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.
An Lambrechts is a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International with extensive experience in biodiversity-related multilateral negotiations. She is the head of the Greenpeace delegation at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17 happening in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 2022, COP15 delivered the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. With COP17 starting in Yerevan, we are now halfway to the deadline, and according to the first Global Review of progress, countries are not on track to meet the biodiversity targets, and implementation must accelerate fast.
One of the main findings of the Global Review is that funding falls far short of the scale needed to halt and reverse nature loss. But the crisis facing the world’s biodiversity is not an absolute scarcity of capital – it is a profound public policy distortion.
The global economy currently spends roughly $30 destroying nature for every single dollar invested in its protection. According to a report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a staggering $2.4 trillion is spent in public subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture and water use, while global investment in biodiversity conservation and restoration stands at a mere $220 billion.
Countries urged to ramp up “insufficient” nature policies at COP17
Yet, discussions about how to close the biodiversity finance gap continue to claim that salvation lies in mobilising private capital, scaling offsets and “derisking” investments in nature. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of ecological stewardship and of the global financial architecture.
Biodiversity conservation is not a speculative investment portfolio – it is the foundation of human survival. The health of our planet is a non-monetisable, non-excludable public good. Expecting profit-seeking private capital to protect nature perpetuates the structural drivers of ecosystem destruction in the first place.
But if private market mechanisms cannot save biodiversity, where will the necessary public resources come from?
Money going to the wrong places
The answer lies in recovering the vast public wealth currently drained by cross-border tax abuse, financial secrecy and corporate impunity. Finance and environment ministers meeting in Yerevan must give a strong political signal that, to avert ecological breakdown, countries need to take swift action to reform global tax rules, eliminate harmful public subsidies and cancel unsustainable sovereign debts for the public revenues to end up where they belong.
Extractive sectors such as industrial agriculture, fishing, timber and mining continue business-as-usual, often heavily subsidised by public treasuries, while voluntary carbon and biodiversity offset markets pose a serious risk to nature conservation. Offset schemes have delivered only a negligible fraction of the funding needed to preserve ecosystems, allowing industries to continue with their destructive business-as-usual practices.
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Global deforestation slowed in 2025 but Brazil’s election could undo “fragile” gains
Countries remain 70% off track to meet a goal to end deforestation by 2030, as progress in Latin America offset by failures in Africa -
Brazil confident new rainforest fund will reach $10bn donor milestone
Brazil’s environment minister said the Tropical Forest Forever Facility has raised billions in record time – which he hopes will convince more investors
In advanced economies, public funding often actively undermines biodiversity. In Europe, over €5.3 billion in public subsidies is funnelled annually into intensive forest biomass harvesting under renewable energy directives, degrading primary forest ecosystems and undermining long-term climate resilience. Pleading with private investors to fill a “finance gap” while pouring billions into ecological destruction is an exercise in futility.
Developing countries struggle with debt burden
For developing countries, reliance on private finance is further compounded by a crushing sovereign debt crisis. In 2024, public debt in developing economies reached record levels, with net interest payments alone absorbing $921 billion. A record 61 developing countries now spend more than 10% of government revenue on foreign debt service, with many climate-vulnerable nations spending twice as much servicing external debt as they receive in climate and biodiversity finance combined.
This burden acts as a structural driver of ecosystem destruction. Under pressure from external creditors and international financial institutions to avoid default and secure foreign exchange, governments are routinely forced into austerity measures and pushed to expand raw commodity exports into pristine biomes.
Comment: World Bank and IMF should lead the financial system in responding to the climate crisis
The current negotiations for a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNFCITC) also offer a way forward. An estimated $492 billion in tax revenue is lost every year to offshore tax havens. Multinational corporations account for around $348 billion of this total by shifting profits away from the countries where real economic extraction and environmental degradation occur.
In the mining sector alone, developing nations lose tens of billions annually to corporate tax dodging. Furthermore, international financial secrecy shields environmental criminals, with illicit financial flows from illegal logging draining between $51 billion and $152 billion annually.
At COP17, leaders must seize the opportunity to build a bridge between the two conventions and enhance cooperation. Governments must put the world on a firm path to securing predictable, sufficient, sovereign public finance for biodiversity conservation. It’s the only path to a restorative, rights-based future for people and the planet.
The post Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity appeared first on Climate Home News.
Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity
Climate Change
Greenpeace delivers 47 metre-long petition with half a million signatures to Woodside HQ following major gas protest
Greenpeace delivers 47 metre-long petition with half a million signatures to Woodside HQ following major gas protest
PERTH, Monday 19 October 2026 — Dozens of Perth community members delivered a giant petition, signed by almost half a million people, to Woodside’s corporate headquarters this morning, calling on the government to save Scott Reef from Woodside’s reckless Browse gas proposal.
Dressed in sea creature costumes and hats, supporters carried one of Australia’s biggest environmental petitions to Woodside’s headquarters, and a local choir performed a ‘Scott Reef’ rendition of Angie McMahon’s iconic cover of ‘Reckless’ by Australian Crawl.
On the sidelines of the Perth Global Citizen Now event, it comes following a two day-long protest at Woodside’s Scarborough gas platform that saw activists scale and occupy the Floating Production Unit calling to “Stop Woodside’s Dirty Gas” and “Save Scott Reef”. The activists were taken from the platform by police helicopter on Sunday afternoon.
David Ritter, CEO at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Less than a day after two Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists were arrested for their peaceful protest at Woodside’s Scarborough gas platform to save Scott Reef, we are here again with another message to Woodside: half a million of us do not want your dirty gas at Scott Reef.
“Community pressure on Woodside is rising. Today we are here to show Woodside that they can’t ignore half a million people who want Scott Reef protected, not turned into an industrialised gas zone.
“Woodside can’t be trusted with our oceans. Woodside’s plans to drill up to 57 toxic wells at Scott Reef, Australia’s largest oceanic reef, putting endangered pygmy blue whales at risk, and jeopardising a nesting ground for unique green sea turtles.
“We Australians love our oceans and this is an opportunity for our governments to do the right thing, to reject Woodside’s reckless drilling plans, and save Scott Reef.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or Emma Sangalli on +61 431 513 465
Climate Change
Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists in police custody after two-day protest against Woodside’s Browse gas project at Scott Reef
PERTH, Sunday 18 October 2026 — Two Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists are in police custody after occupying a gas platform at Woodside’s Scarborough gas project, in peaceful protest of the fossil fuel corporation’s plans to drill for oil and gas at Scott Reef.
NEW footage and photos of the peaceful protest available here and on Instagram
The activists used specialised climbing equipment to scale and attach themselves to a Floating Production Unit (FPU), a key piece of gas processing infrastructure at the Scarborough gas field over 200km off the coast of Exmouth, at around 05:45am AWST on Saturday and proceeded to occupy the platform for two days, d