Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
UK considers cuts
EMISSIONS ADVICE: New recommendations from the UK’s climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee, said the nation should reduce its emissions to 87% below 1990 levels by 2040. This would keep the country on track for reaching net-zero by 2050 and take £1,400 off household bills by the same year, according to the advice. Read Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of the findings, which show that the estimated cost of reaching net-zero is now 73% lower than thought just five years earlier.
‘Y BOTHER’: Despite not being a major focus of the new analysis, much of the UK media coverage zoned in on how achieving the emissions cut might affect people’s lives. The Guardian reported that the average person might need to skip “two kebabs’ worth of meat a week”, while a frontpage Daily Telegraph story raged at the idea that frequent fliers may need to pay a higher rate of tax, which was not a recommendation. It comes shortly after a satirical Private Eye piece by correspondent Y Bother reported that “getting net-zero done might be a massive faff”, asking: “Shall we just not do it?”
UK AID CUT: Elsewhere, prime minister Keir Starmer announced plans to cut the UK aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of national income and spend more on defence, the Guardian reported, just as officials entered international finance negotiations in Rome (more on this below). The newspaper said it understood the UK’s £11.6bn climate finance would be “ringfenced” from cuts, but Climate Home News reported that climate groups were “dismayed” by the move.
Around the world
- BIG VOTE: The centre-right Christian Democrats party won Germany’s federal election, with far-right Alternative for Germany in second place, Al Jazeera reported. Clean Energy Wire said the future government would still be committed to climate neutrality by 2045 but is likely to have a “reduced focus on climate policies”.
- REGULATORY REVERSAL: The US Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to reverse the “endangerment finding”, a key legal ruling that required the agency to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Washington Post.
- SETBACK: Energy company BP announced it will slash investment in renewables, while boosting oil and gas spending by 20%, the Associated Press reported.
- UKRAINE-US PACT: Ukraine made an agreement with the US to jointly explore its mineral resources – including oil and gas, according to a frontpage story in the Financial Times.
45%
The proportion by which Tesla’s electric vehicle sales have fallen in Europe since Elon Musk’s “political meddling”, reported Bloomberg.
Latest climate research
- A new Nature study suggested that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a system of ocean currents that moves water, heat and nutrients around the Atlantic Ocean and the globe – is unlikely to collapse this century. The research has promoted discussion around what AMOC “collapse” means.
- Climate change could lead to the creation of new carbon sinks in some ice-free areas of Antarctica, according to a study in Communications Earth and Environment.
- Peatland fires in the UK released 800,000 tonnes of carbon from 2000-21, a study in Environmental Research Letters found, accounting for 90% of the country’s total fire emissions.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
In December 2022, nearly all countries agreed to a flagship global target to protect 30% of Earth by the end of the decade. But a new investigation of hundreds of country plans submitted to the UN by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that more than half of nations are not willing to commit to protecting 30% of their own land and seas. It comes as nations met in Rome this week to try to find agreement on outstanding biodiversity issues (more on this below). The chart above shows the various pledges made by countries when it comes to protecting a proportion of their land for nature, illustrating how less than half have committed to the key 30% figure.
Spotlight
COP16 talks reach finance deal
This week, Carbon Brief reports from COP16 nature talks in Rome, where countries landed a landmark finance deal in the early hours of Friday morning.
Last year saw a run of fraught and fractious environmental talks play out around the world.
Talks on reversing biodiversity loss, plastic pollution and desertification all ended in failure, while a UN climate summit in Azerbaijan produced a finance deal that was bitterly disappointing for many developing countries.
However, in the early hours of Friday morning at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome, countries delivered what they described as a signal of hope for multilateralism in uncertain times.
Against a backdrop of foreign aid freezes and cutbacks in the US and Europe, nations agreed to a “permanent arrangement” to pay to help developing countries conserve biodiversity and a strategy to “mobilise” at least $200bn per year by 2030.
Striking a deal
The decision came after finance dominated discussions during the three-day resumed session of COP16 in Rome. Countries agreed to meet again in the Italian capital after failing to reach consensus at COP16 in Colombia in October 2024.
Different versions of the financing texts were negotiated throughout the week. Most countries agreed on the need to find a solution, but key disagreements still fractured the path to a deal until the summit’s final plenary.
In the end, two proposals – one from the COP16 presidency and another from Brazil on behalf of the BRICs – were merged to enable countries to find consensus on finance.
A UK official told Carbon Brief that Brazil’s leading role in the negotiations is a “very positive sign” of its commitment to working with countries ahead of hosting the COP30 climate summit in November.
Biodiversity in the balance
Colombian politician and COP16 president Susana Muhamad received a lengthy standing ovation for her role in guiding parties to consensus in the early hours of Friday morning in Rome.
But, amid celebrations, some speakers noted that nations are still far off track for meeting the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The GBF is a landmark deal, first made in 2022, aiming to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
Some three-quarters of nations have still not submitted their UN biodiversity plans for how they will achieve the targets of the GBF – four months after the deadline.
And a recent investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian revealed that more than half of nations that have submitted UN biodiversity plans do not commit to the GBF’s flagship target of protecting 30% of land and seas for nature by 2030.
Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of all of the key outcomes from the COP16 talks in Rome has just been published.
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE DATA: A short video report by ABC News explained how the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses automated techniques to record climate data.
‘FIRE AND FURY’: An editorial in Nature urged the global science community to resist Donald Trump’s “assault on science and international institutions”.
UNLOCK LOVELOCK: A BBC Sounds podcast told the life of James Lovelock, the co-author of the Gaia scientific theory and a former advisor to Shell who in 1966 warned the company about the risks of fossil fuels.
Coming up
- 3-4 March: First G20 agriculture working group meeting | South Africa
- 3-14 March: International Seabed Authority 30th session, legal and technical commission meeting | Kingston, Jamaica
- 4-6 March: Regional workshop on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) | Mombasa, Kenya
Pick of the jobs
- Associated Press, climate social video producer | Salary: $52,046-$82,934. Location: New York
- Imperial College London, deputy director of Undaunted | Salary: £68,005-£77,703. Location: London (hybrid)
- Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, senior economist, climate policy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Beijing
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 28 February 2025: COP16 lands finance deal; More than half of nations skip key nature pledge; UK eyes cost-saving emissions plan appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.
City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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‘Completely delusional’: UN climate chief warns against fossil fuel push after Iran crisis
As Gulf disruptions send oil and gas prices soaring, Simon Stiell urges leaders to double down on renewables and fight fossil fuel dependency -
Gulf oil and gas crisis sparks calls for renewables investment
Energy analysts and some politicians say the Iran war’s effect on oil and gas prices shows renewables are the path to energy security
Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition
Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.
It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.
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