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
Climate Change
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
On the morning of 26 August, flash floods surged through a Himalayan border region of Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, killing more than 1,300 people, with thousands still missing.
In the days since the floods, scientists have examined satellite imagery, drone footage and seismic data in order to understand and explain the forces behind the event.
While initial theories pinned the flood on a glacial collapse, scientists now understand the event as a “multi-hazard cascade”, which began with a bedrock collapse.
Some climate sceptics have tried to use this to falsely claim that human-caused climate change had no impact on the event.
Yet, scientists have noted that, while no formal attribution study has been carried out thus far, warming is making such ice-rock avalanches in the region more likely.
Researchers have highlighted how rapid warming is dramatically reshaping Asia’s high-mountain region – and identified rising temperatures, glacier retreat and permafrost thaw as factors that may have all contributed to the disaster.
Balendra Shah, Nepal’s prime minister, has called the floods a “serious signal that…the risks we must bear in the Himalayan region are increasing” due to climate change.
Here, Carbon Brief unpacks what scientists currently know about the causes of the catastrophic event and what they can – and cannot – say about the role of climate change.
What happened?
A report published on 28 August by the HiRisk scientific consortium of high mountain experts detailed the events that led to the flash floods.
It said that events were set in motion on 26 August when a mass of bedrock, as well as the glacier ice on top of it, broke off a slope of Langtang-Lirung mountain in the Nepalese Himalaya, plunging from approximately 5,200 metres above sea level to the valley floor at 3,000 metres.
The landslide shook the ground hard enough that, at 8:37am Nepal local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Later that day, it clarified the shaking was caused by glacier collapse and debris flow, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
On the valley floor, the melting ice, water and debris slammed into the Lhende Khola river, a high-altitude river that runs along Nepal’s border with China.
Known downstream as the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal and the Poiqu or Poqu in China, the Lhende Khole feeds a network of rivers across Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, including the Trishuli river. (In China, the Lhende Khola is known as the Donglin Tsangpo.)
A large “debris” lake was briefly formed on the valley floor. When this lake burst, a wall of water and rock travelled downstream, killing more than a thousand people and destroying settlements, roads, bridges, hydropower plants and border posts across Nepal and Tibet.
HiRisk said that the floodwave travelled down rivers as fast as 30km an hour (around 19 miles per hour) and reached Mugling – a Nepalese town more than 130km downstream – at around 1pm local time.
A separate report from the Center for Land Surface Hazards in the US noted that the flood moved “exceptionally fast, was sediment-laden and extreme in scale”. For example, in the Nepalese municipality of Galchhi, the Trishuli river rose by nine metres in 30 minutes, it said.
Writing in the Conversation, Dr Umesh Haritashya, a glaciologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, explained that the disaster “wasn’t finished when the first wall of water passed [on 26 August]”.
He continued that a new “barrier lake” – estimated to hold a few million cubic metres of water – had developed in a location where two rivers meet in Tibet before crossing into Nepal. This lake burst on 28 August and the river rose again, he said.
On 4 September, the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters that property and infrastructure worth “at least” $2.5bn (£1.9bn) had been lost. Dharma Raj Upreti estimated the cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and restore power would be around $53m (£39m).
How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, initial reports suggested that the trigger was a collapsing glacier or earthquake in the high mountains of Nepal.
After confirming that a seismic tremor was as a result of falling rock and ice, the USGS said the trigger was likely a “glacial collapse and debris flow”. This was widely picked up by the media.
Subsequently, satellite imagery revealed that an “enormous chunk of the mountainous bedrock” beneath the glacier had also given way, reported the New York Times.
Dr Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told the newspaper:
“The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed…It was a much larger collapse than we were initially able to see in the satellite imagery.”
The result was a “deluge of rock and ice, which pulverized into mud and water as it surged down the mountainside”, the newspaper said.
Dr Jakob Steiner a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria, tells Carbon Brief:
“It was not a glacier that collapsed. It was the mountain below the glacier that collapsed and the glacier had no other chance but to go with it because it was sitting on top of it.
“The trigger for that is something that we are not 100% certain about, but, in the end, it very much looks like simply a mechanical failure of the rock material because of stressors that have built up over a long period of time.”
Failures of “bedrock” – the hard, solid rock that sits below looser rocks and soil – are an “increasingly common occurrence”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These massive landslides occur in mountain regions, commonly following rapid deglacierisation [the melting away of a glacier]. Similar events happened in the Chamoli event in 2021 [in the Indian Himalaya] and in the Blatten landslide last year in Switzerland. They’ve also occurred recently in Alaska.”
With a shift in focus from the failure of a glacier to the bedrock underneath, some climate sceptics seized on the development to falsely claim that climate change had not played any role in the disaster.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program, on Twitter, as well as former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley in the Spectator.
However, scientists have highlighted the likely contribution of rapid warming in the region. These factors include the thawing of permafrost and glacier retreat. (For more, see sections below).
Fundamentally, “this would have been a much less significant tragedy if it had been just a rock-slope failure”, notes Davies.
The initial landslide took a mixture of rock and ice into a valley that “contains buried ice” as well, she says, providing the water that “resulted in the hyperconcentrated flow, which took so many lives”.
How have temperatures risen in the affected region?
Global temperatures have risen by roughly 1.4C since the pre-industrial period. However, this increase is not uniform across the planet, with some regions warming faster than others.
A study published in Global and Planetary Change in June 2026 investigated changes in the Langtang catchment – a river basin in central Nepal, in which the Langtang-Lirung mountain is located, which eventually drains into the Ganges. Around one-quarter of the area is made up of glaciers.
The paper found that glacial areas of the catchment – found at 4,000 metres above sea level – warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023. This was “more than three times” the rate observed at a lower elevation weather station, the authors said.
Looking in more detail at the site of the glacial collapse, Dr Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, used ERA5 reanalysis data to show how temperature has changed at the 5,200-metre elevation site where the mass of ice and rock broke loose.
Rohde’s analysis found that June-to-August temperatures have been rising at the site of the glacier collapse since the year 1940, with 2026’s summer the fourth warmest on record, behind 2024, 2025 and 2022. This is shown in the graph below.
Rohde also found that the days leading up to the disaster recorded the hottest August temperatures ever experienced at the site. This is shown in the graph below.
On social media, Rohde stated:
“Given the warming trend, this Nepali glacier had probably been thinning and weakening for years, or even decades. But it ultimately failed during the warmest week in one of its warmest years on record. It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame.”
How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
Many experts have linked warming temperatures in the region to thawing permafrost – ground that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years, whose thickness ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre.
Steiner is part of a research team that has been using sensors to monitor permafrost in the region since 2014. He tells Carbon Brief that it is “pretty clear” the permafrost has been thawing “very actively” at elevations as high as 5,200 metres above sea level “for many years”. He adds:
“This means that the ground has, over the last decades, moved from being in a solid state into – at least, periodically during the warm season – patchy ground where some is frozen and some isn’t…
“If you have frozen ground next to non-frozen ground, you have dynamics happening between that because there are different densities and there’s movement happening, which is conducive to interventional failure – and that we know from many other cases.”
Davies also points to the “degradation” of perennially frozen ground as a factor in the disaster:
“This permafrost acts as a glue to hold together the rocks and, as it melts, the rock can become weakened.”
Permafrost thaw can also result in saturated ground, says Davies, which adds “pressure in the joints” of rock and can “facilitate” failure. She continues:
“Sources of the water include melting permafrost and meltwater from the overlying glacier. We know that this event happened during a period of warmth, but in the absence of heavy precipitation, pointing to ice melt as the source of water.”
A 2025 study of rock and ice avalanches in High Mountain Asia found that more than two-thirds started in areas “where permafrost is probable”.
How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
Glaciers – frozen rivers of ice holding three-quarters of the global freshwater supply – are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
In the Himalaya, the rate of glacier retreat has doubled since the late 20th century, according to a 2019 study in Science Advances.
The Global and Planetary Change study found that glacier area loss rates in the Langtang catchment increased more than fourfold from 1964 to 2023 – with melting accelerating after 2000.
It added that glaciers in the region also experienced “fragmentation” and “widespread thinning” over this period.
The study noted that this loss “coincided with elevation dependent warming”.
The figure below provides an overview of glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023, with orange, red and dark red indicating areas of retreat.
In addition, green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection.
In comments released by the University of Reading, Prof Maria Shahgedanova, a climate scientist researching climate impacts on mountain glaciers, said that the glacier involved in the floods had “retreated by approximately 450 metres between 1990 and 2020”.
She adds that this “potentially reduce[d] the mechanical support provided by the glacier to the underlying rock slope”.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Davies reiterates that the retreat of the glacier is “potentially a contributing factor” to the bedrock collapse and subsequent disaster.
This is because the removal of the glacier from the lower slopes leaves the “upper rock slopes less stable”, she says.
The most recent assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are “rapidly shrinking” as a result of climate change. (This region extends 3,500km over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.)
It said this loss is threatening the safety of the nearly two billion people, including by increasing the risk of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). A GLOF is a sudden and catastrophic release of meltwater from a glacial lake.
Although this disaster was not caused by a GLOF, it is known that climate change is making such events more likely.
Can the event be attributed to climate change?
In the wake of the flash floods, climate campaigners, media outlets and Nepalese politicians have linked them to human-caused climate change.
However, many climate scientists have cautioned that it is too early to say precisely how climate change impacted the disaster.
Davies tells Carbon Brief:
“These events happen so quickly that the exact causes and drivers can take a little time to uncover, especially if the event was a surprise and there had been no monitoring system in place.”
When trying to determine the role human-caused climate change played in the intensity or likelihood of extreme weather, scientists turn to the field of “attribution science”.
To date, no formal rapid attribution study has been produced that attempts to quantify whether – and how – climate change contributed to the event.
Scientists have noted that climate attribution of ice-rock avalanches – which are typically driven by a variety of factors – remains limited, in part because of the lack of a long-term observational record of previous collapses in high mountain areas.
Meanwhile, the studies that do exist stop short of directly linking such disasters to climate change. For example, the authors of a 2021 study into the Chamoli ice-rock avalanche concluded that “we cannot attribute this individual disaster specifically to climate change”.
However, they added, the “possibly increasing frequency of high-mountain slope instabilities can likely be related to observed atmospheric warming and corresponding long-term changes in cryospheric conditions (glaciers and permafrost)”.
In the aftermath of the disaster, many researchers have similarly highlighted that climate change could not be singled out as the cause of the disaster, even if warming likely increased the probability of its occurrence.
On the Climate Brink substack, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted that a “definitive single-event attribution” of the more recent disaster “may never be possible” due to the “messy causality of rock-ice avalanches”.
However, he added that both the existing scientific literature and “essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction” – namely, that warming is making such events more likely in the Himalaya.
Steiner tells Carbon Brief it might be possible to attribute different factors that played a role in the disasters to climate change – for instance, the recession of the glacier – but it would be more difficult to do so for the event as a whole.
Part of the reason for this, he says, is that rock failures in this region of the Himalaya have occurred for millennia, well before humans started altering the climate.
However, he continues:
“The physics of it is not something that has been made possible by climate change. This could have happened without it. But the chance of it happening – and the likelihood of it happening five years after a previous, similar event [in Chamoli] – we, as the scientific community, can be pretty confident about that [being increased because of a changing climate].
“This is because so many of the changes that we know are related to climate change can potentially drive the build-up to eventual failure.”
Ultimately, says Davies, a “careful attribution study is needed, but it is hard to argue that the rapidly warming climate is not having an effect in these regions”. She adds:
“A single event may have multiple drivers, but we are seeing an increase in these events and are likely to see more as the permafrost and glacier melt continues.”
Related
Explainer: The CMIP7 emissions scenarios – and how they explore future climate change
Climate change exposes 580 million children to 20 extra ‘heat-stress days’ every year
Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
The post Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.
Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.
Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.
China keeps Indonesia’s battery dream afloat but future less certain
The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.
“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.
“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.
Electrifying industry
Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.
A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.
-
China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste
Long-term contracts guarantee coal plants buyers regardless of demand, crowding out renewables, report finds -
China’s coal-chemicals boom risks repeating the mistakes of the past
By reviving the problematic industry in the name of energy security, China runs the risk of higher emissions, stranded assets and setting back its ambitions as a clean energy leader -
China’s carbon emissions rise again as more clean power is wasted
The economic powerhouse burned more coal and gas in the first quarter of 2026, despite record wind and solar build-out
Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.
Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.
In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.
Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.
“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.
“Growing by greening”
China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.
Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.
China and Brazil join pledge to triple global nuclear energy capacity
For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.
The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.
An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.
This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.
Stalling fossil fuel use
At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.
China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.
Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift
A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.
“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.
A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.
-
EU, UK lead push for electrification as “powerful weapon” against fossil fuels
A group of dozens of countries seeks to build momentum for a COP31 pledge to electrify 35% of global energy use by 2035 as an alternative to fossil fuels -
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Co-hosts Türkiye and Australia want countries to sign on to global targets in three of their priority areas for this year’s COP climate negotiations -
Africa can lead the Age of Electrification
The electrification agenda presents both an extraordinary opportunity for Africa and an immense challenge for the continent
In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.
A lesson in sequencing
China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.
“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.
For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.
“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.
The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.
According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.
The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.
How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses.
In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.
UK’s budget juggling trick with rainforest loan for bus-fare cap needs transparency
Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.
“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”
The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.
The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests.
Copy and paste?
More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.
A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.
In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses.
Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s.
-
Most “zombie credits” locked out of new UN carbon market after China and India snub
Fears of a flood of environmentally-dubious carbon credits have faded, with most old projects not able to transition to new UN market -
UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns
Civil society groups allege the cookstove project in Myanmar exaggerated its climate impact while maintaining ties with military junta
The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.
The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market.
Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets.
UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant.
UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis
In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.
The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.
The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News.
During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.
Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.
But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.
At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.
Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).
After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations, which participants were invited to consider and adapt in their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process.
Getting the rules ‘right’
In a statement to Climate Home News, Ghana, Paraguay and the UK – which are FCLP co-leads for its work on forest carbon credits – said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.
They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.
A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.
‘Inconvenient science’
The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six.
To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario.
The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.
Palestine: Israel’s bombing has left Gaza vulnerable to climate change
Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.
But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low.
Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon.
“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”
Regulators under pressure?
An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community.
“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”
Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.
EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says
Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.
Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.
But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.
“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi.
Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears.
“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”
The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Renewable Energy11 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits