Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Germany’s €100bn climate funding
BILLIONS IN FUNDING: Germany’s parliament on Tuesday voted to create a €500bn defence and infrastructure fund and relax “constitutionally-protected debt rules”, the Guardian reported, with “the last-minute backing of the Greens” in return for “guarantees that €100bn of the funds destined for infrastructure would be allocated for climate and economic transformation investments”. The deal came following “clumsy” initial negotiations from Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, Bloomberg said. It reported that the Greens “finally came around” after Merz’s negotiators “conceded to their key demands”, which also included adding Germany’s 2045 climate-neutrality target into the constitution.
TAKING CLIMATE ‘SERIOUSLY’: The Greens said in a statement on social media that the agreement “finally takes the challenges of the future seriously”, according to the New York Times. Paula Piechotta, a member of the Greens in the German Bundestag, told the German newspaper Tagesspiegel that the deal was a “great success for democracy in our country, for sustainability and intergenerational justice”. The newspaper added that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Left party, “unsurprisingly”, criticised the agreement.
UK opposition breaks cross-party climate consensus
BREAKING AWAY: In a speech, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK opposition Conservative party, said it was “impossible” for the UK to meet its net-zero target by 2050, marking a “sharp break from years of political consensus”, BBC News reported. She did not offer an alternative target for the goal, the broadcaster said, quoting her telling reporters that if the Conservatives “do find a target is necessary, then yes we will have one”. Badenoch “failed to cite any evidence in support” of her arguments, according to a factcheck published by Carbon Brief, which concluded that much of the existing evidence “contradicts” her claims.
TORY BACKLASH: In response, Conservative former prime minister Theresa May, who was responsible for passing the 2050 target into law, warned the move “will hurt future generations and cost Britons”, the Times reported. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) also criticised the speech, warning that “now is not the time to step back from the opportunities of the green economy”, according to the i newspaper. In the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard said Badenoch’s “rant comes close to political tragedy”.
Around the world
- CARNEY CUTS: New Canadian prime minister Mark Carney removed the country’s “consumer carbon tax”, CBC News reported, adding that the policy had been a “potent point of attack” for his political opponents.
- GREENPEACE BILL: Greenpeace has been ordered to pay $660m in damages over its protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016, which could “bankrupt its US operations” if upheld, the Financial Times said.
- UK-CHINA FORUM: The UK and China agreed to establish an “annual climate dialogue”, with the first meeting to be held in London later this year, the Times reported.
- CHEQUES AND BALANCES: A US judge has “temporarily barred” attempts by the Trump administration to recoup at least $14bn in “grants issued by the Biden administration for climate and clean-energy projects”, the Washington Post said.
- EXTREME HEAT: “Severe heatwave conditions” have begun affecting several areas across India “unusually early in the season”, the Hindustan Times reported.
- SOUTH AFRICAN SUPPORT: The EU will fill a “$1bn hole” in South African’s “just energy transition partnership” left by the US, the Financial Times reported. The US is also “stalling” $2.6bn of climate finance for South Africa, Bloomberg said.
152
The number of “unprecedented” extreme weather events that occurred in 2024, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate 2024 report. Heatwaves were the most common type of unprecedented events – defined as events “worse than any ever recorded in the region” – followed by “rain or wet spells” and floods.
Latest climate research
- New research in Climate and Development explored how environmental justice featured in the climate action plans of rust-belt cities in the US, finding that few “provided enough details” to determine if it was a priority.
- A new Science Advances study identified “increasing storminess” in the south-western Caribbean, which was attributed to “industrial-age warming”.
- Marine heatwaves are now 5.1 times more frequent and 4.7 times more intense since records began, new research in Communications Earth & Environment found.
(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 high electricity prices are primarily driven by gas prices, according to an analysis published by Carbon Brief, with the UK typically seeing gas set electricity prices 98% of the time – compared to an average in the EU of 40%.
Spotlight
Chatham House talks climate and resilience
Carbon Brief outlines key takeaways from Chatham House’s climate and energy summit.
Chatham House, the UK’s leading international affairs thinktank, held its annual summit on climate and energy on 18-19 March. This year’s theme was: “Securing a resilient future.”
Carbon Brief attended the conference, where speakers including COP30 CEO Ana Toni, UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte and Moroccan minister for energy transition and sustainable development Leila Benali shared their thoughts on encouraging and enacting climate action.
Climate backlash
A sense of urgency permeated discussions at the summit, underpinned by concerns over growing anti-climate narratives.
Toni argued climate scepticism proves climate action is on the right track.
She said: “First people ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you – and this is where we are – then we win.”
Other speakers said that increasing support for climate action by building new norms and creating overlapping interests could also be effective strategies.
Former US climate envoy Todd Stern pointed to increasing adoption of electric vehicles, while ClientEarth CEO Laura Clarke raised the example of community-owned renewable power.
Fretting over finance
Clean Earth Gambia founder Fatou Jeng warned that climate finance, as ever likely to be an important issue at COP30, has “not progressed much”.
“Blended finance” – using public money to leverage private funds – was heavily criticised in several panels. Ben Parsons, a partner at consultancy firm Oaklin, noted that only 72 such deals were agreed in 2024.
Speakers agreed that innovative mechanisms to derisk climate finance were needed, with Morocco’s Benali critiquing “exclusive” and inflexible private financing options.
Ndongo Samba Sylla, head of research and policy at International Development Economics Associates, argued that using local currencies would significantly boost climate finance.
Resilience through renewables
A key benefit of the UK’s “climate leadership”, Kyte argued, is that the energy transition will “make British people more secure”.
Parsons said the argument – recently deployed by Conservative leader Badenoch – that the energy transition replaced reliance on Russian fossil fuels with reliance on Chinese technology was incorrect.
“Fossil fuels are fuel – they require constant replenishment. Renewables are infrastructure,” he said, adding that arguably the UK should be accelerating its deployment of clean-energy technology.
On cybersecurity challenges in renewable power systems, Alex Schoch, vice president and group director of flexibility and electrification at Octopus Energy, argued that the key issue is how renewable energy “hardware” is managed, rather than where it is sourced from.
Parsons agreed, noting that the UK’s current power system has “plenty of cybersecurity vulnerabilities in it today”.
He said: “We have to make sure we’re putting [cybersecurity strategies] in place…But I don’t think that goes hand in hand with thinking we should avoid buying renewables from certain parts of the world.”
In a session on energy security in war-time Ukraine, held under the Chatham House rule, participants noted that the country was a case study for the importance of energy security.
Speakers said that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, attacks on thermal power plants have seen growing use of low-carbon energy – particularly distributed solar.
Watch, read, listen
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: The Columbia Energy Exchange podcast explored how the new Trump government underpinned discussions at the energy industry event CERAWeek.
‘CONFLICT BLINDSPOT’: A new report by ODI found that “less than 10% of international climate finance” in 2022 went to fragile and conflict-affected countries.
METHANE INACTION: Leading supermarkets in the global north are “failing to address the methane pollution in their supply chains”, according to a study covered by Desmog.
Coming up
- 24-26 March: 16th Petersberg Climate Dialogue, Berlin, Germany
- 24-26 March: IPCC lead author meeting for methodology report on inventories for short-lived climate forcers, Bilbao, Spain
- 24-28 March: 20th session of the UN FAO commission on genetic resources for food and agriculture, Rome, Italy
- 25 – 28 March:First G20 climate and environment sustainability working group meeting, online
Pick of the jobs
- ClientEarth, lawyer or legal consultant, energy systems, Asia | Salary: 455m-585m Indonesian rupiah. Location: Jakarta
- European External Action Service, policy officer for green diplomacy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Brussels
- Bloomberg, climate reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Hong Kong
- The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, project manager | Salary: £42,679-£51,000. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 21 March 2025: Germany’s climate win; Conservatives’ net-zero row-back; Key messages from major UK climate conference appeared first on Carbon Brief.
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.