Published

1 year ago

December 25, 2024

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Eyes on the Arctic

SOURCE, NOT SINK: The Arctic tundra has become a net emitter of greenhouse gases, rather than a “carbon sink”, for the first time, according to the Arctic Report Card issued this week by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Alaska Beacon wrote that this shift is “result of permafrost warming, increased wildfires and other effects of climate change”.

ARCTIC ACREAGE: E&E News reported that the US Bureau of Land Management will open 400,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, despite promises to the contrary during Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. The area represents the minimum that was required to be put up for sale by Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which opened the preserve to development, Reuters said.

UK’s path to ‘clean power’

ACTION PLAN: The UK government published a 136-page “action plan” for reaching its goal for low-carbon sources to meet 100% of electricity demand and 95% of generation by 2030, BBC News reported. It includes various reforms that ministers will introduce over 2025 to boost renewables, change the planning system, increase flexibility in the electricity grid and support energy storage projects, according to the broadcaster.

RECORD RENEWABLES: The Financial Times said that the government is considering weakening the rights of communities to object to new pylons or windfarms in their neighbourhoods as part of the plans. It added that, in a bid to meet its goals, the government is “preparing a record-breaking auction of renewable subsidy contracts next year”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth run down of the plan’s key details.

Around the world

BRONZE MEDAL HEAT: The UK Met Office has predicted that 2025 will likely be in the top three warmest years on record, “falling in line just behind 2024 and 2023”.
CANADA TARGET: Canada has a new target to cut its emissions to 45-50% below 2005 levels by 2035, a less ambitious pledge than its climate advisers suggested, Climate Home News reported. A statement from Canada said the pledge will be submitted to the UN in 2025 and act as its “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.
HIGHLY DRY: More than three-quarters of Earth’s land is “permanently drying”, according to a report released at the UN desertification summit in Riyadh. AfricaNews reported that nearly five billion people will be affected by drying by the end of the century, if current warming trends continue.
DENGUE ON THE RISE: The Pan-American Health Organization announced that, this year, the Americas have “faced the largest dengue epidemic since records began” more than 40 years ago. It said “the situation is linked to climate events favouring mosquito proliferation”.
‘NO WINNERS’: “Tariff wars, trade wars and sci-tech wars” will have “no winners”, Chinese president Xi Jinping said in a recent meeting with representatives from “major international economic organisations”, according to Xinhua.
GEOENGINEERING GUIDANCE: The EU’s scientific advisory group recommended that the bloc should move to “prohibit solar geoengineering technologies…and push for a worldwide ban”, Politico reported.

£57.5 million

The record amount of funding provided to farmers in England who were impacted by last winter’s severe flooding, according to figures released to Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

According to research in Science, the 2014-16 marine heatwave in the Pacific Ocean killed at least half of Alaska’s common murre, an abundant seabird species.
Climate-change-driven shifts in atmospheric circulation will result in increased turbulence over Europe, especially during the winter months, a study in Geophysical Research Letters found.
A rapid attribution analysis by the World Weather Attribution service found that this year’s record-setting typhoon season that battered the Philippines was “supercharged” by climate change. Carbon Brief covered the findings.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Ahead of Donald Trump’s second term as US president, a rerun of his first trade war with China is firmly on the cards – and minerals key to the energy transition may end up in the crossfire. Carbon Brief took an in-depth look at what US-China tensions over critical minerals could mean for the stability of their supply chains and for the transition to cleaner energy. The Venn diagram above – put together by the Chinese government and translated to English by Carbon Brief – shows where China expects there to be overlap between itself, the EU and the US when it comes to minerals and materials considered to be “critical” for energy and industry.

Spotlight

What concerns climate scientists

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to scientists at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC about what is on their minds as 2024 draws to a close, and what they think the biggest climate stories of 2025 might be.

Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Prof David Ho, professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and co-founder and chief science officer at [c]worthy

All I seem to think about these days is CDR – carbon dioxide removal. Normally I say that it doesn’t make sense to deploy [CDR] until we decarbonise drastically, because it is useless when we’re still emitting more than 40bn tonnes of CO2 every year…But if we don’t start now, we might not be able to scale [up] fast enough.

I’m thinking about that because it does have to go from something that most people have never heard of, to the biggest thing we’ve ever done, in a short time.

It’s really hard to know with the new administration in the US [what the biggest story will be].

But the overarching story, of course, is that we’re emitting more CO2 – things are getting worse, and we’re not doing anything about it. And whether that remains the biggest story or not, I don’t know, because it seems like everything that we do is small compared to the fact that we don’t do anything about the continued use of fossil fuels.

Dr Sahra Kacimi, a polar scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

There are a couple things that have been on my mind. My research is really focused on sea ice and how can we better monitor it from space, which means providing better estimates of sea ice thickness, including the snow on top of it, and then trying to use a combination of satellite observations to really better understand the state of sea ice and how it’s changing in the context of global warming.

I’m really interested in this new satellite mission called SWOT [Surface Water and Ocean Topography]. To me, it really marks the beginning of a new era…Everyone you can talk to – people working on hydrology, oceanography, sea ice – what we’re seeing is just incredible.

Antarctic sea ice is a really hot topic, because there’s still a lot of things that we don’t know about it and about why it’s been changing so much in the past few years…Not necessarily next year, but in the next few years, the Southern Ocean and Antarctic sea ice and Antarctic climate is going to be a major, major climate story.

Dr Cynthia Rosenzweig, senior research scientist and head of the Climate Impacts Group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and winner of the 2022 World Food Prize

When AgMIP [the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project] started and we started holding these sessions at AGU on the effects of climate change on agriculture and food, they would be very small. And now you can see how this area is growing in importance and [in] the science.

The work is going beyond the “big four” crops – wheat, rice, maize and soya beans. Of course they will always be very important, but you can see a role for a much broader range of crops…I would also say [there’s a growing focus on] mitigation and adaptation together.

It’s wonderful to see all this wonderful work. But unless you coordinate it and actually then bring it to the policymakers, where does it go? And so that’s really the meaning of AgMIP. [We’re holding] the 10th global workshop in March-April. We’ll be bringing together teams of people who actually do the work, and they work together at the workshop. I really believe in putting “work” back in workshops.

Dr Erich Fischer, a climate scientist and lecturer at ETH Zürich

We have now seen the first year with 1.5C of global temperature rise, but that’s just the first one. So most places haven’t yet seen anything close to the highest local temperature, precipitation or drought conditions possible under today’s climate – even without any further warming. I expect to see a lot more records being broken in 2025.

And then the big question is whether global temperatures will continue to rise at these rates. This has implications for all regions of the globe – including the oceans, which are warming very rapidly themselves.

Watch, read, listen

SURVIVAL STORY?: The Washington Post’s Post Reports podcast asked whether the Inflation Reduction Act can survive the term of incoming president Donald Trump.

WORKING THE NIGHT SHIFT: Grist examined how fisherfolk and farmworkers are adjusting to overnight shifts to escape extreme daytime temperatures.
(RE)WILD THING: A comic in Vox explained how rewilding your lawn can help boost biodiversity and contribute to mitigating climate change.

Coming up

9-16 December: Plenary session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Windhoek, Namibia
16-20 December: 68th meeting of the Global Environment Facility Council, Online
17 December: Launch of IPBES nexus assessment
17 December: 168th meeting of the committee of permanent representatives of the UN Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya
18 December: Launch of IPBES transformative change assessment

Pick of the jobs

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, Living Mountain Lab outreach specialist | Salary: $33,720. Location: Kathmandu, Nepal
Sustainability Research Group at the University of Basel, funded PhD in sustainable agri-food system governance (two roles) | Salary: Unknown. Location: Basel, Switzerland
Wired, senior writer, climate | Salary: $95,000-$127,000. Location: San Francisco, New York, London or 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 13 December 2024: Arctic tundra emitting CO2; UK sets path to ‘clean power’; What climate scientists worry about appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 13 December 2024: Arctic tundra emitting CO2; UK sets path to ‘clean power’; What climate scientists worry about

Climate Change

Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks

Published

8 hours ago

April 14, 2026

Alice Rush

Mae Buenaventura is the manager of the debt justice programme of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, a regional alliance of peoples’ movements, community organizations, coalitions, NGOs and networks

A potentially historic shift in public debt governance is set to unfold in Washington DC this week as Global South governments take a collective stand to stop a “silent killer” of development financing.

The first-ever UN-hosted borrowers’ forum will officially be launched on April 15 on the sidelines of the 2026 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Led by five convening countries – Zambia, Egypt, Nepal, the Maldives and Pakistan – the initiative is one of the key wins of last year’s 4th Financing for Development Conference (FFD4) in Sevilla, Spain.

The forum’s mandate is to establish a platform for borrower countries, supported by a UN secretariat, “to discuss technical issues, share information and experiences in addressing debt challenges, increase access to technical assistance and capacity-building in debt management, coordinate approaches and strengthen borrower countries’ voices in the global debt architecture”.

Instead of facing lenders alone, these countries will now use a UN-backed platform to share technical expertise and coordinate their approach to a global debt system that is fundamentally broken.

Debt grips climate-vulnerable nations

The human cost of the current debt architecture is staggering. According to the UN trade and development agency, UNCTAD, more than 40% of the global population – roughly 3.4 billion people – live in countries where the government is forced to spend more on debt payments than on the health, education and social protection of its citizens.

In so-called low-income countries, governments spend an average of 7.5% of their total budgets on debt service, with interest payments consuming up to 20% of total government revenue in these regions.

The Philippines is a case study in this financial stranglehold. It is part of a global majority forced to watch its public services crumble and infrastructure lag while its wealth is siphoned off to satisfy foreign lenders.

The policy of automatic appropriations – a legacy of the rule of late former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. – mandates that debt servicing takes precedence over any other public expenditure, effectively placing the demands of lenders above the needs of the Filipino people. Even as it faces a $1.5 trillion regional financing gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, its hands remain tied by a legal framework that values credit ratings over human lives.

Jul 3, 2025

Finance

UN development conference backs innovative ways to boost climate finance

Leaders push for better financial systems at the Financing for Development summit to help poor nations cope with climate and economic shocks

Read more
Apr 10, 2026

News

GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget

Amid aid cuts, donor governments pledge less nature and climate funding to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), with the four-year package to be finalised in late May

Read more
Apr 8, 2026

News

Charging worries, high prices put brakes on EV growth in Bangladesh

Sales of e-bikes and rickshaws are up amid queues at fuel stations, but a lack of charging infrastructure and high prices still deter many Bangladeshis from going electric

Read more

As a “middle-income country” (MIC), the Philippines is stuck in a frustrating purgatory. It is often deemed “too wealthy” for the G20’s debt-relief framework, yet too poor to absorb global economic shocks. Last year, Finance Undersecretary Joven Balbosa hit the nail on the head when he called for support that goes “beyond the simplistic income categorization” that ignores a country’s actual vulnerabilities.

Without an inclusive and equitable global debt architecture, nations including the Philippines are left to navigate catastrophic climate risks and economic shocks with zero fiscal breathing space.

No respite during climate disasters

The regional evidence of this systemic failure is everywhere. Take Pakistan, which in 2022 was hit by catastrophic flooding that submerged a third of the country and caused billions in losses. Despite this climate-driven disaster, World Bank data shows that Pakistan made payments in 2023 of $11.8 billion for public and publicly guaranteed (PPG) external debt, while its PPG external debt reached $93 billion that same year, surpassing pre-pandemic debt of $87 billion (2020).

Sri Lanka followed IMF prescriptions throughout 16 lending programs since 1991, only to become the first Asian country this century to default. Its MIC status prevents application for debt relief and restructuring measures. Today, the Sri Lankan people bear the brunt of harsh conditionalities, including raising VAT from 8% to 15%, slashing food and fuel subsidies, and the erosion of hard-earned worker pensions.

Residents sit in a Rescue 1122 boat as they evacuate from the flooded area, following monsoon rains and rising water levels of the Chenab River, in Qasim Bela village on the outskirts of Multan in Punjab province, Pakistan, September 11, 2025. REUTERS/Quratulain Asim

Currently, the global rules of lending and borrowing are set by a “creditors’ club” composed of the IMF, the World Bank and the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable it set up, and the Paris Club.

These institutions measure “debt sustainability” through a narrow lens of a country’s capacity to make timely repayments. They largely ignore internal economic inequalities, gender disparities and the existential threat of climate change.

Crises should trigger debt service cancellation

By organising the new borrowers’ forum, the Global South is signalling that the era of passive “standard-setting” by lenders is over.

The ultimate goal for global civil society and debt justice movements is the establishment of a UN Debt Convention; a democratic, binding and inclusive framework that governs both lenders and borrowers. This mechanism would ensure that debt restructuring and cancellation are sufficient to allow countries to fulfill their international human rights obligations and implement necessary climate actions.

Green Climate Fund picks locations for five developing country hubs

To be truly transformative, debt sustainability analyses must align with human rights and sustainable development needs. This means conducting impact assessments – both before and after loans are issued – to identify “illegitimate” debts that do not benefit the public.

Crucially, we need an automatic debt service cancellation mechanism that triggers during extreme climatic, environmental or health shocks. We also need a binding global debt registry to ensure that every loan is transparent and subject to public scrutiny.

Whether the borrowers’ forum becomes a true milestone depends on its courage to challenge the status quo. We can no longer allow debt to act as a “silent killer” of our future. It is time to demand a financial system that serves humanity, not just the balance sheets of the powerful.

The post Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks

Climate Change

Join Greenpeace to save Scott Reef from Woodside’s dirty gas

Published

8 hours ago

April 14, 2026

Alice Rush

Greenpeace and allies will be protesting outside Woodside’s Annual General Meeting to show the WA and federal governments strong community opposition to Woodside’s proposal to drill for gas at Scott Reef.

What: Protest outside Woodside Energy’s Annual General Meeting

When: 8am Thursday 23rd April 2026Where: Kagoshima Park (on the corner of Great Eastern Highway and Bolton Avenue)

RSVP now and join the protest

What’s at stake

Scott Reef is a pristine ocean ecosystem off the north-west coast of Australia.

It is home to endangered and endemic species, including pygmy blue whales and the dusky sea snake, and a nesting ground for green sea turtles. Scott Reef is a place of extraordinary natural beauty, and a vital marine environment that supports a wide range of marine life.

What Woodside is proposing

Dirty fossil fuel corporation, Woodside Energy, is seeking approval to drill more than 50 gas wells underneath and around Scott Reef as part of its Browse project.

The gas would be extracted and transported to the Burrup Hub, the most polluting fossil fuel project in Australia. This proposal would industrialise the doorstep of Australia’s largest freestanding oceanic reef system – threatening the marine life that relies on it and the climate.

Why this can’t go ahead

The WA Environmental Protection Authority has already identified the risks of this project as “unacceptable”, issuing a preliminary rejection.

Serious concerns include:

The risk of an oil spill
Impacts on pygmy blue whales
Damage to green sea turtle nesting grounds

These risks are severe, and potentially irreversible. But the decision hasn’t been made yet. The project is still being assessed.

The Federal Environment Minister is approaching a decision that will determine whether Scott Reef is protected – or vulnerable to decades of industrial gas destruction.

This is a defining moment.