Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
UK sees Labour landslide
‘HISTORIC’ RESULT: The UK Labour party has declared a “historic” victory in the country’s general election, while the Conservatives suffered their worst-ever defeat, the Financial Times reported. BusinessGreen said that Labour’s “sizeable majority” would provide the party with a “clear mandate for its ambitious green plans”. It added this includes a decarbonised power system by 2030 (more on this below), ending new oil and gas licences and a foreign policy “reset” based around international climate diplomacy.
GREEN SURGE: The UK’s Green party won three new seats in parliament, bringing its total number of MPs up to four, the Guardian reported. Across the UK, Green votes increased to around 7% from 2.7% of the vote share in 2019, from a total of 866,000 votes in 2019 to around 2m votes in 2024, according to Greenpeace. Below, Carbon Brief outlines some of the key climate players from across the parties that won seats in the early hours of this morning.
FREE WEBINAR: Following the results, Carbon Brief is hosting a free webinar at 10am UK time on Tuesday 9 July to discuss key climate issues facing the new Labour government. Carbon Brief journalists Dr Simon Evans and Molly Lempriere will be joined by Chris Stark, CEO of the Carbon Trust and former chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive of Energy UK, and Camilla Born MBE, independent climate advisor and former UK senior official at COP26. Register here.
Hurricane Beryl wrecks havoc
KILLER STORM: Hurricane Beryl struck islands across the Caribbean and Venezuela this week, as the earliest category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, reported the Associated Press. The hurricane killed at least 11 people across islands including Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as in northern Venezuela, Reuters said.
‘ARMAGEDDON-LIKE’: After making landfall in the Grenadian island of Carriacou on Monday, the hurricane brought “devastating winds and storm surges” to Jamaica on Wednesday, Sky News reported. Beryl is now set to hit the Cayman Islands before moving further west and reaching the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, reported the Washington Post.
RECORD SEASON: The Financial Times noted that the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned that there was an 85% higher chance of an above-average hurricane season in the Atlantic this year. According to the FT, NOAA said the increased risk was due to a “confluence of factors”, including record-breaking ocean temperatures, the onset of the natural weather phenomenon La Niña and reduced Atlantic trade winds, which allow hurricanes to grow in strength more easily.
Biden unveils heat protections
‘REALLY, REALLY DUMB’: US president Joe Biden has launched a first-ever federal workplace standard for extreme heat, reported the Guardian. If finalised, the standard “will substantially reduce heat injuries, illnesses and deaths for over 36 million workers”, Biden said. Announcing the rules, Biden took aim at Republicans working to undo his climate measures, calling such actions “really, really dumb”, the New York Times said.
CHEVRON DOCTRINE: The US Supreme Court overturned the principle that has guided UK regulatory law for the past 40 years, known as the Chevron doctrine, reported Inside Climate News. The sweeping away of the “Goliath” of modern law will weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s legal authority, as courts “weigh Biden’s policies to cut greenhouse gases”, the publication said.
LNG PERMITS: A federal judge has ruled that the Biden administration must resume issuing permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities, the New York Times reported. The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by 16 Republican state attorney generals who argued that Biden’s pause on licensing, brought in to allow time to analyse how those exports affect climate change, amounted to a ban that harmed their states’ economies, it added. Bloomberg noted that the decision is “unlikely to immediately jump start approvals”.
Around the world
- CHINESE FLOODS: Local authorities in China’s Hunan province declared a “wartime” emergency after torrential rainfall led to “the most severe flooding seen in 70 years”, the South China Morning Post reported.
- BRAZILIAN FIRES: Wildfires in the Brazilian Amazon in the first half of 2024 were the worst in 20 years, with 13,489 individual fires registered, Agence France-Presse reported.
- SBTi CEO RESIGNS: The head of the Science Based Targets initiative, Luiz Amaral, who came “under fire for a controversial decision to loosen guidelines around carbon offsets”, will step down at the end of July, Bloomberg reported.
- THOMPSON FIRE: Around 28,000 residents have been forced to evacuate in northern California after a wildfire broke out as the “state simmers in a brutal and potentially historic heatwave”, the Guardian reported.
- ‘FEROCIOUS STORMS’: Seven were left dead after “ferocious storms and torrential rains” hit France, Switzerland and Italy last weekend, Agence France-Presse reported.
- INDIAN LANDSLIDES: Heavy rains in northeastern India have “triggered floods and landslides in the region”, killing at least 16 people and displacing more than 300,000 over the last two weeks, Deutsche Welle reported.
14
The number of times women are more likely to die in extreme weather disasters, according to Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia, reported the Australian Associated Press.
Latest climate research
- Tropical forest degradation due to “edge effects” – those at the edges of forests – is 200% higher than previously thought, increasing the areas more vulnerable to drought, a study published in Nature and covered by Carbon Brief found.
- As the climate warms, the cities of Hai Phong in Vietnam, Yangon in Myanmar and Bangkok in Thailand will all face increases in the peak intensity and duration of tropical cyclones, a new study published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science indicated.
- The gradual trend towards a warmer and drier climate “poses immense uncertainty for the future of British festivals” stated the author of a new “short research article” published in Weather, which examined the “more extreme weather events” in Glastonbury festival’s history.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
One of the new Labour government’s key manifesto pledges is to reach “zero-carbon electricity” by 2030. While this target is seen as extremely ambitious, the UK has already made significant progress in slashing fossil fuels while rolling out renewable power. Under the Conservatives, coal power has already been all but phased out, falling from 40% of electricity generation in 2012 to near-zero in 2024, just 12 years later. To meet its target, Labour will need to phase out unabated gas twice as fast, from 29% in 2024 to near-zero in 2030.
Spotlight
Key climate figures in the new UK parliament
After a “historic” win for the Labour party and loss for the Conservatives in the UK’s general election, Carbon Brief takes a look at who will be setting the climate agenda in the years to come.
The Labour party has secured a landslide victory in the country’s general election, winning 412 seats in parliament, up by 211 from 2019.
Former Labour leader and MP for Doncaster North Ed Miliband is expected to take on the role of energy security and net-zero secretary, leading one of Labour’s “five main missions”, to “make Britain a clean energy superpower”. This includes targeting lower energy bills, creating jobs and delivering energy security by transitioning to zero-carbon electricity by 2030, the party said.
Beyond the department of energy security and net-zero, other key ministers who will have a say in steering a range of climate and energy policy over the next five years are likely to include Louise Haigh as secretary of state for transport, Steve Reed as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs and Rachel Reeves as chancellor of the exchequer.
Beyond government positions, a number of pro-climate action Labour MPs have won seats, including:
- Katie White in Leeds North West, who led the campaign that created Britain’s first Climate Change Act.
- Polly Billington in East Thanet, who founded the environmental network UK100.
- Melanie Onn, in Great Grimsby & Cleethorpes, who was previously deputy chief executive of trade association RenewableUK.
- Luke Murphy in Basingstoke, who was head of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Fair Transition Unit and associate director for the energy, climate, housing and infrastructure team.
The Green party also won four seats and the Liberal Democrats won 70.
According to research by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in June, these two parties had the most environmentally friendly manifestos, with the Greens and Liberal Democrats scoring 39 and 32 out of 40, respectively. (Labour scored 21).
Greens MPs include co-leaders Carla Denyer, who beat Labour’s shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire by 10,000 votes in Bristol Central, and Adrian Ramsay, who overturned a 22,000 Conservative majority in Waveney Valley, with a 32.1% swing to the Green Party.
Additionally, Siân Berry has won Brighton Pavilion, the seat previously held by former Green MP Caroline Lucas.
For the Liberal Democrats, it was a “record-breaking” night with the number of seats held by the party surging from 11 in 2019.
This includes Pippa Heylings for South Cambridgeshire, who was team leader for the UK’s Global Biodiverse Landscapes Fund at the multinational company PwC. She also founded the climate-focused advisory company Talking Transformation, along with other climate-focused Liberal Democrat MPs.
Watch, read, listen
CONSPIRACY INFLUENCERS: Rolling Stone took a look at how Europe’s “conspiracy influencers” have gone from a focus on Covid-19 to climate change, with conspiratorial narratives about climate action entering the mainstream.
FOOD PRICES: A “big read” in the Financial Times looked at how shifting weather patterns are “reducing crop yields and squeezing supplies”, which could create a permanent source of inflation.
ELECTION MEANING: Ahead of the UK general election, Carbon Brief’s deputy editor and senior policy editor Dr Simon Evans spoke to Michael Liebreich and Baroness Bryony Worthington about what the results mean for climate and energy on the Cleaning Up podcast.
Coming up
- 7 July: France national assembly elections, second round
- 9-11 July: NATO Summit, Washington DC
- 16-17 July: G7 trade meeting, Reggio Calabria, Italy
Pick of the jobs
- Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, communications coordinator | Salary: Up to $38,400. Location: Fully remote, preferred location in the global south
- Uplift, senior political adviser | Salary: £46,259-£50,548. Location: London
- Sustainable Housing Observatory, senior project manager – adaptation to climate change | Salary: Unknown. Location: Paris
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 5 July 2024: Key climate MPs in new UK parliament; Hurricane Beryl; Biden calls deniers ‘really, really dumb’ 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.
-
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 +6