The choices made about how land is used and managed play a crucial role in tackling climate change.
The importance of the land use, land-use change and forestry sector (which is often referred to as LULUCF) is reflected in 118 of 143 countries including land-based emissions reductions and removals in their latest emissions pledges under the Paris Agreement.
However, there is a complication.
It arises because of a fundamental difference in how land-based emissions are treated by scientific models and the national greenhouse gas inventories submitted by parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Specifically, there are different definitions as to what constitutes “managed” land and the human-caused carbon removals on that land.
As we show in our new study, published in Nature, the result is a gap of 4-7bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) between estimates from models and national inventories for net emissions from current land use. Even at the low end of this range, it equates to around 10% of global annual CO2 emissions today.
The knock-on impact of this gap is that it makes comparisons between the two difficult in critical policy processes such as the global stocktake – the five-yearly progress check on collective action towards the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement.
And, more fundamentally, our findings suggest that nations will need to increase the collective ambition of their climate targets to remain consistent with the Paris temperature limits.
Making sense of LULUCF accounting
In order to estimate the amount of carbon emissions or removals of carbon from land, scientists use so-called “bookkeeping” approaches.
These approaches, and the models that employ them, account for stocks and flows of carbon triggered by changes in land cover or land management practices and estimate the resulting “direct” carbon fluxes.
The term “direct” is used because the fluxes – that is, the exchange of CO2 between the land and atmosphere – are a result of direct human intervention. These actions, including deforestation, forest harvest and regrowth, are what scientific models consider as “anthropogenic” carbon fluxes.
This accounting approach is used by the models underpinning the concepts of the remaining carbon budget and net-zero timings in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But to understand the total amount of carbon flux on land, scientists need to use more detailed, process-based vegetation models. These models, collectively called “dynamic global vegetation models”, simulate biogeochemical and hydrological cycles and estimate future plant and forest carbon uptake and release.
These models explicitly include climate and environmental interactions and so they capture so-called “indirect” effects. These include the response of land to indirect human-induced climate and environmental changes, such as through CO2 fertilisation and warming-induced changes to temperatures and rainfall patterns, which affect plant growth.
These “indirect” fluxes are estimated for Earth’s full land surface area, including both land actively managed by humans as well as land with limited or no human activity in what global models consider as the “natural” terrestrial sink.
Taken together, both direct and indirect carbon fluxes on land provide a full picture of the land-related carbon balance, which is assessed each year by the Global Carbon Project.
However, countries estimate their LULUCF fluxes differently. This is because it is not practically possible to separate direct and indirect fluxes through observations, such as via national forest inventories or satellite data.
National GHG inventories follow reporting conventions that define human-caused fluxes using an area-based approach, whereby all fluxes occurring on managed land are considered anthropogenic. By contrast, fluxes on unmanaged land are not reported.
In addition to land that is actively managed for, say, agriculture and forestry practices, countries may consider other land as “managed”, such as national parks, wilderness preserves or areas under less frequent forest management.
But even if countries and models agreed on the amount of land which is considered “managed”, physical measurements and observations cannot distinguish between direct and indirect contributions to LULUCF fluxes.
As a result, national inventories include most of the indirect effect on a larger land area than is considered under scientific conventions. In short, countries consider “anthropogenic” part of the CO2 sink that models consider “natural”.
The infographic below outlines this mismatch. It shows how scientific models differentiate between direct (red) and indirect (blue) fluxes, while national inventories (green) do not.
Globally, this mismatch results in a difference between bookkeeping models and country inventories of around 4-7GtCO2. As the map below shows, the differences vary from country to country.
Overall, 53 and 56 countries report, respectively, LULUCF net removals (pale green shading) and emissions (purple) where models agree. Then 67 countries report net removals, but models suggest net emissions (dark green) and nine countries report net emissions while models show net removals (blue).
Shifting benchmarks
In our study, we propose a method for resolving these differences. We employ a reduced-complexity climate model called OSCAR, which has an explicit representation of the land carbon cycle. We use it to estimate the current and future evolution of indirect emissions to align IPCC pathways with aggregate estimates from national inventories.
We then estimate how this would affect mitigation benchmarks, such as the emissions reductions needed by 2030, the year of net-zero CO2 emissions and the total cumulative CO2 emitted until net-zero.
Across the board, we find that key global mitigation benchmarks become harder to achieve when calculated using conventions set in national inventories, requiring more ambitious mitigation action than when aiming for model-based outcomes.
For example, under inventory accounting conventions, we find that net-zero in emissions pathways that are consistent with 1.5C of warming is achieved one-to-five years earlier than in model-based conventions. Similarly, emissions reduction benchmarks this decade are three-to-six percentage points higher and cumulative CO2 emissions are 15-18% lower.
These shifts arise because of the additional land-based carbon removals in national inventories, or “alignment factor”, acts to lower current global emissions compared to model-based conventions. The alignment factor will diminish over time should the world succeed in reducing emissions drastically in the near-term.
| Benchmark | Change in 1.5C pathways | Change in 2C pathways |
|---|---|---|
| Year of net-zero CO2 | 1 to 5 years | -1 to 7 years |
| Emissions reductions by 2030 | 3.4 to 5.9% | 2.5 to 5% |
| Cumulative CO2 until net-zero | 54-95 GtCO2 (15-18%) | 93-167 GtCO2 (15-18%) |
Table shows difference in key mitigation benchmarks between pathways including fluxes aligned with model-based conventions vs. pathways including fluxes aligned with inventory-based conventions (5th-95th percentiles). Across the board, benchmarks are more difficult to reach when aligned with national inventories.
IPCC assessment
It is important to stress that our results do not conflict with the benchmarks assessed by the IPCC.
The use of simple climate models, such as MAGICC and FaIR, in IPCC assessments includes the “direct” LULUCF emissions from pathways as inputs and include in their simulations the “indirect” emissions due to climate and environmental responses to calculate the global temperature response to human-caused emissions.
In our analysis, we explicitly separate these two flux components, adding the indirect fluxes on “managed” land to our estimate of the direct fluxes. In short, we simply align different accounting practices, shifting fluxes on one side of the “ledger” to the other.
The climate outcome of each scenario we assess remains the same, but the benchmark – when viewed through the lens of inventory accounting conventions – shifts. Understanding this dynamic is critical, because ultimately countries will measure their progress towards achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement against their own accounting conventions.
Our findings show the danger of comparing apples to oranges: in order to achieve the global mitigation benchmarks assessed by the IPCC, global mitigation action needs to be stronger and more ambitious when using the national inventories perspective.
While our adjustment does not change the overall amount of decarbonisation effort necessary to reach the Paris Agreement goal, it changes where we currently stand relative to it.
In the absence of such adjustment, countries would collectively appear in a better position than they actually are.
Depending heavily on LULUCF
Our results also provide a warning to countries depending strongly on the land sector to achieve their national climate pledges under the Paris Agreement.
From a bookkeeping accounting perspective, sustainable land-management practices can both strongly reduce existing sources of emissions as well as enhance land-based carbon removal.
Across pathways assessed by the IPCC, “direct” emissions typically reduce strongly and stay net-negative through the rest of the century. However, in the pathways we reanalyse, inventory-aligned emissions on land begin to reverse around mid-century and become a net source of emissions in about a quarter of the assessed pathways by the end of the century. This is because the weakening of the indirect effect contributes more than the strengthening of the direct effect in these scenarios.
While inventory-aligned fluxes result in smaller net emissions today compared to model-based fluxes, depending on them to achieve national climate targets presents a “double-edged sword”.
The indirect component of these fluxes is due to climate and environmental effects, which will change based on how strongly and quickly the world is able to reduce emissions in the future.
In particular, with high levels of mitigation, as the rate that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere slows down, the strength of indirect fluxes will decrease and may even reverse.
Thus, countries should take care when depending strongly on the land sector as enhanced “direct” emissions reductions and removals can be masked by weakening “indirect” fluxes.
Other important factors which we did not consider could make depending on land-based removals even riskier, such as disturbances from wildfires, which will likely increase as the world continues to warm.
The graphic below provides an illustration. It shows the impact on direct (red) and indirect (blue) carbon emissions (up arrows) and removals (down) for scenarios with low (top) and high (bottom) global mitigation, and unchanged (left) and increased (right) land-based mitigation. The overall impact of each combination on net emissions is shown by the green arrows.
Moving forward
Our study highlights the importance of comparing apples to apples when trying to evaluate and take stock of progress towards the Paris Agreement.
Part of the core enabling architecture of the agreement was its “bottom-up” nature, enabling countries to set targets and measure progress towards them in such a way that fits national circumstances. At the same time, care must be taken to comparing these efforts with pathways assessed by the global scientific community.
Here, we offer one way to use the “Rosetta Stone” approach to align IPCC-assessed pathways with national emissions inventories, which can be used to assess progress in the near-term. We offer a number of recommendations for improving this moving forward.
First, we suggest that national climate targets can be made more explicit by separating targets for land-based mitigation from other sector-based action. In this way, each can be measured and assessed separately and uncertainties due to accounting differences can be contained.
Second, we suggest that countries can be more explicit and clarify their deforestation pledges, as direct and indirect carbon fluxes vary greatly in different forest types.
Third, we suggest that scientific and policymaking communities convene to agree on an “operational translation system”. That is, something that would allow each to understand the other by addressing any remaining inconsistencies and develop methods for estimating country-considered indirect fluxes to support comparison with modelled pathways.
And, fourth, we suggest that modellers incorporate their own estimates of the indirect effect from the land-component of their integrated models. Together with efforts by policymaking communities, this would bring alignment directly into IPCC reports to improve comparability with global progress towards the Paris Agreement.
Countries will come together at COP28 this year to conclude the very first global stocktake of the Paris Agreement.
Our assessment shows that even more ambitious climate action is needed to achieve the benchmarks laid out by scientists when using national inventory accounting as a starting point, which will help future stocktakes.
It is critical that progress is measured in a like-for-like manner rather than the current situation comparing apples and oranges.
Even so, the overarching message remains loud and clear that the world must drastically cut emissions this decade, irrespective of accounting frameworks, to stay within the limits of the Paris Agreement. It is vital this message is not lost in the minutia of discussions around reporting technicalities.
The post Guest post: Why resolving how land emissions are counted is critical for tracking climate progress appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Why resolving how land emissions are counted is critical for tracking climate progress
A new report says the United Kingdom must invest in more widespread cooling, particularly for the most vulnerable populations, as climate change accelerates.
Extreme heat is one of the most dangerous climate change risks in the United Kingdom, according to a new government-backed report that warned the nation is “built for a climate that no longer exists.”
An Unusually Early Heat Wave Breaks Temperature Records Across Western Europe
Just one year ago, Lars Christian Bacher said his career embodied the energy transition – moving from CFO of Norway’s state-controlled oil company Equinor to leading one of Europe’s few home-grown battery makers.
Morrow Batteries was on a mission to compete alongside the industry’s dominant Asian, mainly Chinese, battery producers as Europe sought to reduce its reliance on imports, Bacher told a group of foreign journalists on a sunny day in Oslo last May.
But seven months later, Bacher stepped down as CEO, and earlier this month, Morrow Batteries said it had filed for bankruptcy after its financial situation “deteriorated”.
Coming a year after Swedish battery maker Northvolt filed for bankruptcy, industry analysts said Morrow’s descent into financial difficulties would likely deal a fresh blow to investor confidence in European battery manufacturers – potentially keeping Europe dependent on Chinese energy transition technology for longer.
While bigger European battery makers such as ACC, Verkor and PowerCo – linked to car-makers Stellantis, Renault and Volkswagen, respectively – are still in business, Europe needs to reduce its reliance on China, experts say.
“It’s just such a critical technology that you cannot rely on somebody else,” said Julia Poliscanova, batteries lead at the Brussels-based advocacy group Transport & Environment.
State-backed eco-batteries
Established in 2020, Morrow Batteries expanded its workforce to more than 200 and has the ability to produce three million batteries a year at its factory in the forest outside the coastal city of Arendal, on Norway’s picturesque southern tip.
Investors in the startup included industrial engineering companies Siemens and ABB, and it received a 550 million krone ($59 million) loan from state development agency Innovation Norway. State-owned energy and investment companies were also among its shareholders.
Morrow has promoted its batteries as particularly sustainable, with solar and hydropower supplying energy to the factory. Its lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries do not contain nickel or cobalt, distancing them from the environmental and social problems often linked to critical minerals mining.
“From a sustainability point of view, this is as good as it gets,” Bacher said last May.
He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the company’s decision to file for bankruptcy proceedings.
It aimed to sell these batteries for energy storage, increasingly important as variable solar and wind power comes to dominate European grids, and for off-road and commercial vehicles. Those sectors, rather than electric cars and motorbikes, were being targeted because they were subject to less ferocious competition from Asia, Bacher said.
Industry experts say Morrow started smaller and slower than Northvolt, was selective about its target customers and secured deals with Finnish environmental technology company Proventia Oy and an unnamed German defence company.
But it still ran into financial trouble.
Cash crunch proves costly
In a statement announcing the bankruptcy, Morrow’s board said it had been trying to secure a new industrial investor and finance, and that “several of the ongoing efforts had reached an advanced stage”.
But these talks “could not be concluded within the constraints imposed by the group’s liquidity situation”, it said, blaming the failure on “the capital requirements inherent in an early industrialisation phase” combined with “increased capital costs, delays in the industrialisation process and a more restrained investment market”.
Northvolt’s bankruptcy may have also damaged Morrow’s attempts to raise money. Last May, Bacher himself acknowledged that it “didn’t help”.
Morrow also cited oversupply in the global battery market, and the resulting downward “price pressure”. The price of LFP batteries fell by nearly half between 2022 and 2025, eating into producers’ profit margins, according to the International Energy Agency.
The hefty state investment in Morrow has generated controversy in Norway following its bankruptcy. The leader of the right-wing Progress Party (FrP), Sylvi Listhaug, has said Norwegian taxpayers’ money was wasted on an unviable business.
But others, like Poliscanova and the head of the European Battery Alliance trade association Emma Nehrenheim, told Climate Home News that if Europe wants a battery industry, it will need to back home-grown manufacturers whole-heartedly.
“Valley of death” kills startups
As European battery manufacturers work to perfect and scale up their technology and processes, they face “a valley of death” with severe competition and little patience from investors or battery customers who “can easily buy them from China”, Poliscanova said.
Startups like Morrow typically raise project financing to get them off the ground, according to Nehrenheim. In the period between that finance ending and reaching profitability, they have to rely on money they set aside as a project reserve.
If they underestimate this reserve, which she said is easy to do when setting up a new factory making a new product, they need more money to bridge the gap. This can come from specialised bridging investors, from customers or from governments.
For Morrow, however, the money did not arrive in time.
Nehrenheim – who was previously Northvolt’s chief environmental officer – said it was a characteristically European failure from investors.
“We’re not good at this,” she said. “We’re not bold enough to compete with Silicon Valley or the Asian (countries), who have been scaling industry now for decades.”
Clean energy sovereignty vs price
Since Northvolt’s bankruptcy filing, the European Union has announced policies to support European battery makers.
It is introducing a €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) “battery booster“, providing interest-free loans to battery manufacturers. It is considering putting tariffs on imported batteries, subsidising European battery makers and tying electric car incentives to locally made batteries through the Industrial Accelerator Act. None of these policies are yet in place.
With trade disputes rising up the agenda of UN climate talks, Poliscanova conceded that such moves are protectionist, although she said she prefers to call them industrial policy.
“Honestly,” she said, “the EU and the UK are the two large global blocks left that don’t have such industrial protectionist policies. India has it, Brazil has it, China has it, the US has it – we’re literally the last fool standing thinking that [the World Trade Organization] is the way to go.”
Li Shuo, China Climate Hub director at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said that the trade-offs between cheap foreign batteries and more expensive European ones “need to be discussed honestly”.
“How much higher are Europeans willing to pay?” he said. “How much delay in climate deployment is acceptable? Can we really decarbonise and de-risk at the same time? How long can politicians condemn cheap Chinese imports while consumers simultaneously demand affordability?”
While European policymakers want to fight China, the average European just wants a cheap battery, he added.
Closing the cost gap
But once European battery makers scale up, the price gap with Chinese batteries will shrink, Poliscanova said.
While German LFP battery cells are 90% more expensive than those made in China, scale-up could close this gap to a “sovereignty premium” of just 25% by 2030, Transport & Environment estimates.
Nehrenheim acknowledged that most of Europe’s batteries will continue to come from Asia or the United States. “I’m very happy for that because they’re scaling fast and they get great support subsidies in their respective countries to supply us to help us in the [energy] transition,” she said.
But European-headquartered companies must make at least a quarter of the region’s batteries, she said, otherwise if supply is disrupted – whether by geopolitical factors, a pandemic or natural disaster – the industry will have nothing to scale up from.
Nehrenheim said she was almost 100% confident that Morrow’s factory will continue to produce batteries. The company said it expected a court-appointed bankruptcy administrator to assume control over the company’s assets and operations.
Citing investors’ €1.4 billion ($1.62 billion) reprieve of Swedish green steelmaker Stegra in April, Nehrenheim said there were reasons to be hopeful about Morrow’s survival as Europe demands batteries for diverse uses beyond cars – from energy storage to drones and forklift trucks.
“Somebody will pick this up,” she said.
The post After another battery startup bankruptcy, can Europe ever cut reliance on China? appeared first on Climate Home News.
After another battery startup bankruptcy, can Europe ever cut reliance on China?
Climate Change
‘Energy Vampires’: Greenpeace calls for moratorium on data centres as new report reveals frenzied rollout would derail energy transition
SYDNEY, Wednesday 27 May 2026 — A new report from Greenpeace Australia Pacific and independent expert Ketan Joshi reveals how the frenzied rollout of AI data centres in Australia is set to derail the renewable energy transition, entrench gas and turbocharge climate pollution, prompting calls for an urgent moratorium on data centre approvals until appropriate guardrails are in place.
The report, Energy Vampires: the AI data centres draining Australia, reveals the staggering scale of data centre growth in Australia, set to follow a US path of emissions blowout and rising community opposition to the resource-hungry facilities. The report exposes the links between the data centre lobby and the gas industry, who are using data centre growth to justify extracting more gas.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling on the Federal Government to urgently implement a moratorium on the construction and approval of new data centres, until appropriate regulations and safeguards have been put in place to protect the climate and communities.
Key findings:
- Data centres are already failing to cover their own demand with additional renewable energy, and resisting calls to mandate that they do.
- At its peak, Australia’s biggest proposed data centre, the 1GW Mamre Road Data Centre Campus in Western Sydney, will generate annual emissions equivalent to 560,000 petrol cars, or all domestic flights within NSW in 2023.
- There are early signs of a data centre-fuelled gas boom in Australia, including proposals for new on-site gas, as seen in the US.
- Cloud Carrier’s proposed gas-fired data centre in NSW would wipe out the state’s entire projected 2028 emissions cuts.
- Even if only 1 in 4 new Australian data centres were powered by new on-site gas, it would result in 2.8x higher total emissions compared to using grid power.
Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Australia is completely unprepared for the magnitude of impacts of the AI-driven data centre frenzy. Data centres are being rolled out at a feverish pace, with some of the largest planned for Australia consuming as much energy as Adelaide. The recent federal and state energy minister communique is a positive first step towards regulating the data centre industry, and managing its impact on the energy transition and the communities where they’re being built.
“But we should all be concerned by the extreme lack of scrutiny being applied to the companies leading the data centre charge in Australia and their proposals. Without strong, legislated standards, we risk replicating the disastrous US pattern, where Big Tech corporations have carte blanche to drain energy and water, and build new, polluting gas and diesel-powered plants to fuel their operations. This has seen mounting community opposition that transcends party politics, something we’re beginning to see here in Australia.
“Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on new data centre approvals and construction until we have clearly defined, enforceable regulations and standards in place to govern this industry — essential if we hope to avoid the alarming outcomes outlined in this report.
“Australia is not a playground for Big Tech corporations. It is time our leaders stepped up and took seriously their role as custodians of our resources and protectors of our society and environment.”
Ketan Joshi, independent report author and climate expert said: “Impatience is not a virtue. The reckless data centre buildout is heaping massive new load onto the grid, meaning renewables have to run harder just to stay in the same spot. Currently data centres increase coal and gas output and delay shutdowns, while plugging polluting gas into data centres does the damage directly instead.
“Unless the data centre industry builds no new fossil fuels and far more new renewables than new demand, we end up worse off. Australia’s gas industry sees a lifeline in an unchecked data centre frenzy, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
“Data centre demand projections keep jabbing upwards each revision, and emissions projections keep getting worse. Everywhere in the world facing this frenzy sees the same trend.
“Data centre moratoria have bipartisan support in countries around the world as the only path to reintroducing careful, considered governance of data centre growth. In the context of an irrational, unjustified panic, a temporary pause brings reason and rationality, along with bringing power to communities.”
-ENDS-
Images and an interview clipreel of Greenpeace spokespeople at the Mamre Road data centre in Western Sydney available here.
Media contacts:
Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lucy.keller@greenpeace.org
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
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