Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
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This week
UK’s ‘slowing’ climate ambition
MIXED SIGNALS: The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has warned the perception of the UK’s climate ambition has “suffered from mixed messages” following “new fossil-fuel developments and the prime minister’s speech to soften some net-zero policies”, reported the Press Association. In a report on progress made at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai last year, the advisory body said “decisions to approve a new coal mine and licence new oil and gas production” have contributed to “a perception of slowing UK climate ambition by members of the international community”, the outlet noted.
‘GROSSLY IRRESPONSIBLE’: It comes as the UK this week allocated another 24 licences to major oil companies for the right to drill for fossil fuels in the North Sea, the Guardian reported. According to the North Sea Transition Authority, oil and gas could be produced within the decade under the licences, the outlet noted. The move “angered MPs and environmental campaigners”, who called the move “grossly irresponsible”, it added.
IMF WARNING: Meanwhile, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, has “warned UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt against cutting taxes, arguing the country needs to curb public borrowing and prioritise spending in areas such as health, education and tackling climate change”, reported the Financial Times.
Around the world
- ENVOY IN EMPLOY: US president Joe Biden has appointed his clean energy adviser John Podesta to succeed John Kerry as the nation’s top climate diplomat, reported the Financial Times. Podesta will take on the role in addition to his current White House job overseeing $370bn in spending on clean energy under the Inflation Reduction Act, noted the New York Times.
- SOLAR SUCCESS: China’s installed wind and solar capacity is set to overtake coal for the first time this year, according to Reuters. Bloomberg reported that China installed more solar panels in 2023 than any other nation has built in total.
- ITALY-AFRICA SUMMIT: At a summit of African leaders in Rome, Italy unveiled a plan to use its climate fund to transform into “an energy hub” that creates “a bridge between Europe and Africa”, reported Climate Home News. Observers warned that the plan presents “enormous ambiguities” that leave the door open to fossil-fuel investment.
- TRACTOR TUMULT: Farmers protesting across Europe have “won their first concession”, reported the Guardian, with the EU announcing a delay in rules for setting aside land for nature. Carbon Brief’s Cropped newsletter has more on how far-right political groups are aiming to capitalise on the outrage.
- PAKISTAN ELECTION: Ahead of Pakistan’s general election on 8 February, two major political parties have “prominently highlighted the importance of dealing with climate change-related issues in their manifestos”, reported the Press Trust of India.
- FIGHTING FIRES: More than a hundred firefighters battled a forest fire in the Los Alerces national park in northern Patagonia, reported BBC News. La Nación noted that an “unusual heatwave” has brought temperatures of up to 40C to the region.
2.47 million square kilometres
The “missing” area of Antarctic sea ice in July 2023, relative to the long-term average, according to a Carbon Brief guest post. This is larger than the area of Algeria, the 10th largest country in the world.
Latest climate research
- Melting of a glacier in Switzerland over just two years has left it “irrevocably lost” as a record of past air pollution from ice cores, a Nature Geoscience study reported.
- Economic recovery spending in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic “missed many opportunities to advance climate adaptation and resilience” (A&R), according to a Nature Sustainability study. Analysis of around 8,000 government policies across 88 countries found that just 10-11% had “direct A&R benefits”.
- A study in Earth’s Future warns that extreme heat and thawing permafrost will pose “severe threats” to global rail and road infrastructure as the climate warms.
(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 US is already the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG) and has more additional capacity “proposed” (dark blue on the chart) than any other nation, according to a new Q&A by Carbon Brief. The article unpacked the implications of the surprise move, made late last week by US president Joe Biden, for a “temporary pause” on the expansion of LNG export terminals.
Spotlight
Surging methane from the world’s wetlands
This week, to mark UN World Wetlands Day, Carbon Brief speaks to a scientist helping uncover how methane emissions from wetlands are rising in a changing climate.
In 2020 and 2021, the rate at which methane levels in the atmosphere increased hit record highs.
The rise between 2019 and 2020 was “roughly a doubling” of the annual growth rate, Dr Benjamin Poulter, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, explained to Carbon Brief. This was “unexpected and caught the scientific community by surprise”.
In December 2022, a Nature study by Poulter and colleagues found that “wetlands appear to have played a key role, explaining around 50% of the jump from 2019 to 2020”, he said. Further work – currently undergoing peer-review – has suggested that the world’s wetlands were the main driver behind the growth between 2020 and 2021 as well.
Wetlands are areas of land that are either permanently or seasonally inundated with water. They are found across the world, but predominantly in lush landscapes in the tropics and frozen “permafrost” expanses in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
The near-constant saturation means that decomposing organic matter in the soil releases methane instead of CO2. This methane can diffuse from the water into the atmosphere, be emitted through grass-like plants or abruptly as bubbles. Research has also shown that trees can transport methane from the soil to the atmosphere – or potentially even produce it within their stems.
La Niña’s influence
There appears to be two main reasons why wetlands produced more methane over 2020-22, Poulter explained – a combination of a La Niña event “causing wetlands to expand in the tropics” and climate change “causing warming in all parts of the world, and especially in the high latitudes”.
La Niña is the cold-water counterpart to the natural El Niño climate phenomenon. They are known collectively as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In general, an El Niño event “causes wetland methane emissions to decrease in tropical regions due to drying”, said Poulter, while La Niña causes emissions “to increase as wetlands expand”. There are regional variations that complicate things a little, he added.
In the high latitudes, “ENSO has less of an impact”, explained Poulter, but rapid warming in this region “is likely driving increasing trends in wetland methane emissions” – as well as “changing the seasonal onset of wetland methane production as the permafrost thaws earlier, deeper and freezes later in the year”.
Methane feedback
The overall increase in wetland methane emissions in recent years is “expected from wetland model projections”, noted Poulter. He published a study last year that indicated the rise may be part of an extended climate-wetland methane “feedback” where global warming drives greater wetland methane emissions, which – in turn – drives further warming.
For 2023 and 2024, the methane growth rate is likely to be influenced by “the El Niño phase of ENSO and the record-breaking global air temperatures”, Poulter said. Last year, for example, “droughts in Central America and Amazonia disrupted shipping and livelihoods, and likely led to decreased tropical wetland methane emissions”.
The US Global Monitoring Laboratory is due to release its final atmospheric concentration data for 2023 in April. This will help confirm understanding of wetland methane emissions, Poulter said, and “whether the El Niño-induced drought impacts on tropical wetlands caused the atmospheric growth rate of methane to decrease” last year.
Watch, read, listen
OVERSTATE: In this interactive, a group of Bloomberg journalists investigated how “dozens” of UK wind farms have routinely overestimated how much power they can produce.
BIG OIL: DeSmog uncovered evidence that fossil-fuel companies funded climate research as far back as 1954, further suggesting their long-standing knowledge of global warming.
‘IMPORTANT QUESTIONS’: In a Nature news feature, journalist Gayathri Vaidyanathan looked at the “agonising choices” over how the UN loss-and-damage fund will be allocated.
Coming up
- 6 February: European Commission to table its proposed climate target for 2040, Strasbourg, France
- 7 February: Azerbaijan presidential election
- 8 February: Pakistan general election
- 11 February: Finland presidential election (second round)
Pick of the jobs
- Save the Children US, advisor (climate) | Salary: $68,850-94,050. Location: Washington DC
- Knight Science Journalism Program, fellowship for advancing science journalism in Africa and the Middle East | Salary: $40,000 stipend and $5,000 for housing. Location: US-based fellowship eligible to journalists from Africa and the Middle East
- Met Office, scientist and senior scientist – vegetation-climate interactions | Salary: £32,100-34,925 and £38,838-42,434, respectively. Location: Exeter, UK
- Wateraid, regional WASH and climate change specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pretoria, South Africa (or any city where WaterAid has presence in the region)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 2 February: UK’s ‘slowing’ climate ambition; New top US climate diplomat; Surging methane from wetlands appeared first on Carbon Brief.
An Lambrechts is a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International with extensive experience in biodiversity-related multilateral negotiations. She is the head of the Greenpeace delegation at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17 happening in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 2022, COP15 delivered the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. With COP17 starting in Yerevan, we are now halfway to the deadline, and according to the first Global Review of progress, countries are not on track to meet the biodiversity targets, and implementation must accelerate fast.
One of the main findings of the Global Review is that funding falls far short of the scale needed to halt and reverse nature loss. But the crisis facing the world’s biodiversity is not an absolute scarcity of capital – it is a profound public policy distortion.
The global economy currently spends roughly $30 destroying nature for every single dollar invested in its protection. According to a report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a staggering $2.4 trillion is spent in public subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture and water use, while global investment in biodiversity conservation and restoration stands at a mere $220 billion.
Countries urged to ramp up “insufficient” nature policies at COP17
Yet, discussions about how to close the biodiversity finance gap continue to claim that salvation lies in mobilising private capital, scaling offsets and “derisking” investments in nature. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of ecological stewardship and of the global financial architecture.
Biodiversity conservation is not a speculative investment portfolio – it is the foundation of human survival. The health of our planet is a non-monetisable, non-excludable public good. Expecting profit-seeking private capital to protect nature perpetuates the structural drivers of ecosystem destruction in the first place.
But if private market mechanisms cannot save biodiversity, where will the necessary public resources come from?
Money going to the wrong places
The answer lies in recovering the vast public wealth currently drained by cross-border tax abuse, financial secrecy and corporate impunity. Finance and environment ministers meeting in Yerevan must give a strong political signal that, to avert ecological breakdown, countries need to take swift action to reform global tax rules, eliminate harmful public subsidies and cancel unsustainable sovereign debts for the public revenues to end up where they belong.
Extractive sectors such as industrial agriculture, fishing, timber and mining continue business-as-usual, often heavily subsidised by public treasuries, while voluntary carbon and biodiversity offset markets pose a serious risk to nature conservation. Offset schemes have delivered only a negligible fraction of the funding needed to preserve ecosystems, allowing industries to continue with their destructive business-as-usual practices.
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Global deforestation slowed in 2025 but Brazil’s election could undo “fragile” gains
Countries remain 70% off track to meet a goal to end deforestation by 2030, as progress in Latin America offset by failures in Africa -
Brazil confident new rainforest fund will reach $10bn donor milestone
Brazil’s environment minister said the Tropical Forest Forever Facility has raised billions in record time – which he hopes will convince more investors
In advanced economies, public funding often actively undermines biodiversity. In Europe, over €5.3 billion in public subsidies is funnelled annually into intensive forest biomass harvesting under renewable energy directives, degrading primary forest ecosystems and undermining long-term climate resilience. Pleading with private investors to fill a “finance gap” while pouring billions into ecological destruction is an exercise in futility.
Developing countries struggle with debt burden
For developing countries, reliance on private finance is further compounded by a crushing sovereign debt crisis. In 2024, public debt in developing economies reached record levels, with net interest payments alone absorbing $921 billion. A record 61 developing countries now spend more than 10% of government revenue on foreign debt service, with many climate-vulnerable nations spending twice as much servicing external debt as they receive in climate and biodiversity finance combined.
This burden acts as a structural driver of ecosystem destruction. Under pressure from external creditors and international financial institutions to avoid default and secure foreign exchange, governments are routinely forced into austerity measures and pushed to expand raw commodity exports into pristine biomes.
Comment: World Bank and IMF should lead the financial system in responding to the climate crisis
The current negotiations for a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNFCITC) also offer a way forward. An estimated $492 billion in tax revenue is lost every year to offshore tax havens. Multinational corporations account for around $348 billion of this total by shifting profits away from the countries where real economic extraction and environmental degradation occur.
In the mining sector alone, developing nations lose tens of billions annually to corporate tax dodging. Furthermore, international financial secrecy shields environmental criminals, with illicit financial flows from illegal logging draining between $51 billion and $152 billion annually.
At COP17, leaders must seize the opportunity to build a bridge between the two conventions and enhance cooperation. Governments must put the world on a firm path to securing predictable, sufficient, sovereign public finance for biodiversity conservation. It’s the only path to a restorative, rights-based future for people and the planet.
The post Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity appeared first on Climate Home News.
Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity
Climate Change
Greenpeace delivers 47 metre-long petition with half a million signatures to Woodside HQ following major gas protest
Greenpeace delivers 47 metre-long petition with half a million signatures to Woodside HQ following major gas protest
PERTH, Monday 19 October 2026 — Dozens of Perth community members delivered a giant petition, signed by almost half a million people, to Woodside’s corporate headquarters this morning, calling on the government to save Scott Reef from Woodside’s reckless Browse gas proposal.
Dressed in sea creature costumes and hats, supporters carried one of Australia’s biggest environmental petitions to Woodside’s headquarters, and a local choir performed a ‘Scott Reef’ rendition of Angie McMahon’s iconic cover of ‘Reckless’ by Australian Crawl.
On the sidelines of the Perth Global Citizen Now event, it comes following a two day-long protest at Woodside’s Scarborough gas platform that saw activists scale and occupy the Floating Production Unit calling to “Stop Woodside’s Dirty Gas” and “Save Scott Reef”. The activists were taken from the platform by police helicopter on Sunday afternoon.
David Ritter, CEO at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Less than a day after two Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists were arrested for their peaceful protest at Woodside’s Scarborough gas platform to save Scott Reef, we are here again with another message to Woodside: half a million of us do not want your dirty gas at Scott Reef.
“Community pressure on Woodside is rising. Today we are here to show Woodside that they can’t ignore half a million people who want Scott Reef protected, not turned into an industrialised gas zone.
“Woodside can’t be trusted with our oceans. Woodside’s plans to drill up to 57 toxic wells at Scott Reef, Australia’s largest oceanic reef, putting endangered pygmy blue whales at risk, and jeopardising a nesting ground for unique green sea turtles.
“We Australians love our oceans and this is an opportunity for our governments to do the right thing, to reject Woodside’s reckless drilling plans, and save Scott Reef.”
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Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or Emma Sangalli on +61 431 513 465