Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Three years to 1.5C
‘DOOMED TO BREACH’: At current carbon dioxide (CO2) emission levels, the world is “doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit” in as little as three years, according to research by 60 climate scientists covered by BBC News. (Carbon Brief carried a guest post by two scientists involved in the study.) Co-author and Carbon Brief climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather told the Washington Post: “Some reports, there’s a silver lining. I don’t think there really is one in this one.”
FLOODED AFRICA: South Africa declared a national disaster after floods killed more than 90 people in four of the country’s nine provinces, Bloomberg reported. This is the “second time in about seven months” that the government has invoked the measure to “free up funds for relief and reconstruction”, it added. Separately, 29 people were confirmed to have died “after heavy rains at the weekend triggered floods and landslides” in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Associated Press reported.
CHINA DELUGE: Heavy rainfall fuelled by Typhoon Wutip has caused the “worst flood in a century” in China’s southern province of Guangdong, with the Sui river in the Huaiji county swelling to “over five metres above the official danger level…the highest on record”, reported state broadcaster CGTN. Local authorities have declared a “top-level emergency” as economic losses from the floods are estimated at $5.7m, the outlet added.
HURRICANE AND HEAT DOME: In North America, forecasters have warned that parts of the US could see “dangerously high temperatures and extreme humidity” from an incoming heat dome, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Associated Press reported that a “fast-moving brush fire” burned hundreds of acres and forced the evacuation of 50 Maui residents in Hawaii, even as 2023 wildfire survivors struggle with declining health, per the Guardian. Hurricane Erick made landfall on Mexico’s Pacific coast on Thursday “shortly after being downgraded slightly from an ‘extremely dangerous’ category 4” storm, noted BBC News.
Bonn talks turn ‘bitter’
BEGIN AGAIN: The Bonn climate talks – the annual two-week preparatory talks held each June deemed “critical to thrash out differences” before each year’s COP – began on Monday “amid severe geopolitical turmoil and renewed tensions”, the Hindustan Times reported. It added that the meetings are shrouded by a “shadow of failed climate-finance talks” at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last year and “divergent views” on a roadmap to raise climate finance to $1.3tn.
AGENDA FIGHT: The start of the talks was delayed by an “agenda row”, after Bolivia – on behalf of the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries (LMDC) – sought to include items on climate finance from developed nations and “climate change-related trade-restrictive unilateral measures”, Climate Home News reported. Donald Trump’s administration “decided…not to send a delegation to the preparatory meetings” – meaning the US was absent in Bonn for the first time ever, it added.
‘BITTER EXCHANGES’: After 30 hours of “bitter exchanges”, the agenda was adopted on Tuesday “to polite applause and a bigger sense of discontent”, another Climate Home News article said. The Bonn chairs agreed to hold “substantive consultations” on climate finance and report back in Belém at COP30, it continued. Negotiators can now “turn their full attention to equally thorny discussions” on climate adaptation indicators and fossil fuels, it added. (Carbon Brief’s Josh Gabbatiss and Molly Lempriere will report live from Bonn next week.)
Around the world
- BRUSSELS BAN: The European Commission tabled a bill that, according to Euractiv, “would phase out the large volumes of Russian gas still flowing into the EU until the end of 2027”, adding that the ban would stand “irrespective of whether there is peace” in Ukraine.
- UK-CHINA MEET: UK officials including energy secretary Ed Miliband, climate envoy Rachel Kyte and nature envoy Ruth Davies sat down with Chinese counterparts, including the head of China’s Ministry of Economy and Environment, in London this week to discuss the “next steps of climate cooperation”, according to Chinese business publication Jiemian News.
- AMAZON OIL BID: Brazil’s national oil agency has “auctioned off” several oil sites near the mouth of the Amazon river and two inland sites near Indigenous territories months before the country is due to host COP30, the Associated Press reported.
- BLACKOUT BLACK BOX: Spain announced the findings of a 49-day probe into the “catastrophic” Iberian blackout, the Financial Times reported, “spread[ing] the blame…between its grid operator and electricity companies”. (See Carbon Brief’s updated Q&A.)
- MISINFORMATION MEASURED: A review of 300 studies found that action on climate change is being “obstructed and delayed by false and misleading information stemming from fossil-fuel companies, rightwing politicians and some nation states”, the Guardian said.
- OIL PEAK EARLY: According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China’s oil demand will peak in 2027, two years earlier than previously forecast, Bloomberg reported. At the same time, India’s “thirst for oil will rise more than any other country” over the next five years, wrote the Times of India.
120 kcal
The amount of calories the average person could lose per day for every 1C of warming, due to climate change’s impact on six key crops, according to research covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- New forests larger than the size of North America would need to be planted to offset the potential CO2 emissions from fossil fuel reserves held by the world’s top 200 fossil fuel companies, found new analysis in Communications Earth & Environment.
- According to new research in Science Advances, human-driven climate change will remove coral habitat faster than corals can expand into higher-latitude, cooler waters. It found that severe coral cover declines will likely occur over the next 40-80 years, while large-scale expansion “requires centuries”.
- New rapid analysis by World Weather Attribution estimated that climate change will make Saturday’s “widespread heat” of 32C in southeast England “about 100 times” more likely.
(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 charted eight decades of the UK’s nuclear energy fleet – from setting up the world’s first commercial reactor in Cumbria in 1956 to UK chancellor Rachel Reeves greenlighting the Sizewell C reactor last week. The chart shows the contribution of each of the UK’s nuclear plants to the country’s overall capacity, according to when they started and stopped operating. It also shows timelines for new planned nuclear capacity yet to come on board, plus known planned closure dates.
Spotlight
Forecasting Mumbai’s fierce monsoon
This week, Carbon Brief visits Mumbai’s official monsoon monitoring centre and “war room” to examine how the city is responding to its earliest downpour on record.
If extreme weather had a poster-child capital, it would be Mumbai. The megacity has it all – catastrophic urban flooding every monsoon, sea level rise, landslides, climate-change induced tropical cyclones, heatwaves across all its seven islands – and, with further climate change, it will only get worse.
Famed for its “spirit”, Mumbai’s 26 million metropolis dwellers have come to loathe the term that valorises their resilience every monsoon, evident from the memes that flooded the internet on 26 May when the monsoon arrived earlier than ever before in the city’s history.
On its first monsoon day of the year, the city received 135.4mm of rainfall rather than its normal of 0.2mm – an excess of 67,600%. Visuals of a flooded metro line that opened only 17 days ago went viral.
Faced with criticism, the state’s deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde equated the rains to a “cloudburst” and admitted that the country’s richest civic body – that he heads in the absence of elected representatives – was caught off-guard this year.
Despite having a year to prepare, Shinde admitted that pumps meant to remove water from a city that is barely above sea level were not working to full capacity. They stand in sharp contrast to the billion-dollar highways that have robbed the city of its natural flood defences and now dominate its skyline and waterfront, but are already being overwhelmed by extreme weather.
In India’s financial capital – where 73% of all offices and commercial establishments are within 500m of a flood hotspot and 69% of all employees experience “hindered access” from waterlogging trying to get to or leave work – forecasting the monsoon is fraught, essential and getting trickier with climate change.
Forecasting the monsoon
Dr Sushma Nair, a meteorologist with the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) regional monitoring centre, has the unenviable job of getting it right.
Nair and her team work out of the Colaba Observatory, at the southernmost tip of the city. Established in 1826 by the East India Company, it is one of world’s longest-running observatories and is older than the IMD itself – as well as many parts of the city that have been reclaimed from the sea.
“As weather-in-charge, it’s a 24/7 job,” Nair told Carbon Brief during a visit to the observatory.
Nair’s day begins at 8:30am, when her team prepares a forecast, checks upper air observations, runs models and decides what colour – yellow, orange or red – to assign the region for the next 24 hours, before hopping on a video call with her regional contemporaries and the IMD HQ.
“No journalist will get a forecast from us before 11:30 or 12:30, because we are discussing the weather,” she said.
Meteorological Centre has a Nowcast that refreshes every three hours, allowing forecasters to account for sudden changes in the weather and upgrade the city to a red alert, based on satellite and radar warnings.
Nair confesses that she “normally” checks the Nowcast at 4am, “because I lose my sleep at 3am”, and has the city’s chief disaster manager on speed dial for a red nowcast, no matter what the hour. “I am an insomniac, so don’t take that as a regular forecaster’s sleep hours,” she joked.
Her biggest source of dread is two-hour intense downpours in which the island city receives more than 150mm of rain, caused by an offshore vortex that is a “very small-scale, sub-grid system” that weather models cannot capture. She said:
“Low-pressure cyclonic systems, we can see coming. [But] this is the goblin that I haven’t seen who rushes in usually at night, creates havoc and leaves. Climate change is already contributing to these types of events: a whole lot of rain in smaller spells.”
As a coastal city, scientists told Carbon Brief that the city should be prepared to soak in 300mm of rain, but, because of choked drains, rivers and built infrastructure, it currently cannot even take in 100mm.
Mumbai’s monsoon ‘war room’
Fifteen minutes away from the observatory, a whiteboard in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) “monsoon war room” shows the state of affairs: rivers that should have been desilted by May are still only 66% done.
In its disaster control room three flights down, the phones will not stop ringing. The city’s residents, police and fire brigades are calling to report waterlogging, fallen branches and landslides.
While one giant screen streams live CCTV footage from 25 of the city’s worst traffic chokepoints, another screen shows live Doppler radar footage – when it is working.
“Whatever resources an emergency needs, we mobilise them from this control room,” a senior BMC disaster management official told Carbon Brief:
“If we get an orange alert from the IMD, all of our agencies, the navy, army: all of them get an alert message from us asking them to stand by.”
Many fault the BMC for delayed alerts, desilting and a city dug up beyond recognition. Officials say they are using all platforms – from X to SMS – to warn people about monsoon impacts. They blame TV channels that have “stopped carrying the news” – and people who have stopped watching it for weather updates – for a lack of awareness. The official told Carbon Brief:
“We have sufficient funds. You can’t reduce natural hazards and, in such a crowded city, to survive, the only thing that can save you is your wits.”
Watch, read, listen
ET TU, PETROSTATE? A Foreign Affairs essay by two US professors argued that, as the US’s energy exports have grown, it has “begun to behave more like a classic petrostate”, less likely to “embrace multilateralism and cooperate on international rules”.
ADRIAN VS ADANI: BBC World Service’s Life at 50C had a new documentary following Indigenous Queenslander Adrian Burragubba’s “battle against Adani[‘s]” coal mine in Australia’s Galilee Basin.
NO SHADE: Adaptation policy researcher Aditya Valiathan Pillai spoke to the Migration Story about heat stress and the “politics of shade”.
Coming up
- 16-26 June: SB42 climate talks, Bonn
- 16-20 June: 79th meeting of the World Meteorological Organization’s Executive Council, Geneva
- 23 June-4 July: International Seabed Authority legal and technical commission meeting (Part II), Kingston
- 23-27 June: States parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 35th meeting, New York
Pick of the jobs
- Bruegel, energy and climate economist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Brussels
- The Economist, editorial intern for the digital department | Salary: £30,000. Location: London
- Bertha Foundation, fellowship for filmmakers, lawyers and jouranalists | Fellowship: Up to $64,900 for a year. Location: 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 20 June 2025: Three years to ‘keep 1.5C alive’; Bonn talks turn ‘bitter’; Inside Mumbai’s monsoon ‘war room’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Absolute State of the Union
‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.
COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.
OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.
SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.
Around the world
- RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
- HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
- BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
- ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
- COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
- SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.
$467 billion
The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
- Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action
(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 constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.
Spotlight
Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?
This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.
Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.
Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.
Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:
“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”
Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.
Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:
“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”
Conservative gear shift
For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.
Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.
Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.
Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:
“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”
Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)
Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:
“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”
But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:
“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”
UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Global ‘greenlash’?
All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.
At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.
Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.
She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.
Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:
“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.
RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.
Coming up
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
- 3 March: UK spring statement
- 4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
- 5 March: Nepal elections
Pick of the jobs
- The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
- China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
- University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
- TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil
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 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
The Lincolnshire constituency held by Richard Tice, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of the hard-right Reform party, has been pledged at least £55m in government funding for flood defences since 2024.
This investment in Boston and Skegness is the second-largest sum for a single constituency from a £1.4bn flood-defence fund for England, Carbon Brief analysis shows.
Flooding is becoming more likely and more extreme in the UK due to climate change.
Yet, for years, governments have failed to spend enough on flood defences to protect people, properties and infrastructure.
The £1.4bn fund is part of the current Labour government’s wider pledge to invest a “record” £7.9bn over a decade on protecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from flooding.
As MP for one of England’s most flood-prone regions, Tice has called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
He is also one of Reform’s most vocal opponents of climate action and what he calls “net stupid zero”. He denies the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed, falsely and without evidence, that scientists are “lying”.
Flood defences
Last year, the government said it would invest £2.65bn on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) schemes in England between April 2024 and March 2026.
This money was intended to protect 66,500 properties from flooding. It is part of a decade-long Labour government plan to spend more than £7.9bn on flood defences.
There has been a consistent shortfall in maintaining England’s flood defences, with the Environment Agency expecting to protect fewer properties by 2027 than it had initially planned.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has attributed this to rising costs, backlogs from previous governments and a lack of capacity. It also points to the strain from “more frequent and severe” weather events, such as storms in recent years that have been amplified by climate change.
However, the CCC also said last year that, if the 2024-26 spending programme is delivered, it would be “slightly closer to the track” of the Environment Agency targets out to 2027.
The government has released constituency-level data on which schemes in England it plans to fund, covering £1.4bn of the 2024-26 investment. The other half of the FCERM spending covers additional measures, from repairing existing defences to advising local authorities.
The map below shows the distribution of spending on FCERM schemes in England over the past two years, highlighting the constituency of Richard Tice.
By far the largest sum of money – £85.6m in total – has been committed to a tidal barrier and various other defences in the Somerset constituency of Bridgwater, the seat of Conservative MP Ashley Fox.
Over the first months of 2026, the south-west region has faced significant flooding and Fox has called for more support from the government, citing “climate patterns shifting and rainfall intensifying”.
He has also backed his party’s position that “the 2050 net-zero target is impossible” and called for more fossil-fuel extraction in the North Sea.
Tice’s east-coast constituency of Boston and Skegness, which is highly vulnerable to flooding from both rivers and the sea, is set to receive £55m. Among the supported projects are beach defences from Saltfleet to Gibraltar Point and upgrades to pumping stations.
Overall, Boston and Skegness has the second-largest portion of flood-defence funding, as the chart below shows. Constituencies with Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs occupied the other top positions.
Overall, despite Labour MPs occupying 347 out of England’s 543 constituencies – nearly two-thirds of the total – more than half of the flood-defence funding was distributed to constituencies with non-Labour MPs. This reflects the flood risk in coastal and rural areas that are not traditional Labour strongholds.
Reform funding
While Reform has just eight MPs, representing 1% of the population, its constituencies have been assigned 4% of the flood-defence funding for England.
Nearly all of this money was for Tice’s constituency, although party leader Nigel Farage’s coastal Clacton seat in Kent received £2m.
Reform UK is committed to “scrapping net-zero” and its leadership has expressed firmly climate-sceptic views.
Much has been made of the disconnect between the party’s climate policies and the threat climate change poses to its voters. Various analyses have shown the flood risk in Reform-dominated areas, particularly Lincolnshire.
Tice has rejected climate science, advocated for fossil-fuel production and criticised Environment Agency flood-defence activities. Yet, he has also called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
This may reflect Tice’s broader approach to climate change. In a 2024 interview with LBC, he said:
“Where you’ve got concerns about sea level defences and sea level rise, guess what? A bit of steel, a bit of cement, some aggregate…and you build some concrete sea level defences. That’s how you deal with rising sea levels.”
While climate adaptation is viewed as vital in a warming world, there are limits on how much societies can adapt and adaptation costs will continue to increase as emissions rise.
The post Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
Greenhouse Gases
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Food inflation on the rise
DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.
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NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.
‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.
El Niño looms
NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”
WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”
CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.
News and views
- DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
- SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
- NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
- COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
- FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
- TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.
Spotlight
Nature talks inch forward
This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.
The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.
The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.
The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.
Money talks
Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.
Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.
Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.
Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).
Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:
“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”
Monitoring and reporting
Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.
Parties do so through the submission of national reports.
Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.
A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.
Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:
“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”
Watch, read, listen
NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.
COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.
HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.
‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.
New science
- Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
- Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food
In the diary
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean | Brasília
- 5 March: Nepal general elections
- 9-20 March: First part of the thirty-first session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) | Kingston, Jamaica
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz.
Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
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