Wandering the streets of Shenzhen, a city which has earned the title of China’s “first city of ‘new-energy vehicles’” (NEVs), you will not miss the scene of numerous NEVs parking under slogans promoting “green and low carbon” lifestyles.
Shenzhen, a city of nearly 18 million people bordering Hong Kong, is known for pioneering China’s economic reforms 40 years ago.
Now, it is taking carbon mitigation measures ahead of others and acts as a “pilot” for the construction of “low-carbon cities” in China.
It is the first Chinese city that has replaced all of its buses, taxis and ride-hailing cars with electric versions, while about 77% of all new cars sold in Shenzhen were NEVs 2024 – significantly higher than the national rate of 48%.
It has also introduced a carbon emissions cap – in support of switching from the “dual control of energy” to “dual control of carbon” – ahead of the announcement of a national cap.
In addition, the Shenzhen local emissions trading system (ETS) and “green bonds” were both rolled out before the national ETS and national “green” bonds.
Despite taking steps early, some scholars tell Carbon Brief that Shenzhen’s efforts – which the local government calls the “Shenzhen model” – will be tricky to reproduce for city-level low-carbon transitions elsewhere in China.
Carbon Brief looks back at Shenzhen’s low-carbon transition efforts to date and assesses its progress on carbon mitigation.
Electric transportation
Shenzhen’s low-carbon transition did not happen overnight – it resulted from early planning, government support and market-driven solutions, Wei Fulei, director of finance, taxation, trade and the industrial development research centre at the China Development Institute (CDI), a state-sponsored thinktank based in Shenzhen, tells Carbon Brief.
The city’s low-carbon transformation kicked off in the 2000s, when the number of days with heavy air pollution peaked in Shenzhen.
A BBC News report back in 2017 said that after a decade’s work on tackling pollution, Shenzhen “reduced its average air pollution by around 50%”.
The move was largely a result of changing its “industrial base”, which made Shenzhen “one of [the] first batch of these ‘low-carbon cities’”, said the BBC News article.
During this period, the officials developed strategies for “low-carbon development”. Part of this included nourishing the growth of a number of “strategic emerging industries”, such as the “information and communications technology“, which in return provided core technology support for low-carbon industries, largely benefiting the NEV sector.
The current leading global electric vehicle (EV) giant, BYD, for example, was born in Shenzhen against this background.
“With this ‘industry gene’, Shenzhen only needs to adapt and upgrade accordingly to meet the new demands of the NEV industry [in the 2020s],” says Wei.
According to the Shenzhen government work report at the 2025 “two sessions”, the city – whose population makes up 1% of the country’s total – produced 22% of China’s NEVs in 2024.
About 100 new “climate investment and financing projects” will be launched in the year ahead, said the report, adding that another 180bn yuan ($24bn) of “green loans” will be also be issued.
Shen Xinyi, analyst and China team lead at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), tells Carbon Brief that the local government has a track record of nurturing new industries:
“Wind and solar power, along with EVs, were all emerging industries that required substantial investment and technological research 20 years ago…The risk of failure was high, but the Shenzhen government introduced innovative policies to support them.”
The quick growth of NEV companies has pushed up the share of NEVs in the local vehicle market. On top of national subsidies, the local government has also provided support for producing and purchasing NEVs.
In 2024, NEVs accounted for some 77% of new car sales in Shenzhen, significantly higher than the national share of 48%.
In addition, the city has also replaced all of its buses, taxis and ride-hailing cars with electric versions – the first city to have done so in China.
Heran Zheng, lecturer in sustainable infrastructure economics and finance at University College London (UCL), tells Carbon Brief that the “greener transport fleet” speeds up Shenzhen’s low-carbon transition, because a city’s low-carbon transition mainly requires two focuses – “transport transition” and “industry decarbonisation”.
Zheng says:
“There are limited policy efforts a city can make in carbon mitigation. It can work on greener transports. London, for example, set up the Ultra Low Emission Zone to encourage the usage of public transport and cleaner vehicles. And a city can upgrade industries and mitigate their emissions, which are harder to do because no city wants to slow down economic growth.”
Shenzhen, “different from some coal mining cities in China”, has an “advantage” in industry transition, says Zheng, which allows it to set “more ambitious” emissions targets.
Carbon control
China uses energy intensity and carbon intensity – the energy use and emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) – as key metrics in its climate policies.
In addition, the country has been using the “dual control of energy” system – regulating energy intensity and energy consumption – since 2016. However, it announced plans to switch to the “dual control of carbon” in 2024.
Under the new system, a binding cap for total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will be set and will become the main target after 2030, while carbon intensity – the prime target before 2030 – will be gradually lowered to be the secondary target.
(Read more about the “dual control” systems in this edition of China Briefing.)
Here too, Shenzhen was an early mover. As early as 2023, it became China’s “first city to explicitly state its commitment to the ‘dual control [of carbon]’ system”, according to Dialogue Earth.
It issued two “implementation plans” towards this effort, published in 2023, as well as developing a city-level carbon emissions cap.
The plans, compared to the national ones, have more ambitious timelines. A city-level “dual control of carbon” system will be built up by 2025 and it will be “fully implemented” in 2026-30. One of the plans says:
“We will strive to achieve the goal of using a dual carbon emission control approach to carry out quota allocation in the Shenzhen carbon market [for the] manufacturing industry by 2028…and strive to achieve a significant improvement in market regulation capabilities by 2030.”
Shenzhen plans to reduce its energy intensity by 14.5% before the end of 2025, compared to 2020 levels. The national energy intensity target is 13.5% during the same period.
Zheng says that Shenzhen’s commitment “should be within its capacity”, adding:
“There are three major carbon mitigation areas [for China as a whole] – steel, cement and electricity. Shenzhen has no major steel and cement industries, so it only needs to largely focus on electricity…It is also not at the upstream of a supply chain, unlike some fossil fuel cities; it doesn’t need to worry about business, such as coal mining. Its industry structure is dominated by ‘high value-added’ industries, such as technology and NEVs, whose emissions are easier to mitigate.
“In addition, the city is a technology hub. A lot of high-emissions manufacturers have moved out of Shenzhen to its neighbouring cities, such as Shanwei. This is what we call ‘emissions outsourcing’. Shenzhen, benefiting from this, has fewer hurdles in [its] green transition.”
Last year, Zheng and colleagues published a study on this outsourcing of emissions between Chinese cities in Nature. They found that “some cities benefit from the carbon mitigation efforts of other cities more than their own” and suggested that policymakers work to acknowledge these effects.
Another “big difference” between Shenzhen and other cities is that “Shenzhen has its own nuclear power”, says Zheng, which is “important” for the city’s electricity transition – the remaining sector that Shenzhen needs to put efforts towards low-carbon transition.
Low-carbon energy
According to a 2021 report, Shenzhen’s “largest local power source” is the Daya Bay nuclear power station, with a total installed capacity of 6.1 gigawatts (GW).
Nuclear power accounted for 35% of the city’s total power generation in 2021.
It has also pushed up Shenzhen’s low-carbon energy usage – about 47% of Shenzhen’s primary energy consumption was from clean energy in 2024.
Nuclear dwarfs all the other clean energy sources feeding into the city’s grid. The Shenzhen local authority’s 2025 government work report says current solar power capacity stands at about 1GW – and it does not mention wind capacity.
Its “14th five-year plan for climate change response” says that Shenzhen’s renewable energy capacity has “little room” for future growth due to “scarce” energy resources and “limited” land for wind and solar power.
Meanwhile, Shenzhen relies heavily on imported electricity, which accounts for approximately 70% of the city’s total electricity consumption.
This reliance limits Shenzhen’s control over emissions from the sector. It also challenges the local grid’s ability to manage demand during peak usage times.
In 2024, China approved the constructions of more nuclear reactors in Shenzhen’s neighbouring city of Huizhou.
The Shenzhen government also aims to “raise the combined share of natural gas, nuclear and renewable energy to 90% in 2025, up from the current figure of 77%, which is noticeably ahead of the nationwide figure of 52%”, according to a research paper in 2022.
Zheng says that “Shenzhen is a lot like its neighbour Hong Kong, whose energy transition does not rely on solar and wind build up either”.
He adds that in order to achieve a sustainable energy transition, both Shenzhen and Hong Kong would need to utilise their advantage as “financial cities”.
‘Green finance’
Shenzhen has long been using “market forces” and has successfully “struck a balance between government support and market-driven solutions”, where enterprises “take the lead, handling 90% of the work”, while the government intervenes only when necessary, says Wei.
With little interference from the government, Shenzhen was one of the first seven cities and provinces in China that established a local “pilot” ETS in 2013, ahead of the national rollout in 2021.
Similar to China’s national scheme, the local ETS allocates emissions allowances for companies to trade on the market, based on their emissions intensity – the emissions per unit of output – rather than absolute emissions.
The Shenzhen local ETS covered 38% of the city’s carbon emissions upon launching. The figure rose to 50% in 2020 and will continue to expand, says a report by the trading forum International Carbon Action Partnership (ICPA), with a shift to an “absolute cap” for carbon emissions being announced to apply from 2027.
(For now, the national ETS does not include a cap on emissions either, although this is also set to change.)
However, Yan Qin, carbon analyst at consultancy firm ClearBlue Markets, tells Carbon Brief that despite Shenzhen ETS plans to expand its coverage, more pilot ETS are seeing their coverage “shrinking” due to enterprises leaving to join the national ETS”.
ICPA’s research also finds that electricity production was excluded from the Shenzhen ETS after 2019 when it “transitioned to the China national ETS”.
Yan says that the pilot ETS, nevertheless, “has been an important testing field, paving the way for the successful launch of national ETS eventually. [It] will continue to exist and cover the small to medium enterprises as well as sectors outside national ETS”.
The Shenzhen local ETS, as of 2022, covers water, gas, heat, manufacturing, transport and other sectors, says ICPA.
It was the biggest local ETS in China as of 2024 and maintains the highest annual trading volumes in the country for several consecutive years, says Shenzhen Business News.
In the meantime, Shenzhen has taken initiatives in “green finance”, bringing private investments into the market.
In 2021, Shenzhen issued China’s first overseas sales of “green government bonds” in Hong Kong along with China’s first local “green finance legislation”, which provides a “solid institutional guarantee” for regulating the “green market”, according to an assessment of the legislation by research institute the International Institute of Green Finance.
In contrast, China’s national sovereign bonds were only available to international buyers from April 2025.
Various other “green finance” products have also been issued. According to state-run newspaper Economic Daily, about 4.6 trillion yuan ($633bn) was traded for new energy, NEVs and other environment-related stocks at the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in the first half of 2024.
Nevertheless, Zheng says that the impact of the “green bonds” is “hard to evaluate”. He says: “A lot of projects, such as sewage treatment, can also fall into the category of ‘green bonds’”.
According to the state broadcaster CCTV, Shenzhen’s “green bonds” issued in 2021 covered projects including “construction of ordinary public high schools, urban rail transit and water management”.
Zheng says that although these projects are linked to energy efficiency improvements, they nonetheless make only “limited contributions” to cutting carbon emissions.
Zheng adds that market guidance is “necessary” in a city’s low-carbon transition, but “there is not yet a study on how large a green finance product can make a difference on mitigation”.
Shen says there is nevertheless an important role for “financial instruments” to support the low-carbon transition. She explains:
“Low-carbon industries generally have higher costs than fossil fuel-based industries…With policy support and financial instruments, the costs can be reduced, allowing these industries to scale up.”
‘Shenzhen model’
The local government and media outlets have touted the city’s achievements on climate as the “Shenzhen model”, implying that it could be applied elsewhere.
Xu Hua, an official from the Shenzhen Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau, said the model “demonstrated the results to the world” at last year’s COP29:
“Firstly, Shenzhen has continuously improved its top-level design…establishing a comprehensive policy system. Secondly, the city has focused on the transformation and upgrading of key sectors…promoting strategic emerging industries such as new energy, energy conservation, and environmental protection. Thirdly, following the principle of openness…Shenzhen has been exploring new paths for green and low-carbon development.”
Xu added that the city “positions itself as a leader in green development nationwide”, as it had “significantly reduced its energy consumption, water usage and carbon emissions per 10,000 yuan of GDP to one-third, one-eighth and one-fifth of the national average, respectively” by the end of 2023.
However, not all of Shenzhen’s journey is “replicable”, says Shen, adding: “Shenzhen capitalised on the opportunities of its era.” She tells Carbon Brief:
“For example, its supply chain advantages and the skilled workforce that has settled in the city have been key enablers of its high-end manufacturing sector.”
Zheng agrees with Shen, saying that Shenzhen can only represent a certain type of city in China. He says:
“Shenzhen is China’s Silicon Valley and heavily invests in high-end technology. It can only represent a [certain] type of cities in China, the ‘top tier’, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. There are more than 300 cities in China, all facing unique transition situations. It is meaningless for coal-heavy industrial cities to learn from Shenzhen.”
Other cities in China, meanwhile, have also started to explore their own ways to achieve sustainable development.
The city of Suzhou has built the Suzhou Industrial Park – one of China’s first pilot low-carbon industrial parks. It has also established a “market-based carbon inclusion trading system”, which incentivises “voluntary” carbon emission trading among citizens, as well as small- and medium-sized companies.
Meanwhile, the city of Tianjin has launched a collaboration with Singapore to “explore a path for China’s urban systems to reduce carbon emissions”, according to a Xinhua report.
Other cities must “adapt strategies according to their unique conditions”, Shen adds. This sentiment is reflected in a 2023 document issued by China’s State Council – the country’s central government. The document, called “China’s green development in the new era”, says that:
“Local authorities should rely on their resource endowments, environmental conditions and industrial development foundations to fully leverage the comparative advantages.”
The post Explainer: What is China’s ‘Shenzen model’ for low-carbon transition in cities? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Explainer: What is China’s ‘Shenzen model’ for low-carbon transition in cities?
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Absolute State of the Union
‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.
COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.
OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.
SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.
Around the world
- RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
- HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
- BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
- ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
- COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
- SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.
$467 billion
The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
- Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.
Spotlight
Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?
This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.
Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.
Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.
Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:
“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”
Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.
Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:
“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”
Conservative gear shift
For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.
Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.
Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.
Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:
“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”
Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)
Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:
“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”
But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:
“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”
UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Global ‘greenlash’?
All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.
At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.
Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.
She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.
Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:
“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.
RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.
Coming up
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
- 3 March: UK spring statement
- 4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
- 5 March: Nepal elections
Pick of the jobs
- The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
- China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
- University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
- TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
The Lincolnshire constituency held by Richard Tice, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of the hard-right Reform party, has been pledged at least £55m in government funding for flood defences since 2024.
This investment in Boston and Skegness is the second-largest sum for a single constituency from a £1.4bn flood-defence fund for England, Carbon Brief analysis shows.
Flooding is becoming more likely and more extreme in the UK due to climate change.
Yet, for years, governments have failed to spend enough on flood defences to protect people, properties and infrastructure.
The £1.4bn fund is part of the current Labour government’s wider pledge to invest a “record” £7.9bn over a decade on protecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from flooding.
As MP for one of England’s most flood-prone regions, Tice has called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
He is also one of Reform’s most vocal opponents of climate action and what he calls “net stupid zero”. He denies the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed, falsely and without evidence, that scientists are “lying”.
Flood defences
Last year, the government said it would invest £2.65bn on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) schemes in England between April 2024 and March 2026.
This money was intended to protect 66,500 properties from flooding. It is part of a decade-long Labour government plan to spend more than £7.9bn on flood defences.
There has been a consistent shortfall in maintaining England’s flood defences, with the Environment Agency expecting to protect fewer properties by 2027 than it had initially planned.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has attributed this to rising costs, backlogs from previous governments and a lack of capacity. It also points to the strain from “more frequent and severe” weather events, such as storms in recent years that have been amplified by climate change.
However, the CCC also said last year that, if the 2024-26 spending programme is delivered, it would be “slightly closer to the track” of the Environment Agency targets out to 2027.
The government has released constituency-level data on which schemes in England it plans to fund, covering £1.4bn of the 2024-26 investment. The other half of the FCERM spending covers additional measures, from repairing existing defences to advising local authorities.
The map below shows the distribution of spending on FCERM schemes in England over the past two years, highlighting the constituency of Richard Tice.
By far the largest sum of money – £85.6m in total – has been committed to a tidal barrier and various other defences in the Somerset constituency of Bridgwater, the seat of Conservative MP Ashley Fox.
Over the first months of 2026, the south-west region has faced significant flooding and Fox has called for more support from the government, citing “climate patterns shifting and rainfall intensifying”.
He has also backed his party’s position that “the 2050 net-zero target is impossible” and called for more fossil-fuel extraction in the North Sea.
Tice’s east-coast constituency of Boston and Skegness, which is highly vulnerable to flooding from both rivers and the sea, is set to receive £55m. Among the supported projects are beach defences from Saltfleet to Gibraltar Point and upgrades to pumping stations.
Overall, Boston and Skegness has the second-largest portion of flood-defence funding, as the chart below shows. Constituencies with Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs occupied the other top positions.
Overall, despite Labour MPs occupying 347 out of England’s 543 constituencies – nearly two-thirds of the total – more than half of the flood-defence funding was distributed to constituencies with non-Labour MPs. This reflects the flood risk in coastal and rural areas that are not traditional Labour strongholds.
Reform funding
While Reform has just eight MPs, representing 1% of the population, its constituencies have been assigned 4% of the flood-defence funding for England.
Nearly all of this money was for Tice’s constituency, although party leader Nigel Farage’s coastal Clacton seat in Kent received £2m.
Reform UK is committed to “scrapping net-zero” and its leadership has expressed firmly climate-sceptic views.
Much has been made of the disconnect between the party’s climate policies and the threat climate change poses to its voters. Various analyses have shown the flood risk in Reform-dominated areas, particularly Lincolnshire.
Tice has rejected climate science, advocated for fossil-fuel production and criticised Environment Agency flood-defence activities. Yet, he has also called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
This may reflect Tice’s broader approach to climate change. In a 2024 interview with LBC, he said:
“Where you’ve got concerns about sea level defences and sea level rise, guess what? A bit of steel, a bit of cement, some aggregate…and you build some concrete sea level defences. That’s how you deal with rising sea levels.”
While climate adaptation is viewed as vital in a warming world, there are limits on how much societies can adapt and adaptation costs will continue to increase as emissions rise.
The post Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
Greenhouse Gases
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Food inflation on the rise
DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.
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NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.
‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.
El Niño looms
NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”
WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”
CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.
News and views
- DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
- SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
- NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
- COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
- FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
- TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.
Spotlight
Nature talks inch forward
This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.
The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.
The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.
The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.
Money talks
Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.
Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.
Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.
Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).
Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:
“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”
Monitoring and reporting
Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.
Parties do so through the submission of national reports.
Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.
A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.
Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:
“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”
Watch, read, listen
NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.
COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.
HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.
‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.
New science
- Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
- Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food
In the diary
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean | Brasília
- 5 March: Nepal general elections
- 9-20 March: First part of the thirty-first session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) | Kingston, Jamaica
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz.
Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
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