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”.
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.
The American Lung Association’s annual report finds that climate change is making dirty air worse, especially for communities of color. The Trump administration keeps targeting rules meant to help.
Nearly half the nation’s children live in places with dangerous levels of air pollution, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Lung Association.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed adding microplastics and pharmaceuticals to a list of contaminants in drinking water, but attendees still worried that the administration was prioritizing economic interests over climate and health issues.
Municipal water system leaders and nonprofits gathered in Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress as part of Water Week 2026 focused on two priorities: securing funding to update aging water infrastructure and restoring a federal program that provides grants to low-income households for paying water and wastewater bills.
The fossil fuel crisis triggered by the Iran war should push nations to speed up their shift towards clean energy and break their dependence on volatile sources, energy and climate ministers said on Tuesday.
Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s climate minister and COP31 president, said the crisis was yet another demonstration that fossil fuels cannot guarantee energy security, making it crucial for countries to diversify by investing in renewable energy.
“We know that relying solely on fossil fuels means walking towards volatility, insecurity and climate collapse,” he told fellow ministers at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, an annual gathering in Berlin that traditionally opens the global climate diplomacy calendar.
Ministers from more than 30 countries, along with United Nations representatives, are meeting until Wednesday to lay the groundwork for a deal to accelerate climate action at COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye.
They will debate how to ramp up efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, mobilise climate finance amid shrinking international aid budgets, and leverage a strained multilateral system to deliver results.
Fossil fuels not the answer
The gathering is taking place in the shadow of what some energy analysts have described as the largest oil and gas supply disruption in history. The conflict in the Middle East has sent oil and gas prices soaring, with growing ripple effects on food production and industrial manufacturing.
Australia’s escalating fuel crisis meant the country’s energy minister Chris Bowen, who will also be in charge of COP31 negotiations, cancelled his trip to the Berlin summit. Joining by videolink, he said the crisis is a “unique opportunity” to underline the message that “energy reliability, energy sovereignty and energy security are entirely in keeping with strong decarbonisation”.
-
Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift
Energy think tank Ember said fossil fuel electricity fell slightly in both countries simultaneously for the first time, tipping the global balance -
US pressure puts World Bank’s climate plan at risk
Closed-door talks over the World Bank’s climate agenda have stalled, as the US pushes to scrap green targets and expand support for fossil fuels
“Doubling down on fossil fuels is not the answer to this crisis,” he added. “Wind cannot be subject to a sanction, the sun cannot be interrupted by a blockade. These are all reliable forms of energy, which must be supported by storage”.
Electrification is a “megatrend”
Echoing Bowen’s remarks, Germany’s climate minister Carsten Schneider said the current crisis will be “an accelerator [of the energy transition] because it will help many people understand and realise how dependent we are on fossil fuels”.
He added that “electrification is turning into a global megatrend” but called for more discussion on how to ensure that industry and transport become less reliant on oil and gas across the world.
At last year’s climate talks, countries failed to agree to start a process to draft a global plan to shift away from oil, coal and gas. But the Brazilian COP30 presidency is taking it upon itself to deliver this roadmap before the summit in Antalya.
Discussions are expected to kick into higher gear at the first-ever conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels due to start at the end of this week in Colombia. COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago has said the roadmap should be published in September.
Clear plans needed
Addressing the Petersberg summit, the head of the United Nations António Guterres said that transition roadmaps can help countries manage urgent choices during the ongoing fuel crisis while advancing a just transition to a clean and secure energy future.
“We must respond to the energy crisis without deepening the climate crisis,” he added. “Short-term measures must not lock in long-term fossil fuel dependence and expansion”.
The ministers argued that, despite the US withdrawal from international climate diplomacy under President Trump, other countries remained committed to working together to tackle the climate crisis.
But Türkiye’s Kurum scolded the more than 40 governments that have not yet published their national climate plans, more than a year after the official UN deadline. These are mostly smaller nations, but the group of laggards also includes Vietnam, Argentina and Egypt.
“We will ensure that countries fulfil the fundamental requirements of the COP,” he said, adding that his team is working intensely with the UN to ensure these plans – known as nationally determined contributions – are submitted.
“Without diagnosis, you can’t treat”, he said.
The post Fossil fuel crisis offers chance to speed up energy transition, ministers say appeared first on Climate Home News.
Fossil fuel crisis offers chance to speed up energy transition, ministers say
-
Greenhouse Gases8 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change8 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change Videos2 years ago
The toxic gas flares fuelling Nigeria’s climate change – BBC News
-
Renewable Energy6 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits