Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Earth’s first climate ‘tipping point’ reached
CORAL IN CRISIS: A new report warned that the world has reached its first climate “tipping point” as global warming pushes warm-water coral reefs towards an irreversible decline, the Press Association outlined. The report, co-authored by more than 160 scientists in 23 countries, also warned the world is “on the brink” of reaching other tipping points, including the dieback of the Amazon, the collapse of major ocean currents and the loss of ice sheets, the Guardian noted.
CO2 RECORD: Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reached the highest level ever recorded last year, according to a new report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) covered by the Associated Press, which said it was fuelling “more extreme weather”. On top of burning fossil fuels, an increase in wildfires contributed to the rise in CO2 levels over the last year, Reuters reported.
DECLINING SINKS: The Guardian said WMO scientists are also “concerned” that the natural land and ocean “sinks” that remove CO2 from the air are “weakening as a result of global heating”. Separate new research concluded that Australia’s tropical rainforests are among the first in the world to start emitting more CO2 than they absorb, Agence France-Presse reported, with the decay of dead trees emitting more than the growing trunks and branches can store.
INCREASED EMISSIONS: Wildfires burned an area of land larger than India during the 2024-25 “global fire season”, emitting more than 8bn tonnes of CO2, almost 10% above average. This is according to the annual “state of wildfires” report covered by Carbon Brief, which also finds that four of the most prominent extreme wildfire events were found to have been more likely to occur as a result of human-caused climate change.
October extremes
MEXICO MOURNING: At least 66 people have died and 77 people are still missing after five days of torrential rain caused “historic” floods and landslides in Mexico, Reuters reported. The Associated Press said that the extreme weather “cut off 300 towns…from the outside world” and the New York Times reported Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum saying that 100,000 homes were affected.
TYPHOONS TOO: At least 14 gold mine workers have been killed in floods after heavy rainfall in Venezuela, according to Agence France-Presse. At least one person was killed, two are missing and more than 1,500 people have been displaced across Alaska due to Typhoon Halong, the Associated Press reported.
Around the world
- ‘HEADING FOR THE ROCKS’: US president Donald Trump’s plan to derail a global climate agreement for the shipping industry is “heading for the rocks”, as more than 100 nations gathered in London for talks to approve the legally binding regulation, with a decision expected today, the Financial Times reported.
- COP FLOTILLA: A group of Amazon Indigenous peoples have departed from Ecuador to attend COP30, planning to travel more than 3,000km on rivers and grow in size along the way, according to Folha de São Paulo.
- KIWI CONCERN: Scientists have warned that New Zealand’s decision to weaken its methane emissions reduction target, from a 24-47% cut on 2017 levels by 2050 to a 14-24% cut, sets a “worrying precedent”, said Bloomberg.
- DIPLOMACY DETOUR: The EU plans to cooperate with US local authorities and businesses to “bypass” the federal government on clean energy, the Financial Times detailed.
- VOTING VICTORY: After years of campaigning, citizens of Hamburg voted for stricter climate targets for the city during a referendum, reported Der Spiegel.
- ‘ENVIRONMENTAL FREEFALL’: A report on the environmental damage after nearly two years of conflict found that Gaza’s energy, water, food and ecosystems have been “devastated” and are “on the brink of a total collapse”, the Independent outlined.
582 gigawatts
The record amount of new renewable energy capacity added globally in 2024, reported Reuters.
Latest climate research
- Just seven African nations “would be able to satisfy their nutrient gaps” through production expansion, given water and land constraints | Nature Food
- An experiment finds that generative artificial intelligence “can alter the information diet [climate] sceptics consume” | Nature Climate Change
- While many frog species show “short-term resilience” to climate-induced wildfires, flooding poses an “underappreciated threat to frog biodiversity” in Australia | Biological Conservation
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief sat down for an in-depth interview with Emma Pinchbeck, the chief executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC). The CCC is a statutory body created under the Climate Change Act 2008 and is the official adviser to the UK government on climate change mitigation and adaptation. The conversation covered a range of topics from the UK’s high energy costs to talking to children about climate change.
Spotlight
Why paediatricians want climate action
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to Dr Helena Clements, a paediatrician who was appointed as the inaugural officer for climate change for the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
Carbon Brief: How does climate change risk children’s health?
Dr Helena Clements: In lots of ways. Partly it’s about the direct impacts of climate change on health and that might include air pollution as a really easy example here in the UK right now. We know about Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah who died of asthma induced [by] air pollution on her way to school and the little boy in [Rochdale], Awaab [Ishak], who died because of exposure to indoor air pollution. Those are two people that pediatricians have looked after and failed to save, who have been directly impacted by air pollution in this country. Of course it’s much worse in other parts of the world, particularly where people are cooking on open fires. It’s a global problem.
For children who are exposed to air pollution, the answer isn’t to lock them up inside. It’s to clean the air by addressing the burning of fossil fuels. It’s about creating green spaces and active transport, because that’s better for our mental health, our physical well-being and we’re also cleaning the air. All of the solutions are solutions for climate change, as well as for health, and it’s not anything that I can prescribe.
Only about 20-30% of your health is down to what a doctor can do. I can treat asthma, but I’m not in control of the causes.
CB: How do you engage the medical community – and external groups – with health risks facing children from climate change?
HC: What I find helpful is to paint that picture of health and wellbeing, because if we had healthy children and adults, we would reduce demand on our services. I sometimes talk about being a lazy pediatrician. If everybody had their immunisations and a healthy diet, and we had clean air and families who had better health literacy, there would be much less work for me to do because most of what children need is good conditions to grow and thrive in.
A healthy diet is high in fibre, fruit and vegetables, which is also a lower-carbon diet. Pediatricians spend a lot of time treating constipation because children don’t eat a healthy diet and it’s rarely more complicated than that. We need to help children and families to eat more healthily to avoid things that need treatment and become more complex.
So there’s lots of benefits to focusing on the health and wellbeing side, rather than necessarily talking lots about the climate, but I talk about the two things simultaneously. Healthy people have a lower carbon impact than unhealthy people who require lots of medicines and trips to hospital.
CB: What else does your work in this intersection of climate change and children’s health involve?
HC: We’ve got three things really. One is advocating about climate itself because climate change is a health crisis, a massive risk, because of changing demographics and vector-borne diseases coming our way. The second thing is the NHS [National Health Service] is a very carbon-dense business, so we need to decarbonise. There’s the “how do we get rid of all these anesthetic gases or single-use items” practical changes that we need to make. And then there’s the fact that health is expensive and, if we were all healthier through, not directly tackling climate change, but say, tackling air pollution, we’d make health cheaper and be addressing climate change. You can tackle it from different lenses, but the solutions are all the same.
This interview has been edited for length.
Watch, read, listen
TORY LEGACY: Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute released a new Youtube video offering the “inside story” of the UK’s net-zero target, featuring former prime minister Theresa May.
BIG IN BRAZIL: With one month to go until COP30 begins in Belém, Brazil, Agence France-Presse listed “four Brazilians to watch” at the conference.
COX QUIZZED: In a new A Question of Science podcast, Prof Brian Cox and a panel of experts answered listener’s questions on everything from carbon capture to climate sceptics.
Coming up
- 19 October: Bolivia presidential elections (2nd round)
- 20-23 October: Africa energy efficiency policy training week, Accra, Ghana
- 20-24 October: 27th meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, Panama City, Panama
Pick of the jobs
- Global Green Growth Institute, senior energy officer | Salary: $77,904. Location: Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
- Mongabay, wire reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote in Asia
- London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, editorial manager | Salary: £43,277-£55,497. Location: London
- Centre for International Environmental Law, publications manager | Salary: $81,000-$110,000. Location: Remote (EST)
- UN Environment Programme, chief scientist and the director of the office of science | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi, Kenya
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: Earth’s first ‘tipping point’; Climate adviser interview; How warming affects children’s health appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The United Nations has said the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 6% per year to limit global warming enough to be able to return to the 1.5C goal by 2100, as decades of insufficient climate action have now made an overshoot inevitable.
In a video message accompanying the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2026 Emissions Gap Report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the world could no longer avoid overshooting the 1.5C limit and that the consequences were already devastating. However, he said it was still possible to return average global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial times by the end of the century.
“Overshoot is not surrender,” he said, adding that the report, released on Wednesday, sets out what is needed to limit warming. That entails cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, all compared with 2025 levels.
This implies average annual reduction rates of 5.7% for 2025-2035, higher than the pathways laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last major scientific report, which required annual reduction rates of about 5%, UNEP said.
Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs
The more ambitious emissions reductions – which countries are still far off achieving – would put the world on the lowest-possible overshoot pathway, giving a 50% chance of limiting peak warming to 1.7–1.8C around mid-century before bringing global temperatures back to 1.5C or below by 2100, the report said. Reaching this scenario will also require carbon removal from the atmosphere, it added.
UNEP noted that if countries fully implement their current national climate plans (NDCs), they would only reduce emissions by 5-8% by 2030 and 11-15% by 2035, relative to 2025 levels.
UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said the world must not give up on the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious warming limit, adding that every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of heating above 1.5C increases climate change impacts and risks, such as the deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year.
“We must pull out all the stops to minimise peak warming and return to 1.5C by the end of the century. This is possible,” she said, adding that governments must urgently implement policies that deliver rapid and sustained emissions reductions.
Climate pledges fall short
New climate pledges since last year’s report have made a negligible difference to projected emissions and warming, UNEP said. Under current policies, the world is on course for 2.8C of warming this century, while full implementation of national climate pledges and continued similar efforts would limit warming to 2.6C, the report found.
UNEP said its projections had deteriorated, attributing this to the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement under President Donald Trump and revised estimates of historical emissions.
Even with the most optimistic pledge-based scenario – which assumes countries deliver both their current national climate commitments and additional net-zero targets – warming would now only be limited to 2.1C this century, the report found.
IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock
Speaking to journalists ahead of the report’s launch, co-author Anne Ohlhoff said the US exit from the Paris accord meant that its previous national climate target was no longer included in UNEP’s global projections. The country has also dropped its net-zero emissions goal, she said, affecting the outlook because the US is the world’s second-largest emitter.
She warned that there is still a large gap between countries’ emissions commitments for 2035 and the reductions needed under the report’s lowest-possible 1.5C overshoot scenario.
Every five years of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions at current levels pushes peak warming up by around 0.1C, she said, adding that without urgent action, it could quickly become impossible to keep peak warming below 1.7–1.8C.
Describing the emissions gap as a “leadership gap”, UN chief Guterres warned that current national climate plans and policies “fall dangerously short” of what is needed to limit warming. He urged countries to adopt credible roadmaps for transitioning away from fossil fuels, accelerate clean energy deployment and electrification, invest in electricity grids and storage, cut methane emissions and halt deforestation.
Carbon removal needed, but risky
Alongside deep emissions cuts, removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere needs to be accelerated throughout the century, the report found. The world will need to remove and permanently store about 320 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere to return global temperatures to around 1.5C by 2100.
The estimated carbon removal is equivalent to around eight years of global CO₂ emissions at 2024 levels. However, UNEP cautions that removing carbon at this scale remains uncertain because of technological and socio-economic challenges.
Keywan Riahi, a contributor to the report, said carbon could be removed through nature-based approaches, such as planting forests and improving wetland management, which help ecosystems absorb carbon emissions, as well as engineering solutions that capture emissions from energy production or remove carbon directly from the air.
However, he warned that both nature-based and technological approaches face risks and might not deliver carbon removal at the scale needed. This is because nature solutions such as planetary sinks are weakening because of climate change while techno-fixes remain uncertain, he added.
“All of those technologies come with risks,” Riahi told reporters, adding that what the world needs is to try “to keep the overshoot as low as possible, so that we do not need to rely on these technologies to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere later on”.
Renewable energy supports emissions cuts
Despite the expected overshoot of the 1.5C warming limit, the UNEP Emissions Gap Report underscored that the rapid growth of renewable energy and the impact of climate policies so far show that deeper emissions cuts remain possible.
It stated that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, global renewable electricity capacity has grown three times faster than anticipated, while solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has increased sevenfold compared with projections made a decade ago.
Maintaining the recent pace of renewable energy expansion, alongside stronger policies, could put the world on track to meet the global goal of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030, the report said. It could also increase the share of wind and solar in electricity generation to levels consistent with the pathway that limits the overshoot of 1.5C to the lowest possible level, it added.
SE Asia speeds up plan for connected clean power grid after oil shock
Andersen said the explosion of renewable energy and slower-than-projected growth in coal energy supply showed that accelerating climate action is possible. However, she warned that progress remains insufficient, particularly in phasing down fossil fuels and halting forest loss.
“Nations must understand that the point of return begins now, not later,” she said, calling for “fast, deep and sustained emissions reductions”. She urged governments to strengthen their climate action at upcoming UN climate talks and accelerate efforts to keep the 1.5C pathway within reach.
Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, said major fossil fuel-producing countries need to take greater responsibility for reducing their emissions, saying that big polluters such as the US and Saudi Arabia need “to stop playing politics and face the scientific reality”.
“Right now they are looking at the fire, denying it exists and pouring more petrol on it, while their own citizens increasingly face searing heat, wildfires and other impacts,” he said. “Governments [need] to get on with enacting policies that cut fossil fuel use as soon as possible.”
The post UN sets steep emission cuts to reverse 1.5C overshoot by end of century appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN sets steep emission cuts to reverse 1.5C overshoot by end of century
When the Turkish COP31 presidency presented its priorities to international business leaders for the first time in New York in September, among those invited to give the private sector’s first response was Ali Koç, scion of one of Türkiye’s wealthiest families.
On stage, the vice chair of the board of Koç Holding said the family company, which weeks earlier had been announced as one of the top sponsors for the UN climate summit, can be seen as “quite exemplary” for its climate record.
What Koç did not mention was that the group’s biggest money-making arm – Türkiye’s largest oil refiner Tüpraş – plans to keep running its refineries “at maximum potential”. Nor did he say that, in 2025, both parent company and subsidiary cut their 2030 climate targets to a level they had already nearly achieved, as Climate Home News’ analysis of company records reveals.
The decision to hand Koç Holding a prominent role at COP31 – the company is also the summit’s “Global Business Partner” – has reignited a long-running controversy over the platforming of fossil fuel interests at the annual UN climate conference.
It has also thrown into question how COP sponsors are chosen and screened. The hosting agreement between the Turkish government and the UN climate secretariat (UNFCCC) says that a partner company’s “climate integrity” should be taken into account.
COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment
But how that test is applied is unclear and the process for picking sponsors remains largely opaque. The Turkish COP31 presidency has not published its selection criteria, nor the financial terms of any of its partnership agreements, including Koç’s. The UNFCCC declined to clarify how it advises on such deals.
Campaigners have long argued that accepting sponsorship from polluting companies is wrong because it gives them a global stage, visibility and access to policymakers at talks that are meant to move the world away from fossil fuels, and tarnishes the reputation of the COPs.
Koç’s energy division, which is dominated by oil refiner Tüpraş, accounted for three-quarters of the parent firm’s income in the first half of 2026.
“How was Koç Holding ever chosen as a COP31 sponsor? Any corporation that makes most of its money from oil refining should not qualify as sustainable,” said Pascoe Sabido, a campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory, which exposes company lobbying. “This is hugely embarrassing for the UNFCCC and its climate integrity check, which doesn’t appear to be worth the paper it’s written on.”
Koç Holding “is not just standing still but walking backwards”, he told Climate Home News.
Koç Holding and Tüpraş did not reply to multiple requests for comment. The UNFCCC secretariat and the Turkish COP31 presidency declined to respond to questions from Climate Home News on the sponsorship agreement.
Oil refining windfall
Türkiye’s biggest industrial group, Koç Holding has stakes in several key sectors of the economy, spanning vehicle manufacturing in a joint venture with Ford to electronics, home appliances and banking.
But the conglomerate’s crown jewel is oil refiner Tüpraş, which Koç controls. Last year its four refineries turned crude oil into 26.8 million tonnes of petrol, diesel, jet fuel and other products, enough to fill about 36 Olympic swimming pools every day.
The company plans to raise its production to 29 million tonnes in 2026 – already a bumper year so far with soaring profits, thanks to sky-rocketing refining margins driven by a crunch in global oil processing capacity caused by the Middle East crisis.
The oil business boom sits awkwardly with the climate and energy transition plans Koç and Tüpraş unveiled in 2021, when both pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050. Then, Tüpraş set out its aim to become “a leading carbon-neutral energy company”.
Despite these promises, in 2025, both companies lowered their targets for cutting emissions from their own operations by 2030, from 27% to 20% below 2017 levels. Tüpraş also cut its 2035 goal from 35% to 25%. The company still technically retains its long-term target of carbon neutrality by 2050, but the new plan will require much more drastic cuts after 2035.
Lowering the climate bar
Tüpra