Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
This week
Crude geopolitics
VIOLENT SPIKE: The escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas drove global oil prices up this week, the Times reported. On Monday, Brent crude rose to $88.15 a barrel as markets feared “wider regional instability”, Al Jazeera reported. Amid the violence, Saudi Arabia could hold the “key” to global oil prices, said Bloomberg. On Wednesday, the leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia discussed the “need to end war crimes against Palestine” in their first phone call since resuming ties, Reuters reported. US treasury secretary Janet Yellen indicated that additional sanctions on Iranian oil “could be coming”, the New York Times reported.
SUBSEA SABOTAGE? Elsewhere, gas prices surged in response to fears that Russia sabotaged an undersea pipeline between Finland and Estonia, the Daily Telegraph reported. Finnish president Sauli Niinistö on Tuesday said the leak had signs of “external activity”, Politico reported, while Iltalehti reported that state and defence authorities suspected Russia being behind the attack.The loss of the pipeline could expose both Finland and Estonia to winter shortages, experts told the New York Times.
1.5C ‘breached’
NEW RECORD: According to an analysis published by BBC News, the world “breached” 1.5C, “a key warming threshold” for a record number of days this year, accounting for “about a third of days in 2023”. The broadcaster clarified that “breaching Paris [Agreement] thresholds doesn’t mean going over them for a day or a week, but instead involves going beyond this limit across a 20- or 30-year average”. Temperatures have also been driven up by the onset of El Niño conditions, the story added.
TEMPERATURE CHECK: Elsewhere, many climate scientists have been left puzzled by “Earth’s fever suddenly spik[ing] so high in September”, Inside Climate News reported. The lack of certainty has sent “a shiver of unease through parts of the climate science community”, with scientists “who have authored important climate science research together” contradicting one another, “at least partly”, about the possible causes, the publication said. Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor, added that the September temperature spike is “certainly pushing the boundaries of model expectations”.
Around the world
- HEAT ATTRIBUTED: Heat scorching large parts of South America in September was made “100 times more likely” by human-caused climate change, according to a new analysis by the World Weather Attribution initiative.
- NICKEL DROPS: New data showed that tropical forests occupying an area equivalent to the size of New York have been cleared across 329 nickel mines in Indonesia since 2017 as demand for nickel batteries has increased, the Financial Times reported.
- COAL RECEIPTS: The Financial Times alleged that the influential Indian conglomerate the Adani Group “inflated” imported coal costs, leading to millions of Indian consumers and businesses overpaying for electricity. The group responded saying it uses an “open, transparent, global bidding process”.
- ESKOM EXIT: Mpho Makwana has quit as chairman of South African power utility Eskom even as parts of the country reel from floods, Bloomberg reported. It has previously called the gig “the worst job in global energy”.
77
The number of countries that just had their hottest September on record, according to climate science initiative Berkeley Earth.
Latest climate research
- A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that humans are “more vulnerable to moist heat stress than previously proposed”.
- Warming oceans and oxygen loss could drive a centuries-long irreversible reduction in marine ecosystem habitability, with impacts lasting “well after global temperatures have peaked”, said new research in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
- Small Island Developing States could face flood damages 14 times higher than at present under a scenario of very high greenhouse gas emissions and no adaptation, according to a new Nature Sustainability study.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief analysis by Josh Gabbatiss found that the UK has fallen nearly 40% behind on its pledge to rapidly scale up climate finance for developing countries. Instead of increasing steadily to meet a £11.6bn target over five years, the UK’s climate spending abroad has fallen two consecutive years in a row and is off track by around £2bn. The chart above shows the amount of annual international climate finance provided by the UK from the financial year 2011/12 to 2022/23, indicated by the blue line. Dotted lines indicate the annual average spend that would be required to meet the £11.6bn goal by 2025/26, both from a starting point of 2020/21 (yellow) and a starting point of 2022/23 (red). This analysis is from a three-part Carbon Brief investigation into the UK’s international climate finance commitments. Read parts one, two and three – which was covered by the Guardian.
Spotlight
Lessons from Sikkim’s deadly flash floods
Devastating flash floods in India’s north-eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim claimed 37 lives last week, with scores still missing. In the aftermath, Carbon Brief looks at whether authorities were adequately prepared for such an event – and how it could be linked to climate change.
The deadly floods that burst the largest dam in India’s smallest state – the 1,200 MW Teesta III project in Sikkim – have been at the centre of a charged debate on climate change and infrastructure development across the country, after a brutal monsoon in the Himalayan region.
While the event was initially characterised by Indian authorities as a “cloudburst” – an episode of heavy rain – scientists and meteorological experts later confirmed that the floods were caused by a breach of Sikkim’s “largest and the fastest-growing” South Lhonak glacial lake, during an event known as a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF).
“Part of the slope next to the glacier fell and crashed into the lake like the wall of a house, creating a tsunami wave that eventually managed to overtop and erode the dam,” Jakob Steiner, a research fellow at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), told Carbon Brief.
This also caused parts of the glacier to collapse into the lake, he said. Permafrost has been thawing in the region and destabilising the barriers that once held the two kilometre-wide lake in place, he added.
Rainfall, while intense, was “not apocalyptic” in north Sikkim, he said, as data now confirms.
The South Lhonak GLOF had been modelled in a 2021 paper led by scientist Dr Ashim Sattar at the Divecha Institute for Climate Change, who told Carbon Brief that it was “heartbreaking” to see the events in Sikkim unfold. He added:
“Our research did not predict when this is going to happen, but it assessed the potential damage it could have downstream. The science we produce is often restricted to a scientific community, but it has to go to the common people and policymakers.”
Policymakers knew for more than a decade that the area was vulnerable to a GLOF event, according to a report in the Hindustan Times. Since 2006, activists and communities have pointed out that environment impact assessments for the Teesta III dam did not factor in the risk of earthquakes or GLOFs, Scroll.in reported – but authorities did not take action or address blindspots.
Draining glacial lakes before they burst has been attempted in the past, but, according to Sattar, “getting equipment to higher elevations is very, very challenging” and focusing on non-structural measures is also important, such as early warning systems, awareness and resilience-building.
Experts and activists have called for an urgent overhaul of India’s dam safety mechanism.
“We have the data, we have an understanding of the change in the cryosphere, so you can start at 8am tomorrow and do proper risk assessments for each and every valley,” said Steiner. He added that there is a need for central funding for early warning systems, but that this has to be “done together with the people who are supposed to be warned”.
On the question of whether this GLOF was linked to human-caused climate change, he added:
“I don’t need an attribution study to tell you that this glacial lake is linked to a changing climate because it would not have formed if you didn’t have climate change.”
He added that, with continued global emissions, there will be a limit to the degree that Himalayan communities can adapt:
“We don’t have the money or the capacity to keep putting in these early warning systems, while we keep putting more CO2 in the atmosphere. We have to change something at the source. There are many culprits in this murder.”
Watch, read, listen
‘CRUCIAL DECADE’: What does COP28 – its global stocktake, fights over loss and damage funding and 1.5C – mean for developing countries in an “overshoot” world and how should India chart its path in a changing energy, geopolitical and legal landscape? Carbon Brief moderated a discussion with the Centre for Policy Research’s Prof Navroz Dubash, Dr Lavanya Rajamani, Dr Radhika Khosla and Shibani Ghosh.
ARCTIC MONITORS: Scientific American talked to Inuvialuit climate monitors who are recording how climate change is causing their town north of the Arctic Circle in Canada to erode away.
SEEDS OF WAR: Wild Relatives, a film streaming on TrueStory, traced the journey of seeds from the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard to Lebanon, in an attempt to recreate a gene bank destroyed by the outbreak of war.
Coming up
- 9-15 October: World Bank and International Monetary Fund Annual Meetings, Marrakech, Morocco
- 14 October: Australia Indigenous rights referendum
- 14 October: New Zealand general election
- 15 October: Poland parliamentary election
- 17-20 October: Fourth Meeting of the Transitional Committee (TC4) on the operationalization of the new funding arrangements for responding to loss and damage, Aswan, Egypt
- 19-20 October: CBD resumed second part of COP15 | Nairobi, Kenya
Pick of the jobs
- Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), faculty at the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) Initiative. Salary: Unknown. Location: Gangtok, Sikkim, India
China Dialogue, ocean editor | Salary: £39,776.18. Location: London (remote work considered for international candidates) - Bank Track, campaign lead for banks and climate and banks and nature | Salary: €3,300-3,700 per month. Location: Hybrid (Netherlands or remote) with travel to the Netherlands two to four times a year
DeBriefed is written in rotation by Carbon Brief’s team and edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 13 October 2023: Israel and Hamas conflict hits oil prices; 1.5C ‘breached’; Lessons from India’s flash floods appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
-
Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks
Plans to build Africa’s second largest oil refinery in ecologically sensitive region criticised as “environmental recklessness” -
Tanzania pushed African nations to oppose fossil fuel transition at COP30
While chairing the African group at the summit, the gas-dependent nation advised the continent’s ministers to block language on transitioning away from fossil fuels
Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls
Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
Why the global electrification agenda misses the point on Africa’s energy crisis
Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
Ugandan farmers use British court to try to stop East Africa oil pipeline
Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.