Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
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This week
EU 2040 target
AMBITION: Major EU economies – including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain – have called for the European Commission to set “an ambitious climate target for 2040”, in a letter obtained by Politico. While the memo does not mention a specific percentage reduction, Politico said “its rhetoric implies…that the countries would back a push to cut at least 90% of the EU’s emissions by 2040”. This is the minimum level recommended by EU science advisers.
TRILLION-EURO TARGET: The memo comes after the Financial Times reported on a draft document from Brussels detailing how the bloc can cut its emissions by 90% by 2040 and reach net-zero by 2050. The document says the EU must invest around €1.5tn a year from 2031 in order to meet its goals, according to the FT, adding that this would unlock savings of up to €2.8tn by lowering demand for fossil-fuel imports. Reuters also covered the draft, reporting that it says that EU fossil-fuel use could drop 80% on 1990 levels by 2040 under the proposals.
BREWING BACKLASH?: Meanwhile, a second Reuters story reported on the results of a cross-EU opinion poll suggesting that populist, right-wing parties could surge in the next set of European elections, which “could make passing ambitious climate change policies harder”. The Guardian also reported on how populist “anti-European” party gains in European elections “could shift the parliament’s balance sharply to the right and jeopardise key pillars of the EU’s agenda including climate action”.
IPCC roadmap
ISTANBUL MEETING: Countries gathered for a four-day meeting in Istanbul to decide on a future roadmap for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate science authority responsible for producing reports aimed at helping guide global action on climate change, Carbon Brief reported. At the meeting, governments decided against a new structure for the IPCC’s next “assessment cycle”, committing instead to the traditional set of three “working group” reports and just one “special” report (on cities) over the next five years.
‘NOT THRILLED’: Reacting to the decisions, one scientist told Carbon Brief that she is “not thrilled” by the decision to produce “a whole set of working group reports again”, given they will “not say that much new”. And another said that “waiting until 2028 for the three reports and 2029 for the synthesis is too late to have an impact on decision-making”. They added: “The world will be significantly different by then.”
Around the world
- LNG PERMIT ‘PAUSE’: President Joe Biden today announced a “temporary pause” on approving new export terminals for liquified natural gas (LNG), the Financial Times reported. It said the move was “a blow to a booming industry and…a win [for] climate campaigners”
- SCEPTIC APPOINTMENT: A UK Conservative peer who was previously criticised for claiming that rising temperatures are “likely to be beneficial” has been appointed to a parliamentary committee on climate change, the Guardian reported.
- AMAZON DROUGHT: Climate change was the main driver of the Amazon rainforest’s worst drought in at least half a century, according to a World Weather Attribution analysis.
- ZIM LITHIUM: China has invested more than $1.4bn in Zimbabwe, which holds one of the world’s largest lithium reserves, to secure supplies for electric vehicle manufacturing in the past two years, Climate Home News reported. It added there was a risk that local communities are “missing out” on benefits.
- COAL FIXATION: The Third Pole reported on how India’s push for new coal production could “cast doubt” on its climate targets.
2,195TWh
The amount of power that global nuclear is projected to generate by 2025 – an all-time high, according to an International Energy Agency report covered by the Financial Times.
Latest climate research
- The frequency and extent of concurrent drought and heat events in North America occurring this century is “likely unprecedented” since at least the 16th century, according to a Science Advances paper.
- Spiders may adjust the size of their webs in response to how warming temperatures could affect the size of their prey, new research in Nature Climate Change found.
- A “brief communication” in Nature Climate Change suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could “hamper the ability to adequately describe conditions across the Arctic, thus biassing the view on Arctic change”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A new sector-by-sector analysis for Carbon Brief by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air looked at economic growth driven by investments in clean energy in China in 2023. Clean energies – particularly the so-called “new three” industries: solar power, electric vehicles and batteries – injected 11.4tn yuan ($1.6tn) into China’s economy, accounting for 9% of China’s GDP in 2023. The analysis made use of official figures, industry data and analyst reports. This sector is a “key part not only of China’s energy and climate efforts, but also of its broader economic and industrial policy”.
Spotlight
Gender equality in climate negotiations
This week, Carbon Brief interviews the director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization on why women are still a minority at UN climate summits.
Last week, the president of Azerbaijan was forced to rejig the organising committee for the COP29 climate summit, after receiving a large backlash for having previously picked an all-male panel.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that COPs have been male-dominated since their inception, with delegates at the most recent summit being 38% female and 62% male.
Carbon Brief spoke to Bridget Burns, executive director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). Burns has campaigned for more than a decade for the representation of women and the inclusion of gender equality in the climate negotiations outcomes.
Carbon Brief: Why is it important to have equal participation of men and women in the COP29 organising committee?
Bridget Burns: The reason why we need an equal percentage of men and women in the climate change negotiations is a matter of human rights. Representation goes well beyond just gender, [it includes] frontline communities, Indigenous peoples, who also really need to have a voice in decision-making.
The decisions will not necessarily be equitable and or effective [if] they’re not being designed by the entire population who have been impacted by [climate change].
[Women] are facing impacts differently, they have different access needs. But they also have potentially different solutions.
So even though [the COP29 hosts] have added 12 women [to the 28-strong organising committee], the fact that nobody in that room stepped back to say – “Oh! this is an all-male committee” – is deeply worrying.
Gender is just one of the challenges. It’s also a leadership committee that is full of fossil-fuel executives, which is not the type of leadership that we need in charge of the COP.
CB: What is needed to ensure that climate negotiations are really inclusive?
BB: Part of changing the nature of power, and the ways in which it showed up in our system for multiple years, [goes] beyond making room at the table. It’s to allow other folks to step up into leadership and to allow for their voices to be heard. That requires important conversations on ceding power.
There’s a lot of long-term systemic work that needs to happen. At a global level, we still need the decisions, mandates and benchmarks.
CB: Should we be talking about climate policies for women beyond their participation in climate summits?
BB: It’s hard to get gender equality discussed in the climate change negotiations. It’s even harder to take a feminist approach to climate justice. As the women and gender constituency, we always bring a feminist lens – and we’re calling for feminist climate justice.
If you are a country that is pushing for a strong gender action plan – but you are not backing that up with finance for developing countries, and you’re not backing that up with [emissions] reductions – then that’s not a feminist country.
Watch, read, listen
ELFSTEDENTOCHT: BBC Sport reported on how a much-loved skating race across frozen lakes and waterways in the Netherlands could be lost forever because of climate change.
AFRICAN DISCOURSE: In African Arguments, a group of African writers respond to a recent article focused on how “war in the Congo has kept the planet cooler” – noting that such a narrative “renders African people invisible”.
INDIGENOUS MENTAL HEALTH: A podcast by Climate Tracker explored the effects of climate change on Indigenous peoples from Jamaica and Guyana.
Coming up
- 28 January: Finland presidential election
- 29-30 January: G20 first environment and climate sustainability working group meeting, Vila do Conde, Brazil
- 30-31 January: UK Climate Change Committee COP28 key outcomes briefing report
Pick of the jobs
- UK Climate Change Committee, chief executive | Salary: Unknown. Location: UK
- Politico, energy technology reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Arlington, US
- Global Canopy, Claudia Comberti research assistant on Brazil and COP30 | Salary: £25,000. Location: Oxford
- The Chancery Lane Project, head of forestry, land and agriculture | Salary: £60,000-80,000. Location: Remote (must have right to work in the UK for at least two years)
The post DeBriefed 26 January 2024: EU eyes ‘ambitious’ 2040 target; IPCC decides on new climate reports; Gender inequality at COPs appeared first on Carbon Brief.
At least fifty countries have yet to submit a nationally determined contribution (NDC) climate plan to the United Nations, even though the latest set of plans was due in 2025 – and among them, around half have failed to provide information on why they have not met the deadline.
More than a year past an initial deadline of February 2025, the Paris Agreement’s Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC) met this March and said 55 countries had yet to communicate an NDC to the UN climate body. According to the UN’s registry, two have since submitted their plans.
A key requirement of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement is that governments publish a more ambitious NDC every five years, setting targets to reduce their planet-heating emissions and outlining their policies to adapt to climate change, in order to meet the accord’s goals on limiting global warming and protecting people from its effects.
The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in 2025.
After India’s recent submission, the countries yet to publish their new NDCs are mostly poorer and smaller nations, with few emissions. The biggest emitters in the group are Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina and the Philippines. The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement, although the US submitted a 2035 NDC under the Biden administration before Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN climate accords.
Some nations have argued that they cannot put together an NDC – which requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy – because of exceptional circumstances. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC committee, seen by Climate Home News, says that the country’s civil war has led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.
No information from some nations
But others have failed to communicate with the PAICC, which is tasked with encouraging governments to respect their commitments under the Paris Agreement.
In a report on its March 27 meeting, the PAICC board said it “noted with concern” that 28 countries have not provided information about either their NDCs or their biennial transparency reports on the climate action they are taking, or both. This was “despite several reminders”, it said.
Despite a push from some board members, the committee did not agree at this meeting to name these 28 countries. But it may do so at a meeting in September.
-
Oil crisis could boost struggling sustainable aviation fuel industry
As the price of oil-based jet fuel shoots up, biofuel or hydrogen-based alternatives look more appealing -
ICJ follow-up resolution is a test of climate leadership at the UN
If states back the resolution by consensus, it would send a powerful message of commitment to climate action and the rule of law, despite pushback by some big emitters
One source who has seen the list of countries told Climate Home News it was a “mixed crowd” of developing nations, including least developed countries, small island developing states, emerging economies and at least one government with a representative on the PAICC board.
The PAICC decided to send individual letters to these governments requesting that they engage with the committee and “reminding them that it shall take appropriate measures with a view to facilitating implementation and promoting compliance” with the Paris Agreement.
Non-punitive system
The PAICC’s rules of procedure state that it should be “non-adversarial and non-punitive” and the strongest measure it can take is to issue a public finding naming a government that has breached the Paris Agreement rules. It has done this once before in 2023, rebuking the Vatican for not filing an NDC and Iceland for not telling the UN how much climate finance it plans to provide.
Joanna Depledge, a historian of the UN climate process and research fellow at the University of Cambridge, said that “any measures stronger than naming and shaming would have been unacceptable” to some governments when they were negotiating the Paris Agreement.
She added that “naming and shaming in the international arena is not trivial” because governments do not like to be exposed as non-compliant. “But if the PAICC cannot even name, then that is a serious problem,” she warned.
Avoiding Kyoto’s mistakes?
Tejas Rao, who is researching the PAICC as part of a doctoral thesis at Cambridge, said the architects of the Paris Agreement made it less enforceable so as to try and prevent countries leaving or staying out of the agreement as happened with its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol.
While the Paris Agreement asks all governments to set their own emissions-reduction targets, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol set specific targets for developed countries.
When in 2011 it became clear that Canada was not going to meet those targets, it quit the agreement rather than face formal non-compliance proceedings and a multibillion-dollar obligation to buy carbon credits to cover the shortfall, Rao said.
Japan and Russia also declined to endorse some of their emissions reduction targets and the US never ratified the Kyoto agreement. “Enforcement proceedings became politically toxic,” exposing “the limits of punitive compliance regimes”, Rao said.
The idea of the Paris Agreement’s less stringent compliance system is to engage with governments and keep them within the system rather than threaten them with sanctions and potentially push them out, he added.
Rao said this was “the right trade-off” because governments comply when they feel they have chosen to sign up to the rules rather than having them imposed. He noted that back in April 2025, 171 governments had yet to submit their NDCs and this figure is now down to just over 50.
“We’ve got countries that are at least reporting NDCs,” he said, adding that PAICC is “working as it was designed to”. “It is issuing findings of fact and non-compliance, it’s initiating discussions with parties and, as a result of those discussions, the non-compliance figures are coming down every time.”
The post Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans appeared first on Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans
Climate Change
As Energy, War and Climate Collide, A Climate Summit in Colombia Charts a Path Beyond Fossil Fuels
Participants broke a long-standing taboo by openly linking oil and gas not just to emissions, but to war, displacement and economic instability.
While some major fossil fuel producers keep pushing for expanded oil and gas use, which is linked to warfare, economic shocks and ecological damage, more than 50 countries at the first Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels began developing plans to shift toward renewable energy systems designed for stability and abundance rather than scarcity and conflict.
As Energy, War and Climate Collide, a Conference in Colombia Charts a Path Beyond Fossil Fuels
Most of the wild sloths imported by a planned tourist attraction in Orlando did not survive.
The Florida Attorney General’s office announced a criminal investigation into the deaths of dozens of sloths at a now-shuttered Orlando business, a development that signals a new level of animal-welfare accountability in the commercial wildlife trade.
Florida Opens Criminal Probe Into Sloth World After Dozens of Animal Deaths
Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans
As Energy, War and Climate Collide, A Climate Summit in Colombia Charts a Path Beyond Fossil Fuels
Florida Opens Criminal Probe Into Sloth World After Dozens of Animal Deaths
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