Published

1 year ago

March 29, 2025

Alice Rush

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

This week

Raging wildfires

SOUTH KOREAN BLAZE: Wildfires in south-eastern South Korea – the “worst wildfires in its history” – have killed at least 27 people and displaced more than 37,000 from their homes, the Korea Times reported. The Chosun Daily said that the 1,300-year-old Gounsa Temple “was reduced to ashes” and the fire continues to endanger many of the “most prized cultural assets”. A “spate” of recent wildfires in South Korea and Japan have been “linked to climate change”, the Japan Times said.

FUEL TO THE FIRES: Parts of North and South Carolina have been under evacuation orders due to several large, uncontained wildfires, with “millions of downed trees” from September’s Hurricane Helene fuelling the blazes, the Raleigh News & Observer reported. The Guardian added: “Many people in the area are still getting over the hurricane.”

UK climate and energy roundup

DEADLINE DROPPED: The UK’s High Court “agreed to push back the deadline” for the government to modify its “delivery plan” needed to meet its legally binding climate targets, BusinessGreen reported. The plan was published in 2023, but had been “subject to a legal challenge from green groups, which alleged it was not sufficiently detailed”, the outlet added.

‘GREEN SILENCE’: UK chancellor Rachel Reeves made “no mention of green issues” in her spring statement, the Guardian reported, adding that this “silence [came] as a relief” to “green experts”, given cuts announced elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Chinese owner of British Steel “rejected a £500m lifeline offer from the UK government, raising fears about thousands of jobs at the steelmaker”, the Financial Times reported.

Around the world

IT’S ELECTRIC: Chinese automaker BYD “topped $100bn” in sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, surpassing electric-only manufacturer Tesla, the Financial Times said. Tesla sales have fallen 49% year-on-year in Europe in 2025, ABC News noted, even as EV sales overall grew 28%.
CARBON MARKET: China released plans to include its steel, cement and aluminium industries in the country’s carbon-trading market, Reuters reported.
COAL COMMITMENT: Germany’s incoming coalition “stand[s] by” plans to phase out coal power by 2038, according to a leaked draft reported by Euractiv, which noted the outgoing government had “favoured” 2030.
POWER SURGE: Record temperatures in 2024 meant “global energy demand surged” last year, according to a report from the International Energy Agency covered by the Wall Street Journal. A record 585 gigawatts of new renewables were added last year, Axios reported, citing International Renewable Energy Agency data.
SHIP-SHAPE: In Climate Home News, Kenya’s special envoy for climate change, Ambassador Ali Mohamed, “unequivocally” endorsed a proposed carbon levy on emissions from ships.

267

The number of days in 2024 – nearly three-quarters of the year – in which the US was experiencing a “major disaster”, according to analysis of US Federal Emergency Management Agency data by the International Institute for Environment and Development and CNN.

Latest climate research

Research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that political polarisation around climate change becomes more pronounced as countries become wealthier.
In China, compound hot-dry and hot-wet events became more frequent, long-lasting and intense from 1985 to 2019, with serious implications for crop losses, a new study in Earth’s Future found.
A study in Environmental Research Letters detailed a machine learning-driven model capable of accurately forecasting marine heatwaves 10 days in advance.

(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 US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that Arctic sea ice reached its annual maximum extent on 21 March. At 14.33m km2, the winter peak is the smallest in the 47-year satellite record. Dr Julienne Stroeve, a senior scientist at the NSIDC, told Carbon Brief that the record low “continue[s] the overall long-term decline in the ice cover”.

Spotlight

Warming may turn butterfly hotspots from ‘safe havens to graves’

This week, Carbon Brief covers a new study that mapped and analysed the biodiversity of butterfly species around the world.

Up to a third of butterfly biodiversity “hotspots” will become too warm for the species they host by 2070, according to new research.

The study, which analysed distributional data on more than 12,000 butterfly species, was published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

It found that two-thirds of butterfly species are mountain-dwellers, with mountains holding 3.5 times more butterfly biodiversity hotspots than lowland ecosystems.

The lead author of the paper told Carbon Brief he hopes that the approach laid out in the study will “broadly boost the representation of insects in global ecology and conservation”.

The heliconius erato butterfly on a leaf in Ecuador. Credit: Citizen Kepler / Alamy Stock Photo. Image ID: 2XAB7G0.

Mapping hotspots

Butterflies are “uniquely well-documented among insects”, Dr Stefan Pinkert, a researcher at Germany’s University of Marburg, told Carbon Brief.

But, even so, “much of this information remain[s] fragmented and inaccessible”, said Pinkert, who led the new study.

Pinkert and his colleagues used a country-level database of butterfly occurrences, along with regional range maps and previously published species-distribution models, to model the distribution of 12,119 butterfly species. They then calculated and mapped the “richness” and “range rarity” of butterfly species around the world.

Species richness was calculated as the number of unique species in the database for a given area. “Range rarity” is inversely proportional to the range size of the species in an area.

For both richness and range rarity, the researchers defined a “hotspot” as the 5% of areas around the world with the highest value of each quantity. They found that only 10% of species richness hotspots and 10% of range rarity hotspots overlap. The study said that this underlines the “limited value” of species-richness hotspots for identifying conservation priorities.

Pinkert told Carbon Brief that he was concerned to find that only 40-45% of butterfly biodiversity hotspots overlap with the biodiversity hotspots of land animals. Land-animal biodiversity has historically “served as main surrogates for defining” priorities for global conservation, he added.

Warming warning

The researchers also found that around two-thirds of all butterfly species they studied live in mountain regions, with species richness peaking at around 2,500 metres elevation and range rarity peaking at 3,500 metres. They noted that, while mountains are known for their species richness, the concentration of butterfly biodiversity is “substantially” higher than it is for other types of organisms, such as plants, birds and reptiles.

They then used climate models to project warming over the next 45 years – as well as how those temperature changes will affect butterfly habitat in the future.

They found that “temperature niche loss” – warming beyond the safe temperature range for species in a given area – would erode up to one-third of species-richness hotspots globally, under a very-high emissions scenario, with some areas losing nearly two-thirds of their hotspot area. Under a moderate emissions scenario, sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia would each lose a quarter of their temperature niches.

The loss of safe temperature niches was greater for hotspot areas than non-hotspot areas. The authors concluded that under accelerating warming, mountains might be converted “from safe havens to graves”.

Pinkert told Carbon Brief:

“Our results underscore the urgent need to prioritise insect conservation amid global change…Business-as-usual in prioritisation and implementation [of conservation actions] will threaten ecosystem integrity – the foundation of our well-being and that of future generations.”

Watch, read, listen

TIMELY TREK: Latin America Reports chronicled a journey to visit Colombia’s melting Andean glaciers on the country’s “climate change trail”.

ENERGY OUTLOOK: Kaare Sandholt of top Chinese thinktank the Energy Research Institute talked about the country’s energy transformation outlook – recently covered by Carbon Brief – on the Environment China podcast.

TRUMP-PROOF TOOLS: The Guardian recreated a climate-risk tool that had been purged from the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s website under Trump’s anti-climate directives.

Coming up

2-3 April: 41st UN-Water meeting, Rome
7-11 April: Meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization, London

Pick of the jobs

Earthjustice, legislative director, climate and energy | Salary: $164,000-$182,200. Location: Washington DC
International Maritime Organization, media and communications associate | Salary: £45,347. Location: London
UN Environment Programme, finance and budget assistant | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi

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 March 2025: South Korea’s record-breaking wildfires; Arctic sea ice hits record-low peak; Butterfly biodiversity imperilled appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 28 March 2025: South Korea’s record-breaking wildfires; Arctic sea ice hits record-low peak; Butterfly biodiversity imperilled

Climate Change

Analysis: UK no longer top UN Green Climate Fund donor after latest aid cut

Published

20 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Alice Rush

The UK is no longer the top contributor to the UN’s flagship Green Climate Fund (GCF), after the government announced that it only intends to honour half of its most recent pledge.

Amid wider cuts to its climate aid for developing countries, the UK informed the GCF in May that it will reduce its commitment for the 2024-27 period to £815m ($1.1bn).

In doing so, the Labour government is drastically cutting a Conservative pledge of £1.62bn ($2.16bn), hailed by former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s government as “the biggest single funding commitment the UK has made to help the world tackle climate change”.

This “record” pledge also meant the UK became the top GCF funder, after the Trump administration withdrew $4bn in pledged US funds in 2025.

Now, the UK follows the US in becoming the second major donor to cancel substantial funding, leaving aid experts concerned that other developed countries will follow suit.

As the chart below shows, the UK’s total past and promised contributions to the GCF have now dropped below those of Germany, France and Japan.

GCF pledges by top 10 donors. Dark bars indicate pledges from the initial resource mobilisation in 2014 and the first replenishment round in 2019, while light blue bars indicate pledges from the second replenishment round in 2023. Source: NRDC GCF pledge tracker.

The GCF is the largest dedicated UN climate fund and is seen as a vital way of raising grant-based climate finance for developing countries. It oversees more than $20bn worth of funding across 354 projects and programmes.

Developed countries, such as the UK, are obliged under the Paris Agreement to provide climate finance. One of the main ways to do this is through specialised climate funds, such as the GCF.

However, despite countries committing to increase their climate finance over time, progress in scaling up GCF contributions between funding rounds has been gradual.

With its now-revoked £1.62bn pledge in 2023, the UK was among the donors that had increased its GCF pledging compared with the previous 2019 funding round.

The latest reduction means the UK will now provide around 45% less funding than it did during the 2019 round. This is the biggest reduction between rounds by any major donor, apart from the US.

In an email to the GCF board, reported by the Financial Times, the fund’s executive director Mafalda Duarte said the UK’s actions were “expected to have a material impact on the delivery” of the fund’s projects.

According to the newspaper, Duarte noted that the move came as the UK cuts its overall aid budget in order to “invest more in addressing growing security threats”.

In March, the UK government announced plans to spend “around £6bn” of its aid budget on climate projects in developing countries over the next three years.

Carbon Brief analysis suggests that this spending amounts to roughly halving the UK’s annual climate finance, when accounting changes and inflation are factored in.

The post Analysis: UK no longer top UN Green Climate Fund donor after latest aid cut appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Analysis: UK no longer top UN Green Climate Fund donor after latest aid cut

Climate Change

Federal Budget must give Aussies a ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle’: Greenpeace

Published

20 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Alice Rush

SYDNEY, Tuesday 12 May 2026 — Ahead of tonight’s Federal Budget, the following statement can be attributed to David Ritter, CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific:

“As the Albanese government hands down the budget, it has an obligation to both look after households today, and to set Australians up for a flourishing future.

“The government has an opportunity to give Aussies a fair shake of the sauce bottle by taxing gas corporations fairly, accelerating the clean, affordable renewable solutions we already have, backing its own nature law reforms with appropriate funding and by protecting our oceans, forests and climate from polluting gas projects.

“The massive swell for fairly taxing gas corporations shows the public mood has permanently shifted; most Australians rightly do not accept that gas corporations like Woodside and Santos should make obscene war profits, while everyday people face soaring bills, and natural wonders like Scott Reef are threatened by reckless gas drilling projects.

“The global energy shock has exposed the dangers of our dependence on coal, oil and gas, and made clear that our future security and prosperity is in clean, affordable and homegrown wind and solar power.

“This must be a budget to benefit Australians, not gas corporations.”

Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s 2026 Federal Budget expectations can be found here.

–ENDS–

Notes:

Greenpeace has spokespeople available for interview before and after the budget announcement, including experts who can speak on Australia’s climate and emissions, the gas tax, Woodside’s Browse project, Labor’s new nature law, and our renewable future.

Media contact:

Kimberley Bernard on +61407 581 404 or kbenard@greenpeace.org

Federal Budget must give Aussies a ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle’: Greenpeace

Climate Change

‘A new low’: Greenpeace responds to Woodside’s flawed emissions reduction and renewables modelling

Published

21 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Alice Rush

PERTH, Tuesday 12 May 2026 — In response to Woodside’s Browse economic modelling released yesterday, the following comments can be attributed to WA Campaign Lead at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Geoff Bice:

“Greenpeace has analysed Woodside’s report on the polluting Browse gas project against independent modelling of WA’s energy system and emissions, and found glaring holes in the case made for the project.

“Woodside has reached a new low by modelling WA’s emissions reduction and energy transition pathway based on wildly expensive and risky decarbonisation options simply to justify its reckless Browse development at Scott Reef, initially rejected by the WA Environmental Protection Authority on environmental grounds.

“The WA Government cannot allow climate policy to be directed by climate vandals like Woodside. The clearest way to get WA’s emissions down is by setting clear emission reduction targets, which Greenpeace continues to call for.”

Key points from Greenpeace’s analysis of Woodside’s modelling follow:

Gas is the most expensive form of available electricity generation, according to the CSIRO; IEEFA also found that Browse gas would be about four times higher than the current average production cost of domestic gas in WA.
Direct air capture (DAC): The model assumes WA will be able to capture 6.9Mt of CO₂/year by 2050. Worldwide, the current total volumes captured are 0.01 Mt CO₂/year. DAC is currently priced at a minimum of $USD-400/tonne with many estimates ranging higher. Even reduced to $200/tonne, the cost per year of the volumes modelled becomes a staggering $1.38 billion, or $34.5 billion by 2050.
Carbon dumping, or carbon capture and storage (CCS): The model requires 40 times the amount of sequestration that occurred last year at WA’s only CCS operation on Barrow Island (32.4Mt compared to 1.3Mt). Barrow Island CCS has consistently failed to meet requirements and last year alone cost $344m (at 265 AU$/tCO₂). At those prices the Woodside modelling results in a cost per year by 2050 to be $8.6 billion.
Woodside’s Pluto gas facility has been supplying less than 4% to the WA market, far short of the 15% required under the WA domestic gas reservation policy.
Woodside includes $1.6 billion payable via the Offshore Petroleum Levy. The Levy was implemented to offset offshore decommissioning costs to the taxpayer but is set to expire in 2030 — 3 years before the Browse field is proposed to come online.