that public discourse, for public understanding, and that’s why we’ve got a bit of a backlash. I don’t think we need to necessarily abandon the phrase net-zero, but I think we should just talk about clean energy and concepts that people have a chance of hanging onto, rather than something that’s really quite difficult.
Prof Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society research professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia
I think narratives about the way that we present climate action can be very negative, and, in fact, we do climate action all the time. We’ve cut emissions by half in the UK and most people haven’t realised that this is happening. Just talking about climate change in the way that there are things that you can do that are desirable and have benefits for you. Of course, the government needs to make climate solutions accessible to everybody. But improving the narratives about how we talk about climate change, that would be, for me, a small thing that we could do.
Prof Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University
I don’t think we can do it alone. I think we try to do everything alone and I don’t think that’s the right approach. My personal opinion is we need to be collaborating with key influencers and celebrities, quite honestly, who can actually get that message across to the people who need to hear that message. I think we need probably a few key spokespeople. And I don’t think they should be scientists, but they should have simple and clear scientific messages that they convey. There’s lots of misinformation and it’s conveyed in very clear ways with simple messaging. Often climate science is really, really complicated and that’s why people just don’t understand it, they don’t understand the jargon surrounding it and, therefore, perhaps they are more likely to understand the simple messages that come from the climate deniers.
Dr Ruth Wood, senior lecturer in environment and climate change at the University of Manchester
I find it quite challenging to work out how to engage in those discussions because they’re taking place in forums that I’m not at. Do we need a groundswell of voices around supporting net-zero, which have the same level of media savviness of the anti net-zero groups? If we had their same ability to mobilise and get the message out there, maybe that would counter some of their narratives. The gap between science and communication is a huge challenge.
Prof Charlie Wilson, professor of energy and climate change and senior research fellow in the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford
I guess that part of the answer is how we’ve always done it, which is forceful rebuttals and corrections with appropriate evidence. The second bit is like learning how the algorithms work to promote both information, as well as misinformation. This misinformation is being amplified by algorithmic preferences expressed through social media platforms, which emphasise juicy clickbait-type stuff.
Watch, read, listen
FIXING TOMORROW: Climate scientist Dr Kimberly Nicholas and the NGO Project Drawdown released an evidence-based online guide for how individuals can take actions to address climate change.
‘WAR ON SCIENCE’: Bloomberg had a special feature on how Donald Trump’s “war on science” is crippling the US.
CLIMATE IN COURT: The New York Times unpacked how and why a group of students from the Pacific Islands took a climate case to the International Court of Justice.
Coming up
- 9-23 September: 80th session of the UN general assembly, New York
- 16 September: Malawi elections
- 19 September: First technical session of the UN Environment Programme working group on nitrogen, online
Pick of the jobs
- Floodlight, editor-in-chief | Salary: $130,000. Location: Remote (US)
- University of Birmingham, research fellow in climate intervention | Salary: £36,636-£46,049. Location: Birmingham, UK
- Climate Group, communications coordinator | Salary: 695,800-850,000 rupees. Location: New Delhi, India
- Wired, senior writer, science frontiers | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post Debriefed 12 September 2025: Africa calls for promised finance; Deadly heat linked to big oil; How to tackle net-zero backlash appeared first on Carbon Brief.
At Climate Home News, we found this year a pretty depressing one to cover, shaped as it was by Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science and action at home and abroad – and rounded off by the UN declaring global warming will break through the key 1.5C limit the world set itself in 2015.
But it wasn’t all bad. Nobody had decided to follow the US out of the Paris Agreement by the time it turned 10 this month. Anti-climate candidates in Canada and Australia, backed by Trump, lost elections convincingly. And 2025 may also have been the year carbon dioxide emissions fell for the first time.
What’s more, our reporting this year saw results in the real world. After we revealed that Chilean doctors believe pollution from copper mines in the northern hub of Calama is causing autism, campaigners sued state-owned mining company Codelco. The case is ongoing.
One of the lawyers representing the campaigners said “when [Climate Home News] revealed our silent suffering and our fight, we felt we had finally been heard and had entered the national conversation thanks to international media coverage. That was the final push to file the lawsuit.”
If you want to fund more impactful reporting like this in 2026, please subscribe and unlock all of our content for just the price of a coffee per week. Or to keep up with our latest coverage, you can sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky and Facebook.
Below are nine of our best stories this year and, if that’s not enough, here’s nine more from 2024.
1. Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand
In the year of trade wars, Trump extended Biden-era tariffs on solar panels from China to neighbouring countries. Nicha Wachpanich spoke to some of those workers who subsequently lost their jobs making panels at Chinese-run factories in Thailand and found that the US levies and bad behaviour by bosses had combined to crush their dreams of a better life.
2. Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs
Trump being Trump, and axing US climate finance, is no reason to let other wealthy donor nations off the hook. We examined the latest spreadsheets for annual adaptation aid and found Japan is counting support for massive infrastructure projects in its figures, despite them having only a dubious role in helping people adapt to climate change.
Our reporter Tanbirul Miraj Ripon visited one such project – the Matarbari port in Bangladesh. He found that the port handles coal and gas imports and has destroyed locals’ homes and livelihoods. Despite this, on paper it represents $363 million in Japanese climate adaptation finance, the biggest single climate resilience project being funded by a wealthy country in 2023.
3. Ethiopia’s bold EV ambitions hit bumps in rural areas
Other nations are trying hard to go green but finding it tricky. This year, Ethiopia hosted the Africa Climate Summit, was selected as the host of COP32 and opened the continent’s biggest hydropower dam.
It plans to use some of this clean power to charge electric vehicles, after banning imports of cars with internal combustion engines (even as the European Union is softening its own 2035 ban on ICEs). While that will reduce Ethiopia’s already tiny emissions and its fossil fuel import bills, it won’t be easy in a nation where only half the population has electricity access, as Solomon Yimer and Vivian Chime reported.
4. Ending poverty and gangs: How Zambia seeks to cash in on the global drive for EVs
Other African governments are trying to cash in on their minerals, which big players like China, the US and increasingly Saudi Arabia want for green technologies and/or making equipment for wars.
Pamela Kapekele went to look at the situation in Zambia’s Copperbelt province – where you can probably guess what they produce! She found that good tax regulations and working conditions will be needed if locals are to see the benefits of surging demand for the metal.
Later in the year, an acid spill from a copper-mine tailings dam that contaminated the country’s main river showed the value of environmental regulation too. Reporting from Nigeria’s lithium and South Africa’s platinum mines also highlighted the challenges of making minerals mining and processing cleaner and fairer for communities.
5. Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?
Some sectors – like international aviation and shipping – tend to fall outside the scope of national media, and it’s a gap we’ve aimed to fill. Together with Singapore’s Straits Times, we tracked the supply chain for what the airline industry calls “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF) and found that virgin and barely used palm oil – which threatens rainforests – is being passed off as waste cooking oil and used to power planes in Europe.
Malaysia is a particular hotspot for this fraud, as government subsidies there make virgin palm oil cheap in the shops – and it can be sold for a higher price as “used” cooking oil, providing a profit motive for flipping it. Our investigation was picked up by the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Malaysian authorities, who have since launched a crackdown on this kind of fraud.
But with verification of the materials used for SAF relying on just a handful of commercial auditors conducting mainly paper-based checks, airlines currently cannot know for sure if their green jet fuel is actually sustainable. Their advertising to passengers should – but often doesn’t – reflect this uncertainty.
6. Brazil’s environment minister suggests roadmap to end fossil fuels at COP30
Our reporting was often prescient this year. We called it correctly that the US would leave the Paris Agreement but not the UNFCCC, that Argentina would not follow America out of Paris, that Ethiopia rather than Nigeria would be chosen as COP32 host and that petrostates would try to kill a new green shipping framework at the International Maritime Organization.
We are also pretty sure we were the first – at least in English – to pick up on Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva’s proposal for COP30 to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels, which she aired back in June at London Climate Week. That proposal was pushed by President Lula at the start of COP30, dominated much of the conversation at the summit and will continue to be discussed throughout 2026.
8. PR firm working for Shell wins COP30 media contract
In the summer of 2025, our crack investigative reporter Matteo Civillini got the scoop on how the Brazilian government, via a contract tendered by the UN, was working with Edelman on international media relations for the COP30 climate summit while the global PR giant was simultaneously engaged in promoting Shell’s fossil fuel interests in Brazil.
This story was picked up by a range of other media, and amplified calls for agencies whose clients include fossil fuel firms to be excluded from the climate negotiations. Advocacy group Clean Creatives was inspired by Matteo’s reporting to launch a campaign against Edelman’s COP involvement. That culminated in an open letter from influencers and creators with a combined audience of over 24 million calling for Edelman to be dropped. The drumbeat on this theme is likely to get louder in 2026.
8. “House of cards”: Verra used junk carbon credits to fix Shell’s offsetting scandal
And talking of smoke and mirrors, just when we thought the murky web of carbon offsetting linking oil and gas major Shell to sham rice-farming projects in China couldn’t get any more convoluted, it did exactly that.
By combing through the records of carbon-credit registry Verra – the world’s biggest – Matteo confirmed that nearly a million bogus offsets from 10 disqualified methane reduction projects had been compensated for with the same number of junk credits from another four such projects that were also axed by Verra.
“It’s frankly unbelievable that Verra considers it appropriate to compensate for hot air credits with other hot air credits,” Jonathan Crook, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told us. “To pretend this is a satisfactory resolution is both absurd and deeply alarming.”
Verra insists the replacement credits were technically available to plug the gap left by the first batch – even though the second set, too, now need to be swapped out. Shell is keeping its distance, saying it does not manage or operate “the projects in question” despite being earlier involved in the Chinese rice-farming programmes as their “authorised representative”. Mind-boggling indeed!
9. Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries
In what was on balance a bad year, we brought you some hope too. A landmark advisory opinion on climate change and human rights from the International Court of Justice in The Hague was stronger than anyone imagined and may open the door to lawsuits against polluting countries and companies in 2026.
Other good news stories included analysts suggesting China’s fossil fuel use could peak this year, the UN’s loss and damage fund launching its first call for proposals, South Korea and Morocco moving to phase out coal and a boom in imports of solar panels to Africa.
Hope came too from ordinary people and their ingenuity – like the untrained Jordanians interviewed by Yamuna Matheswaran, hooking up solar panels to old Tesla batteries, lowering both their electricity bills and their carbon emissions into the bargain.
The post Nine of our best climate stories from 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
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