Stephanie Pfeifer is CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), a European-focused investor-led membership organisation.
As world leaders meet in Belém for the so-called Amazon COP, the global financial community should seize the opportunity to declare its commitment to managing the growing investment risks posed by deforestation in the Amazon and beyond.
Besides emphasising their support for a global transition towards sustainable supply chains at the COP30 talks, investors can also help unlock the investment and financing opportunities that such a transition makes possible.
The financial impacts of deforestation-related risk are broad and growing. For long-term asset owners such as pension funds and insurers, exposure to deforestation can affect everything from investment performance to reputational resilience. For investors more broadly, addressing deforestation exposure is increasingly part of fulfilling fiduciary duty in a world with compounding climate- and nature-related risks.
Tech tools to improve supply chain traceability
To that end, many investors are already taking meaningful steps to address deforestation risk.
Some are working directly with portfolio companies to improve traceability, strengthen supply chain policies, and support the economic inclusion of smallholder farmers. Others are using geospatial tools and satellite data to monitor deforestation in real time and inform engagement discussions. There has also been positive momentum in integrating deforestation into risk assessments, stewardship strategies, and exclusions policies.
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Five big questions hanging over COP30
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This work cannot be done in isolation. For investors looking to accelerate action, collaboration will remain key. Global initiatives like the Finance Sector Deforestation Action (FSDA), launched at COP26, have raised the bar of ambition for investors seeking to address agricultural commodity-driven deforestation risks in their portfolios.
EUDR should be implemented without further delays
While previous COPs highlighted the urgent need to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030, only a few countries have taken steps to drive that action through policy.
One of the few jurisdictions mounting a comprehensive approach to deforestation is the European Union, with its Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) – a prime example of ambitious policy that can transform supply chains while protecting company competitiveness.
In its current form, the regulation frames deforestation as a material business risk and safeguards companies taking proactive steps toward deforestation-free supply chains by ensuring that non-compliant companies are penalised for falling short on due diligence. Given the level of ambition, the multiple changes in direction around the implementation of the EUDR have understandably raised concern.
Explainer: What is the TFFF, Brazil’s COP30 rainforest fund?
Last year’s delay of the EUDR was disappointing for many investors, who view the regulation as a critical lever in mitigating deforestation risk exposure. The EU’s recent announcement that it will no longer propose a further one-year delay but instead implement a six-month transition period to ensure the legislation enters into force as planned is a more positive sign.
We’re pleased that the voices of investors and businesses calling for a timely implementation – given the importance of the law and the work done by a number of producer countries – have been taken into account.
Maintaining momentum, beyond policy
Though some provisions of the EUDR still lack certainty, public policy remains integral to redirecting financial flows towards deforestation- and conversion-free production systems.
A clear, well-designed regulatory environment provides investors with the consistency and confidence to scale solutions and make long-term decisions for financial stability and sound risk management. Continued engagement with policymakers is therefore essential, with COP30 providing a crucial platform to advance public-private dialogue on global deforestation.
Big banks’ lending to coal backers undermines Indonesia’s green plans
It is important to remember, however, that regulation is not the only lever for progress. The need for meaningful investor action – and for maintaining momentum – continues.
When IIGCC assumed the secretariat role for FSDA in 2024, the aim was to advance the initiative’s ambitious agenda and mainstream deforestation action across the investment community. As FSDA concludes its four-year term in December, IIGCC will continue this work through the Deforestation Investor Group (DIG) – an investor-led platform that will maintain momentum for multistakeholder action, align with global goals, and be reinforced by IIGCC’s forthcoming guidance on integrating deforestation into net-zero planning.
Ten years on from Paris, forests are firmly a climate issue The first Global Stocktake underscored the urgent need to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030 to keep 1.5C within reach. For the first time, countries were asked to report on forest-related progress, turning pledges into measurable benchmarks and cementing deforestation as central to climate targets.
The conference also built momentum around nature-based solutions, with financial commitments and policy frameworks aimed at protecting tropical forests and empowering Indigenous stewardship. The message was clear: there is no net zero without addressing deforestation.
Now, in the lead-up to COP30, attention is turning to emerging finance mechanisms – such as the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) spearheaded by Brazil – that directly target deforestation.
World failing on goal to halt deforestation by 2030, raising stakes for Amazon COP
For the COP30 presidency and delegates, the “Amazon COP” is a clear opportunity to align the climate and biodiversity agendas, reaffirm their interdependence, and strengthen coordination across the Rio Conventions.
With that stage already set, it’s crucial that the financial sector continues engaging and maintaining dialogues with corporates, policymakers, and the wider range of stakeholders to support global efforts to address deforestation. This includes participation in engagement work such as through the DIG.
Progress remains possible, but the window for action is narrowing as deforestation continues unabated. The cost of inaction will far exceed the investment required to build resilience and end deforestation and land-conversion as soon as possible.
The post Investor action is crucial to maintaining progress on deforestation risk appeared first on Climate Home News.
Investor action is crucial to maintaining progress on deforestation risk
Big cuts in generating capacity are coming as the Colorado River struggles to meet demand.
Some day in the next 12 months—maybe in late August, maybe not until next spring— Lake Mead will drop below the critical threshold of 1,035 feet above sea level.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 12 June 2026: El Niño begins | COP31 hosts eye electrification | Atlantic current monitoring at risk
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
El Niño begins
‘DOMINO WEATHER’: The natural weather phenomenon El Niño, which can raise global heat and “bring domino weather effects across the planet”, is now underway, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared on Thursday, reported the Washington Post. The Japanese Meteorological Administration also identified the start of El Niño on Wednesday, said Bloomberg. According to the Japanese weather agency, the event is “expected to intensify in the coming months and become very strong later in the year, persisting into at least December”, reported the outlet.
‘SUPER EVENT’: BBC News reported that “many forecasts suggest this could end up as a so-called ‘super’ El Niño” and be “among the strongest ever recorded”. It added: “Coming on top of decades of human-caused warming, it could bring another record-hot year – most likely in 2027 – with disruption to weather, food supplies and economies running well into that year.”
COP31 hosts eye electrification
‘35 BY 35’: COP31 hosts Turkey and Australia have called for countries to support a target of electrifying 35% of global energy use by 2035, reported Politico. Speaking at climate talks in Bonn, Germany, Turkish minister Murat Kurum said that electrification would be a “flagship priority” at the COP31 summit, noted the publication. Kurum added that “electrifying daily life, from transport to buildings and industry” could “protect families and businesses from volatile energy markets”, said the outlet.
WASTE AND BUILDINGS: Climate Home News reported that electrification was one of three priorities unveiled by the COP31 hosts, with the other two being waste and buildings. On buildings, the COP31 hosts “quietly overhauled [their] goal”, Climate Home News said. It reported: “An initial press statement on Monday set out a target ‘to achieve at least a 25% increase in energy efficiency in buildings by 2035’. But…on Tuesday, that was replaced with a different goal to ‘reduce energy consumption intensity in the building sector by at least 25% by 2035’.”
‘HARDEST’ CHALLENGE: Elsewhere in Bonn, UN climate chief Simon Stiell said “governments must stop revisiting climate commitments and start delivering on them”, South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reported. It quoted Stiell as saying: “Tackling the global climate crisis is the hardest but most important thing humanity has ever tried to do together…We are not yet where we need to be. But we are somewhere we have never been before.”
Around the world
- ETS EXTRA: The EU has agreed “stronger” price controls on “ETS2”, its planned trading system for heating and transport emissions, according to Reuters.
- OCEAN STRESS: The rate of sea level rise has doubled in 10 years amid “severe and accelerating” pressures on oceans, said a UN report covered by Time.
- CLIMATE MIGRANTS: Donald Trump’s “immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters”, according to Guardian analysis.
- ULTRA-RICH: Investments by the world’s ultra-rich in 2022 are linked to nearly $1tn in climate damages, according to a Greenpeace Africa analysis covered by BusinessGreen.
Two
The number of bidders for Trump’s auction for drilling rights in an Arctic wildlife refuge, with big oil companies “sitting out the sale”, reported Bloomberg.
Latest climate research
- As the Arctic warms, increased iceberg activity could “reshape” deep-sea habitats and “elevate” navigational hazards as maritime traffic expands | Nature
- Around 11% of the population of the world’s “rarest great ape”, the Tapanuli orangutan, is estimated to have perished in an extreme rainfall event in Indonesia in 2025 | Current Biology
- Canada’s forests are shifting from a carbon sink to a carbon source, due to “wildfires disturbances” | Global Change Biology
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Solar power has overtaken gas in Asia to become the region’s third largest electricity source behind coal and hydropower, according to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the thinktank Ember. Solar became the third largest electricity source for Asia on an annual basis in April 2026, according to the analysis. In the year to April 2026, solar generated 1,727 terawatt hours (TWh), while gas generated 1,711TWh, it added.
Spotlight
Atlantic current monitoring at risk
This week, Carbon Brief reports on how Trump plans could disrupt efforts to track a major ocean current.
The Irminger Sea, a patch of frigid ocean east of Greenland, plays an outsized role in the Earth’s climate.
Here, surface water that has travelled thousands of kilometres from the tropics grows cold and dense enough to sink to the ocean’s depths – a transformation that must occur for the water to begin a long journey back to the southern hemisphere.
This makes the Irminger Sea an “action centre” for the mighty Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the vast system of ocean currents that keeps temperatures in Europe mild.
Last week, the US government announced plans to dismantle ocean moorings installed in the Irminger Sea which, among other things, collect data on the health of the AMOC.
This came as part of a programme to “descope” the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368m network of ocean sensors installed in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Two of the moorings earmarked for removal in the Irminger Sea form part of an internationally funded, trans-Atlantic AMOC monitoring array, known as OSNAP, that stretches from Canada to Scotland.
Experts told Carbon Brief the move by the Trump administration highlights the vulnerability of AMOC observation systems around the world. These deep-sea moorings – scattered across the Atlantic – collect real-time data on, among other things, ocean current, temperature, pressure and biochemistry.
Prof Penny Holliday, chief scientific officer of the UK National Oceanography Centre, told Carbon Brief that the OSNAP array, as well as the RAPID array at 26N, are “entirely dependent” on research grants that have to be “continually reapplied for”.
“Funding is perilous all the time,” she said.
A report prepared last month by scientists for Nordic ministers exploring the security of funding for AMOC observing systems warned that RAPID and OSNAP were in “critical condition” and faced “material exposure over an 18-month horizon”. Meanwhile, other key basin-wide and global components of the global AMOC observing system were rated as “at risk”.
It is not just US funding that is uncertain. The report notes, for example, that the five-yearly funding the UK provides to RAPID and OSNAP is “at risk from 2027 due to year-on-year budget reductions” at the Natural Environmental Research Council.
(RAPID is funded by the US and UK, whereas OSNAP is backed by five different countries, with the US contributing half of the total financial support.)
Report co-author Dr Femke de Jong from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research told Carbon Brief that “continued AMOC observations” are under pressure in “multiple countries”. She said:
“While the risk of a declining AMOC to society is starting to be recognised, there is not yet a system or institution in place to guarantee a way to monitor it.”
AMOC monitoring arrays are still in their infancy – RAPID, the oldest, was launched in 2004. Two decades of data captured so far shows that the AMOC is slowing down. However, scientists will need many more years of data to be able to confidently link the decline to climate change, rather than natural variability in the ocean.
NOC’s Holliday points to the disconnect between scientific and funder timelines:
“The timescale of observations needed in order to be able to detect a climate change signal from the very naturally variable ocean is around 40-60 years…. [And yet], in the Netherlands, they have to apply for a new grant for their ocean moorings every two years. They are going to have to do that for 40 years.
“This is a very inefficient way of getting funding for what should be critical infrastructure.”
This spotlight first appeared in Cited, Carbon Brief’s new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free.
Watch, read, listen
‘BEYOND GROWTH’: A group of economists set out a “roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth” in the Guardian.
OIL CAMPAIGN: Politico reported on how “oil industry allies” are campaigning against attribution science, including by working to discredit a US National Academies report that “will examine research into the ways corporate climate pollution is intensifying natural disasters”.
‘FIGHT BACK’: For the Apocalyptic Optimist podcast, Dr Dana Fisher spoke to historian and author Dr Naomi Oreskes about how to “fight back” against climate misinformation.
Coming up
- 8-18 June: Bonn climate talks, Bonn, Germany
- 16-18 June: 11th Our ocean conference, Mombasa, Kenya
- 18 June: International Energy Agency Global Hydrogen Review 2026 report launch
Pick of the jobs
- S-Curve Economics, head of road transport | Salary: £75,000-£80,000. Location: Remote (UK)
- UK Department for Energy Security and Net-Zero, speechwriter to the secretary of state | Salary: £62,595-£69,765. Location: London (hybrid)
- Basque Centre for Climate Change, postdoctoral researcher for JustBioSolar project | Salary: €27,040-€34,320. Location: Bilbao, Spain
- Boston Globe climate science and environment reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Boston, US
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 12 June 2026: El Niño begins | COP31 hosts eye electrification | Atlantic current monitoring at risk appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Solar has overtaken gas power in Asia to become the continent’s third-largest source of electricity, according to new analysis by Carbon Brief.
The rapid expansion of solar power in nations such as China, India and Pakistan has seen its annual output increase nearly fourfold since 2020.
Asia accounts for around 60% of the world’s solar-power growth in this period, putting the continent at the heart of the global solar boom.
Coal and hydropower remain Asia’s largest sources of electricity, generating roughly 52% and 12% of the continent’s power each year, respectively.
Yet despite expectations that gas power would undergo “explosive growth” in the region, output has stalled due to supply disruptions, relatively high gas prices and growth in clean alternatives.
In contrast, solar has surged, generating some 1,727 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity in the 12 months to April 2026.
As the chart below shows, this pushes it just ahead of gas, which generated 1,711TWh over the same period and has remained roughly flat for the past several years.
The milestone reflects wider trends in the global electricity mix, with monthly generation from both wind and solar surpassing gas generation globally for the first time in April 2026.
Asia’s solar expansion has been driven largely by China, which accounts for nearly three-quarters of the growth in the region’s output since 2020.
Record installations in 2025 took China’s cumulative installed capacity to 1.2 terawatts (TW) by the end of the year.
China also dominates global solar supply chains, hosting more than 80% of solar manufacturing capacity.
This means it has played an important role in enabling solar deployment in other Asian countries through cheap solar-panel exports. Amid the energy crisis sparked by the Iran war, Chinese solar exports to Asia doubled to reach a record 39 gigawatts (GW) in March 2026.
Meanwhile, Asian countries have faced a number of challenges in expanding gas-power capacity. Most of these nations are reliant on imported liquified natural gas (LNG) to support their gas-power projects.
Around 81GW of planned gas capacity in Asia was cancelled in 2022 and 2023, amid LNG supply disruptions and price spikes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
LNG import terminals and pipelines have faced delays and cancellations in south Asia and South Korea as a result of rising fuel and construction costs, as well as weak demand for gas power.
Global gas turbine shortages have also delayed plans to build new gas-power plants in Vietnam and the Philippines.
While Asia’s gas-power capacity increased by 22% between 2019 and 2024, gas-fired generation has only increased by a modest 6% over the same period. Existing gas plants are not always operating at high capacities, as gas is outcompeted by other fuels.
These trends are not uniform across the region, with increased generation in some countries – such as China and Taiwan – being offset by declines in others – such as Japan and India.
Although China has nearly doubled its gas -power generation in the past decade, gas supply issues and high prices make it less competitive than coal and renewables.
The expansion of clean energy has also reduced the need for gas-fired generation in many Asian countries. Pakistan’s widely reported “boom” in rooftop solar is one notable example of this trend.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the latest energy crisis has “renewed gas supply reliability and affordability concerns” among gas-importing countries in Asia, many of which are highly dependent on gas flows through the strait of Hormuz.
Methodology
The figures in this article are based on Ember’s monthly and annual electricity data for Asia.
Annual data was used for the year-end data points, as the coverage is more complete compared to the monthly data.
Rolling annual totals based on monthly data were used to interpolate between the annual data points.
The figures in the chart are based on Ember’s definition of Asia, which covers the following countries: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Georgia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macao, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
This does not include some countries that are part of the continent of Asia and that use relatively large amounts of gas, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Russia.
The post Analysis: Solar overtakes gas power in Asia for first time ever appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Solar overtakes gas power in Asia for first time ever
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