Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
This week
UN General Assembly
FOSSIL FAILURE: At the UN’s 78th general assembly in New York, secretary general António Guterres said that “the fossil fuel age has failed”, but “stopped short of calling on specific countries”, the New York Times reported. On Wednesday, Guterres invited leaders from 34 countries to speak at the first-ever “climate ambition” summit “in recognition of their strong action on climate change” – notably omitting China, the US and the United Arab Emirates, Reuters reported.
FINANCING THE FIGHT: Nigerian president Bola Tinubu told the general assembly that Africa’s fight against climate change must happen “on our own terms”, namely, alongside “overall economic efforts”, reported Nigerian daily the Premium Times. Surangel Whipps Jr, president of Palau, called for “scaled-up climate finance that adequately recognise[s] the context” of small island developing states, Pacific News Service wrote.
BREAKING THE BANK: On Sunday, an estimated 75,000 people took to the streets of New York to demand stronger action on climate change. The protest was “far more focused on fossil fuels and the industry than previous marches” had been, the Associated Press wrote. The next day, more than 100 protesters were arrested outside New York’s Federal Reserve Bank, Inside Climate News reported.
PM rolls back UK climate commitments
UK U-TURN: UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has made a “major shift on green policies”, announcing “exemptions and delays” to a range of plans and programmes, BBC News reported. Among them is a five-year postponement of the ban on new petrol and diesel cars, originally set for 2030. The prime minister “denied he was ‘watering down’ the government’s net-zero commitments”, the outlet added.
‘IN JEOPARDY’: Carbon Brief analysis showed that these policy changes “could put the UK’s legally binding emissions targets in jeopardy”, as well as its commitment under the Paris Agreement. Carbon Brief has also just published an in-depth Q&A which includes a factcheck of Sunak’s claims and policy announcements. Despite Sunak’s emphasis on being “honest with the public” about the “unacceptable costs” of net-zero, the assessment makes it clear that many of his statements were misleading and his policy changes could cost consumers billions of pounds.
Around the world
- CLIMATE (RE)COMMITMENT: Brazil’s government has approved amending the country’s pledge under the Paris Agreement returning it “to the level of climate ambition of 2015”, according to the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo.
- ‘LEGAL BLITZKRIEG’: California has filed a lawsuit against five oil majors, seeking billions of dollars to cover future damages from climate change. The state’s suit alleges wrongdoing on many counts, including misleading the public, violating state pollution regulations and defrauding investors, San Jose’s Mercury News reported.
- LIBYA’S UNREST: “Hundreds of protesters” in Libya are accusing their government of neglect after more than 10,000 people died in catastrophic flooding last week, the North Africa Journal said. Analysis covered by Carbon Brief has shown that the extreme rainfall was made up to 50% more intense by climate change.
- OFF-TARGET: Climate change and conflict mean the world is “likely to miss” targets to end the spread of HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria by 2030, Reuters wrote. Warmer temperatures are expanding the range of disease-carrying mosquitoes, while extreme weather events strain health services and interrupt public-health programmes.
- BUSHFIRES BURN: Several parts of Australia are facing record or near-record springtime temperatures, while dozens of fires burn across New South Wales in what the Sydney Morning Herald described as “a taste of the hot, dry summer ahead”.
- GOING GEOTHERMAL: The World Geothermal Congress concluded on Sunday with the launch of the Beijing Declaration, which proposed “principles and recommendations for the sustainable development of the global geothermal industry”, Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua reported.
60
Number of countries that saw marches, rallies and other actions over 15-17 September to demand fossil fuel phase-out, according to the campaign group the Global Fight to End Fossil Fuels.
Latest climate research
- Sea-level rise already delays US commuters in coastal areas by 22 minutes per year, which could increase to 200-650 minutes by 2060, according to a study in Environmental Research: Climate.
- A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters showed skill in predicting marine heatwaves in the Arabian Sea up to seven months in advance.
- Shading shallow-water coral reefs periodically can decrease light stress and slow bleaching, said new research in Frontiers in Marine 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 sea ice extent around Antarctica is more than 1.5m square kilometres lower than the September average, satellite data has revealed. This extent is much smaller than has ever been measured in the austral winter, a record that goes back to 1979. “It’s so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind-blowing,” Dr Walter Meier, senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told BBC News. Meier is “not optimistic that the sea ice will recover to a significant degree”, the outlet added.
Spotlight
Three ways to better protect the ocean
A new report from the OSPAR Commission, which is responsible for protecting the marine environment of the north-east Atlantic, assessed the status and health of that part of the ocean and its neighbouring seas. Here, Carbon Brief unpacks three key takeaways from the report.
Climate change and ocean acidification are “driving major changes” in the north-east Atlantic.
A range of climate impacts are already being felt across the north-east Atlantic, from marine heatwaves and sea-level rise to deoxygenation and changes in the ocean circulation. “While the root cause is global, the effects are felt at more local scales,” the report said. For example, it identified the Arctic waters as warming more rapidly than elsewhere in the region.
Local changes can have knock-on effects, it added, such as shifts in wind patterns and strength due to changes in Arctic sea-ice extent. Warming also affects ecosystems, with the report providing evidence of changes in plankton, “which, in turn, trigger changes at other trophic levels”.
Ocean acidification is also having both direct and indirect impacts on marine ecosystems in the region, “with significant negative impacts for calcareous or shelled organisms”, the report concluded.
While supporting improved ocean resilience is important, it cannot come at the expense of broader climate action, said Dr Bee Berx, one of the lead authors of the climate change assessment within the report.
She told Carbon Brief: “Reducing global warming in compliance with the UNFCCC Paris Agreement would be the main way to ensure the impacts of marine climate change and ocean acidification are minimised.”
Human pressures on marine ecosystems “reduce their resilience to climate change”.
Besides climate change, the world’s oceans face a multitude of other human impacts. Some of these pressures have eased over the past several decades.
Pollution from the oil and gas industries operating in the north-east Atlantic has waned and the amount of marine litter has diminished, despite increasing use of plastics overall. Excessive nutrient inputs from agriculture and wastewater have also decreased over much of the OSPAR region – although not everywhere.
At the same time, pressures, such as noise pollution from shipping traffic and contamination by pharmaceuticals, have increased. According to the report, such pressures weaken marine ecosystems and make them less resilient to the effects of climate change and ocean acidification.
There is “emerging understanding of the complex interactions between cumulative pressures”, Berx told Carbon Brief. Managing those pressures will be a “critical tool for the OSPAR countries to support climate change resilience”, she added.
“Collective trends point to declining biodiversity”, despite gains for some species.
Understanding ecosystem change “is crucially important for developing effective and efficient management”, the report said. It noted that “collective trends” indicate continuing biodiversity decline and ecosystem degradation, despite measures that OSPAR countries have taken.
The report did note some bright spots for biodiversity. For example, the introduction of invasive alien species – one of the five major drivers of biodiversity loss – to the OSPAR region has slowed.
But, at the same time, the status of most of the threatened species assessed by OSPAR was either “not good” or “unknown”. Species are harmed by both direct and indirect pressures, with localised pressures such as habitat loss exacerbated by climate change.
Watch, read, listen
THREE STRIKES: The historic labour action by the US United Auto Workers union is inextricably linked to the future of electric vehicles, Grist wrote.
PAKISTAN’S PROGNOSIS: The Third Pole interviewed Sherry Rehman, former climate minister of Pakistan, on the challenges her country faces under increasing uncertainty.
OLD FOREST, NEW APPROACH: Garry Merkel, a Canadian forester and a member of the Tahltan Nation, discussed holistic forest management on the YourForest podcast.
Coming up
- 25-27 September: 32nd session of the North American Forest Commission, Fredericton, Canada
- 26-28 September: Second annual forum on environmental defenders in Latin America and the Caribbean, Panama City
- 28 September: IEA critical minerals and clean energy summit, Paris
- 30 September: Maldives presidential election (2nd round)
Pick of the jobs
- Inside Climate News, senior editor | Salary: $85,000-$100,000. Location: Remote (US)
- National Taiwan University, atmospheric sciences faculty | Salary: up to $51,000. Location: Taipei
- Global Green Growth Institute, climate finance technical officer | Salary: from $64,920. Location: Suva, Fiji
- UN Environment Programme, climate risk analyst | Salary: Unknown. Location: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
DeBriefed is written in rotation by Carbon Brief’s team and edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 22 September 2023: UN’s first ‘climate-ambition’ summit; UK govt’s climate U-turn; How to protect the north-east Atlantic appeared first on Carbon Brief.
But a $345 million U.S. verdict against the environmental group hangs over the case.
A lawsuit filed by Greenpeace International against the U.S.-based fossil fuel company Energy Transfer in the Netherlands is moving forward after a Dutch court recently ruled in favor of the environmental organization in rejecting the company’s bid to toss out the case.
Greenpeace’s Dutch Anti-SLAPP Case Against Oil Pipeline Giant Advances
Go behind the scenes with executive editor Vernon Loeb and oceans correspondent Teresa Tomassoni as they discuss the search for heat-resilient coral reefs that are somehow defying the odds to survive a warming planet.
The world has already lost more than half of its coral reefs, and most of what remains is at risk of disappearing in the next 25 years.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Bonn talks close
‘SIDE-STEPPING AND STALLING’: UN climate talks in Bonn have ended in “gridlock”, according to Climate Home News. The outlet reported on the failure to balance developing countries’ need for climate-adaptation finance with “richer nations’ desire to move forward” on emissions cuts. It added that both topics were subject to “rule 16”, meaning no agreement could be reached and work will be pushed to the COP31 summit in Turkey. Inside Climate News quoted UN climate executive secretary Simon Stiell, who said the talks had seen “side-stepping and stalling”.
JUST TRANSITION: One “glimmer of hope” came from negotiations on achieving a “just transition”, reported Euronews. The news outlet said negotiators “made headway on operationalising the Belém-Antalya mechanism”, intended to support people in the shift to a low-carbon economy. However, Politico concluded that much of the focus in Bonn had “shift[ed] to efforts outside diplomatic talks – raising questions about the future of global climate negotiations”.
‘ATTACKING SCIENCE’: Agence France-Presse reported on the EU, Switzerland and “dozens of developing nations” warning of “attacks on science” by a “small group of fossil-fuels interests” in Bonn. Table Briefings explained that “the 1.5C target is increasingly being challenged” and the role of the UN climate-science panel – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – in an upcoming assessment of global climate progress “remains controversial”. See Carbon Brief’s full write-up of the talks for more detail.
US-Iran deal
PRICE DROP: The US and Iran announced that they have reached an interim agreement to halt the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz, reported Bloomberg. Oil prices have fallen, as the “long-awaited deal” began the process of “eas[ing]” the global energy crisis triggered by the conflict, according to the New York Times. The Associated Press noted that high fuel prices will “likely outlast the Iran war”.
‘OIL GLUT’: The Financial Times reported that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast a “glut of oil” emerging next year, if the peace deal holds. The IEA said this would allow countries to build new strategic reserves, as they “review their energy strategies and policies in response to the crisis”, according to Reuters.
‘NEW ERA’: Agence France-Presse reported that oil and gas companies have “few illusions about a return to normal for the Gulf energy industry after more than three months of blockage”. One analyst told the newswire that the war “showed the oil and gas industry that Hormuz risk is no longer just a geopolitical headline”.
Around the world
- OCEAN MONITOR: The Trump administration is “abandoning its plan” to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system key for tracking climate change after a “bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill”, reported the New York Times.
- CORAL HAVEN: The New York Times covered preliminary research, presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya, suggesting there could be three times as many “coral refugia” – where corals are relatively safe from climate change – than previously thought.
- BAD CREDIT: Down to Earth reported that the first carbon credits issued under the Paris Agreement’s new Article 6.4 mechanism are “facing scrutiny over alleged links to institutions controlled by Myanmar’s military junta”.
- OIL BACKTRACK: Reuters reported that oil-and-gas company Equinor has dropped a renewable-energy target and scaled back clean investments, while another Reuters story noted that Shell is selling off its offshore wind assets.
1.1 billion
The number of children facing “at least three overlapping climate hazards”, according to a new Unicef report covered by Agence France-Presse.
Latest climate research
- Including the “permafrost carbon-climate feedback” in climate models increases the chance of exceeding “tipping elements” – such as the Greenland ice sheets, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or Amazon rainforest – by up to 50% | Environmental Research Letters
- The intensity of influenza outbreaks could decline in temperate regions, but increase in tropical areas over the next century, as the climate warms | PNAS Nexus
- European snow cover has declined by 20% for December and January since the start of the industrial era, revealing an “unprecedented ongoing shrinkage of European winters” | Communications Earth & Environment
(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 more than 2m battery electric vehicles (BEVs), 1m “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs) and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are already saving drivers a total of around £3bn a year, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This amounts to savings of more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs for each BEV driver in the UK. The analysis comes amid reports in UK media this week that the government is considering “watering down” its EV sales targets.
Spotlight
Oceans rising at UN climate talks
The state of the world’s oceans is inextricably linked to the changing climate – and many delegates at UN climate talks want to see more focus on this issue, reports Carbon Brief.
Oceans are often described as the world’s “greatest ally” against climate change – absorbing 30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and most of the heat generated by those emissions.
They are also the site of important climate solutions, such as huge offshore windfarms and the shipping industry’s transition to cleaner fuels.
At the same time, the oceans themselves present a growing danger to coastal communities and sea life due to sea level rise, marine heatwaves and ocean acidification.
These diverse issues have led to growing calls within the UN climate process for more focus on oceans. During climate negotiations this week in Bonn – known as SB64 – nations and civil society had a chance to air these views during an “ocean and climate change dialogue”.
‘Elevate action’
Oceans first entered UN climate outcomes in 2019, when the final COP25 negotiated text requested a new “dialogue” on “the ocean and climate change to consider how to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action”.
The following years saw this dialogue established as an annual event. However, the political weight of these discussions has been limited.
COP31 is being co-led by Turkey and Australia, but with Pacific islands playing a supporting role. These small islands sometimes self-identify as “large ocean states”, stressing the ocean’s centrality in their societies.
In Bonn, figures from across the presidency threw their weight behind this issue. Chris Bowen, an Australian minister and incoming COP31 “president of negotiations”, told attendees:
“Australia, Turkey and the Pacific see an important opportunity to elevate ocean-based climate action.”
Strategies and finance
The two-day dialogue in Bonn involved a series of panels, statements and breakout groups.
One of the main topics was how oceans are integrated into national climate plans under the Paris Agreement, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).
Three-quarters of the latest round of NDCs mention oceans, with conservation of “blue carbon” ecosystems the most frequently described action. (Landscapes such as mangroves can both absorb CO2 and protect coastal areas.)
Delegates also discussed alignment with the UN biodiversity process, as well as ocean finance, which currently makes up less than 1% of all climate finance.
(As discussions were taking place in Bonn, country officials also gathered in Mombasa, Kenya for the 11th Our Ocean Conference. Carbon Brief’s associate editor Giuliana Viglione attended the conference and will publish a full summary shortly.)
Developing countries were clear that many of the ocean-related actions in their NDCs would depend on receiving more financial support.
‘Political momentum’
With the backing of the COP31 presidency, delegates were hopeful about where this year’s dialogue could lead.
Charles Hamilton, an advisor for the Bahamas who spoke for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the dialogue, told Carbon Brief that island representatives “are not traveling thousands of miles to just talk and pat ourselves on the back”. He added:
“A dialogue that just remains a dialogue is just more talk – no action.”
Given that, he said “discussions in the dialogue must move into COP decisions and the decisions must be actioned”, noting the importance of finance.
Marina Corrêa, oceans lead at WWF-Brazil, pointed to an upcoming UN climate change Standing Committee on Finance forum as a space to ramp up pressure on ocean finance.
More broadly, she wanted to see the presidencies translate their support into a “leader-level ocean initiative” that could “mainstream” oceans across negotiations.
“We have a really interesting opportunity, in terms of political momentum,” Corrêa told Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listen
‘HOTTER THAN HELL’: An episode of the BBC’s Rare Earth podcast titled “hotter than hell” considered the issue of extreme heat, with input from experts and “people facing up to the hottest temperatures on the planet”.
NOT BROKEN?: John Drake, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, wrote an essay for Aeon – also re-published as a Guardian “long read” – questioning the framing of ecosystems and climate systems “breaking down”.
ON COURSE: On his Volts podcast, US climate journalist David Roberts interviewed UK climate minister Katie White, quizzing her about whether the UK will “stay the course with its climate plans”.
Coming up
- 20-28 June: London climate action week
- 21 June: Colombia presidential runoff
- 24 June: UK Climate Change Committee progress in reducing emissions 2026 report to parliament
Pick of the jobs
- Mongabay, managing editor – Africa | Salary: Unknown. Location: Global
- Contexte, environment reporter – Brussels | Salary: €45,000-€60,000. Location: Brussels
- Climate 200, communications director | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia
- Energy Tracker Asia, energy transition correspondent | Salary: $3,000-$4,000 per month. Location: South-east Asia (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 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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