Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Pakistan and India floods
EXTREME WEATHER: Heavy flooding forced half a million people to evacuate their homes in just 24 hours in Pakistan’s Punjab this week, the Associated Press reported. It brings the total number of people displaced since last month to 1.8 million, the newswire said. According to Arab News, at least 41 people have died as a result of the flooding since last week. The flooding has also destroyed thousands of acres of crops in Punjab, a province that accounts for 68% of Pakistan’s total annual food grain production, Bloomberg reported.
CROSS-BORDER EVENT: Meanwhile, in Indian Punjab, “at least 30 people have died and more than 354,000 have been affected” by flooding, BBC News reported. India also warned Pakistan about more cross-border flooding for the second time in as many weeks, as both countries reeled from monsoon rains, the Associated Press reported.
UK dividing lines
NEW FACE: Zack Polanski has been elected as the new leader of the Green Party of England and Wales in a landslide victory, the Financial Times reported. Polanski is an “outspoken campaigner who has argued his party needs to ‘connect with people’s anger’ and become more combative against ‘villains’, including oil major Shell and the ‘super-rich’”, the newspaper said. Polanksi wants to “replace” the ruling Labour party on a platform of “eco-populism”, according to BBC News.
NORTH SEA OIL: Meanwhile, the UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch pledged to drill “all” of the remaining oil and gas in the North Sea if elected, BBC News reported. [The Conservatives are polling third, at 17%.] In response to the speech, the Daily Telegraph‘s world economy editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argued that Badenoch’s plan would not “raise this country’s long-term output of oil and gas by more than homeopathic amounts” nor “move the needle on UK energy prices” (more below).
Around the world
HIGHER AMBITIONS: The UN urged countries to set new, more ambitious national climate plans this month, ahead of this year’s COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, Reuters reported.
‘JUNK SCIENCE’: A group of more than 85 climate scientists released a “scathing review” of the Trump administration’s misleading climate report, DeSmog reported.
FOSSIL ENERGY: Russia said China had agreed to a massive new pipeline capable of importing as much as 50bn cubic metres of gas a year, the Financial Times reported.
US PRESSURE: Reuters reported that the US is pressuring other countries to reject a UN deal on cutting emissions from shipping by threatening them with tariffs, visa restrictions and port levies.
SWELTERING HEAT: Authorities in Japan and South Korea said 2025 was the hottest summer in their countries since records began, Al Jazeera reported.
MITIGATION WORK: According to Bloomberg, Zimbabwe has published draft regulations to establish a National Climate Fund. The fund will finance projects “aimed at mitigating the impact of climate change and respond[ing] to emergencies”.
20%
The amount by which clean-energy production has surged in India this year, according to Reuters, citing data from the thinktank Ember.
Latest climate research
“Extreme cold surges” have “robustly weakened in middle-to-high latitude continents during autumn and winter” due to climate change, according to a study in Nature Communications.
A study published in npj Climate Action found that exposing people to moral appeals results in overall carbon footprint reduction and increased participation in civic and political climate action, regardless of ideological affiliation.
The World Bank’s increase in climate finance spending since the Paris Agreement has been driven by projects with “low climate components”, according to a study in Climatic Change.
A claim that gas produced in the North Sea emits “four times” less CO2 than imported liquified natural gas (LNG) featured prominently in both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph this week, following Badenoch’s pledge to drill “all” the remaining oil and gas in the UK. However, this figure is highly misleading. It only refers to the emissions that come from the process of extracting and delivering the gas, which are much smaller than those from burning it. When both extraction and burning of the gas are taken into account, CO2 emissions from UK production are only around 15% lower than those from LNG imports, according to a new factcheck from Carbon Brief.
Spotlight
A man-made lake threatened by climate change
This week, Carbon Brief reports on how climate change is impacting the sustainability of a scenic nature reserve in the southern US.
In 1941, as World War 2 thickened, the US Congress approved a plan to construct a reservoir storage project on the Hiwassee River, a water body that cuts across the states of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.
The dam, which came to be known as Chatuge after an 18th-century Cherokee village, was originally built for power generation purposes. However, after it was completed, it became more than a hydroelectric project.
Today, the park offers “scenic mountain views” and “panoramic views” of Lake Chatuge. The lake is also home to rare, endangered plant species and is an important source of drinking water.
However, Lake Chatuge’s future has been plunged into uncertainty after the Tennessee Valley Authority proposed a plan to repair the dam’s spillway, which could involve draining the lake’s water levels by 20 feet (6m) for up to eight years.
The TVA’s action is largely forward-thinking. While the dam and its spillway are in good condition, the public utility company is wary of extreme weather events made more likely by climate change.
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through parts of Georgia and North Carolina, leaving more than 128 people dead across the US and uprooting communities in its wake. One analysis estimated that 44% of the economic damage from the storm can be attributed to human-caused climate change.
The Lake Chatuge area was largely spared, but officials worry that the next extreme weather event may not be far off.
“It’s the kind of event – the unusual storm event that can happen, that’s pretty rare – is what we’re looking out for,” a TVA project manager has said.
Meanwhile, aside from the imminent repairs made more likely by the increased possibility of extreme weather events, Lake Chatuge is also battling a parrot feather infestation, a phenomenon involving the spread of an invasive plant that has been linked to global warming in other parts of the US.
Saving Lake Chatuge
The threat posed by climate change to Lake Chatuge is not an isolated case. A July 2025 report by researchers at Utah State University found that climate change is affecting the social benefits of dams across the country.
Elsewhere in the world, the impact of extreme weather on ageing dams is wide ranging, including recently heightening tensions between India and Pakistan.
However, community members in the Lake Chatuge area are not giving up easily. A Facebook group dedicated to saving the lake has more than 2,000 members.
“Lake Chatuge is our economy,” Towns County’s sole commissioner, Cliff Bradshaw, told Carbon Brief. He added:
“The main attraction to this area is Lake Chatuge. Without the lake, the county’s tourism would drop, and our economy would suffer greatly – could even drive the county into a depression – as we have a great deal of businesses that rely solely on activities on Lake Chatuge for their customers, such as marinas, party boats and water activity playgrounds. The other businesses in town may not rely on the lake for customers, but do rely on the tourist traffic brought into the area by the lake to drive customers into their place of business.”
According to reporting by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, visitors have spent up to $100m annually in the area since 2021.
The TVA’s repair work could begin as soon as 2027, but community members are asking both the public utility company and political leaders to help find the least damaging pathway.
Watch, read, listen
SCIENCE CUTS: The Financial Times reported on how the Trump administration has “gutted” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), throwing into doubt the nation’s ability to respond to extreme weather disasters.
SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS: In an interview with Le Monde, the French economist Thomas Piketty argued that protecting the planet from climate change requires wealth redistribution.
TWEAKING NATURE: A Havard atmospheric chemist and an Oxford planetary physicist discussed the nuances and subtleties of geoengineering on the podcast Entanglements by Undark.
In Kenya’s Laikipia County where temperatures can reach as high as 30 degrees Celsius, a local building technology is helping homes stay cooler while supporting education, creating jobs and improving the livelihoods and resilience of community residents, Climate Home News found on a visit to the region.
Situated in a semi-arid region, houses in Laikipia are mostly built with wood or cement blocks with corrugated iron sheets for roofing. This building method usually leaves the insides of homes scorching hot – and as global warming accelerates, the heat is becoming unbearable.
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, lived in these harsh conditions until 2023, when the Laikipia Integrated Housing Project began in his community.
The project uses compressed earth block (CEB) technology, drawing on traditional building methods and local materials – including soil, timber, grass and cow dung – to keep buildings cool in the highland climate. The thick earth walls provide insulation against the heat.
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, stands in front of classroom blocks built with compressed earth blocks (Photo: Vivian Chime)
Peter Muthui, principal of Mukima Secondary School in Laikipia County, stands in front of classroom blocks built with compressed earth blocks (Photo: Vivian Chime)
“Especially around the months of September all the way to December, it is very, very hot [in Laikipia], but as you might have noticed, my house is very cool even during the heat,” Muthui told Climate Home News.
His school has also deployed the technology for classrooms and boarding hostels to ensure students can carry on studying during the hottest seasons of the year. This way, they are protected from severe conditions and school closures can be avoided. In South Sudan, dozens of students collapsed from heat stroke in the capital Juba earlier this year, causing the country to shutter schools for weeks.
COP30 sees first action call on sustainable, affordable housing
The buildings and construction sector accounts for 37% of global emissions, making it the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). While calls to decarbonise the sector have grown, meaningful action to cut emissions has remained limited.
At COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates and Canada launched the Cement and Concrete Breakthrough Initiative to speed up investment in the technologies, policies and tools needed to put the cement and concrete industry on a net zero-emissions path by 2050.
Canada’s innovation minister, François-Philippe Champagne, said the initiative aimed to build a competitive “green cement and concrete industry” which creates jobs while building a cleaner future.
Coordinated by UNEP’s Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, the council has urged countries to embed climate considerations into affordable housing from the outset, “ensuring the drive to deliver adequate homes for social inclusion goes hand in hand with minimising whole-life emissions and environmental impacts”.
Homes built with compressed earth blocks in Laikipia (Photo: Julián Reingold)
Homes built with compressed earth blocks in Laikipia (Photo: Julián Reingold)
With buildings responsible for 34% of energy-related emissions and 32% of global energy demand, and 2.8 billion people living in inadequate housing, the ICBC stressed that “affordable, adequate, resource-efficient, low-carbon, climate-resilient and durable housing is essential to a just transition, the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the effective implementation of the Paris Agreement”.
Compressed earth offers local, green alternative
By using locally sourced materials, and just a little bit of cement, the compressed earth technology is helping residents in Kenya’s Laikipia region to build affordable, climate-smart homes that reduce emissions and environmental impacts while creating economic opportunities for local residents, said Dacan Aballa, construction manager at Habitat for Humanity International, the project’s developers.
Aballa said carbon emissions in the construction sector occur all through the lifecycle, from material extraction, processing and transportation to usage and end of life. However, by switching to compressed earth blocks, residents can source materials available in their environment, avoiding nearly all of that embedded carbon pollution.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), global cement manufacturing is responsible for about 8% of total CO2 emissions, and the current trajectory would see emissions from the sector soar to 3.8 billion tonnes per year by 2050 – a level that, compared to countries, would place the cement industry as one of the world’s top three or four emitters alongside the US and China.
Comparing compressed earth blocks and conventional materials in terms of carbon emissions, Aballa said that by using soil native to the area, the process avoids the fossil fuels that would normally have been used for to produce and transport building materials, slashing carbon and nitrogen dioxide emissions.
The local building technology also helps save on energy that would have been used for cooling these houses as well as keeping them warm during colder periods, Aballa explained.
Justin Atemi, water and sanitation officer at Habitat for Humanity, said the brick-making technique helps reduce deforestation too. This is because the blocks are left to air dry under the sun for 21 days – as opposed to conventional fired-clay blocks that use wood as fuel for kilns – and are then ready for use.
Women walk passed houses in the village of Kangimi, Kaduna State, Nigeria (Photo: Sadiq Mustapha)
Traditional knowledge becomes adaptation mechanism
Africa’s red clay soil was long used as a building material for homes, before cement blocks and concrete became common. However, the method never fully disappeared. Now, as climate change brings higher temperatures, this traditional building approach is gaining renewed attention, especially in low-income communities in arid and semi-arid regions struggling to cope with extreme heat.
From Kenya’s highlands to Senegal’s Sahelian cities, compressed earth construction is being repurposed as a low-cost, eco-friendly option for homes, schools, hospitals – and even multi-storey buildings.
Senegal’s Goethe-Institut in Dakar was constructed primarily using compressed earth blocks. In Mali, the Bamako medical school, which was built with unfired mud bricks, stays cool even during the hottest weather.
And more recently, in Nigeria’s cultural city of Benin, the just-finished Museum of West African Art (MOWA) was built using “rammed earth” architecture – a similar technology that compresses moist soil into wooden frames to form solid walls – making it one of the largest such structures in Africa.
David Sathuluri is a Research Associate and Dr. Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
As climate scientists warn that we are approaching irreversible tipping points in the Earth’s climate system, paradoxically the very technologies being deployed to detect these tipping points – often based on AI – are exacerbating the problem, via acceleration of the associated energy consumption.
The UK’s much-celebrated £81-million ($109-million) Forecasting Tipping Points programme involving 27 teams, led by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), represents a contemporary faith in technological salvation – yet it embodies a profound contradiction. The ARIA programme explicitly aims to “harness the laws of physics and artificial intelligence to pick up subtle early warning signs of tipping” through advanced modelling.
We are deploying massive computational infrastructure to warn us of climate collapse while these same systems consume the energy and water resources needed to prevent or mitigate it. We are simultaneously investing in computationally intensive AI systems to monitor whether we will cross irreversible climate tipping points, even as these same AI systems could fuel that transition.
The computational cost of monitoring
Training a single large language model like GPT-3 consumed approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity, resulting in 552 metric tons of carbon dioxide – equivalent to driving 123 gasoline-powered cars for a year, according to a recent study.
GPT-4 required roughly 50 times more electricity. As the computational power needed for AI continues to double approximately every 100 days, the energy footprint of these systems is not static but is exponentially accelerating.
And the environmental consequences of AI models extend far beyond electricity usage. Besides massive amounts of electricity (much of which is still fossil-fuel-based), such systems require advanced cooling that consumes enormous quantities of water, and sophisticated infrastructure that must be manufactured, transported, and deployed globally.
The water-energy nexus in climate-vulnerable regions
A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day – sufficient to supply thousands of households or farms. In the Phoenix area of the US alone, more than 58 data centers consume an estimated 170 million gallons of drinking water daily for cooling.
The geographical distribution of this infrastructure matters profoundly as data centers requiring high rates of mechanical cooling are disproportionately located in water-stressed and socioeconomically vulnerable regions, particularly in Asia-Pacific and Africa.
At the same time, we are deploying AI-intensive early warning systems to monitor climate tipping points in regions like Greenland, the Arctic, and the Atlantic circulation system – regions already experiencing catastrophic climate impacts. They represent thresholds that, once crossed, could trigger irreversible changes within decades, scientists have warned.
Yet computational models and AI-driven early warning systems operate according to different temporal logics. They promise to provide warnings that enable future action, but they consume energy – and therefore contribute to emissions – in the present.
This is not merely a technical problem to be solved with renewable energy deployment; it reflects a fundamental misalignment between the urgency of climate tipping points and the gradualist assumptions embedded in technological solutions.
The carbon budget concept reveals that there is a cumulative effect on how emissions impact on temperature rise, with significant lags between atmospheric concentration and temperature impact. Every megawatt-hour consumed by AI systems training on climate models today directly reduces the available carbon budget for tomorrow – including the carbon budget available for the energy transition itself.
The governance void
The deeper issue is that governance frameworks for AI development have completely decoupled from carbon budgets and tipping point timescales. UK AI regulation focuses on how much computing power AI systems use, but it does not require developers to ask: is this AI’s carbon footprint small enough to fit within our carbon budget for preventing climate tipping points?
There is no mechanism requiring that AI infrastructure deployment decisions account for the specific carbon budgets associated with preventing different categories of tipping points.
Meanwhile, the energy transition itself – renewable capacity expansion, grid modernization, electrification of transport – requires computation and data management. If we allow unconstrained AI expansion, we risk the perverse outcome in which computing infrastructure consumes the surplus renewable energy that could otherwise accelerate decarbonization, rather than enabling it.
With global consensus over climate action faltering on the accord’s 10th anniversary, experts say “coalitions of the willing” should move faster and with more ambition
Rising demand in Southeast Asia and India is expected to prevent coal use from falling significantly this decade, the International Energy Agency predicts
What would it mean to resolve the paradox?
Resolving this paradox requires, for example, moving beyond the assumption that technological solutions can be determined in isolation from carbon constraints. It demands several interventions:
First, any AI-driven climate monitoring system must operate within an explicitly defined carbon budget that directly reflects the tipping-point timescale it aims to detect. If we are attempting to provide warnings about tipping points that could be triggered within 10-20 years, the AI system’s carbon footprint must be evaluated against a corresponding carbon budget for that period.
Second, governance frameworks for AI development must explicitly incorporate climate-tipping point science, establishing threshold restrictions on computational intensity in relation to carbon budgets and renewable energy availability. This is not primarily a “sustainability” question; it is a justice and efficacy question.
Third, alternative models must be prioritized over the current trajectory toward ever-larger models. These should include approaches that integrate human expertise with AI in time-sensitive scenarios, carbon-aware model training, and using specialized processors matched to specific computational tasks rather than relying on universal energy-intensive systems.
The deeper critique
The fundamental issue is that the energy-system tipping point paradox reflects a broader crisis in how wealthy nations approach climate governance. We have faith that innovation and science can solve fundamental contradictions, rather than confronting the structural need to constrain certain forms of energy consumption and wealth accumulation. We would rather invest £81 million in computational systems to detect tipping points than make the political decisions required to prevent them.
The positive tipping point for energy transition exists – renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels, and deployment rates are accelerating. What we lack is not technological capacity but political will to rapidly decarbonize, as well as community participation.
Deploying energy-intensive AI systems to monitor tipping points while simultaneously failing to deploy available renewable energy represents a kind of technological distraction from the actual political choices required.
The paradox is thus also a warning: in the time remaining before irreversible tipping points are triggered, we must choose between building ever-more sophisticated systems to monitor climate collapse or deploying available resources – capital, energy, expertise, political attention – toward allaying the threat.
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