Published

2 years ago

June 28, 2024

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Record floods across the globe

IVORY COAST: Floods and landslides killed at least 24 people in Ivory Coast’s largest city of Abidjan after a week of heavy rains that was “four times the usual volume in some cases”, the Associated Press reported. The newswire added that the city’s disadvantaged communities are “particularly vulnerable” because of poor storm drainage in informal settlements.

CHINA ‘SWAMPED’: Landslides killed eight people in their homes in southern China’s Hunan province, said the South China Morning Post, with Taoyuan county receiving 39.5cm of rain in a day. Record rains “swamped” Hunan’s capital of Changsha, “turning roads into rivers and submerging subway tunnels”, Reuters wrote. By Monday, 33 rivers had “exceeded warning levels”, Xinhua reported. Associated Press also reported that flooding killed two people in the “deluged” US midwest.

BANGLADESH INUNDATED: Widespread flooding has stranded nearly two million people in north-east Bangladesh, CNN reported. It added that “large swathes” of Sylhet and Sunamganj provinces were underwater after a second wave of flooding hit the region in less than a month, with 772,000 children “in urgent need of assistance”. Camps in Cox’s Bazaar that accommodate “almost [one million] documented [Rohingya] refugees have been overrun by the incoming floodwaters”, Down to Earth reported, with at least 10 Rohingya fatalities out of the total 31 deaths in the Bangladesh floods this year.

Heat deaths: tolls apart

PAKISTAN’S FATAL HEAT: Doctors in Karachi “treated thousands of victims of heatstroke at various hospitals” after a “days-long heatwave” scorched southern Pakistan, the Associated Press reported. While local media reported that the heatwave “killed more than two dozen people” in Karachi alone, AP added that “no government spokesman was available to confirm the number of heatstroke-related deaths”. However, the Edhi ambulance service told BBC News it had taken around 568 people’s bodies to the Karachi city morgue in Pakistan over the past six days – up from its usual rate of 30-40 bodies a day.

‘TOLLS APART’: In neighbouring India, the country’s health ministry said 143 people across the country had died of heatstroke from the start of summer until 20 June, far lower than 209 confirmed and 448 suspected deaths tallied by Times of India. Meanwhile, a non-profit report estimated that “192 homeless individuals died from the heat in just nine days” in the national capital region alone, experts in India Development Review Online wrote, “highlighting the significant underreporting of heat-related deaths” in the country.

CULPABLE HEAT: In the US, the Boston Globe reported that New England experienced the “highest rate of heat-related emergency department visits” in the country, with temperatures in the region crossing 32C. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Arizona could “reasonably press homicide charges against big oil” for heat deaths in the state last year, the Guardian reported. Finally, Reuters wrote that the “sweltering summer” is worsening conditions in Gaza, where “nearly all the 2.3 million inhabitants have been driven from their homes by Israel’s military campaign” with almost no access to electricity and little clean water.

Around the world

COW TAX: Denmark is set to introduce the world’s first carbon tax on agriculture after a historic agreement on Monday, Politico reported. Farmers will be charged “almost €100 a year” per cow once the levy rolls out in 2030, Financial Times said.
PARLEY VOUS: In a “new and surprising” move, South China Morning Post reported that China agreed to talks with the EU over its plans to raise tariffs on electric vehicle imports by 48%.
MAI KUHIHEWA: Youth in the US state of Hawaii who sued transport authorities for their use of fossil fuels reached a “first-of-its-kind” settlement that recognised their “constitutional rights to a life-sustaining climate”, Teen Vogue reported.
OILSTRUCK: Financial Times reported on ExxonMobil’s development of “one of the largest offshore oil developments in history” and what it could mean for Guyana.
BP U-TURN: Oil and gas giant BP has imposed a hiring freeze and paused new offshore wind projects to place a greater emphasis on oil and gas rather than renewables amid investor discontent, sources at the company told Reuters.
PIPELINE PROTESTS: 37 activists in Uganda were arrested for protesting the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), calling on China to “reject financial support” to the project, All Africa reported.

£116bn £30bn £2.8tn

Some of the “scary-sounding” numbers being used to mislead the public about the “cost” of net-zero in the UK general-election campaign. Carbon Brief’s Dr Simon Evans has factchecked them.

Latest climate research

A new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that Earth’s most extreme wildfires increased 2.2-fold in the past 20 years, with the last seven years seeing the six most extreme fires on record.
According to new research in Nature Climate Change, a 1C rise in average temperatures would mean four extra minutes every day spent collecting water for women. By 2050, women could spend 30% and 100% more time – globally and regionally – collecting water, “undermining” their welfare.
New research on grounding zones – where ice transitions from land to water – suggests that sea-level rise projections could be substantially underestimated, according to a Carbon Brief guest post.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

UK governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have missed their tree-planting targets set in 2020 and failed to plant an area of forest nearly the size of Birmingham.

New Carbon Brief analysis found that UK governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have missed their tree-planting targets set in 2020 and failed to plant an area of forest nearly the size of Birmingham. Tree-planting is a “significant” part of the UK’s net-zero strategy to compensate for other polluting sectors. By 2050, the unplanted trees would have removed some 8.5m tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, roughly 2% of the UK’s annual emissions in 2023. This shortfall will need to be made up for with stronger efforts elsewhere if the UK’s net-zero by 2050 target is to be met.

Spotlight

Monsoon mixtape

As the UK gears up for Glastonbury, Carbon Brief interviews pioneering Indian hip-hop and folk artists about protest music and the role of artists in an era of climate change.

When Carbon Brief spoke to the Marathi-language rapper MC Mawali from the hip-hop collective Swadesi, Mumbai was under an orange alert for extremely heavy rains, after stalling for most of the month.

The monsoon has changed along with the mega-city most defined by it. Massive infrastructure projects have cost the island city its flood buffers, including the much-diminished Aarey forest, home to the Indigenous Warli tribe and the only urban leopard population in the world.

In 2019, Mawali, along with fellow Swadesi rappers and Warli bard Prakash Bhoir, gave Mumbai’s #SaveAarey movement its protest anthem, The Warli Revolt – its chorus warning of a dystopian climate future to come.

“I used to go to Aarey to swim in the Vihar lake as a kid, but I didn’t know about [Warli] culture, their instruments, their songs going extinct that are not on the internet,” said Mawali.

When the chainsaws came for the forest, Mawali says he “felt helpless”, but he’s happy to hear that Warli Revolt has become a go-to anti-deforestation anthem across the country since. He added:

“Today’s music business is about labels pouring in music and splashing their artists all over platforms that censor messages like ours, but, through hip-hop, we’ve learned to hijack that same system to keep folk, tribal and conscious music alive.”

To anti-caste singer-poet Dhammarakshit Randive from the Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch collective, the word “green” has turned into “its own kind of propaganda” that justifies “ask-no-questions development”, with high displacement of people and a large emissions footprint.

“‘Green’ often becomes propaganda, telling us you can offset 100 trees in a biodiverse forest that Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) depend on by planting another 1,000 somewhere else,” he told Carbon Brief.

Randive sees climate change, anti-caste and “movements to centre democracy” as interlinked, “affecting all our lives, everywhere”. To him, the main role of musicians and artists in responding to climate change is to establish that intersectionality. He told Carbon Brief:

“Otherwise, those fighting for forests are dying unheard in those same forests, sanitation workers are dying in the same sewers, factory workers are dying in the heat and there’s no one to widen peoples’ perspectives to say ‘this is all part of the same struggle’.”

Taru Dalmia, also known as Delhi Sultanate, was among the earliest pioneers to fuse dub and dancehall with protest anthems penned by Indigenous singers, such as Bhagaban Majhi, protesting mining projects in central India. Blood Earth, the album Dalmia made with producer Chris McGuiness, is now 12-years-old, but remains just as relevant.

“At that time we made it, I felt that there was a kind of hidden violence and not as much discourse about a war-like situation in [mineral-rich Indian states],” said Dalmia, speaking to Carbon Brief. He feels that, since then, “there’s definitely more awareness and politicisation which has to do with how much more repressive things have gotten and [environmental and other] issues staring at us in the face”.

While hip-hop has “blown up” over the past half-decade, he feels that little has changed as far as mining companies are concerned, since “profit margins remain huge”. Dalmia added:

“This awareness of how fundamentally our way of life is based on extraction, extractive industries and destruction and how that’s a direct continuation of the colonial project…sure, there’s more politicisation, but the depth of it is still missing.”

While extreme weather has not quite made its way to the airwaves, aside from boilerplate Bollywood songs invoking heat and rain, mercury levels were the subject of one of India’s earliest environmental campaign songs.

Sofia Ashraf stars in a music video for Kodaikanal Won’t in 2015. Credit: Jhatkaa Org/YouTube

In 2015, a young Sofia Ashraf dropped the single Kodaikanal Won’t, a rap parody of Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, demanding that Unilever clean up toxic waste from its thermometer factory dumped in the rainforest and compensate its workers for mercury poisoning. It drew over 2m views, praise from Minaj and a public apology and settlement from Unilever. Speaking to Carbon Brief, Ashraf said:

“Since Kodaikanal Won’t, there has been a whole gamut of songs around climate change, from general awareness-building to pointed information-sharing, music has been used effectively to express the dread a lot of us live under. The downside is that greenwashing is constantly on the rise and there is too much onus on the audience to parse this content for the truth.”

But she remains optimistic, telling Carbon Brief:

“As long as art still strives to build conscious narratives, I feel we are headed in the right direction.”

Watch, read, listen

PETROCENTRIC: Adam Hanieh, author and professor of political economy at the University of Exeter, spoke to the Break Down about all the ways in which oil came to “permeate” our lives.

MIC TEST: Vox tuned in to how scientists are listening to Puerto Rico’s frogs to understand how climate change is altering life on the rainforest island.

NON-ALIGNED: A piece in Drilled unpacked new research prompting questions of what “Paris-aligned” means and whether “climate pledges…need a terminology overhaul”.

Coming up

22-30 June: London climate action week
30 June: France national assembly elections, first round
4 July: UK general election

Pick of the jobs

International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), head of global climate law, policy and governance programme (maternity cover) | Salary: £64,814-£80,654. Location: UK (hybrid) with access to London office
Sustainable Futures Collaborative, senior research associate, climate policy | Salary: Unknown. Location: New Delhi
Climate and Community Project, data communications manager | Salary: $105,000. Location: US (fully remote), one week of travel every two months
Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ), communications coordinator. Salary: $38,400. Location: Remote. Preference for candidates from the global south
Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), global fellowships for scholars from non-OECD countries | Stipend: NOK 15,000 per month, plus travel, accommodation and insurance coverage. Location: Bergen, Norway
Climate News Tracker, managing editor | Salary: £70,000-£80,000. Location: Remote, with occasional UK travel for meetings

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 28 June 2024: Global floods; Heat deaths uncertainty; India’s climate protest music appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 28 June 2024: Global floods; Heat deaths uncertainty; India’s climate protest music

Greenhouse Gases

DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?

Published

22 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Absolute State of the Union

‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.

COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.

OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.

SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.

Around the world

RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.

$467 billion

The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.

Latest climate research

Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action

(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 constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.

Spotlight

Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?

This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.

Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.

Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.

Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:

“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”

Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.

Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:

“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”

Conservative gear shift

For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.

Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.

Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.

Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.

Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:

“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”

Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)

Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:

“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”

But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:

“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”

UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

Global ‘greenlash’?

All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.

At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.

Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.

She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.

Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:

“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”

Watch, read, listen

TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.

RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.

Coming up

2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
3 March: UK spring statement
4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
5 March: Nepal elections

Pick of the jobs

The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil

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 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?

Greenhouse Gases

Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding

Published

1 day ago

February 27, 2026

Alice Rush

The Lincolnshire constituency held by Richard Tice, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of the hard-right Reform party, has been pledged at least £55m in government funding for flood defences since 2024.

This investment in Boston and Skegness is the second-largest sum for a single constituency from a £1.4bn flood-defence fund for England, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

Flooding is becoming more likely and more extreme in the UK due to climate change.

Yet, for years, governments have failed to spend enough on flood defences to protect people, properties and infrastructure.

The £1.4bn fund is part of the current Labour government’s wider pledge to invest a “record” £7.9bn over a decade on protecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from flooding.

As MP for one of England’s most flood-prone regions, Tice has called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.

He is also one of Reform’s most vocal opponents of climate action and what he calls “net stupid zero”. He denies the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed, falsely and without evidence, that scientists are “lying”.

Flood defences

Last year, the government said it would invest £2.65bn on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) schemes in England between April 2024 and March 2026.

This money was intended to protect 66,500 properties from flooding. It is part of a decade-long Labour government plan to spend more than £7.9bn on flood defences.

There has been a consistent shortfall in maintaining England’s flood defences, with the Environment Agency expecting to protect fewer properties by 2027 than it had initially planned.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has attributed this to rising costs, backlogs from previous governments and a lack of capacity. It also points to the strain from “more frequent and severe” weather events, such as storms in recent years that have been amplified by climate change.

However, the CCC also said last year that, if the 2024-26 spending programme is delivered, it would be “slightly closer to the track” of the Environment Agency targets out to 2027.

The government has released constituency-level data on which schemes in England it plans to fund, covering £1.4bn of the 2024-26 investment. The other half of the FCERM spending covers additional measures, from repairing existing defences to advising local authorities.

The map below shows the distribution of spending on FCERM schemes in England over the past two years, highlighting the constituency of Richard Tice.

Map of England showing that Richard Tice's Boston and Skegness constituency is set to receive at least £55m for flood defences between 2024 and 2026 — Flood-defence spending on new and replacement schemes in England in 2024-25 and 2025-26. The government notes that, as Environment Agency accounts have not been finalised and approved, the investment data is “provisional and subject to change”. Some schemes cover multiple constituencies and are not included on the map. Source: Environment Agency FCERM data.

By far the largest sum of money – £85.6m in total – has been committed to a tidal barrier and various other defences in the Somerset constituency of Bridgwater, the seat of Conservative MP Ashley Fox.

Over the first months of 2026, the south-west region has faced significant flooding and Fox has called for more support from the government, citing “climate patterns shifting and rainfall intensifying”.

He has also backed his party’s position that “the 2050 net-zero target is impossible” and called for more fossil-fuel extraction in the North Sea.

Tice’s east-coast constituency of Boston and Skegness, which is highly vulnerable to flooding from both rivers and the sea, is set to receive £55m. Among the supported projects are beach defences from Saltfleet to Gibraltar Point and upgrades to pumping stations.

Overall, Boston and Skegness has the second-largest portion of flood-defence funding, as the chart below shows. Constituencies with Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs occupied the other top positions.

Chart showing that Conservative, Reform and Liberal Democrat constituencies are the top recipients of flood defence spending — Top 10 English constituencies by FCERM funding in 2024-25 and 2025-26. Source: Environment Agency FCERM data.

Overall, despite Labour MPs occupying 347 out of England’s 543 constituencies – nearly two-thirds of the total – more than half of the flood-defence funding was distributed to constituencies with non-Labour MPs. This reflects the flood risk in coastal and rural areas that are not traditional Labour strongholds.

Reform funding

While Reform has just eight MPs, representing 1% of the population, its constituencies have been assigned 4% of the flood-defence funding for England.

Nearly all of this money was for Tice’s constituency, although party leader Nigel Farage’s coastal Clacton seat in Kent received £2m.

Reform UK is committed to “scrapping net-zero” and its leadership has expressed firmly climate-sceptic views.

Much has been made of the disconnect between the party’s climate policies and the threat climate change poses to its voters. Various analyses have shown the flood risk in Reform-dominated areas, particularly Lincolnshire.

Tice has rejected climate science, advocated for fossil-fuel production and criticised Environment Agency flood-defence activities. Yet, he has also called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.

This may reflect Tice’s broader approach to climate change. In a 2024 interview with LBC, he said:

“Where you’ve got concerns about sea level defences and sea level rise, guess what? A bit of steel, a bit of cement, some aggregate…and you build some concrete sea level defences. That’s how you deal with rising sea levels.”

While climate adaptation is viewed as vital in a warming world, there are limits on how much societies can adapt and adaptation costs will continue to increase as emissions rise.

The post Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding

Greenhouse Gases

Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate

Published

3 days ago

February 25, 2026

Alice Rush

We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.

Key developments

Food inflation on the rise

DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.

Sign up to Carbon Brief’s free “Cropped” email newsletter. A fortnightly digest of food, land and nature news and views. Sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.

NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.

‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.

El Niño looms

NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”

WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”

CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.

News and views

DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.

Spotlight

Nature talks inch forward

This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.

The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.

The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.

The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.

Money talks

Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.

Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.

Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.

Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).

Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:

“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”

Monitoring and reporting

Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.

Parties do so through the submission of national reports.

Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.

A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.

Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:

“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”

Watch, read, listen

NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.

COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.

HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.

‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.

New science

Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food