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.
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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