Hundreds of scientists gathered in London this week to discuss the role of migration as a way for communities to adapt to climate change.
The impacts of a warming world, such as sea level rise and worsening extremes, are pushing many people around the world to leave their homes.
As a form of climate adaptation, a decision to migrate involves an array of different factors, such as politics, conflict and economic opportunity.
The conference unpacked these topics, as well as the impacts of climate change on livelihoods, relocation and gender norms across Africa and Asia.
The event had a strong focus on urban areas, with one co-convenor stating that “half of the world’s population now lives in the cities…A lot of the battles of climate adaptation will be won and lost in cities.”
Another co-convenor told Carbon Brief that the conference’s “focus really is on the climate change adaptation community, showing that migration is not a failure of adaptation – it is part of adaptation”.
Carbon Brief attended the conference to report on the sessions and speak to world-leading experts on climate-driven migration.
- Migration as adaptation
- Cities and livelihoods
- Immobility and relocation
- Legal pathways
- Changing narratives
Migration as adaptation
The two-day conference on “mobility in adaptation to climate change” was held at Wellcome’s headquarters in London. It gathered more than 100 leading experts in migration, adaptation and climate change from countries across Europe, Africa and Asia.
On day one of the conference, co-convenor Prof Neil Adger, a professor from the University of Exeter, told Carbon Brief:
“Our focus really is on the climate change adaptation community, showing that migration is not a failure of adaptation – it is part of adaptation.”
In his opening address, Adger highlighted that there were still many unknowns on climate migration – such as how and when it is an appropriate way to adapt to climate change, and who benefits and loses in these situations.
Dr Manuela Di Mauro – the head of climate-adaptation research at the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office – took to the stage next. She told attendees that mobility has always been a part of human life, stating:
“We are all migrants. We are all part of the same history.”
She urged the scientific community to “learn the language and the political perspective” needed to support and engage with policymakers about climate-driven migration.
Conference co-convenor Dr Chandni Singh from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) then delivered the first in-depth talk of the conference, outlining the current state of knowledge on climate change and migration.
She explained that cross-border migration is “emotionally and economically arduous” adding “under a changing climate, people choose to move within national borders first”. (Estimates suggest that around three-quarters of total global migration is internal.)
Singh emphasised that “mobility choices are extremely complex and nuanced, based on one’s aspirations and capabilities, social norms and asset bases”. She continued:
“Some [people] are forced to move or are displaced, others are relocated preemptively to move people out of harm’s way and others choose to stay despite escalating risk – or because resilience-building measures allow people to stay.”
She stressed that people need resources to migrate, so the poorest people are often unable to move – leaving them in a state of “immobility”. However, she also noted that most people do not want to leave their homes, stressing the “visceral reality of place attachment”.
Singh explained that many families “live dual lives”, in which family members work in the city to save money for a life back in their village. This dynamic of living across two locations is often referred to as “translocality”.
For example, Singh shared the story of residents from the Indian village of Kolar, who travel more than 100km to and from Bangalore for work every day, or else live there in informal settlements.
These workers send the money they earn back home, where it is often used to dig bore wells to access water. However, Singh warned that climate change and poor water management mean these wells often fail year after year, trapping people in this cycle of travelling to Bangalore to earn more money.
Singh also stressed the prevalence of rural-to-urban migration. She cited UN estimates (that do not explicitly include climate-driven migration), which find that around 2.5 billion people are expected to migrate from rural to urban areas by 2050. It adds that 90% of the change occurring in Africa and Asia.
Singh added:
“Half of the world’s population now lives in the cities…A lot of the battles of climate adaptation will be won and lost in cities.”
She noted that although migration “helps to manage risks”, it also has “significant financial, personal and social costs”.
Singh went on to discuss the global goal on adaptation – a set of 59 indicators to measure global progress on adaptation. Singh said that “migration and mobility are completely invisible…and therefore completely overlooked” in the goals.
She concluded by discussing the importance of new narratives on climate change and migration, saying:
“It’s the narratives and stories we tell of this moment that can help us first acknowledge what is happening, help subvert misinformation and untruths, and really demand accountability.”
Cities and livelihoods
Migration from villages to cities was a central theme of the conference.
On day two of the conference, Dr Aromar Revi, founding director of the IIHS, told delegates that the “root cause of the climate emergency is maldevelopment” and emphasised the importance of pursuing adaptation, mitigation and development goals together.
He noted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is currently working on a special report on climate change and cities and argued that “cities will play a decisive role in shaping global climate futures”.
He continued:
“Cities concentrate opportunities, but they also concentrate poverty, inequality and risk. And that’s something that we really don’t know how to understand, especially in a changing climate.”
Throughout the conference, many of the delegates presented nuanced stories of rural-to-urban migration from individual communities. These case studies highlighted the complex, interlinking factors that drive a person’s decision to move and the wide range of outcomes.
Dr Aysha Jennath from the IIHS presented the results from her research, which unpacks the experiences of migrants who have moved from rural to urban areas, for a range of reasons including the changing climate and for better livelihoods.
Jennath and her colleagues interviewed thousands of migrants living in informal settlements, or working in informal jobs, in large cities in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal. The researchers’ questions aimed to understand the migrants’ “wellbeing, adaptive capacity and precarity”.
Overall, Jennath found that migrants in large cities are vulnerable to poor housing, unsafe working conditions and a lack of basic social services.
Dr Binaya Pasakhala and Dr Sabarnee Tuladhar from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, presented initial results from the Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CLARE) project, in which researchers interviewed households across Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal about migration patterns.
They conducted hundreds of surveys to identify how households are adapting to the changing climate and grouped responses into a series of “pathways” describing the impacts of rural-to-urban migration on their livelihoods.
For example, Tuladhar noted that in Bhutan, there is a huge emphasis on education, which has “changed the aspirations of the community – especially the youth”. This drives “huge depopulation” from rural areas as young, educated people migrate to urban areas or internationally, she said.
This mass movement into the cities provides opportunities for young people. It also provides money for the families back home – a type of finance known as remittances.
However, it also “weakened resilience” in the villages through “gungtong” – a phrase which translates literally to “empty houses”.
However, they also described the case of Nepal’s Baragon mountain community, where remittances from people who moved to urban centres has allowed communities in the villages to shift livelihoods away from subsidence farming towards commercialised farming and tourism. In this case, “migration has actually strengthened the resilience of the community”, Tuladhar said.
Prof Nitya Rao is a researcher in gender and development at the University of East Anglia (UEA), also presented research funded by CLARE.
She told the conference that when men are forced to leave for work, due to a lack of other options, a lot of their earnings go towards “survival” and less is saved. On the other hand, “mixed migration” – such as the movement of a father and son – is often “aspirational”. It typically yields higher remittances and improves adaptive capacity back home, according to Rao.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Rao argued that in order to “make migration a case of adaptation and not just survival in the short term”, destination cities need to do more to welcome migrants.
Dr Maria Franco Gavonel, a lecturer at the University of York and Prof Mumuni Abu, a senior lecturer from the University of Ghana, explored the concept of “social tipping points” in migration decision-making.
They suggested that as a drought intensifies, there may be a threshold at which households decide to leave. The authors compared drought indices to immigration patterns across communities in Ghana, Mali, Kenya and Ethiopia, but did not find evidence of a social tipping point.
This could be because households anticipate severe droughts and leave before they hit, the speakers suggested. They also noted that there are many government-led policy responses to drought that could affect a household’s decision to stay or leave.
For example, Kenya has a livestock-insurance policy to help families who lose animals during drought. Similarly the African Union uses satellite data to assess the severity of droughts and provide compensation to affected households.
In the final session of the conference, Dr Kasia Paprocki, an associate professor of environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, provided a counterpoint to the idea that the vast majority of villagers want to abandon farming and move to the city.
She argued that people are often displaced from rural communities and unable to live farming lifestyles, even if they want to, adding:
“I have found that agrarian dispossession is being intensified through development interventions that are today being referred to as climate change adaptation.”
She argued for the need to “reorganise economies” to enable people to stay “if they would like to”, adding:
“Climate change adaptation and climate migration without meaningful agrarian reform will not produce climate justice.”
Immobility and relocation
Movement from rural to urban areas was not the only migration pattern discussed in the conference. Experts also discussed movement patterns including planned relocation and immobility.
The graphic below – adapted from the 2021 Groundswell report and originally published in Carbon Brief’s 2024 explainer on climate-driven migration – shows different categories of mobility and immobility due to climate change.
Dr Roman Hoffmann from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis’s migration and sustainable development research group opened a session on “immobility” by presenting a way of defining and measuring the phenomenon.
He told Carbon Brief that immobility is “basically the absence of movement”, adding:
“The are different types of immobility. We have voluntary and involuntary immobility – and sometimes these different forms are not so clearly distinguishable, but there’s more sort of a continuum. Basically, the question is whether people are able to realise their aspirations to move or to stay.”
In his talk, Hoffman noted that media narratives around migration often focus on large movements of people, while the topic of immobility “falls between the cracks”.
Immobility is often seen as a problem experienced by the poorest and most vulnerable members of society – for example, because people cannot find or afford the resources they need, such as food or transportation, because they are not healthy enough to move or because they do not have the social network they require to make such a big change.
However, Dr Joyce Soo from the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, explained that there are also instances when “wealth enables immobility”.
Soo explained that in coastal regions of Sweden that are exposed to extreme events, many residents there choose to stay, as there is “strong trust in government protection”, such as coastal defences. She explained that in this instance “immobility is linked to identity and status”.
A separate session at the conference focused on planned relocation – the organised movement of a group of people away from a site that is highly vulnerable to climate extremes.
Dr Ricardo Safra de Campos, a senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Exeter, told the delegates that planned relocation is “arguably the most controversial aspect of mobility as a response to climate change” and is usually implemented when “all other forms of in-situ adaptation have failed”.
Safra de Campos and Nihal Ranjit, a senior research associate at IIHS, worked with a team of researchers to interview people who underwent planned relocation programmes in India and Bangladesh.
They told delegates that planned relocation is often implemented when people feel unsafe – for example due to climate extremes – resulting in an “erosion of habitability”.
However, Ranjit explained “safety alone doesn’t make relocation successful”. He argued that the most important aspect of planned relocation is to ensure that migrants do not lose their livelihoods.
He presented the example of Ramayapatnam – a fishing village in India where houses were slowly being lost to coastal erosion. Ranjit explained that a planned relocation programme was set up to move people away from the coast, but that many people refused to move, as doing so would mean losing their only means of earning money.
He also noted the many Indian citizens hold a deep mistrust of the government and question the authorities’ intentions.
Relocation must be “rights-based, participatory, livelihood-centred and attentive to culture, community and long-term wellbeing”, Ranjit said.
Meanwhile, Dr Annah Pigott-McKellar, a human geographer at the Queensland University of Technology, compared two case studies of relocation in Australia.
When devastating flash floods hit Queensland in January 2011, a relocation programme led by the local government was set up to move people. The first houses were built within a year, and people were moved in “extremely fast”, Pigott-McKellar said. She explained that the goal was to keep the town together and “keep some level of social continuity”.
Conversely, when northern New South Wales faced severe flooding in 2022, the response was slow, according to Pigott-McKellar. She explained that different members of the community were offered varying levels of assistance by the state. For example, some households offered buybacks for their lost properties, while others were not.
The result was a “fragmented and dispersed mobility pathway” that saw the community split up and mistrust in the government grow.
Pigott-McKellar emphasised the importance of follow-through and continuity in relocation, stating:
“Relocation isn’t a moment in time. It is a process that unfolds over months or years”.
Legal pathways
Most human migration happens within borders. However, conference delegates also discussed cases in which people move to other countries, with a focus on the possible legal pathways.
Prof Jon Barnett, professor in the school of geography, Earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Melbourne, explained migration patterns in the south Pacific islands.
He told delegates that climate change is causing “significant social impacts” across the islands, adding:
“While we can’t say that climate change is a major factor in migration decisions…there is a “fingerprint of climate change in [all] migration decisions.”
Barnett outlined legal migration routes for Pacific islanders, such as Fiji’s climate relocation trust fund, which has already had more than 2,000 requests, or seasonal worker schemes to New Zealand, which have already issued 137,000 visas.
However, he noted that there is a “massive burden” for the women who stay on the Pacific islands when their husbands leave. He explained that not only do women substitute for the labour of the men, but climate change can also amplify their workload by making farming more difficult and illnesses more widespread.
He concluded:
“Migration cannot be the only adaptation strategy we offer to the Pacific Islands. It’s got to be one strategy in the portfolio.”
Speaking separately to Carbon Brief, he said:
“As climate change amplifies pressures on people’s livelihoods, we may end up with a whole series of transnational populations that are kind of constantly in churn – where they’re not just living on the island, but also in Australia, New Zealand, the US.
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing, I think, so long as people still have a right to return to their islands and can do so – and are making informed choices…to manage their climate risk.”
Demographer Prof Raya Muttarak, from the University of Bologna, told delegates that Italy is the only EU country with explicit legislation for climate-related protection.
This six-month residence permit was introduced in 2018, for people who are found to have faced a “contingent and exceptional calamity”. However, she noted that there are flaws in the evidence base for making these claims, which can make it difficult for people to obtain the permits.
Changing narratives
Many speakers discussed the framing of climate change and migration in their talks. There was also a workshop on how to develop and promote “new narratives” around migration as an adaptation response to a changing climate on the first day of the conference.
Dr Reetika Subramanian, a senior research associate at UEA who helped to organise the conference, told Carbon Brief that many media narratives around migration are “alarmist” and “crisis-based”, with a focus on people from poorer countries illegally entering wealthier countries.
However, explained that the conference convenors wanted to begin work on developing a new framing for migration – both in response to climate change and more generally – focusing on its “adaptive aspects”.
Dr Benoy Peter, the executive director of the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development, told Carbon Brief that “far right” media and politics often “leverage” migration to present a negative framing.
However, he said that he sees migration as a “solution”, describing it as the “fastest way for intergenerational upward social mobility for people from socially and economically disadvantaged populations”.
Prof Kerilyn Schewel, assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Carbon Brief that the migration community has “moved beyond a ‘push factor’ narrative – that climate change is coming and uprooting communities – to a more nuanced perspective that recognises that people are already moving for all kinds of reasons”.
She said the new “research frontier” is “seeing how environmental factors intersect with these other social or developmental outcomes”, such as education.
Liby Johnson, the executive director of development organisation Gram Vikas, told the conference his reason for hope:
“Communities are figuring this out. They are not rejecting mobility – they are asking for mobility that is safer, fairer and more dignified. Communities affected by climate uncertainty are not simply enduring crises – they are actively using mobility to diversify risk, protect dignity and build better futures.”
Revi, from the IIHS, told Carbon Brief:
“The future of mobility is much more certain than the climate futures are. People have been mobile for a very long time. That’s been an important part of the transformation of societies and economies for centuries…Mobility is part of the solution. It is not the full solution, but it’s part of the solution. People are voting with their feet and with their aspirations to make a change.”
The post Experts: Why migration is ‘not a failure of adaptation’ in a warming world appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Experts: Why migration is ‘not a failure of adaptation’ in a warming world
This is a republication of October’s edition of The Climate Agenda – a subscriber-only newsletter designed to keep you informed of the key events, negotiations and announcements happening every month. If you want to receive The Climate Agenda straight to your inbox at the start of each month, sign up as a subscriber today.
This month, we’ll be on the ground reporting from the Convention on Biological Diversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia later this month and following all the developments as we build towards COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye next month. Here’s what you need to know for October, why it matters and what to expect.
Brazilian Election
First round: Sunday 4 October – Second round: Sunday 25 October
This poll is being closely watched by Brazilian environmentalists as it’s likely to make a big difference to Brazil’s international climate politics and the health of the Amazon rainforest.
The two clear front-runners are current left-wing President Lula and right-wing Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who ruled from 2019 to 2023 but was declared ineligible to hold public office because of his attacks on the electoral system and is now under house arrest.
In the unlikely event that either candidate wins more than half the votes in the first round, they will be elected as the country’s leader. Latest polls have Lula on 39% and Bolsonaro on 35% (though the numbers are shifting) with several minor candidates in the single-digits. If none of them get a majority, there will be a one-on-one run-off on October 25.
The Latin American nation is set to record its lowest-ever level of deforestation, as efforts to rein in illegal clearing and restore Indigenous rights progressed under Lula. But Brazilian experts are warning that the huge agribusiness lobby in Congress, whose interests shape what happens in the Amazon, will be emboldened if Bolsonaro takes power, with the Supreme Court also risking a turn to the right.
As for climate politics, some seasoned watchers fear that Flávio – a climate change denier like his dad – could even try to pull Brazil out of the Paris Agreement. That would leave other countries to take forward Brazil’s COP30 global roadmaps on transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF) and ending deforestation – both of which are due to be delivered by COP31.
For Brazil’s own TAFF roadmap – commissioned earlier this year but so far nowhere to be seen – the election may have less of an impact, given Lula is as keen as any other politician to extract oil and gas from the Amazon, amid cross-party support for fossil fuel production.
Read more: Brazil leads “encouraging” decline in global rainforest destruction in 2025
Pre-COP
Monday 5 October – Thursday 8 October – Fiji and Tuvalu
The annual Pre-COP meeting is usually a business-like gathering of government negotiators, sounding out each other’s positions and laying the groundwork for deals at the main COP summit. But this year’s “pre” has been jazzed up by Australia’s partnership with Pacific governments keen to elevate their climate issues on the international stage.
“We will bring the eyes of the world to our region, highlight the threat that climate change poses to it, and show how Pacific voices are shaping global action to counter it,” Australian PM Anthony Albanese said of the event.
On Monday, before the Pre-COP officially starts, a group of senior government figures – including a handful of leaders – will visit the world’s second lowest-lying nation Tuvalu, as UN boss Antonio Guterres did in 2019.
They will visit areas affected by sea level rise, see climate resilience projects and meet local communities before flying 2.5 hours south to Fiji to join up with the Pre-COP – which starts on Tuesday – and speak at a “Leaders’ plenary session” that evening.
The Pre-COP runs until Thursday. Governments are expected to try to advance on some kind of a roadmap for protecting oceans from climate change, while Fiji says Pacific nations will emphasise the need to follow science and step up efforts to limit warming to 1.5C.
Australia is also due to present an action plan to improve access to climate finance for small island nations and least-developed countries, so that governments, development banks and climate funds can endorse it ahead of the Antalya summit.
Alongside the official Pre-COP discussions, a “green zone” will host talks organised by civil society on topics like public transport, carbon markets and the International Court of Justice advisory opinion. Unfortunately, these events won’t be available to follow online.
Read more: Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood
Read more: At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
Article 6.4 Supervisory Body
Monday 5 October – Friday 9 October – Bonn, Germany
The UN carbon market’s rule-making body meets for one last jam-packed session ahead of COP31, with decisions pending on several high-stakes issues that could shape the future of the new crediting mechanism.
Top of the agenda is a rulebook for clean cooking projects, which aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves. These projects generate some of the most popular carbon credits but have also drawn some of the heaviest criticism for overstating their climate benefits through lax accounting.
Technical experts have recommended the Supervisory Body tighten the rules compared to existing crediting programmes, including by forcing cookstove project developers for the first time to guard against the risk of the climate benefits of their credits – the trees saved from becoming cooking fuel – being wiped out by fire, drought or logging.
The proposal on the so-called reversal risk assessment has sparked a “coordinated” lobbying campaign from the industry, some conservation NGOs and UNEP, arguing that stronger protections could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits.
Read more: Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) plenary
Monday 12 October – Friday 16 October – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Scientists and government officials will try, once again, to agree on a timeline to produce the highly influential AR7 assessment report from the UN’s climate science body.
The faultlines that have blocked a deal at several previous sessions are well established: a large group of predominantly developed countries, small island and progressive Latin American states and the poorest nations want the reports to be ready in time to inform the UN’s next global assessment of climate action, due to be completed in November 2028.
A small group of primarily big emerging economies disagree, claiming this timeline would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and restrict their ability to provide scientific input into the process.
Three options will be on the table in Addis Ababa. Two of them would see all three flagship assessment reports approved by July 2028 and September 2028 respectively, just in time to feed into the second Global Stocktake.
The third, based on proposals from Saudi Arabia and India, would deliver only the Working Group 1 report, on the physical science of climate change, by May 2028. The reports from Working Groups 2 and 3, covering climate impacts and ways to cut emissions, would not be approved until mid-2029, well after the stocktake concludes at COP33.
Delegates are also expected to discuss the IPCC’s increasingly strained budget, made worse by a funding gap left by the withdrawal of the United States. The panel has warned that, without a sustained increase in contributions, its trust fund’s cash balance would run out by the end of 2028, putting the delivery of the AR7 set of reports at risk and forcing cuts to in-person meetings, translation and outreach.
Read more: Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
Read more: As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
World Bank & IMF Annual Meetings
Tuesday 12 October – Sunday 18 October – Bangkok, Thailand
With their biggest shareholder – the US – resolutely opposed to climate action, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are likely to try to avoid mentioning climate change at their annual meetings in Bangkok – and there are no headline events on the subject.
But they aren’t in complete control of the agenda. Thailand will host a discussion on financing a green resilient economy and World Bank President Ajay Banga is likely to be challenged on climate at a live-streamed civil society townhall on October 12.
With tricky negotiations on the World Bank’s climate finance target concluded earlier this year (it was dropped), talks are moving on to the sustainability framework of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, which invests in the private sector. Civil society is calling for its rules on protecting people and the planet to be maintained and strengthened.
The IMF’s guidance note to staff – which shapes the circumstances under which climate can be included in IMF programmes – will also be negotiated. Longer term, the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, which channels funding to green projects, will be reviewed but not before 2028 at the earliest.
Read more: World Bank’s climate work can endure without finance target, experts say
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17
Monday 19 October – Friday 30 October – Yerevan, Armenia
The biodiversity COP – a sister convention to the UN climate process – will for the first time take stock of progress towards key goals in its 2022 landmark agreement, the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). These include a headline target to protect and conserve at least 30% of the planet’s land and marine ecosystems by 2030.
A draft report prepared by a scientific panel warns that “unless collective implementation accelerates rapidly, the 2030 targets and mission will not be achieved”. In fact, governments are failing on 22 out of 23 targets. The final report is expected to be published ahead of COP17, where governments are expected to react strongly.
UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker told journalists earlier this month that the most significant progress is expected to occur towards the end of the decade, as 174 countries took the first four years to develop national targets.
Finance, meanwhile, is set to become a contentious issue, as the draft report says developed countries fell short on a target to provide $20bn per year in international public finance for nature protection, reaching only about $17bn per year from 2020 to 2023. They have also yet to meet a wider goal to mobilise $200bn per year counting all kinds of finance.
Much like in climate talks, the EU has proposed to broaden the base of donors to include emerging economies who want to “voluntarily assume the obligations” of developed countries. Saudi Arabia and Qatar want nothing to do with this proposal. China has said bringing in new contributors should not weaken the obligations of developed countries. Expect a fight in Yerevan.
A preliminary meeting in Nairobi in August resulted in a heavily bracketed text that delegates will have to unravel in Armenia. One observer said countries had “overall missed the level of urgency” needed.
Keep an eye out for our webinar live from Yerevan later this month, where we’ll provide an update on the talks and how governments are responding to science’s demands for quicker action.
Read more: Mombasa ocean summit drives progress on marine protection, but threats persist
Read more: UN biodiversity talks agree finance roadmap, postponing decision on a new fund
European Climate Resilience & Risk Management Framework
Wednesday 28 October – Brussels, Belgium
Following a torrid summer beset by recurring heatwaves, drought and outbreaks of forest fires across the continent, the European Commission will present its keenly awaited climate resilience and risk management framework to help member states protect their populations from worsening climate change impacts.
As part of the policy package, the Commission will identify 100 of Europe’s most climate-vulnerable territories. And alongside an assessment of the risks, there will be guidance at which level they should be managed – regional, national or by the EU. Currently, confusion often arises over who is responsible for preventing, preparing for and managing disasters across the bloc.
The framework will also aim to make Europe a “champion in adaptation technologies” – such as drought-resistant crops, flood prevention or energy-efficient cooling – which have been described by EU President Ursula von der Leyen as “a huge emerging market”.
With only around a quarter of catastrophe losses in Europe covered by private insurance, the Commission also plans to set up a Climate Insurance Alliance to boost that figure.
READ MORE: WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in
The post What’s on the climate calendar for October 2026? appeared first on Climate Home News.
On the desert shores of the Red Sea, Jordan plans to build a vast desalination plant to send drinking water hundreds of kilometres across its arid interior to the capital, Amman – bolstering climate resilience and reducing the country’s reliance on Israel for the vital resource.
As climate change exacerbates water scarcity in Jordan, a deterioration in the country’s already prickly ties with Israel since the start of the Gaza war has underscored the strategic importance of the roughly $6-billion desalination initiative, billed by its backers as a strategic climate adaptation project.
But despite receiving $295 million in support for the project from the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF), the energy-hungry plant – which will double the power needs of Jordan’s water sector – will get no more than 27% of its electricity from a purpose-built solar farm in the desert near the plant in Aqaba. The rest will come from the grid, whose power is mostly generated by fossil gas.
To get salt out of sea water, it has to be pushed at high pressure through a membrane – a process requiring huge amounts of electricity.
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The annual planet-heating emissions from producing the non-renewable power needed for the plant would be equivalent to having 160,000 petrol-run cars on the road for a year, according to an analysis by Climate Home News of figures provided by the project’s developers to the GCF – the world’s largest multilateral fund to help developing countries tackle climate change.
Such forecasts prompted a warning from its independent technical advisory panel and criticism by climate campaigners, but the GCF board nevertheless approved the financing at a meeting late last year, with GCF Executive Director Mafalda Duarte hailing it as a “milestone project”.
A GCF spokesperson told Climate Home News its design “required the balanced optimisation of multiple objectives”, among them water security, financing considerations and climate-related benefits.
Asked to respond to concerns about the project’s sustainability, a spokesperson for Jordan’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation said the plant is key to tackling the nation’s water deficit, in tandem with other steps to conserve supplies such as managing leaks.
“We have carried out environmental impact studies for the Aqaba desalination plant,” the spokesperson added. “All donor countries reviewed and approved these studies.”
Dry and getting drier
Jordan is already one of the world’s most water-stressed countries, and climate change impacts mean the country of about 11 million people is getting less rain at a time of population growth, in part due to the arrival of refugees from the war in Syria.
Half of Jordanian homes currently receive water for less than 24 hours a week and many pay to get tanker trucks to deliver extra water despite the high cost.
“Every Jordanian living in a village or city … can feel, especially in the summer, that the amount of water reaching their home is not enough,” said University of Jordan water science professor Elias Salameh.
At the same time, heightened political tensions in the region are raising fears over a long-standing water supply accord with Israel.
Prominent Israeli news outlet Ynet quoted government officials as saying last year that – until Jordan ends its criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza – it would no longer send Jordan 100 million cubic metres of water a year, as it has been doing since 2021.
Instead, media reports said Israel had decided to send just the 50 million cubic metres required by the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace agreement.
That makes the desalination project all the more urgent, Motasem Saidan, a former water minister who pushed it forward, told Climate Home News.
“Relying on neighbouring countries for sources of the most important resource for life is risky. You need to have self-sufficiency and water security,” Saidan added.
Largest single GCF investment
French multinationals Meridiam and Suez have been awarded the contract to lead construction of the desalination facility, which Suez says will be one of the largest of its kind globally.
Scheduled for completion in 2030, it will turn 300 million cubic metres of seawater a year – enough to fill 120,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools – into drinking water, which will then be carried by pipeline more than 400 km across the desert to reservoirs near Amman, home to nearly half of Jordan’s population.
The GCF will support it with a $220 million loan and a $75 million grant. While that represents a small share of the total cost, Duarte said last year it represented “the largest single investment in one project that we have made”.
But the GCF’s decision to pour millions into the project followed strong criticism from climate campaigners, initial opposition from some of the fund’s board members and a warning by its independent technical advisory panel (ITAP) over its potential impact on emissions.
The emissions it aims to avoid rest on the timely completion of a 65-km transmission line connecting the desalination plant to the solar farm. Without this, the plant will run entirely on Jordan’s gas-dominated grid, the ITAP said in its assessment report.
Moreover, while the government plans to make the power supplied by the national grid greener in the years ahead, there is no guarantee this will be achieved, the report added.
Such issues make the project “difficult to reconcile with climate finance objectives”, the ITAP said, adding there is a significant risk that “concessional resources could end up subsidising a high-carbon, high-cost water pathway”.
Still, the ITAP concluded that “given the dire water situation in Jordan”, the project’s benefits outweighed those concerns and recommended approval to the board.
Bigger renewables role deemed unfeasible
The possibility of producing more of the plant’s electricity from solar power and batteries was dismissed by the project’s proposer and co-funder – the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) – and the GCF as too expensive and impractical, a decision critics see as a wasted opportunity to shift to clean energy.
The companies that carried out the project’s environmental and social impact assessment – Eco Consult and Energies Group – said the option of sourcing all power from renewables “was not studied in detail” because it was seen as unfeasible.
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Asked to comment, the GCF spokesperson said the fund supported that conclusion, citing renewable energy’s intermittency and noting that excess solar power produced would be wasted because there is no provision for it to be sold to the grid.
“The optimum design of such a critical life-line desalination project for Jordan is fundamentally a whole-of-system water optimisation challenge rather than a standalone energy storage exercise,” the spokesperson said.
Instead, the plan’s advocates have touted potential emissions reductions as the pipeline replaces water trucks. They say the solar farm set to supply more than a quarter of the desalination plant’s power will prevent 6.7 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent being emitted over its 26-year projected lifetime.
Saidan, the former water minister, said the urgency of providing water must take priority over gas dependency concerns.
“This is not the time to raise such issues,” he told Climate Home News.
But Kostanta Rangelova, a global electricity analyst at think-tank Ember, said the plant could “easily” get at least 80% of its power from solar with batteries, pointing to Jordan’s abundant sunshine and the plunging costs of the equipment needed.
Such systems are set to power large facilities elsewhere in the region, like a luxury Red Sea resort just over the Saudi border and a data centre near Abu Dhabi, she said. Jordan’s own energy sector strategy, published in May, lists increasing battery storage as a strategic target.
Rangelova noted that with battery prices falling significantly in recent years, the cost of solar plus battery storage is now competitive with grid power in many places, particularly in countries like Jordan that have a lot of sun but currently rely on expensive imported gas.
“With solar and batteries, Jordan (could) use homegrown electricity not just during daytime hours, but round-the-clock, which can significantly strengthen its energy security position,” she added.
Lesser of two evils
Using more renewables in the project could also help reduce demand for Israeli natural gas imports – a sensitive issue in Jordan.
“[The desalination plant] will not be viable if we depend on gas supplied by the Israeli occupation,” Mahmoud Amin Al-Hayari, an activist with the General Trade Union of Electricity Workers in Jordan, told Climate Home News.
Jordan’s government is working to develop new sources of gas imports to diversify its current supply, and also wants to boost domestic gas production, alongside renewables.
In the meantime, Jordan’s National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) remains heavily dependent on Israeli gas for electricity generation, industry experts say. Latest government figures from 2024 show the country got 58% of its electric power from gas.
Most of that gas is likely to be Israeli. “About 57% of the electricity that NEPCO supplies to distribution companies comes from gas imported from Israel,” a Jordanian energy and conflict analyst told Climate Home News, asking to speak anonymously due to the sensitivity of the subject.
The spokesperson for Jordan’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation declined to comment on the source of the gas that would help power the Aqaba desalination project.
The issue has gained attention due to several security-related gas supply disruptions from Israel related to the conflict in the Middle East.
For countries like Jordan, a net fuel importer, the energy security case for boosting renewables is a no-brainer, said Ember’s Rangelova. “Unlike imported fossil fuels, the sun cannot be turned off,” she said.
The post Jordan’s mega-plan for water security risks locking in fossil gas demand appeared first on Climate Home News.
Jordan’s mega-plan for water security risks locking in fossil gas demand
The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £5.9bn since the start of the Hormuz crisis as a result of record electricity generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis.
While gas prices are surging towards levels not seen since the 2022 energy crisis, the UK has been generating record amounts of power from wind and solar, up 14% year-on-year.
This unprecedented clean-power generation is directly cutting the need for gas-fired electricity, which is down by nearly 10% year-on-year in 2026 to date.
In total, wind and solar have generated a record 41% share of the UK’s electricity needs in 2026 to date, compared with 25% from gas, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis.
The figure below shows that wind and solar generation has avoided the need for UK gas imports worth a total of £5.9bn since the outbreak of war between the US and Iran in February 2026.
The analysis shows that these avoided gas imports would have required the UK to secure the equivalent of more than 100 additional tanker deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The £1.3bn import saving in September 2026 to date is the result of record wind and solar output, at nearly 10 terawatt hours (TWh), combined with surging gas prices.
Wholesale gas prices in the UK have remained elevated ever since Russia cut off supplies to Europe in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Gas averaged 90p per therm from 2023 until the start of this year, roughly three times above 2019 prices, before the Covid and Ukraine crises.
Since the outbreak of war in the Middle East in March, gas prices have climbed higher still, averaging 134p per therm or nearly four times the level seen in 2019.
In September 2026 to date, gas prices have averaged 189p per therm, reaching their highest level since the global energy crisis in 2022, as shown in the figure below.
UK gas prices are spiking again because winter is approaching – meaning higher demand for heating – and there is no end in sight for the Hormuz crisis.
At the same time, European gas stocks are low. This means Europe will have to compete with Asia to secure the cargoes of LNG needed to keep warm.
In the UK, high wholesale gas prices are hitting household gas bills under the price cap set by energy regulator Ofgem – but thanks to clean energy, electricity bills have barely increased.
From this Thursday, 1 October, typical household gas bills will be 33% higher than they were in April, some £200 per year, according to thinktank Nesta.
In contrast, household electricity bills will only have risen 4%, according to Nesta’s analysis.
Andrew Sissons, director for sustainable future at Nesta, explained in a social media post that “the link between electricity and gas prices has already begun to break”.
The UK and other fossil-fuel importing nations are being hit not only by high gas prices, but also by high prices for oil, diesel and other refined fuels. The EU has reportedly had to pay an extra €100bn for fossil-fuel imports since the start of the crisis.
For example, UK diesel prices this week hit record levels of nearly £2 per litre. In contrast, recent Carbon Brief analysis shows that electric cars are up to nine times cheaper to drive.
In her speech to the Labour party conference this week, energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh said that energy bills were high because the UK is “exposed to global fossil-fuel markets”.
In his own conference speech, prime minister Andy Burnham said the expansion of clean energy was easing the impact of high gas prices on electricity bills. He said:
“We are already taking more control of our electricity prices with a massive expansion of home-grown renewables and nuclear. I have asked Miatta to speed up the breaking of the link between what we pay for power at home and the international gas market, to get bills down.”
The post Analysis: Wind and solar save UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during Hormuz crisis appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Wind and solar save UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during Hormuz crisis
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