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.
Scientists are the most trusted source of information for climate change in some of the largest global-south countries, ranking above newspapers, friends and social media.
This is according to a survey of 8,400 people across Chile, Colombia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Vietnam, the results of which have been published in Nature Climate Change.
The study finds that trusting and paying attention to climate scientists was associated with increased climate knowledge, roughly twice the effect size associated with a college degree.
One scientist who was not involved in the research says the findings suggest there is an opportunity to “bolster climate knowledge” in the global south by widening access to climate science information.
When asked to rank how important climate change is for their country, participants rated the issue as high, with the average score for each country above 4.4.
However, when asked to rank the importance of climate change compared to other key social issues, respondents – on average – ranked taking action on climate change ninth out of 13, after improving healthcare, decreasing corruption and increasing employment.
Another expert not involved in the study says the results highlight a “crucial tension” between “strong” public concern about climate change and the perception that other social issues should take priority when allocating “scarce” public resources.
Global-south focus
The impacts of climate change are disproportionately felt by the poorest members of society, who often live in the global south.
Voices from the global south are “often invisible in science”, he adds.
Huerta was not involved in the study, but has published research using surveys to assess public beliefs about climate change. He describes the new study – which is evenly distributed across Chile, Colombia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Vietnam – as “a valuable attempt to capture public views across Latin America, Africa and Asia”.
The seven countries featured in the research include six of the 20 largest in the global south and range from “the lower end of low-to-middle-income countries (Nigeria) to the low end of high-income countries (Chile)”, according to the study.
The survey was administered online by polling company YouGov between April and May 2023. Respondents could answer in English or in other “country-specific languages”. For example, respondents in Chile and Colombia had the option to carry out the survey in Spanish, while those in India could answer in Hindi.
Trust and attention
The authors asked survey respondents to rank 12 different sources of information about climate change, based on the attention they pay it and how much they trust it.
The average rankings are shown in the table below, where one indicates the highest level of attention or trust and 12 indicates the lowest.
Average survey results for ranking 12 different sources of information about climate change, based on the attention respondents pay to it and how much they trust it. Source: Carson et al (2025).
The table shows that, on average, scientists are ranked the highest for both trust and attention.
The country-specific results show that scientists rank the highest in trust in every country except Vietnam, where they rank second highest after television programmes. Meanwhile, friends and religious leaders rank the lowest for trust.
Huerta says it is “encouraging” that the general public “tend to trust scientists as their main source of information”.
However, he warns Carbon Brief about “social desirability” – a phenomenon in which people respond to surveys in a way that they think will be viewed favourably by others. In this case, it means that “people may report higher trust in scientists and less reliance on social media than they actually practice”, Huerta explains.
He tells Carbon Brief that the relatively low attention and trust shown to family and friends is a “remarkable finding that stands in contrast with conventional knowledge”. He continues:
“Previous psychological research on this topic (generally predominated by western samples) would support an expectation that people would have greater trust in interpersonal social referrents like friends and family…
“I think the findings from the study signal an opportunity to bolster climate knowledge in the global south by widening access to scientific information on climate change.”
Climate knowledge
The survey also assesses the level of climate knowledge of the respondents, by asking them to identify whether a series of statements are true, false, or if they are “not sure”.
More than 80% of respondents correctly identified that the following two statements are correct:
Climate change is mainly caused by human activities.
Knowledge about climate change was “quite similar” across countries, according to the survey. However, the authors found that women are more likely to respond “not sure” than men.
The study finds that trusting and paying attention to climate scientists was associated with increased climate knowledge, roughly twice the effect size associated with a college degree.
Policy comparison
Early in the survey, respondents were asked to rank how important climate change is for their country on a scale from one to five. On average, all countries ranked climate change above 4.4 on this scale.
However, the survey later asked respondents to rank the 13 government programmes, including climate, healthcare and education, in order of importance.
The authors found that “addressing climate change” ranks at ninth, on average, across the seven countries.
Climate change ranks the highest in Vietnam, where it comes in second behind “decreasing political corruption”.
However, it ranks 10th in Nigeria and South Africa, beating only “improving public transport”, “improving access to credit” and “getting Covid-19 under control”.
Lead author Prof Richard Carson, a professor of economics at the University of California, tells Carbon Brief that asking respondents to rank different issues “provides a much richer picture of the structure of public opinion on climate issues” than asking them to rank issues separately. This, he says, is because it forces respondents to make “direct tradeoffs”.
The survey shows that “people might say that dealing with climate change matters – but this does not mean that they would place it on the leaderboard when it comes to priorities”, he adds.
Huerta – the experimental psychology researcher – tells Carbon Brief that results highlight “a crucial tension”. He explains:
“Athough people show strong concern for climate change, when it comes to allocating scarce public resources, priorities such as health, education, poverty reduction, and security often come first.”
He adds:
“People may genuinely care, but without clear, immediate benefits, climate action is often deprioritised – unlike issues such as air pollution, where the consequences and gains are more tangible.”
The authors also asked survey respondents to rank seven “health-related issues”, with respiratory problems consistently identified as the highest priority.
Huerta says the results show a “disconnection”, adding:
“People rank respiratory illness as a top health concern, but they do not always connect it with climate change more broadly. This highlights a key communication challenge for climate policy.”
Finally, the authors asked respondents to rank their preference for the use of a carbon tax. In keeping with the results above, “spend on education and health” ranks top of the list. This is followed by subsidising solar panels and investing in “clean research and development”.
Dr Stella Nyambura Mbau is a lecturer at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and was not involved in the study. She tells Carbon Brief that “the preference for earmarking carbon tax revenue for health, education and renewable energy subsidies aligns with community-based adaptation strategies, such as solar-powered solutions, that address immediate needs while building resilience”.
She suggests that prioritising policies that can tackle climate change alongside other social issues could “bridge the gap between climate action and local priorities”.
Next steps
The authors note that their survey could only be completed by people with access to the internet, meaning that it “systematically underrepresents those with lower income, living in rural areas and who are older”.
Only people over the age of 18 were allowed to complete the survey. Across the countries, the median age of respondents was 31 years old. There was also a slight skew towards men, who made up 55% of the respondents.
As such, some external experts pointed out that results could be skewed.
For example, Prof Tarun Khanna, a professor at Harvard Business School, notes that when ranking uses for carbon taxes, there was low support for policies such as returning money to the poor. He questions whether this could be “because the survey concentrates on a relatively affluent class of people”.
He praises the study’s “large, cross-national dataset” and “rigorous statistical techniques”. However, he adds:
“The survey questions focus primarily on mitigation [greenhouse gas emissions prevention and reduction] responsibilities, reflecting a global north bias in climate surveys. [The questions] do not fully capture urgent adaptation concerns or the lived realities of climate vulnerability in low and middle-income countries.”
Future research should incorporate more “adaptation-specific questions” in order to “provide a more holistic understanding of climate action priorities”, he says.
Given the constant flow of bad news around climate change – smashed heat records, shrinking polar ice, rampant wildfires, apocalyptic floods – you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s no cause for hope. But a new book by the head of the World Resources Institute (WRI) argues passionately for a more positive view.
Dasgupta, president and CEO of the US-based WRI, is far from evangelical about the global mission of green transition. His assessment of the state of play is rooted in realism – and, like many advocates for a sustainable world, he is disappointed with the pace of change so far.
But, he insists, that is no reason to give up. The book explains elegantly – drawing on some 60 real-world stories of success and more than 100 interviews with experts, leaders and change-makers – not just what’s holding things back but, most importantly, how to overcome those obstacles.
In an interview with Climate Home News before the book’s publication this week, the softly-spoken former head of infrastructure at the World Bank pointed to leaps forward in technology – from solar and wind power to greener cement and satellites that can monitor rainforest loss remotely – as the underlying enabler of climate progress. But he emphasised that technology alone will not be enough.
“We need to use technology as a starting point to orchestrate the change,” he explained. “We need to get the outcome we want that is not only good for climate, but good for people and nature at the same time.”
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Focus on people – not carbon
A major failure of the climate movement so far, in Dasgupta’s view, is that it has focused too heavily on carbon – the damage it’s doing and how to reduce CO2 emissions – and not enough on people.
Unless voters understand that measures to tackle climate change will bring them benefits now rather than in a far distant future, they are unlikely to make green choices a priority, he argues – especially when those decisions come with an upfront cost such as replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump.
That’s why some governments, including in Europe, have run into trouble when trying to force low-carbon behaviour shifts. Dasgupta believes politicians have done a pretty bad job at telling citizens why it makes personal sense for them to switch to greener ways of living, working and doing business.
He noted that in 2024 – a historic year for elections, with about 70 countries holding polls – only one, the UK, saw strong campaigning on climate policies, with the centre-left Labour Party winning partly on a green ticket.
India-born Dasgupta, a trained architect who has many years’ experience of working on ways to make cities more sustainable, argues that climate policy experts need to offer politicians more help to demonstrate why it’s in the public interest to get behind climate action.
“I think for too long, the transition has been painted as about the sacrifices we need to do; don’t drive cars, take buses and [buy] heat pumps – but not the outcome that is there. That is clean air for our kids, abundant, affordable energy, food that doesn’t destroy nature, clean water,” he said.
Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute and author of “The New Global Possible – Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis” (Photo: Beverlié Lord)
Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute and author of “The New Global Possible – Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis” (Photo: Beverlié Lord)
Hydrocarbons “everywhere”
Yet the question still begs itself: why – if the advantages seem obvious – has it been so hard to make these changes at the scale and pace required? The answer, according to Dasgupta, is that their proponents are running up against a model rooted in 200 years of prosperity fuelled by coal, oil and gas.
As a result, hydrocarbons “are everywhere in the economy”, even in many daily essentials like shampoo – and the incumbents who got rich from extracting and selling fossil fuels are fighting to preserve the status quo.
“We have to find a path for them to change. They’re not just going to go away. They’re very economically powerful, politically connected,” Dasgupta said.
Renewed business and political support for the prevailing high-carbon economic model has led to a pushback against climate action in some parts of the West, not least in the United States where the administration of climate change-sceptic Donald Trump wants to “drill, baby drill” and is pulling the country out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Dasgupta doesn’t find this too surprising.
“I think this backlash was inevitable because when we signed the Paris Agreement, we thought we were signing a climate agreement. We didn’t realise we were signing onto a vast economic transition that we’re in the beginning of,” he said.
COP: “Imperfect but necessary”
The book does an efficient job at defending the UN climate process that yielded the Paris pact and its emblematic annual COP summits, which have come under attack in recent years for falling short of promises, getting bogged down in arcane arguments and turning into a travelling climate circus.
Dasgupta points to how – patchy as its implementation may be – action spurred by the Paris Agreement has brought down global warming predictions from around 4 degrees Celsius this century to 2.6C – and if all pledges made so far were to become a reality, even to 1.7C, within the promised range.
At the same time, he argues for making COPs more effective by changing decision-making from the current consensus-based model to one that that “gives every country a voice but not a veto”.
Cop21 president Laurent Fabius holds up the text of the Paris Agreement. (Photo: IISD/ENB/ Kiara Worth)
Cop21 president Laurent Fabius holds up the text of the Paris Agreement. (Photo: IISD/ENB/ Kiara Worth)
In addition, to give the Paris process more teeth, he recommends greater transparency on individual countries’ progress, which would help civil society and citizens hold governments to account, along with the ability for the five-year stocktake to offer “remedies and rigorous regimes for improvement”.
In the end, making the Paris Agreement – and the national climate plans (NDCs) that underpin it – work as intended will require “a systemwide economic transition” that can only be achieved by uniting all government ministries, businesses and financial institutions behind that mission, the book notes.
“COP is an imperfect but necessary instrument for mobilising global climate action, but the harsh reality is that our success currently depends on voluntary contributions to be implemented beyond it,” Dasgupta writes.
Win-win-win?
Making this happen means convincing the world outside of COPs it’s an endeavour worth signing up for. The sixth chapter of the book is dedicated to how a loose consortium of researchers, top-level officials and organisation such as WRI and the World Economic Forum embarked on a monumental mission to do that by shaping a positive narrative around the economics of a low-carbon transition.
One piece of number-crunching in particular captured imaginations in the climate community and beyond: if done right, investing in climate action could result in $26 trillion of economic benefits by 2030 compared with business as usual, the New Climate Economy (NCE) research programme calculated.
Has hard data like this worked to win hearts and minds? It depends on who you ask. According to the book, in a statement released ahead of COP27 in 2022, NCE commissioners Sharan Burrow, Nicolas Stern and Paul Polman described this figure and the work supporting it as “a breakthrough”, showing “once and for all that ambitious climate action is a win-win-win for the climate, people, and the economy”.
Sadly, that victory may not have been as decisive as they had hoped, as evidenced in today’s culture wars over the costs of net zero in the UK, the conspicuous absence of climate and nature from election campaigns, and the dash by many fossil-fuel and financial behemoths to row back on their emissions-cutting pledges.
Despite recent setbacks, Dasgupta puts his hope in two ways forward: a push to translate global climate goals into national-level transitions in sectors like energy and food; and a combination of government regulation and voluntary business action to keep the private sector moving in the right direction.
“I don’t think we have the luxury to be disappointed,” he said. “I think we know what [has] to be done, what needs to happen. We just have to get to work.”
China and India accounted for 87% of the new coal-power capacity put into operation in the first half of 2025, whereas other regions continued to move away from coal.
These developments, highlighting a growing global divide between many countries phasing out coal power and a handful continuing to expand new capacity, are revealed in Global Energy Monitor’s latest Global Coal Plant Tracker results and reported here for the first time.
The results include Ireland becoming the fifth EU country to phase out coal power and Latin America becoming a region with zero active proposals for new coal capacity.
Meanwhile, the results show the US is on track to retire more coal capacity in 2025 than it did under the Biden administration last year, despite the efforts of the Trump White House.
Moreover, rather than follow the US in turning away from clean-energy leadership, other countries have continued their efforts to phase down coal power, with “just energy transition partnerships” (JETPs) advancing in Vietnam, Indonesia and South Africa during 2025 to date.
EU and Latin America pave the way for coal phaseout
The EU and Latin America are emerging as the global leaders in phasing out coal power, according to GEM’s analysis.
On the heels of the UK coal phaseout in 2024, Ireland stopped the use of coal power in June 2025, with nine EU countries expected to follow suit through 2029, including Spain, France and the Netherlands.
In total, all but three EU countries are planning to phase out coal by 2033, as shown in the chart below.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal power should be virtually phased out in advanced economies by 2030 and the rest of the world by 2040 to keep warming below 1.5C, as the Paris Agreement targets.
The target year for the phaseout of coal across EU countries, separated into countries that never had coal units, those that have completed the coal phaseout, those with Paris-aligned phaseouts planned and those that do not have Paris-aligned phaseout plans. Source: Global Coal Plant Tracker, GEM.
Development has also ceased in the region. No new coal plants have been proposed in the EU since 2018 and no coal plants have entered construction since 2019.
The coal phaseout in the EU and UK has been driven by a combination of country commitments and supporting policies and regulations, including air and carbon pollution limits on power plants, carbon pricing and policy support for clean-energy deployment.
Coal-power capacity retirements in the EU stalled for two years, following gas shortage concerns in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they have since accelerated.
Coal capacity retired in the first half of 2025 (2.5GW) has already nearly exceeded all of 2023 (2.7GW) – with another 11GW planned for retirement in the EU by the end of the year.
GEM data shows that, in Latin America, the shelving of two coal-plant proposals in Honduras and Brazil in 2025 has left the region with no new coal plants actively proposed, as shown in the chart below – a collapse of the 18 plants totalling 7.3GW of capacity proposed in 2015.
The number of proposed coal plants per year in Latin America. Source: Global Coal Plant Tracker, GEM.
This followed the entry of Honduras into the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) in May and the lack of new coal plants proposed in Brazil’s 2025 national energy auctions, with a decrease in coal-power generation projected through 2034 in Brazil’s most recent 10-year energy plan.
Latin America is also nearly on track for a coal-power pathway that would be aligned with the 1.5C target of the Paris Agreement. More than 60% (10GW) of its 16.3GW of operating coal-power capacity is scheduled to come offline by 2040.
China and India continue to dominate
China and India dominated coal development in the first half of 2025, as the two countries had more new proposals, construction starts and coal plants commissioned than the rest of the world combined, GEM’s tracker shows.
As the chart below shows, there were 74.7GW and 12.8GW of newly proposed coal projects in China and India, respectively, in the first half of 2025, compared to just 11GW in the rest of the world.
Proposals, construction starts and coal capacity brought online in the first half of 2025 in China, India and the rest of the world. Source: Global Coal Plant Tracker, GEM.
Construction starts and restarts in China also reached 46GW, putting the country on track to match the record levels of 2024, when more than 97GW of coal-power plants began construction.
As discussed in GEM’s recent joint report with the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), major coal-producing provinces, including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Shandong and Shaanxi, are among the provinces commissioning and building the most new coal power, as shown in the chart below.
This expansion is backed by established permitting pathways, strong local power companies and a reliable flow of investment.
Changes in the project status of coal-power projects by province in China in H1 2025, showing those that are commissioned (darkest blue), under construction or restarted (mid-blue), permitted (aqua), a new project that has been activated or restarted (pale blue) or retired (grey). Categories are not mutually exclusive; for example, a plant that was both permitted and started construction in H1 2025 appears in both categories. Source: Global Coal Plant Tracker, GEM, CREA.
Yet, China has also been installing record amounts of clean energy, with more than 500GW of solar and wind power expected to come online in 2025. The increased generation from solar and wind power exceeded the increase in power demand in the first half of 2025, helping drive down China’s CO2 emissions by 1% compared to last year.
As clean energy has gained growing significance in China’s energy mix, more attention is being placed on renewables’ role in energy security and on coal power’s future as a flexible, supporting resource rather than as a primary generator.
Despite this narrative shift, coal remains deeply embedded in China’s power system, with little public discussion of its phasedown or eventual exit.
Coal-plant development is also on the rise in India, GEM’s tracker shows.
Commissioning of new coal plants in the country in H1 2025 (5.1GW) has already exceeded all of last year (4.2GW), as shown in the chart below.
Proposed coal-power capacity in India has also been on the rise, led by a record 38.4GW of coal-plant proposals in 2024 – driving up proposed coal capacity to over 92GW as of July 2025.
Coal-fired power capacity in India, GW, by status, with announced (dark blue), pre-permit (mid-blue) and permitted (aqua) shown for each year since 2015. Source: Global Coal Plant Tracker, GEM.
Retirements also remained sluggish in India, with 0.8GW retired in H1 2025 and just 0.2GW retired in 2024 and 2023, according to GEM’s tracker.
The decline follows 2023 guidance by India’s Central Electricity Authority (CEA) advising power utilities not to retire any thermal power capacity until 2030. In 2025, the country’s environment ministry again delayed long-pending sulfur dioxide regulations on coal plants.
Yet India also added more than 28GW of wind and solar power in 2025, a nearly 50% increase over the previous year. Despite the growth, the Indian government has stated that it is planning a coal expansion, with coal use not projected to peak until 2040, according to India’s Ministry of Coal.
In both China and India, coal retains its policy support, with clean energy framed, not as a replacement, but as a supplement – reinforcing a dual-track energy strategy that postpones difficult decisions on coal phaseout.
The US goes big on ageing coal plants
Like China and India, the US under President Donald Trump is also supporting coal power. Unlike China and India, however, the US has reversed course on clean energy in the first half of 2025.
During his tenure, former US president Joe Biden reached an agreement with other G7 nations to phase out coal power by 2035, offered incentives for clean energy under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and moved to finalise pending power plant regulations – effectively helping replace the nation’s ageing coal plants with lower-cost solar and wind power while boosting domestic cleantech manufacturing.
The Trump administration has moved to derail Biden’s agenda by phasing out the clean energy tax credits, repealing coal plant regulations and slowing or halting solar and wind power permitting and financing.
It has also been using “emergency powers” to keep coal plants online, racking up $29m in costs to extend the life of Michigan’s Campbell plant through the summer – costs the utility is seeking to pass on to ratepayers for power the grid operator said was not needed.
Despite the political support for coal, the US remains on track to retire more coal power in 2025 than in 2024, with 3.7GW retired as of July.
Whether this trend continues in an increasingly uncertain environment for clean energy remains to be seen, as plant closures are often part of long-term plans and economic considerations, usually extensively negotiated with state regulators and based on broader considerations than just current federal policy.
In all, US utilities are slated to close nearly 100GW of coal capacity by 2035, as shown in the chart below. By then, the average age of a US coal plant will be 55 years.
Coal-fired power capacity – including plants that have been announced, are at the pre-permit stage or have been permitted – added and retired in the US, 2000-2025, and planned retirements through to 2035, GW. Source: Global Coal Plant Tracker, GEM.
The US also saw a new coal plant proposal in H1 2025, bringing the total to three proposals according to GEM’s tracker, the most of any OECD country. All three plan to incorporate carbon capture and storage, although none have the necessary permits for construction.
Just energy transition partnerships advance despite hurdles
Despite delayed documentation, ongoing negotiations and the withdrawal of the US from International Partner Group participation, JETP agreements in Vietnam, Indonesia and South Africa are all continuing to progress.
In Vietnam, three clean-energy investment projects have officially penned financing agreements as of July 2025, getting the country one step closer to mobilising JETP capital.
Just a few months prior, Vietnam released an adjustment to its latest power development plan, which featured substantial increases in projected wind and solar capacity and a modest increase in projected hydropower capacity.
However, the plan also includes a 1GW increase in projected coal power by 2030, as shown in the chart below.
The new figure for peak coal, 31.1GW, coincides with the interest from state-owned utility EVN to revive a coal plant previously considered to be cancelled.
Vietnam’s planned 2030 capacity by fuel type in the country’s last four power development plans, GW. Source: GEM analysis of Vietnam power development plans.
In Indonesia, the release of the latest electricity supply business plan (RUPTL 2025–2034) in May 2025 resulted in a spike in new and revived proposals for on-grid coal capacity. This was alongside the continued growth of off-grid, captive-coal plant proposals to power industrial areas, as GEM’s tracker shows.
Accounting for these captive-coal plants in Indonesia’s JETP documentation has presented a challenge, but Indonesia’s JETP secretariat has reiterated that updates to the country’s JETP comprehensive investment and policy plan are ongoing through the first six months of 2025 to address emissions from captive plants and incorporate efficiency targets.
Disparity remains between the government’s stated renewable energy ambitions and the reality of present advancements at the project level. Presidential regulation 112/2022 targets a 2050 national coal phaseout date in Indonesia and President Prabowo Subianto has more recently made overtures to an even faster 2040 coal phaseout.
Meanwhile, Indonesia’s proposed coal-power capacity grew by 5.1GW in H1 2025, to 17.1GW overall, as shown in the chart below.
On-grid and captive coal-fired power plant capacity in Indonesia, including announced, pre-permit and permitted plants, in GW. Source: Global Coal Plant Tracker, GEM.
In South Africa, the government has also reiterated its commitment to its JETP agreement. While Vietnam and Indonesia have substantial numbers of recently built coal plants and plants in continued development, South Africa operates a fleet of old, unreliable coal plants.
World Bank-linked funding for South Africa’s energy transition was approved in June 2025. While solidifying a climate investment fund, the plan also included the delayed closure of three coal plants that already average more than 50 years of age (Camden, Hendrina and Grootvlei).
All three countries are continuing down the dual paths of simultaneously extending coal’s lifetime and maintaining just energy transition commitments, banking on “all of the above” approaches and, ultimately, causing misalignment with JETP principles.
Yet, the continued progress of their just energy transition programs, despite global political and economic volatility, is a strong indicator that policy and planning priorities could soon align towards the phaseout of coal.
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