Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
1.5C looms
1.5C EXAMINED: The run of record heat last year suggests the world is close to exceeding the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, according to two new studies covered by the Press Association. In 2024, annual average temperatures reached 1.5C for the first time. However, the Paris goal is measured as a 20-year average – meaning breaching 1.5C in a single year does not yet show the target has been crossed, the publication noted.
BREACH IN REACH: The first of the two studies “looked at real-world observations of already reached warming levels…and showed that the first single years exceeding each threshold have consistently fallen with the first 20-year period which averaged the same level of warming”, said the newswire. The findings suggest the Paris goal could be crossed within 10 years – unless there are “stringent” emissions cuts, Agence France-Presse reported. This is in-line with recent estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Carbon Brief.
HEAT GOES ON: The second study explored what the run of temperatures above 1.5C from July 2023 to June 2024 could mean for the Paris Agreement, the Independent reported. It continued: “The study shows that having 12 consecutive months above 1.5C means there’s a 76% chance that we’ve already hit that long-term warming threshold under current climate policies. If this trend continues for 18 consecutive months, the research says, the breach of the Paris Agreement threshold will be virtually certain. January 2025 was the 19th month to cross that mark.”
Around the world
- BP SWITCH: According to the Times, BP’s chief executive – under pressure from an activist investor – has pledged to “fundamentally reset” the company’s strategy, which is expected to involve a formal ditching of its target to cut oil and gas output and a further scaling back of its renewables projects.
- 35% RENEWABLE: Under Indonesia’s new electricity plan, the country aims to increase its renewable energy share from 12% to 35% in 2034 by expanding solar, battery, hydro and geothermal capacity, reported Reuters.
- ‘EXISTENTIAL THREAT’: A first-of-its kind German government report found that climate change poses an “existential threat” to the European Union due to its “destabilising and unequal” effects, reported Politico.
- COAL ON A HIGH: As covered by Carbon Brief, China’s construction of coal-fired power plants reached a new 10-year high in 2024, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor.
- ‘100% SUSTAINABLE WOOD’: The UK government agreed a new deal for the Drax power plant – which burns wood pellets to generate electricity – halving its subsidies and requiring all wood to come from “100% sustainable” sources, the Guardian said. Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans had more details.
- INDIA DEALS: Reuters reported that Nigeria is seeking assistance from India with its energy transition plans. Meanwhile, BBC News reported on the US and India agreeing a new deal that will see more American oil and gas imported by Delhi.
57%
The annual increase in second-hand EV sales in the UK from 2023 to 2024, with 188,382 cars changing hands in 2024, reported BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- New research in npj Climate Action showed that the more pronounced local climate change effects become, the stronger the relationship between a person’s education level and their level of “climate concern”.
- A new study published in Nature Cities showed that people in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more exposed to floods, based on studying nearly 45,000 neighbourhoods in eight Latin American countries between 2000 and 2018.
- Carbon emissions from permafrost “may pose a considerable risk” to climate mitigation efforts, “even if net-zero and negative emissions are achieved”, according to a new study published in Science Advances.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Nearly 95% of countries miss UN climate pledge deadline
Nearly 95% of countries have missed a UN deadline to submit new climate pledges for 2035, Carbon Brief analysis shows. Just 13 of the 195 parties – highlighted on the map above – signed up to the Paris Agreement published their new emissions-cutting plans, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs), by the 10 February deadline. Countries missing the deadline represent 83% of global emissions and nearly 80% of the world’s economy, according to Carbon Brief analysis. The US submitted its NDC under the previous Biden administration and has now announced plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
Spotlight
From faint idea to ‘forest twice the size of London’
This week, Carbon Brief takes you behind the scenes of its recent rapid analysis on UK airport expansion.
At the end of January, Carbon Brief published an analysis showing that a forest “twice the size of London” would be needed to offset the emissions from the UK government’s proposed airport expansion.
It was covered widely in the press, featured on an ITV current affairs show and was cited twice by MPs in UK parliament.
The analysis – by myself, Carbon Brief’s data scientist, and policy correspondent Josh Gabbatiss – came together in just a few days. Below, I explain how we undertook the rapid analysis.
Heathrow third runway
In January, UK chancellor Rachel Reeves signalled that the UK government was planning to back a third runway at Heathrow airport, along with the expansion of two other London airports, Luton and Gatwick.
We decided to examine what the “climate cost” of such an expansion would be. The UK has so far done little to align its aviation sector with its net-zero target and this seemed like it could make that target even harder to reach.
The question was how should we go about this? Carbon Brief has previously published a guest post showing that airport expansion was not net-zero compatible and others had published more recent emissions analysis. What more could we add?
For a new angle, we wanted to focus on the extra emissions that would result specifically from the expansion of the three airports.
Calculating airport emissions
We noted that Carbon Brief’s guest post had used estimates for the average emissions per passenger to calculate the extra emissions in the year 2050 from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the UK’s official climate advisers.
But calculating the extra emissions for a single year more than two decades in the future did not feel sufficient because the expansions would be operational years before 2050 – and it is the cumulative that matters for global temperatures.
However, calculating cumulative emissions would require modelling based on airport expansion dates.
Assuming the expansions are fully operational by 2040 and using CCC modelling, I produced the first rough chart (below) using pandas, a data analysis tool designed for the Python coding language.
This showed that the expansion of Heathrow, Luton and Gatwick would produce an extra 81m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) by 2050 (in orange on the chart below).
Forest figures
After calculating the extra emissions from the UK’s planned airport expansion, we decided that we needed to come up with a way of contextualising the number for our readers.
This is a common issue for us at Carbon Brief – how to communicate the scale of emissions. The average person does not necessarily know how to interpret 81m tonnes.
It can help to compare it to something more grounded and visible. In this case, we decided to work out how many trees would be needed to absorb all the extra emissions.
First, I redid the analysis with more accurate information on airport-expansion timelines from the Aviation Environment Federation, an NGO focused on the climate impacts of flying, which updated the total to 92m tonnes.
For converting this to trees, I drew on the methods of a previous analysis to get the emissions absorbed per hectare of forest planted over its lifetime.
From this, and assuming that the new forest is planted in 2028, I could calculate the forest area that would need to be planted so that by 2050 it has offset the extra aviation emissions from 2028 to 2050.
Using this, we got a forest “twice the size of Greater London”.
For more context, I added the historical emissions from the aviation sector and separated out each airport’s contribution in the updated chart (below).
Visualising the headline
The last step of the analysis was to present it in Carbon Brief style. I sent the data to our multimedia team and asked them to add two London-shaped forests to the chart.
Armed with the headline and caption text, the multimedia team turned the data into something visually captivating that could tell the story on its own.
If such work interests you, consider applying for our data-analyst vacancy. Deadline: 9am GMT 17 February
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE BOWL: Super Bowl viewers in Los Angeles were shown the first-ever climate advert from a nonprofit group, showing the progress of climate change through the timeline of a young girl.
BIG SIX WASHING: A DeSmog investigation outlined how the six largest communication companies present themselves as climate friendly while helping to promote fossil fuels.
‘TOTAL WIPEOUT’: A France24 video report highlighted how some lower altitude ski towns are adapting to their new snow-scarce reality in the face of climate change.
Coming up
- 15-16 February: 38th African Union Summit: assembly of the heads of state, Addis Adaba, Ethiopia
- 17-19 February: UN Environment Programme UrbanShift Africa Forum, Nairobi, Kenya
- 17-21 February: 18th session of the Intersessional Working Group on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from ships, London
Pick of the jobs
- World Resources Institute, programme lead, Latin America Clean Energy Coalition | Salary: Unknown. Location: Brazil, Mexico or Colombia
- Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, postdoctoral researcher AMOC | Salary: €4,630 per month. Location: Potsdam, Germany
- Action for the Climate Emergency, director of renewables, UK, | Salary: £80,000-£90,000. Location: Remote, UK
- InfluenceMap, analyst, climate change (India-focused), UK-based | Salary: £29,000. Location: London (hybrid)
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 14 February 2025: Nearly 95% of countries miss UN climate deadline; 1.5C on horizon; Behind-the-scenes of CB analysis appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 10 October 2025: Renewables power past coal; Legacy of UK’s Climate Change Act; Fukushima’s solar future
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Renewables overtake coal
‘HISTORIC FIRST’: Renewables have overtaken coal to become the world’s leading source of electricity for the first six months of this year in a “historic first”, BBC News said. The analysis, from the thinktank Ember, found the world generated “almost a third” more solar power in the first half of the year, compared with the same period in 2024, while wind power grew by “just over 7%,” reported the Guardian.
HEAVY LIFTING: According to the report, China and India were “largely responsible for the surge in renewables”, while the US and Europe “relied more heavily on fossil fuels,” the Guardian wrote. China built more renewables than every other country combined in the first half of this year, the newspaper added.
CONTINENTAL SHIFTS: A second report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted a “surge” in global wind and solar capacity by 2030, but shaved 5% off its previous forecast, the Financial Times said. The IEA revealed that India is set to become the second-largest growth market for renewables after China, “with capacity expected to increase 2.5 times by 2030”, Down to Earth reported. The IEA also upped its forecast for renewables in the Middle East and north Africa by 23%, “helped by Saudi Arabia rolling out wind turbines and solar panels”, but halved the outlook for the US, the FT noted.
Around the world
- EV BOOM: Sales of electric and hybrid cars made up “more than half” of all new car registrations in the UK last month, a new record, according to data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers, reported BBC News.
- BANKING COLLAPSE: A global banking alliance launched by the UN to get banks to slash the carbon footprint of their loans and investments and help drive the transition to a net-zero economy by 2050 has collapsed after four years, Agence France-Press reported.
- CUTS, CUTS, CUTS: The Trump administration plans to cut nearly $24bn in funding for more than 600 climate projects across the US, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
- PEOPLE POWER: A farmer, a prison guard and a teacher were among those from the Dutch-Caribbean island Bonaire who appeared at the Hague on Tuesday to “accuse the Netherlands of not doing enough to protect them from the effects of climate change”, Politico reported.
400,000
The number of annual service days logged by the US National Guard responding to hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters over the past decade, according to a Pentagon report to Congress, Inside Climate News reported.
Latest climate research
- Politicians in the UK “overwhelmingly overestimate the time period humanity has left to bend the temperature curve”, according to a survey of 100 MPs | Nature Communications Earth and Environment
- Fire-driven degradation of the Amazon last year released nearly 800m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, surpassing emissions from deforestation and marking the “worst Amazon forest disturbance in over two decades” | Biogeosciences
- Some 43% of the 200 most damaging wildfires recorded over 1980-2023 occurred in the last decade | Science
(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 UK’s Climate Change Act, landmark legislation that guides the nation’s response to climate change, is increasingly coming under attack from anti-net-zero right-leaning politicians. In a factcheck published this week, Carbon Brief explained how the UK’s Climate Change Act was among the first comprehensive national climate laws in the world and the first to include legally binding emissions targets. In total, 69 countries have now passed “framework” climate laws similar to the UK’s Climate Change Act, with laws in New Zealand, Canada and Nigeria among those explicitly based on the UK model. This is up from just four when the act was legislated in 2008. Of these, 14 are explicitly titled the “Climate Change Act”.
Spotlight
Fukushima’s solar future
This week, Carbon Brief examines how Fukushima helped to recover from nuclear disaster by building solar farms on contaminated farmland.
On 11 March 2011, an earthquake off the pacific coast of Japan caused 15m-tall waves to crash into the eastern region of Tōhoku, killing 19,500 people and injuring a further 6,000.
In the aftermath, flooding at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant caused cooling systems to fail, leaching radioactive contaminants into the soil and leading to a major nuclear incident.
Some 1,200km2 around the site was restricted and up to 100,000 people were evacuated – in some cases forever.
In the years following, Japan entered a fraught debate about nuclear energy.
In 2010, nuclear power provided 25% of Japan’s electricity, but, in the years following the disaster, its 54 nuclear reactors were taken offline.
Successive governments have fought over reintroducing nuclear power. Today, some 14 reactors are back online, 27 have been permanently closed and another 19 remain suspended. (Japan’s newly-elected prime minister Sanae Takaichi has promised to make nuclear central to her energy strategy.)
Against this backdrop, Fukushima – a prefecture home to 1.8 million people – has emerged as a surprise leader in the renewables race.
In 2014, the Fukushima Renewable Energy Institute (FREA) opened with the twin goals of promoting research and development into renewable energy, while “making a contribution to industrial clusters and reconstruction”.
That same year, the prefecture declared a target of 100% renewable power by 2040.
Contaminated land
“A lot of these communities, I know, were looking for ways to revitalise their economy,” said Dr Jennifer Sklarew, assistant professor of energy and sustainability at George Mason University and author of “Building Resilient Energy Systems: Lessons from Japan”.
Once evacuation orders were lifted, however, residents in many parts of Fukushima were faced with a dilemma, explained Skarlew:
“Since that area was largely agricultural, and the agriculture was facing challenges due to stigma, and also due to the soil being removed [as part of the decontamination efforts], they had to find something else.”
One solution came in the form of rent, paid to farmers by companies, to use their land as solar farms.
Michiyo Miyamoto, energy finance specialist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Carbon Brief:
“The [Fukushima] prefecture mapped suitable sites early and conducted systematic consultations with residents and agricultural groups before projects were proposed. This upfront process reduced land-use conflicts, shortened permitting timelines and gave developers clarity.”
As a result, large-scale solar capacity in Fukushima increased to more than 1,300 megawatts (MW) from 2012 to 2023, according to Miyamoto. Moreover, installed renewable capacity now exceeds local demand, meaning the region can run entirely on clean power when conditions are favourable, Miyamoto said.
Today, aerial pictures of Fukushima reveal how solar panels have proliferated on farmland that was contaminated in the nuclear disaster.
Charging on
Last year, 60% of Fukushima’s electricity was met by renewables, up from 22% in 2011. (The country as a whole still lags behind at 27%.)
And that is set to grow after Japan’s largest onshore windfarm started operations earlier this year in Abukuma, Fukushima, with a capacity of 147MW.
The growth of solar and wind means that Fukushima is already “ahead of schedule” for its 2040 target of 100% renewable power, said Miyamoto:
“The result is a credible pathway from recovery to leadership, with policy, infrastructure and targets working in concert.”
Watch, read, listen
OVERSHOOT: The Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, in partnership with Planet B Productions, has released a four-part podcast series exploring what will happen if global warming exceeds 1.5C.
DRONE WARFARE: On Substack, veteran climate campaigner and author Bill McKibben considered the resilience of solar power amid modern warfare.
CLIMATE AND EMPIRE: For Black history month, the Energy Revolution podcast looked at how “race and the legacies of empire continue to impact the energy transition”.
Coming up
- 12 October: presidential elections, Cameroon
- 13-14 October: Pre-COP, Brasilia, Brazil
- 13-18 October: World Bank Group/IMF annual meetings, Washington DC
- 14-17 October: 2nd extraordinary session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee at the International Maritime Organisation, London
- 15-16 October: Circle of Finance Ministers report
Pick of the jobs
- Buckinghamshire Council, principal climate change officer | Salary: £49,354-£51,759. Location: Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
- Sustainable NI, sustainable business lead | Salary: £60,000. Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
- Dialogue Earth, South Asia managing editor | Salary: £1,875 per month. Location: South Asia
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 October 2025: Renewables power past coal; Legacy of UK’s Climate Change Act; Fukushima’s solar future appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The Caribbean region is among the most vulnerable to climate change, despite historically contributing less than half of one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Rising sea levels, extreme heat and more frequent and intense storms – such as the 2024 Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall in Grenada – pose urgent and growing threats to the small island states, coastal nations and overseas territories that comprise the Caribbean region.
With global progress to address climate change still too slow, Caribbean countries are taking matters into their own hands by enacting more robust legislation to help protect against climate risks.
In a new study published in the Carbon and Climate Law Review, we identified 78 climate laws and legally binding decrees across 16 Caribbean states, as well as two constitutional references to climate change and a growing recognition of the right to a healthy environment.
Our analysis suggests that, together, these developments are not only enhancing resilience, but also positioning Caribbean states as influential actors in the global climate arena.
Caribbean climate laws on the rise
Climate governance in the Caribbean has expanded significantly in recent years. In the past decade, countries such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic have embedded climate obligations and programmatic guidelines into their national constitutions.
At the same time, legislative recognition of the human right to a healthy environment is gaining momentum across the region. Six Caribbean nations now affirm the right in their constitutions, while 15 have recognised it through international instruments, such as the UN Council, UN Assembly and the Escazu Agreement, as shown in the figure below.
More recently, there has been a notable rise in targeted, sector-specific climate frameworks that go beyond broader environmental statutes.
Saint Lucia stands out as the only country with a climate framework law, or a comprehensive national law that outlines long-term climate strategies across multiple domains. Meanwhile, several other Caribbean governments have adopted climate-specific laws that focus on individual sectors, such as energy, migration and disaster management.
According to our analysis, more than a quarter of climate-relevant legislation in the region – comprising 21 laws and legally binding decrees – now has an explicit focus on climate change, as illustrated in the chart below.
Our research suggests that this represents an ongoing shift in legislative focus, reflecting changes in how climate legislation is being structured in one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions.
Caribbean nations are also advancing legal reforms to structure and institutionalise climate finance and market mechanisms directly into domestic law, aligned with Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement.
For example, the Bahamas has introduced provisions for carbon credit trading, while Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and Grenada have established national climate financing mechanisms to support mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Some states, including Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis, have incorporated regional bodies such as the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre – the climate arm of the intergovernmental Caribbean community organisation CARICOM – into national frameworks. This indicates an increasing alignment between regional cooperation and domestic law.
In addition to the influx of regulations specifically addressing climate change, Caribbean nations are also legislating broader environmental issues, which, in turn, could provide increased resilience from climate impacts and risks, as shown in the graph above.
Key trends in these types of climate-related laws include the expansion of disaster risk management governance, which addresses national preparedness for climate-induced weather events or related catastrophes. Likewise, energy law is an increasingly prominent focus, with countries including Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines integrating renewable energy and energy efficiency goals into national climate governance.
More broadly, many Caribbean nations have adopted wide-ranging and comprehensive environmental laws, many of which were developed in alignment with existing climate commitments. In combination, these legal developments reflect a dynamic and evolving climate governance landscape across the region.
Proactive vs reactive approaches
Despite general alignment with these broader regional trends, our research reveals distinct developmental pathways shaping domestic climate regulation.
In the eastern Caribbean, for example, we saw both proactive, long-term planning strategies and reactive, post-disaster reforms.
Saint Lucia’s multifaceted approach to climate resilience evolved steadily over the course of more than a decade. During this time, the country developed numerous adaptation plans, strengthened cross-sectoral coordination and engaged in institutional climate reforms in areas such as energy, tourism, finance and development.
More recently, the passage of Saint Lucia’s Climate Change Act in 2024 marked a milestone in climate governance, by giving legal force to the country’s obligations under the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement – making Saint Lucia one of the few small island states to incorporate global climate commitments into domestic law.
Our research indicates that this strategy has not only positioned the country as a more climate-resilient nation, but also solidified its access to international climate financing.
In contrast, Dominica’s efforts evolved more rapidly in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, which destroyed over 200% of the country’s GDP. The storm’s impacts were felt across the country and hit particularly hard for the Kalinago people – the Caribbean’s last Indigenous community – highlighting the role of socioeconomic disparities in shaping climate vulnerability and resilience.
In response, the government passed the Climate Resilience Act, creating the temporary Climate Resilience Execution Agency for Dominica (CREAD).
Beyond establishing an exclusively climate-focused institution, the act aimed to embed resilience into governance by mandating the participation of vulnerable communities – including Indigenous peoples, women, older people and people with disabilities – in shaping and monitoring climate resilience projects.
As noted in a recent statement by the UN special rapporteur on Climate Change, Dr Elisa Morgera, these frameworks underscore the government’s ambition to become the world’s first “climate-resilient nation.”
Although challenges persist, Dominica’s efforts demonstrate how post-disaster urgency can drive institutional change, including the integration of rights and resilience into climate governance.
Uneven progress and structural gaps
Despite significant progress, our research shows that several key opportunities for climate governance across the Caribbean continue to exist, which could enable improvements in both resilience and long-term ambition.
The region’s legal landscape remains somewhat heterogeneous. While Saint Lucia has enacted a comprehensive climate framework law, the rest of the region lacks similar blanket legislation. This includes some states that entirely lack climate-specific laws, instead relying on related laws and frameworks to regulate and respond to climate-related risks.
Other nations have yet to adopt explicit disaster-risk management frameworks, leaving Caribbean populations vulnerable before, during and after climate emergencies. Most have yet to enshrine the right to a healthy environment at the national level.
Our research suggests that outdated legal frameworks are further limiting progress in addressing current climate risks. Because many of the longer-standing environmental laws in the region were adopted well before climate policy became a mainstream concern, some fail to address the nature, frequency and intensity of modern climate challenges, such as sea-level rise, tropical storms, wildfires, floods, droughts and other impacts.
More broadly, many Caribbean climate laws include limited integration of gender equity, Indigenous rights and social justice. As Caribbean nations such as Grenada and the Dominican Republic begin to link climate resilience with these issues, the region has an opportunity to lead by example.
Ultimately, capacity and resource constraints persist as significant barriers to implementation and adaptation.
The Caribbean region faces debt that exacerbates ongoing development challenges, a burden made heavier by the repeated economic shocks of climate-related disasters. Along with regional debt-for-resilience schemes, increased funding from high-emitting countries to support adaptation measures in climate-vulnerable nations – as endorsed under the Paris Agreement – is likely to be critical to ensuring the region’s climate laws can be executed effectively.
Global implications of Caribbean climate law
Our research suggests that Caribbean countries are outpacing other regions in terms of the scope and ambition of their climate laws. This legislation has the potential to serve as a model for climate-vulnerable nations worldwide.
Continuing efforts in the region show that legal frameworks in the field can not only drive resilience, embed rights and strengthen claims to international finance, but also highlight how regional cooperation and diplomacy can enhance global influence.
These findings demonstrate that innovation in climate law need not wait for action from major emitters, but can instead be led by those on the front lines of climate change.
The post Guest post: How Caribbean states are shifting climate legislation appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How Caribbean states are shifting climate legislation
More than 100 countries have cut their dependence on fossil-fuel imports and saved hundreds of billions of dollars by continuing to invest in renewables, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It says nations such as the UK, Germany and Chile have reduced their need for imported coal and gas by around a third since 2010, mainly by building wind and solar power.
Denmark has cut its reliance on fossil-fuel imports by nearly half over the same period.
Renewable expansion allowed these nations to collectively avoid importing 700m tonnes of coal and 400bn cubic metres of gas in 2023, equivalent to around 10% of global consumption.
In doing so, the fuel-importing countries saved more than $1.3tn between 2010 and 2023 that would otherwise have been spent on fossil fuels from overseas.
Reduced reliance
The IEA’s Renewables 2025 report quantifies the benefits of renewable-energy deployment for electricity systems in fossil fuel-importing nations.
It compares recent trends in renewable expansion to an alternative “low renewable-energy source” scenario, in which this growth did not take place.
In this counterfactual, fuel-importing countries stopped building wind, solar and other non-hydropower renewable-energy projects after 2010.
In reality, the world added around 2,500 gigawatts (GW) of such projects between 2010 and 2023, according to the IEA, more than the combined electricity generating capacity of the EU and US in 2023, from all sources. Roughly 80% of this new renewable capacity was built in nations that rely on coal and gas imports to generate electricity.
The chart below shows how 31 of these countries have substantially cut their dependence on imported fossil fuels over the 13-year period, as a result of expanding their wind, solar and other renewable energy supplies. All of these countries are net importers of coal and gas.
In total, the IEA identified 107 countries that had reduced their dependence on fossil fuel imports for electricity generation, to some extent due to the deployment of renewables other than hydropower.
Of these, 38 had cut their reliance on electricity from imported coal and gas by more than 10 percentage points and eight had seen that share drop by more than 30 percentage points.
Security and resilience
The IEA stresses that renewables “inherently strengthen energy supply security”, because they generate electricity domestically, while also “improving…economic resilience” in fossil-fuel importer countries.
This is particularly true for countries with low or dwindling domestic energy resources.
The agency cites the energy crisis exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which exposed EU importers to spiralling fossil-fuel prices.
Bulgaria, Romania and Finland – which have historically depended on Russian gas for electricity generation – have all brought their import reliance close to zero in recent years by building renewables.
In the UK, where there has been mounting opposition to renewables from right-wing political parties, the IEA says reliance on electricity generated with imported fossil fuels has dropped from 45% to under 25% in a decade, thanks primarily to the growth of wind and solar power.
Without these technologies, the UK would now be needing to import fossil fuels to supply nearly 60% of its electricity, the IEA says.
Other major economies, notably China and the EU, would also have had to rely on a growing share of coal and gas from overseas, if they had not expanded renewables.
As well as increasing the need for fossil-fuel imports from other countries, switching renewables for fossil fuels would require significantly higher energy usage “due to [fossil fuels’] lower conversion efficiencies”, the IEA notes. Each gigawatt-hour (GWh) of renewable power produced has avoided the need for 2-3GWh of fossil fuels, it explains.
Finally, the IEA points out that spending on renewables rather than imported fossil fuels keeps more investment in domestic economies and supports local jobs.
The post IEA: Renewables have cut fossil-fuel imports for more than 100 countries appeared first on Carbon Brief.
IEA: Renewables have cut fossil-fuel imports for more than 100 countries
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