Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Trump leaves Paris pact
US EXIT: Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, the New York Times reported. By exiting, the world’s biggest historic emitter will join Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only countries not committed to the global deal to keep global warming well-below 2C by the end of the century. The decision will take one year to take effect, the newspaper added.
‘FATAL SIGNAL’: European leaders speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week condemned Trump’s decision, Bloomberg said. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the Paris Agreement was “the best hope for all humanity”, while Germany’s economy minister described Trump’s exit as a “fatal signal to the world”, according to the publication. The Times reported that UK prime minister Keir Starmer refused to condemn Trump’s withdrawal from the pact.
CHINA ‘CONCERN’: The Associated Press reported that China expressed concern over Trump’s move, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun saying: “Climate change is a common challenge facing mankind. No country can be outside of it. No country can be immune to it.” At a press conference, however, he said China’s “resolve” to act was “unchanged”. African Business reported that the chair of the African climate negotiating bloc said the group was “deeply disappointed” by the decision.
US climate regime shift
WIND WOES: Amid shattering the record for the number of executive orders signed in one day, Trump also signed a bill temporarily halting offshore wind lease sales in federal waters and pausing the issuance of approvals, permits and loans for both onshore and offshore wind projects, the Associated Press reported. The Washington Post examined how the move could “significantly curtail” wind power growth over the next four years.
OIL AND GAS ‘UNLEASHED’: Trump became the first president to announce an “energy emergency”, as part of “a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions to unleash already booming US energy production”, the Guardian reported. This included lifting the moratorium on new US licenses to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) put in place by Joe Biden, Bloomberg reported. The Financial Times reported that Trump could be thwarted by Wall Street’s “reluctance to approve another drilling binge” due to “investor pressure…[and] economic realities”.
EVS AXED: Reuters reported that Trump also signed an order to revoke a 2021 bill signed by Joe Biden, which sought to ensure half of all new vehicles sold in the US were electric by 2030. A Lex opinion article in the Financial Times said the move could be enough to have a “chilling effect on the market”. An FT editorial contrasted Trump’s approach with China’s push for EVs, calling it a “bet on the energy status quo, not on the future”.
Around the world
- COP30 HEAD: Brazil appointed André Aranha Corrêa do Lago – an “experienced climate negotiator” and the country’s secretary for climate, energy and environment – as incoming president of the COP30 climate talks, the Guardian reported.
- HEATHROW SPAT: The UK Labour Party is “split” over a plan from chancellor Rachel Reeves to approve a third runway at Heathrow airport, with energy secretary Ed Miliband and the mayors of London and Manchester strongly opposed to the move, according to the Independent.
- INDONESIA FLOODS: At least 21 people have been killed and 300 more displaced in flash floods and landslides in Indonesia’s Java province, the Associated Press reported.
- NIGERIA OIL PROTESTS: More than 20 environmental groups and local communities are protesting the planned return of oil drilling to Ogoniland, Nigeria – an area already deeply affected by pollution from oil spills, Reuters said.
- LA ABLAZE: Multiple new fires have erupted amid continuing dry conditions in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported. It added that rain is now forecast for the weekend.
One-third
The proportion of Arctic tundra and ecosystems that has become a source of emissions, rather than a carbon sink, according to research covered by the Guardian.
Latest climate research
- Anti-climate change groups are more likely to develop in countries with strong environmental plans, according to an analysis drawing on 30 years of data published in PLOS One.
- A study in Limnology and Oceanography Letters recorded how corals in one area of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef fared after facing their most widespread bleaching event on record in 2024.
- Arctic “ice roads” – temporary roads formed from the build up of snow that act as lifelines for isolated communities – have reduced because of climate change and are likely to decline further this century, according to research in Communications Earth and 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 EU generated more electricity from solar than coal for the first time ever in 2024, according to analysis by the thinktank Ember covered by Carbon Brief. Solar power output in the EU more than tripled between 2014 and 2024, while coal has plummeted by 61%. The analysis also found that wind and solar growth over the past decade has pushed EU fossil-fuel generation in 2024 to its lowest level in 40 years, despite a long-term decline of nuclear power.
Spotlight
Tracing climate fingerprints on tropical storms
This week, Carbon Brief explores a new tool that could be used to calculate the economic damages from tropical storms that can be attributed to climate change.
Tropical storms – known as hurricanes, typhoons or cyclones depending on what part of the ocean they form in – are typically the most costly of all extreme weather events.
Amid a growing field aimed at understanding the influence of climate change on extreme weather, they have also emerged as one of the most difficult events for scientists to study.
There are several reasons for this. One is that tropical storms are rare in comparison to other types of extreme weather events, meaning scientists have less data to draw on to try to work out how they may have changed because of fossil-fuelled warming.
Another is that one of the main tools that scientists use to study climate change – climate models – are often not of high enough resolution to recreate the relatively small-scale structure of a storm. Global models can typically simulate Earth down to around a 100 kilometre (km) by 100km scale, whereas the eye of a storm tends to be just 30-40km wide.
To try to address these issues, researchers at Imperial College London have come up with a new tool for examining the influence of climate change on tropical storms.
Rapid attribution
The “Imperial College storm model” (IRIS) is a statistical technique that can be used to calculate how the potential intensity of any given tropical storm globally could have been affected by climate change.
IRIS has been used to create a database of millions of virtual tropical storms. The computing power for this is supported by a citizen science project, where people can download an app to donate the processing power of their smartphones.
Researchers can draw on this database to rapidly calculate how the potential intensity of a tropical storm occurring today compares to one in a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change.
IRIS works in a similar way to models used by the insurance sector, explained its creator Prof Ralf Toumi, co-director of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment at Imperial. He told Carbon Brief:
“There’s been a few academic attempts to replicate these models. We’ve taken a very different approach to everyone else and that allows us to do this attribution quite quickly.”
Toumi’s team outlined the workings of IRIS in a paper published in Scientific Data in 2024.
Earlier this month, they published their first climate attribution study using the tool in Atmospheric Science Letters.
This study found that Typhoon Haiyan, the second-strongest landfalling tropical storm on record, which struck the Philippines in 2013, was “very unlikely to have occurred without the increase in potential intensity driven by global warming”.
In addition to this, Toumi and his team have been using the model to calculate how climate change may have affected the intensity of a wide range of recent storms, choosing to publish the results directly on Imperial’s website.
“We feel we should communicate [our results] immediately,” he told Carbon Brief, adding that the peer-review process for publishing scientific papers is comparatively “slow and painful”.
Loss and damage
In a recent analysis using the tool, the team estimated that around 45% of the $50bn in economic damages caused by Hurricane Milton, which struck Florida in 2024, can be attributed to climate change.
Toumi hopes that the tool could one day be used to inform discussions about how much money polluting countries should pay into a new fund for loss and damage from climate change agreed at UN climate talks. He told Carbon Brief:
“If a Pacific island says ‘we’ve just been hit by a category 5 storm, we need some money’, a donor country may argue ‘your nation is bound to be hit by hurricanes, how do we know the extra risk from climate change?’ With this model we could provide answers to such statements.”
Harjeet Singh, a UN climate veteran involved in aiding negotiations for the loss and damage fund, said that advances in attribution science could be a “game changer” in assigning responsibility for damages from climate change. He told Carbon Brief:
“However, rigorous, event-specific attribution studies can be time-consuming and may not always be feasible – especially for communities needing urgent support. Simpler frameworks based on historical emissions, technological capacity and GDP can be more practical, while still being guided by scientific insights.
“Ideally, a hybrid approach would apply detailed attribution for unprecedented or contested events, while a simpler, responsibility-based funding mechanism covers more frequent climate impacts to ensure fair and timely financing.”
Watch, read, listen
PARIS EXIT EXPLAINED: Veteran US climate diplomat, Sue Biniaz, explained the ramifications of the wording of Trump’s Paris Agreement exit order, in Just Security.
‘THIRSTY’ AI: The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast explored what the UK government’s plan to boost artificial intelligence could mean for energy and water resources.
SAVIOUR OR VICTIM: In the Conversation, a group of female academics explained why the portrayal of women as either “climate victims” or “saviours of nature” can be problematic.
Coming up
- 26 January: International Day of Clean Energy
- 26 January: Belarus presidential election
- 28 January: EU event on public funding for carbon removal, Brussels and online
Pick of the jobs
- La Trobe University, river communities research fellow | Salary: Unknown. Location: Bundoora/Albury-Wodonga, Australia
- Climate Litigation Network, science adviser | Salary: £42,500 or €50,000. Location: London or Amsterdam
- British Antarctic Survey, marine biologist | Salary: £30,201. Location: Rothera, Antarctica
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 24 January 2025: Trump leaves Paris Agreement; EU solar outshines coal; Tracing climate fingerprints on tropical storms appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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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.