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

Coral reefs are not doomed – but policy must catch up with the science

Published

6 hours ago

June 16, 2026

Alice Rush

Dr. Stacy Jupiter is the Executive Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Global Marine Program. Melissa Wright is Bloomberg Ocean Initiative Lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies.

For years, the dominant story on coral reefs has been one of inevitable loss, with news headlines focusing on mass bleaching, ecosystem collapse, and catastrophic tipping points. As ocean temperatures continue to rise, many people have come to see the decline of the world’s reefs as unavoidable.

The threats are real and urgent, but new evidence points to a more complicated and useful conclusion: some reefs still have a meaningful chance to survive and recover, provided they are protected.

A major new analysis, published today with the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, identifies more than 165,000 square kilometers of coral reefs, across 71 countries and 100 territories and jurisdictions, with the strongest potential to withstand and recover from climate impacts.

Drawing on more than 45,000 coral surveys, along with decades of climate and ocean data, the research finds that three times more reefs may be capable of surviving the climate crisis than previously understood. That has major implications for reef-dependent communities, food security, coastal protection, fisheries, tourism, and national economies.

Jun 5, 2026

Nature

Offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report warns

Sea life in countries like Kenya is under threat from planned new oil and gas production, analysis by environmental groups has found

Read more
Jun 11, 2026

Comment

The Pacific made history in the courts – now we must do it in the negotiations

Legal clarity alone will not lead to reduced emissions, more finance or stronger national climate plans – political will is key to meeting states’ obligations

Read more

Essential natural infrastructure for communities

The findings make clear that reefs will not all respond to climate impacts in the same way. Some are located in rare underwater cool spots that can help shield them from extreme heat. Some show greater resistance to bleaching and other climate-related stress. Others recover more quickly after severe disturbances. These differences matter because they show where protection can have the greatest long-term impact.

More than 500 million people depend on reefs for food, livelihoods, and coastal protection. For those communities, climate-resilient reefs are not an abstract conservation priority. They are essential natural infrastructure. They help protect coastlines, sustain fisheries, support local economies, and reduce climate risk. Because ocean currents move coral larvae and marine life between reef systems, some of these reefs may also help regenerate wider reef ecosystems after climate shocks.

This should change how governments, funders, and conservation partners prioritize action.

Climate change remains the greatest long-term threat to coral reefs. At the same time, many of the pressures pushing reefs closer to collapse are immediate and local. Sewage pollution, deforestation, agricultural runoff, destructive fishing practices, and poorly managed coastal development continue to damage reefs that are already under stress. Recent research shows that water pollution and fishing pressure are now among the leading local threats affecting nearly two-thirds of the world’s coral reefs.

These pressures can be reduced. Governments and local partners are already working to improve reef management, cut pollution, strengthen enforcement, and protect critical ecosystems. Those efforts need to move faster, alongside much stronger action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Prioritising climate-resilient reefs

The new maps of climate-resilient reefs give governments, communities, and reef managers a clearer basis for action. They show where reefs have the strongest potential to persist over time, and where protection can deliver the greatest benefits for people, coastlines, and economies.

Right now, only around 28 percent of the identified climate-resilient reefs fall within protected or conserved areas. If these reefs are among the most capable of surviving climate impacts and helping regenerate broader reef systems, they should be prioritized for protection, management, and investment.

The case for action is practical as well as ecological. Healthy reefs can reduce wave energy by up to 97 percent, helping protect coastlines from storms, flooding, and erosion. They support fisheries that feed millions of people, sustain tourism jobs and local economies, and help reduce climate risk for vulnerable coastal communities.

For many families, a healthy reef means food, income, and protection when storms hit. For Indigenous Peoples and coastal communities, reefs are also tied to culture, heritage, identity, and traditional knowledge systems.

Ocean conservation must catch up

Governments are beginning to recognize the urgency of protecting climate-resilient reefs. At last year’s UN Ocean Conference in Nice, 11 countries signed a declaration committing to stronger protection of these reefs, including action to address destructive fishing, pollution, and unsustainable coastal development.

As leaders meet in Kenya this week to discuss the challenges facing the world’s ocean, more governments should join the declaration and help build a broader coalition committed to safeguarding these critical ecosystems.

As coral reefs pass tipping point, ocean protection rises up political agenda

Some countries are already showing what this leadership can look like. Brazil has included corals in its national climate plans. The Bahamas is embedding reef protection into national policy and local stewardship systems. The declaration offers a way to build on these efforts and scale them globally.

But commitments will not be enough. Success will depend on implementation. That means stronger protection and management, reduced local pressures, increased investment, and meaningful support for the Indigenous Peoples and local communities stewarding these ecosystems.

The science is clear. Many reefs still have the capacity to persist and recover. The question is whether policy and investment will move quickly enough to protect them, so they can continue sustaining communities, economies, and coastlines for generations to come.

The post Coral reefs are not doomed – but policy must catch up with the science appeared first on Climate Home News.

Coral reefs are not doomed – but policy must catch up with the science

Climate Change

Months After a Jet Fuel Leak, No Agency Tested Waters Downstream of Piscataway Creek. So Community Groups Are Doing It Themselves.

Published

6 hours ago

June 16, 2026

Alice Rush

Authorities that manage the Potomac River tributary did not sample the stretch where residents fish and recreate. One Indigenous leader sees the lack of response as part of a pattern of ongoing neglect.

By Aman Azhar

In the five months after jet fuel started leaking from Joint Base Andrews into Piscataway Creek, no agency tested the water or sediment some 20 miles downstream, where the creek empties into the Potomac River and the shoreline community and anglers gather to fish and boat along the riverbank.

Months After a Jet Fuel Leak, No Agency Tested Waters Downstream of Piscataway Creek. So Community Groups Are Doing It Themselves.

Climate Change

Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges

Published

15 hours ago

June 15, 2026

Alice Rush

The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.

By Aman Azhar

The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.