Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Plastic treaty pause
BUSAN BUST: Efforts to finalise a global treaty on plastic pollution failed to reach agreement in Busan, South Korea, Reuters reported. The newswire said more than 100 nations wanted the treaty to cap plastic production, but “a handful of oil-producers were prepared only to target plastic waste”. Carbon Brief previously explained how failure to address plastics production could affect efforts to tackle climate change.
FINGER POINTING: Saudi negotiators were accused of “leading” efforts to block limits on plastic production, which relies mostly on fossil fuels, said the New York Times. A French official was quoted by Agence France-Presse saying: “We also are worried by the continuing obstruction by the so-called like-minded countries.” Members of this group include China and India, which opposed limits on plastic production, according to the Hindustan Times.
POST MORTEM: The talks foundered, in part, because, as with the UN climate regime, they rely on making decisions by consensus, found analysis from the Independent. Negotiations will continue next year based on the current draft text, said the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.
Around the world
- DESERT COP: UN talks on desertification began in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Monday, reported Le Monde. The COP16 land summit will last for two weeks, it said.
- PRABAWO’S PLEDGE: Indonesia leader Prabawo Subianto’s pledge to phase out coal power by 2040 would entail “massive costs, reforms”, the Jakarta Post reported. The country would need to build 8 gigawatts (GW) of renewables and retire 3GW of coal each year to meet the target, according to Ember analysis cited by Bloomberg.
- COAL CURTAILED: A high court in South African capital Pretoria overturned plans for 1.5GW of new coal-fired capacity, the Mail and Guardian reported. It said the “landmark” ruling found the government had failed to adequately consider the impact of coal on children’s rights, particularly their right to a health environment.
- MONSOON FLOODS: More than 30 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced by floods in Malaysia and Thailand, Al Jazeera reported. The outlet noted climate change is “causing more intense weather patterns that can make destructive floods more likely”, according to scientists.
- CHINESE CURBS: Beijing has banned exports to the US of a series of critical minerals needed for low-carbon technologies, Reuters reported. China wanted to “safeguard its national security and interests”, said China Daily.
- HISTORIC DISCOVERY: Brazilian oil giant Petrobras and Colombian Ecopetrol have discovered Colombia’s “largest ever gas deposit”, according to Oilprice. The gas could double the country’s existing reserves, but the outlet says its energy sector is “grappling” with a government that supports the “transition away from fossil fuels”.
$100bn
The funds needed by Caribbean countries over the next 20 years to become “climate resilient”, according to comments from the International Monetary Fund reported by La Vanguardia.
Latest climate research
- The Arctic Ocean could see its first ice-free days before 2030, according to findings in Nature Communications.
- The recent “surge” in global temperatures has been “intensified by record-low planetary albedo” (reflectiveness), said a study in Science.
- A Nature Climate Change perspective critiqued the idea of climate “tipping points”, saying they “confuse and can distract from urgent climate action”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
At COP29 in Baku, developed-country parties such as the EU, the US and Japan agreed to help raise “at least” $300bn a year by 2035 for climate action in developing countries. This target faced a strong backlash – and a closer inspection of climate-finance data helps to explain why. Carbon Brief analysis showed how pledges from before the COP29 deal would already bring climate finance up from $115.9bn in 2022 to around $200bn by 2030. Counting contributions from developing countries – something “encouraged” under the new goal – could raise this to $265bn. These pre-existing funds mean the target is achievable for developed countries with virtually “no additional budgetary effort”, according to experts.
Spotlight
Landmark climate case kicks off
This week, Carbon Brief interviews a leading international law scholar about a landmark climate case at the UN international court of justice.
The international court of justice (ICJ) has opened two weeks of hearings on states’ climate-related legal obligations – and the consequences, if “significant harm” is caused.
The case stems from a UN general assembly (UNGA) request for an “advisory opinion” from the ICJ. It is the ICJ’s largest ever case, with more than 100 countries and international organisations making interventions, deploying a wide variety of legal arguments.
In his opening address, Ralph Regenvanu, climate envoy for Vanuatu, which pushed for the case, said: “[T]his may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity.”
Carbon Brief interviewed leading international law scholar Prof Philippe Sands to find out more about the legal issues at stake and the wider significance of the ICJ case.
Carbon Brief: Would you be able to start by situating this case in its wider legal context and explaining why it could be so consequential?
Philippe Sands: Well, it’s the first time the international court of justice has been called upon to address legal issues relating to climate change. The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and, although the advisory opinion that it hands down will not be binding on states, it is binding on all UN bodies. The determinations that the court makes will have consequences that go very far and that will have a particular authority, in legal and political terms. Of course, everything turns on what the court actually says.
CB: Would you be able to summarise the key legal arguments that are being fought over in this case?
PS: [F]or me, the crucial issues are, firstly, what the court says about the state of the science: is it established, or is there any room for doubt? Secondly, what are the obligations of states having regard to the clarity of the science. Thirdly, are there legal obligations on states in relation to the climate system that exist and arise outside of the treaty regime – the 1992 [UN Framework] convention [on climate change], the Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement and so on and so forth. And, related to that, fourthly – this is the most intense, legally interesting aspect – what are the responsibilities of states for historic emissions under general international law? And, in particular, are the biggest contributors liable under international law to make good any damages that may arise from their historic actions…The practicalities are that islands are disappearing with sea level rise. Are historic polluters of greenhouse gases responsible for the consequences of those disappearances?
CB: If you were going to make a bet, which way would you say the court would go on that key question of whether it’s just the [UN] climate regime that gives rise to obligations [on states], or whether there could be obligations from other parts of the law?
I think the court will proceed very carefully. I don’t think it will want to close the door to the application of other rules of international law…The broader issue here is that, essentially, the legislative system has broken down. The states have been unable to legislate effectively and efficiently to address the issues related to climate change. And, so, what has happened is that a group of states have essentially gone to the General Assembly and said: “The legislative system is broken down. Let’s now ask the judges to step in and tell us what the applicable principles and rules are.” The difficulty that that poses for the judges, who will be conscious that the legislative system has not delivered, is that it’s not the function of judges to legislate.
The full transcript of the interview can be read here.
Watch, read, listen
ZHENMIN SPEAKS: In a long interview with China Newsweek, Chinese climate envoy Liu Zhenmin reflected on the outcome of the COP29 climate talks, including the “disappoint[ing]” $300bn finance goal, and said the global energy transition is “irreversible”.
‘WAKE UP’: In a “viewpoint” article, Guardian economics editor Heather Stewart wrote that rising food prices were a sign of the “destabilising impact of [the] climate crisis”.
TALKING COP: Carbon Brief’s Anika Patel joined the All Things Policy podcast to discuss COP29, the upcoming Trump presidency and China’s actions at the summit.
Coming up
- 2-13 December: UN Desertification Conference, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- 2-13 December: International court of justice hearings on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, The Hague, Netherlands
- 7 December: Ghana presidential and parliamentary elections
Pick of the jobs
- International Energy Agency, junior energy modeller/analyst | Salary: €5,741 a month. Location: Paris
- University of Oxford, director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History | Salary: Unknown. Location: Oxford, UK
- Mongabay, staff writer – California biodiversity | Salary: $54,000-$75,000. Location: California
- University of East Anglia, senior research associate – land use resource and engagement | Salary: £37,999. Location: Norwich, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 6 December 2024: Plastics talks collapse; $300bn finance goal analysed; Landmark climate case kicks off appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Governments need to start addressing climate change impacts and nature loss as a threat to national security and manage shocks before they hit rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, Britain’s foreign minister and other leaders told the opening of Climate Week NYC on Monday.
Ed Miliband – who was until July the UK’s energy minister – said the growing urgency and severity of extreme weather and related disasters require a shift in thinking, calling on governments to put the issues “front and centre”.
“Climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers – the security community, not just the activist community, the generals, not just the green campaigner,” he told an audience of policy and business leaders.
There is a need to assess risk differently, he added, by embedding climate and nature in national security systems, threat assessments and contingency planning. He also urged countries to pool information because climate shocks can travel fast through supply chains as well as influencing financial markets and migration patterns.
The framing of climate change as a threat to countries’ security and stability is not new, but it has gained greater emphasis as the impacts of global warming are biting harder in places like Europe, which is struggling with more intense heatwaves, drought and forest fires.
In mid-August, Miliband said in a social media post, reflecting on the UK’s hot and dry summer, that he would convene foreign ministers attending the UN General Assembly in late September to discuss how to respond to “this new national security threat” and build a coalition for action. But he did not give further details of that initiative on Monday.
-
Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn
Türkiye and Australia are pushing coal, oil and gas at home with no national timeline for their own fossil fuel phase-out -
DR Congo’s power-hungry mining sector drives record solar surge
As solar deployment rapidly accelerates across Africa, miners in the DRC are driving significant demand for clean energy to replace expensive diesel
Australia calls for unified response
Other leaders in New York also reflected on the growing threat to their societies and economies from climate change impacts and exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his country “understands the dangers of global warming and the urgency of climate action as well as any nation”.
“We have seen it up close – from increasingly intense bushfires and floods, to the damage warming oceans are wreaking on our vulnerable coastlines,” he said in a speech, adding that with a record-breaking El Nino forecast, Australia and Pacific nations are preparing for a potential summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.
With scientific forecasts of worsening impacts now coming to pass, “this means the global community cannot afford to be frozen in time as the world warms around us”, he added. People cannot be left to cope alone, he said, emphasising that as leaders, “we need to come together, to meet the problem head on”.
Australia will lead the negotiations at the upcoming COP31 climate summit, and has brought the existential threat to Pacific countries from sea level rise into the diplomatic limelight. The pre-COP gathering next month will be hosted in Fiji, with a visit by leaders to Tuvalu.
Speaking to Climate Home News in New York, Panama’s environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro said the small Central American country faces hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from drought in the Panama Canal due to El Niño.
The Panama Canal Authority estimates income could be reduced by between $225 million and $400 million due to slower maritime traffic passing through the strait.
“What a great irony,” Navarro said. “Panama being a small, carbon-negative country pays the price for the big carbon-emitting countries.”
Climate investment “critical” to stability
Amina J. Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said there was a need for countries to stick with multilateral approaches to problems including climate change, despite the difficult geopolitical times the world is going through. She added, however, that it “does require your voices. It won’t happen by itself. We have to lean into it.”
The rest of the high-level UNGA week in New York will show the extent to which multilateral efforts to resolve the world’s problems – from climate change to poverty – have top-level support as leaders give their speeches, including the Brazilian and US presidents on Tuesday.
Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and geopolitics with think-tank E3G, said the statements by Miliband and other leaders at Climate Week NYC had underlined the political and government case to integrate climate considerations into security thinking and institutions at the highest level.
“In a world of escalating climate impacts and the record El Niño expected to heighten risks worldwide alongside energy volatility and geopolitical tensions, investing in global climate resilience and the clean energy transition are critical to credible strategies to enhance stability and national security,” she added in a statement.
Suneeta Kaimal from the Natural Resource Governance Initiative (NRGI) said that, while in previous years governments heavily focused their speeches on climate action, this year’s focus on energy security does not change the underlying challenge.
“The fact that the framing has changed from energy transition to energy security doesn’t change the reality that this transition needs to occur in energy systems. It’s just a different framework. It’s a more transactional framework, but it all points to the need for resilience,” she said.
Speaking at the opening session of Climate Week, Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described how her country had reacted to the spiralling costs it faced from the 1970s oil price crisis by investing in a large-scale district heating system fuelled instead by its abundant geothermal energy.
“Resilience wasn’t built while the crisis was happening. It was built in the years after – deliberately, patiently, as a national mission – so that the next shock wouldn’t hit as hard, if at all,” she said.
New COP goal on electrification
Speaking at a separate event on Monday, UN climate chief Simon Stiell pointed to a new voluntary target expected to be adopted at COP31 for 35% of global energy use to come from electricity by 2035 as a strategy that can help cushion countries, families and businesses from fossil fuel supply shocks and rising costs.
At the United Nations, the Turkish COP presidency gave more details of the electrification goal it first announced at the Bonn climate talks in June, including sharing with governments a final text of the pledge it wants them to get behind.
The pledge sets out a global ambition to advance electrification, highlighting the importance of supporting developing countries to identify their grid investment needs and access finance for electrification.
“It is a development strategy, an industrial strategy, a health strategy, and a security strategy,” Stiell said.
The post Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda
Climate Change
Albanese’s NY Climate Week address acknowledges scale of the climate challenge, but fossil fuels notably absent
SYDNEY, Tuesday 22 September 2026 — In response to Prime Minister Albanese’s keynote address at New York Climate Week, Dr Simon Bradshaw, COP31 Lead and climate expert at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“It is encouraging to see Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledging the immediate and profound climate threat to communities in the Pacific, Australia and worldwide, and the need to work together, with bravery and compassion. Now we must match those words with real action to phase out fossil fuels.
“Earlier this month in Palau, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committed Australia to helping accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and defend the crucial goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C — a survival line for Pacific island countries and all those paying the cost of our fossil fuel addiction through worsening floods, fires, drought and sea level rise.
“However, Australia continues to undermine its aspirations for global climate leadership by expanding fossil fuel production. The Albanese Government has approved an astonishing 37 new, extended or expanded coal and gas projects since first elected. Every one of which compounds the threats to our shared security and wellbeing. Remarkably, in his major climate speech in New York overnight, the Prime Minister failed to even mention fossil fuels.
“As our Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen has said, we are in a global fossil fuel crisis. Getting off fossil fuels through transitioning to renewable energy is the quickest pathway to greater security, stability and affordability for all. But right now Australia is throwing more fuel on the fire.
“We are now near certain to overshoot 1.5°C of warming. For the Pacific and Australia alike, this will be measured in more communities torn from their land and homes, and the loss of more people and places we love. There is a path back below 1.5°C of warming, and every fraction of a degree matters, but it will demand all minds and all hearts working together.
Australia fought hard for the privilege to chair the next round of global climate negotiations. The world is crying out for a clear vision and leadership from Australia as we head towards COP31 in Antalya.
“Australia must lead by example at home through an immediate end to new fossil fuel approvals, including rejecting Woodside’s mammoth Browse project. And must ensure that COP31 boosts our shared security by accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels. Get this right, and Australia will emerge as a responsible middle power and force for good in troubled times.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
This year’s so-called “super El Niño” is entering into record-breaking territory.
Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific now equal the previous daily record set in 2015 and will likely keep rising in the days ahead.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in the Pacific that reshapes weather patterns around the world and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
The current El Niño event – which has been underway since June and is expected to last until next year – has been developing faster than any previous event on record.
The strength of an event is tracked using the “Niño 3.4 anomaly”, which measures how much warmer sea surface temperatures in a section of the central Pacific are than average.
As of 19 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region stands at 3.07C, putting it in a statistical tie with the previous record of 3.08C.
Some scientists, using a different baseline for calculating the anomaly, have already called the new record.
Either way, this is remarkable, in part because of how early in the calendar year it is occurring. El Niño typically peaks in the winter months, most commonly in November or December.
Every strong El Niño on record has continued to strengthen after mid-September – and there is every reason to think that this one will as well.
(For more on El Niño, see Carbon Brief’s recent interactive explainer.)
Record territory
El Niño events are typically classed as “weak” when the Niño 3.4 anomaly reaches 0.5C, “moderate” above 1C, “strong” above 1.5C and “very strong” above 2.0C.
For this year’s event, the Niño 3.4 anomaly has now reached 3.07C, which puts it in a statistical tie with the record set on 18 November 2015, set during a “very strong” El Nino event.
The chart below shows how the strength of the current El Niño (red line) is dramatically outpacing both 2015-16 (blue) and another “very strong” event in 1997-98 (light blue).
To analyse the developing El Niño, Carbon Brief followed the convention of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Oceanic Niño index (ONI).
ONI is calculated by subtracting the latest 30-year average temperature in the Nino 3.4 region from daily sea surface temperatures. This approach allows for the most recent years to be compared against the most recent 30-year period. It removes much of the influence of longer-term, human-driven warming from the index.
(While meteorological organisations typically track changes to ONI on a three-month rolling average basis, Carbon Brief’s analysis looked at how the metric is changing on a daily basis.)
If ONI is calculated using a baseline of 1991-2020 then the current El Niño has already set a new record.
Since the start of June, El Niño’s strength has been greater than any other year. In early September in both 1997 and 2015, anomalies were around 1.9C – more than one degree below where they are this year.
An alternative index
There is another commonly used metric – the relative Oceanic Niño index (RONI) – used to study El Niño.
Introduced by NOAA in 2024, the RONI index adjusts for tropical ocean warming linked to human-caused climate change. To do this, it takes sea surface averages in the Nino 3.4 region and subtracts out temperature anomalies observed across the tropical oceans (between the latitudes of 20 degrees north and south).
This approach may better remove the influence of climate change in this specific region, but can also diminish the apparent strength of strong El Niño events, such as the current one, which extend well outside the Niño 3.4 region.
The chart below shows daily RONI values, which are record setting for this time of year, but remain below an all-time daily record set during the 1982-83 El Niño event.
RONI stood at around 2.5C in mid-September, some 0.7C below the 1982 record.
However, that record was set in late December, at the peak of the event.
The 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 events added between 0.5C and 1.9C to their RONI values between mid-September and their peaks.
On track to smash monthly and seasonal records
Because daily El Niño values are noisy, scientists typically turn to monthly or seasonal averages to compare El Niño events.
The latest full calendar month for which data is available – August 2026 – had a Niño 3.4 anomaly of around 2.45C. This is higher than the peak of every prior El Niño event on record except 2015-16 – where the anomaly reached 2.75C – and 1877-78, when the anomaly sat at around 2.7C, based on a reconstruction of sea surface temperatures using sparse ship data.
The figure below shows the monthly evolution of the five strongest El Niño events on record alongside 2026, as well the current forecast from 14 seasonal forecast models.
Taken together, the models project a peak monthly anomaly later this year of around 4.1C, with 80% of the 674 individual model runs falling between 3.4C and 4.6C.
Every single model run peaks above the 2015-16 record. The projected margin over that record, some 1.3C, is larger than the entire gap between the strongest and fifth-strongest El Niño of the past 150 years.
Some caution here is warranted, however. No seasonal forecast system has ever been verified against an event of this size, because none has ever occurred. The models also predicted temperatures slightly warmer than observed this summer, with real-world observations for August coming in around 0.3C below forecasts.
However, all strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter – and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too. If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.
El Nino’s effect on global temperatures typically lags rising ocean temperatures in the Pacific by several months, so most of the impact will be felt in 2027 rather than 2026.
Carbon Brief’s most recent “state of the climate” quarterly analysis found 2026 on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year on record. The next update in early October will examine what a record El Niño means for 2027.
The post Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ reaches ‘remarkable’ all-time record
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