“Fragmented governance” between biodiversity, climate change, food, water and health is putting all of those systems at risk, according to a major new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
The report, known as the “nexus assessment”, explores the interlinkages between climate change, biodiversity, food, water and human health.
It says that focusing on a single element of the nexus at the expense of the others will have negative impacts for both humans and the planet.
At the same time, many of the actions that can be taken to address nature loss will have co-benefits for the climate.
The report also finds that funding for nature is dwarfed by both public and private finance that goes towards nature-harming activities.
However, it says, reforming global financial systems could help address the “funding gap” needed to effectively protect nature.
These conclusions form part of a “summary for policymakers”, a 57-page document that explains the key messages of the report. The full report will be published sometime next year.
IPBES is an independent body that provides scientific advice around biodiversity and biodiversity loss to policymakers, including through the Convention on Biological Diversity. It was modelled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and functions in much the same way.
Prof Pam McElwee, co-chair of the report and a professor at Rutgers University, told a press briefing that biodiversity, climate, food, water and health should not be treated as “single-issue crises”. She added:
“These are interlinked crises. They are compounding each other. They are making things worse, and the current business as usual approach is not only failing to tackle the drivers of these problems, [but] in some cases, we are wasting money because we’re duplicating policies, when in fact, we could be treating them as issues that need to be dealt with together.”
Here, Carbon Brief explains five key takeaways from the IPBES “nexus” assessment report.
1. Biodiversity loss puts food and water systems, human health and the climate at risk
3. Shifting to sustainable healthy diets will benefit people and the planet
4. All available options for restoring nature would also help to tackle and adapt to climate change
5. Reforming global financial systems can help close the biodiversity funding gap
1. Biodiversity loss puts food and water systems, human health and the climate at risk
The report explores how the decline of biodiversity in “all regions of the world” has serious consequences for food, water, health and climate change.
It stresses that biodiversity is “essential” to human existence, because it supports water and food supplies, underpins public health and contributes to the stability of the climate.
But over the last 30-50 years, biodiversity has declined by an average of 2-6% each decade across “all of the assessed indicators”, according to the report.
It notes that the ongoing decline has been caused by an intensification of the direct drivers of biodiversity loss: land- and sea-use change, climate change, overexploitation of resources, invasive alien species and pollution.
These trends have, in turn, been caused by “a wide range of indirect drivers”, including economic, demographic, cultural and technological changes, the report argues.
When these “direct” and “indirect” drivers of biodiversity loss interact with each other, they cause “cascading impacts among the nexus elements”, the report warns. In particular, it notes that climate change and biodiversity loss “interact and compound each other to negatively impact ecosystem resilience and all the other nexus elements”.
The document points to “fragmented governance” of biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change as a major obstacle preventing effective action on the issues.
While environmental regulations have been “partially successful”, they are “unlikely to be fully effective without more concerted efforts to address interlinkages among the nexus elements and their direct and indirect drivers”, it warns.
Prof Paula Harrison, co-chair of the report and a scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, says that governance systems need to reflect the interconnections between biodiversity, food, health, water and climate change. She told a press briefing on 16 December:
“Because our current governance systems are often different departments, they are working in silos. They are very fragmented, and they are working and developing policy in isolation – often these links [between climate, health, biodiversity, water and food] are not even acknowledged or ignored.
“What that actually means is that you can just get unintended consequences or trade-offs that emerge because people just weren’t thinking in the holistic way.”
For example, unsustainable agricultural practices introduced to increase food production result in biodiversity loss, unsustainable water usage, reduced food diversity and quality, and increased pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.
The graphic below provides an illustration of how unsustainable agriculture can impact all five of the nexus elements.
Moreover, the report finds that over the last 50 years, decision makers have prioritised “short-term benefits and financial returns for a small number of people”, while ignoring the negative impacts of their actions on the five nexus elements.
This oversight exacerbates societal inequalities, according to the report, given that communities in developing countries and Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, climate change and health risks.
Overall, it says that “dominant economic systems” are causing “unsustainable and inequitable economic growth”, noting that $7tn a year is invested in activities detrimental to nexus elements.
2. Focusing solely on food security leads to ‘severe trade-offs’ with climate, water and biodiversity
To assess how the five nexus elements – biodiversity, water, food, health and climate – will interact with each other over the 21st century, the authors used 186 scenarios from 52 studies to develop six “nexus scenario archetypes”.
The table below shows the overall projected impact on each nexus element under the different archetypes. The graphic beneath shows how the different nexus elements impact each other under each archetype.
In both graphics, blue arrows show a positive impact, red a negative impact and grey a variable impact. More arrows, or thicker lines, indicate a stronger impact.
The report calls archetypes one and two “sustainability scenarios”.
These are associated with sustainable consumption and production, healthy diets, reduced food waste and lower water use. These archetypes project positive long-term outcomes across all of the nexus elements.
Additionally, the benefits of economic growth are more evenly distributed across different “societal groups”, and multiple actors and knowledge systems – including Indigenous knowledge – are involved in decision-making.
The “nature-oriented nexus” – the first archetype – focuses on increasing protected areas and improving their effectiveness, with a focus on areas with high biodiversity. This takes “deliberate efforts to address existing and emerging injustices and inequality”.
The report finds evidence that “protecting up to 30% of terrestrial, freshwater and marine areas can provide nexus-wide benefits, if these are effectively managed for nature and people”.
The archetype also sees a transformation of global food systems, through changes including increased sustainable agricultural practices, reducing food waste, developing new food sources and promoting healthy, sustainable diets.
Archetype two, called the “balanced nexus”, is characterised by stronger environmental regulation and less reliance on technologies than the nature-oriented nexus. This archetype has a strong focus on restoration and sustainable use of natural resources. It has fewer positive impacts on biodiversity, water and climate and slightly more positive impacts for food and human health, compared to archetype one.
Meanwhile, archetypes three, four and five each prioritise a specific nexus element. These archetypes force “severe trade-offs among the nexus elements” and result in “unsustainable and inequitable economic growth”.
For example, archetype five – “food first” – uses “unsustainable” agricultural processes, which result in higher greenhouse gas emissions, land-use change, water use and nitrate pollution. This scenario sees nutritional health improve, but has negative impacts on biodiversity, water and climate change.
Archetypes five and six are “business-as-usual” scenarios, which represent the continuation of current trends. These are characterised by “intensive…material and energy consumption, increased greenhouse gas emissions, intensive land use and
unsustainable exploitation of natural resources”.
The sixth archetype is called “nature overexploitation” and is characterised by negative impacts across all five nexus elements. This archetype sees overconsumption of natural resources, unsustainable energy demand and “weak environmental regulation exacerbated by delayed action”.
The report warns that these business-as-usual scenarios result in “declining outcomes for biodiversity, mainly driven by unsustainable food production and resource extraction as well as climate change”.
The report concludes:
“Maximising all nexus elements simultaneously is unlikely to be possible, but achieving balance across policy goals will likely lead to beneficial outcomes for nature and people.”
3. Shifting to sustainable healthy diets will benefit people and the planet
The report says it is well established by scientists that shifting to sustainable healthy diets and reducing food waste would “benefit food security and health” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
This shift could also “free up land, providing in a range of cases co-benefits for nexus elements, such as biodiversity conservation and carbon sinks”, the report says.
The assessment examines 71 “response options” for tackling at least one element of the nexus between biodiversity, water, food security, health and climate change.
The report says that these responses “are not meant to be an exhaustive list”, but “represent a menu of options that can be applied in different contexts”, adding:
“Some response options may not be appropriate in all countries, and all would be implemented in accordance with national legislation and sovereignty and in accordance with relevant international obligations. Even within countries, effectiveness and acceptability depend critically on political, social and ecological context.”
The graphic below summarises the response options, which are grouped into 10 categories. The coloured tags indicate which element of the nexus the option addresses.
The graphic illustrates how most of the options for addressing food security involve consuming sustainably, managing ecosystem functions and ensuring Indigenous rights and equity.
Measures to consume sustainably in order to boost food security include shifting to sustainable healthy diets and reducing food waste.
The diagram also notes that human health could be improved by reducing meat overconsumption.
The report says it is well established that “behaviour change will be necessary to shift consumption practices”.
It says this can be enabled by the “increasing accessibility and desirability” of sustainable healthy diets. It also says that implementing food-based dietary guidelines to the public, “particularly targeting public school feeding programmes”, can create a “structured demand” for healthy and sustainable food.
This measure could also “increase opportunities for on-farm diversification aimed at increasing supply and consumption of local seasonal foods”, the report says.
The report also says that improving the sustainable use and management of ecosystems is “particularly important for the agricultural sector”.
This is because “the way food is produced, what foods are produced and consumed, where they are produced, and how much food is lost and wasted impact both nature and people”. It says the “ecological intensification” of croplands, rangelands and aquaculture can help to address food security while having benefits for people and nature.
“Ecological intensification” refers to the idea of using natural functions of an ecosystem to produce more food in a sustainable way – for example, by allowing wild insects to pollinate crops.
The report also says “agroecology” could have positive effects for biodiversity and addressing climate change. It says:
“Agroecology represents a shift to production systems where equitable access to land and a blend of scientific and Indigenous and local knowledge guide the sustainable management of biodiversity, crops and other resources.”
4. All available options for restoring nature would also help to tackle and adapt to climate change
All of the available options for restoring biodiversity examined by the report would come with co-benefits for tackling and adapting to climate change, although the size of this positive impact varies with each technique.
The figure below shows the positive (dark blue) and negative (red) impacts associated with the report’s 71 “response options” for tackling at least one element of the nexus between biodiversity, food security, health and climate change (see previous section for more on these options).
In the figure, positive and negative impacts are shown for biodiversity (butterfly icon), water (droplet), food security (wheat), health (heart) and climate change (thermometer). The size of the circle represents the relative size of the effect.
The figure shows that all of the options for addressing biodiversity loss (B01-14) come with a positive impact on efforts to tackle and adapt to climate change.
Furthermore, the report says, implementing multiple response options together can have a synergistic effect, “enhanc[ing] nexus-wide benefits”. Current approaches, it adds, “have failed to harness the full potential…because they have been designed and implemented in isolation”.
The report says it is well established that addressing nature loss by protecting natural ecosystems from further destruction could come with benefits for all elements of the nexus, adding:
“Conserving or halting conversion of forests and other ecosystems protects human health and wellbeing by combating climate change, reducing the impact of extreme weather events, such as storms, droughts and landslides, increasing water and air quality and reducing disease risk.”
It is also well established that restoring degraded ecosystems can help to tackle climate change “when it targets carbon storage in forests, peatlands, seagrass beds, salt marshes and marine and coastal ecosystems that contribute to carbon sequestration”, the report says.
Restoration is “most effective” when it is inclusive of the knowledge and rights of Indigenous peoples and when it covers large areas, according to the report.
Many of the response options offered in the report support the implementation or achievement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.
The report says:
“The capacity to contribute to multiple goals simultaneously is a common and powerful feature of nexus approaches. These response options are therefore a promising mechanism for integrating efforts and accelerating progress towards multiple policy goals and frameworks.”
However, it says, in order to achieve these goals within a nexus framework, “new types of indicators, data and processes may need to be put into place”. It adds that current, siloed methods of governance “have resulted in misaligned, duplicative and inconsistent governance and have failed to address direct and indirect drivers of change”.
5. Reforming global financial systems can help close the biodiversity funding gap
The report identifies the gap in finance needed to meet the needs for biodiversity action as between $300bn and $1tn per year.
Additionally, it says, achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals related to the nexus will require at least another $4tn in investment annually in water, food, health and climate change.
Given those large sums, the report calls for “urgent action” to “address the dominance of a narrow set of interests within economic and financial systems” and increase investment in biodiversity, food and water. It adds that these wider reforms could “amplif[y]” the additional investment made in the nexus.
For example, regulatory reform could make investment in nature more attractive by increasing the costs of biodiversity-harming activities. This is closely linked to target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls on countries to “eliminate, phase out or reform incentives” that are harmful to biodiversity.
Target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Source: CBD (2022)
According to the report, there is established but incomplete evidence that the world’s current economic and financial systems are contributing to biodiversity loss and resulting in increased “nature-related risks”, which, it adds, are “mutually reinforcing with risks from climate change”.
These risks are estimated to be “in the trillions of dollars”.
Spending “aimed at improving the status of biodiversity” is estimated at around $200bn per year.
Currently, the world spends 35 times more resources on activities that directly damage biodiversity than it does on preserving nature. This is exacerbated by an additional $300bn spent on illegal activities that harm nature, such as illegal deforestation and wildlife trafficking.
The report identifies three pathways that could help better align global financial flows for biodiversity and the rest of the nexus:
- Improving the availability and use of information on the “diverse values of nature”, such as by updating transparency and reporting requirements to reflect the nexus elements.
- Improving access to finance through multiple different financial instruments, including green bonds, reformed tax policies and payments for ecosystem services.
- Reducing negative incentives, including by improved investment safeguards and addressing harmful subsidies.
The graphic below shows the current state of funding for the nexus, with biodiversity-harming financial flows shown in red and biodiversity-positive finance in blue. The icons denote the funding that is directed to each element of the nexus: biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.
The graphic also shows how financial reforms could benefit the nexus by reducing negative finance and increasing biodiversity-supporting finance.
Of the finance that is currently directed towards biodiversity and the other components of the nexus, there are “some existing synergies”, the report suggests. However, more than half of the funding identified in the report goes solely to addressing a single element of the nexus: 48% for biodiversity, 8% for water and 1% for climate change.
Additionally, there is a “clear bias” in the distribution of biodiversity finance, with public funds primarily concentrated in North America, Europe and China, the report says. At the same time, only 5% of global private biodiversity finance is allocated to least-developed countries.
Addressing related concerns, such as the unsustainable debt burden faced by developing countries and striving for just and equitable transitions, can help support financing the nexus as well. The report concludes:
“Collectively, these efforts could reform the relationship between the economy and nature, enhance equity and deliver sustainable development outcomes.”
The post IPBES nexus report: Five takeaways for biodiversity, food, water, health and climate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
IPBES nexus report: Five takeaways for biodiversity, food, water, health and climate
A “critical assessment” report commissioned by the Trump administration to justify a rollback of US climate regulations contains at least 100 false or misleading statements, according to a Carbon Brief factcheck involving dozens of leading climate scientists.
The report – “A critical review of impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the US climate” – was published by the US Department of Energy (DoE) on 23 July, just days before the government laid out plans to revoke a scientific finding used as the legal basis for emissions regulation.
The executive summary of the controversial report inaccurately claims that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed”.
It also states misleadingly that “excessively aggressive [emissions] mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial”.
Compiled in just two months by five “independent” researchers hand-selected by the climate-sceptic US secretary of energy Chris Wright, the document has sparked fierce criticism from climate scientists, who have pointed to factual errors, misrepresentation of research, messy citations and the cherry-picking of data.
Experts have also noted the authors’ track record of promoting views at odds with the mainstream understanding of climate science.
Wright’s department claims the report – which is currently open to public comment as part of a 30-day review – underwent an “internal peer-review period amongst [the] DoE’s scientific research community”.
The report is designed to provide a scientific underpinning to one flank of the Trump administration’s plans to rescind a finding that serves as the legal prerequisite for federal emissions regulation. (The second flank is about legal authority to regulate emissions.)
The “endangerment finding” – enacted by the Obama administration in 2009 – states that six greenhouse gases are contributing to the net-negative impacts of climate change and, thus, put the public in danger.
In a press release on 29 July, the US Environmental Protection Agency said “updated studies and information” set out in the new report would “challenge the assumptions” of the 2009 finding.
Carbon Brief asked a wide range of climate scientists, including those cited in the “critical review” itself, to factcheck the report’s various claims and statements.
The post Factcheck: Trump’s climate report includes more than 100 false or misleading claims appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-trumps-climate-report-includes-more-than-100-false-or-misleading-claims/
Climate Change
Cropped 13 August 2025: Fossil-fuelled bird decline; ‘Deadly’ wildfires; Empty nature fund
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
‘Deadly’ wildfires
WINE BRAKE: France experienced its “largest wildfire in decades”, which scorched more than 16,000 hectares in the country’s southern Aude region, the Associated Press said. “Gusting winds” fanned the flames, Reuters reported, but local winemakers and mayors also “blam[ed] the loss of vineyards”, which can act as a “natural, moisture-filled brake against wildfires”, for the fire’s rapid spread. It added that thousands of hectares of vineyards were removed in Aude over the past year. Meanwhile, thousands of people were evacuated from “deadly” wildfires in Spain, the Guardian said, with blazes ongoing in other parts of Europe.
MAJOR FIRES: Canada is experiencing its second-worst wildfire season on record, CBC News reported. More than 7.3m hectares burned in 2025, “more than double the 10-year average for this time of year”, the broadcaster said. The past three fire seasons were “among the 10 worst on record”, CBC News added. Dr Mike Flannigan from Thompson Rivers University told the Guardian: “This is our new reality…The warmer it gets, the more fires we see.” Elsewhere, the UK is experiencing a record year for wildfires, with more than 40,000 hectares of land burned so far in 2025, according to Carbon Brief.
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WESTERN US: The US state of Colorado has recorded one of its largest wildfires in history in recent days, the Guardian said. The fire “charred” more than 43,300 hectares of land and led to the temporary evacuation of 179 inmates from a prison, the newspaper said. In California, a fire broke out “during a heatwave” and burned more than 2,000 hectares before it was contained, the Los Angeles Times reported. BBC News noted: “Wildfires have become more frequent in California, with experts citing climate change as a key factor. Hotter, drier conditions have made fire seasons longer and more destructive.”
FIRE FUNDING: “Worsening fires” in the Brazilian Amazon threaten new rainforest funding proposals due to be announced at the COP30 climate summit later this year, experts told Climate Home News. The new initiatives include the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, which the outlet said “aims to generate a flow of international investment to pay countries annually in proportion to their preserved tropical forests”. The outlet added: “If fires in the Amazon continue to worsen in the years to come, eligibility for funding could be jeopardised, Brazil’s environment ministry acknowledged.”
Farming impacts
OUT OF ORBIT: US president Donald Trump moved to “shut down” two space missions which monitor carbon dioxide and plant health, the Associated Press reported. Ending these NASA missions would “potentially shu[t] off an important source of data for scientists, policymakers and farmers”, the outlet said. Dr David Crisp, a retired NASA scientist, said the missions can detect the “glow” of plant growth, which the outlet noted “helps monitor drought and predict food shortages that can lead to civil unrest and famine”.
FARM EXTREMES: Elsewhere, Reuters said that some farmers are considering “abandoning” a “drought-hit” agricultural area in Hungary as “climate change cuts crop yields and reduces groundwater levels”. Scientists warned that rising temperatures and low rainfall threaten the region’s “agricultural viability”, the newswire added. Meanwhile, the Premium Times in Nigeria said that some farmers are “harvest[ing] crops prematurely” due to flooding fears. A community in the south-eastern state of Imo “has endured recurrent floods, which wash away crops and incomes alike” over the past decade, the newspaper noted.
SECURITY RISKS: Food supply chains in the UK face “escalating threats from climate impacts and the migration they are triggering”, according to a report covered by Business Green. The outlet said that £3bn worth of UK food imports originated from the 20 countries “with the highest numbers of climate-driven displacements” in 2024, based on analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. The analysis highlighted that “climate impacts on food imports pose a threat to UK food security”. Elsewhere, an opinion piece in Dialogue Earth explored how the “role of gender equity in food security remains critically unaddressed”.
Spotlight
Fossil-fuelled bird decline
This week, Carbon Brief covers a new study tracing the impact of fossil-fuelled climate change on tropical birds.
Over the past few years, biologists have recorded sharp declines in bird numbers across tropical rainforests – even in areas untouched by humans – with the cause remaining a mystery.
A new study published this week in Nature Ecology and Evolution could help to shed light on this alarming phenomenon.
The research combined ecological and climate attribution techniques for the first time to trace the fingerprint of fossil-fuelled climate change on declining bird populations.
It found that an increase in heat extremes driven by climate change has caused tropical bird populations to decline by 25-38% in the period 1950-2020, when compared to a world without warming.
In their paper, the authors noted that birds in the tropics could be living close to their “thermal limits”.
Study lead author Dr Maximilian Kotz, a climate scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, explained to Carbon Brief:
“High temperature extremes can induce direct mortality in bird populations due to hyperthermia and dehydration. Even when they don’t [kill birds immediately], there’s evidence that this can then affect body condition which, in turn, affects breeding behaviour and success.”
Conservation implications
The findings have “potential ramifications” for commonly proposed conservation strategies, such as increasing the amount of land in the tropics that is protected for nature, the authors said. In their paper, they continued:
“While we do not disagree that these strategies are necessary for abating tropical habitat loss…our research shows there is now an additional urgent need to investigate strategies that can allow for the persistence of tropical species that are vulnerable to heat extremes.”
In some parts of the world, scientists and conservationists are looking into how to protect wildlife from more intense and frequent climate extremes, Kotz said.
He referenced one project in Australia which is working to protect threatened wildlife following periods of extreme heat, drought and bushfires.
Prof Alex Pigot, a biodiversity scientist at University College London (UCL), who was not involved in the research, said the findings reinforced the need to systematically monitor the impact of extreme weather on wildlife. He told Carbon Brief:
“We urgently need to develop early warning systems to be able to anticipate in advance where and when extreme heatwaves and droughts are likely to impact populations – and also rapidly scale up our monitoring of species and ecosystems so that we can reliably detect these effects.”
There is further coverage of this research on Carbon Brief’s website.
News and views
EMPTY CALI FUND: A major voluntary fund for biodiversity remains empty more than five months after its launch, Carbon Brief revealed. The Cali Fund, agreed at the COP16 biodiversity negotiations last year, was set up for companies who rely on nature’s resources to share some of their earnings with the countries where many of these resources originate. Big pharmaceutical companies did not take up on opportunities to commit to contributing to the fund or be involved in its launch in February 2025, emails released to Carbon Brief showed. Just one US biotechnology firm has pledged to contribute to the fund in the future.
LOSING HOPE: Western Australia’s Ningaloo reef – long considered a “hope spot” among the country’s coral reefs for evading major bleaching events – is facing its “worst-ever coral bleaching”, Australia’s ABC News reported. The ocean around Ningaloo has been “abnormally” warm since December, resulting in “unprecedented” bleaching and mortality, a research scientist told the outlet. According to marine ecologist Dr Damian Thomson, “up to 50% of the examined coral was dead in May”, the Sydney Morning Herald said. Thomson told the newspaper: “You realise your children are probably never going to see Ningaloo the way you saw it.”
‘DEVASTATION BILL’: Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, signed a “contentious” environmental bill into law, but “partially vetoed” some of the widely criticised elements, the Financial Times reported. Critics, who dubbed it the “devastation bill”, said it “risked fuelling deforestation and would harm Brazil’s ecological credentials” just months before hosting the COP30 climate summit. The newspaper said: “The leftist leader struck down or altered 63 of 400 provisions in the legislation, which was designed to speed up and modernise environmental licensing for new business and infrastructure developments.” The vetoes need to be approved by congress, “where Lula lacks a majority”, the newspaper noted.
RAINFOREST DRILLING: The EU has advised the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) against allowing oil drilling in a vast stretch of rainforest and peatland that was jointly designated a “green corridor” earlier this year, Climate Home News reported. In May, the DRC announced that it planned to open the conservation area for drilling, the publication said. A spokesperson for the European Commission told Climate Home News that the bloc “fully acknowledges and respects the DRC’s sovereign right to utilise its diverse resources for economic development”, but that it “highlights the fact that green alternatives have facilitated the protection of certain areas”.
NEW PLAN FOR WETLANDS: During the 15th meeting of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, held in Zimbabwe from 23 to 31 July, countries agreed on the adoption of a new 10-year strategic plan for conserving and sustainably using the world’s wetlands. Down to Earth reported that 13 resolutions were adopted, including “enhancing monitoring and reporting, capacity building and mobilisation of resources”. During the talks, Zimbabwe’s environment minister announced plans to restore 250,000 hectares of degraded wetlands by 2030 and Saudi Arabia entered the Convention on Wetlands. Panamá will host the next COP on wetlands in July 2028.
MEAT MADNESS: DeSmog covered the details of a 2021 public relations document that revealed how the meat industry is trying to “make beef seem climate-friendly”. The industry “may have enlisted environmental groups to persuade people to ‘feel better’ about eating beef”, the outlet said, based on this document. The strategy was created by a communications agency, MHP Group, and addressed to the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. One of the key messages of the plan was to communicate the “growing momentum in the beef industry to protect and nurture the Earth’s natural resources”. MHP Group did not respond to a request for comment, according to DeSmog.
Watch, read, listen
MAKING WAVES: A livestream of deep-sea “crustaceans, sponges and sea cucumbers” has “captivated” people in Argentina, the New York Times outlined.
BAFFLING BIRDS: The Times explored the backstory to the tens of thousands of “exotic-looking” parakeets found in parks across Britain.
PLANT-BASED POWER: In the Conversation, Prof Paul Behrens outlined how switching to a plant-based diet could help the UK meet its climate and health targets.
MARINE DISCRIMINATION: Nature spoke to a US-based graduate student who co-founded Minorities in Shark Science about her experiences of racism and sexism in the research field.
New science
- Applying biochar – a type of charcoal – to soils each year over a long period of time can have “sustained benefits for crop yield and greenhouse gas mitigation”, according to a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study.
- New research, published in PLOS Climate, found that nearly one-third of highly migratory fish species in the US waters of the Atlantic Ocean have “high” or “very high” vulnerability to climate change, but the majority of species have “some level of resilience and adaptability”.
- A study in Communications Earth & Environment found a “notable greening trend” in China’s wetlands over 2000-23, with an increasing amount of carbon being stored in the plants growing there.
In the diary
- 18-29 August: Second meeting of the preparatory commission for the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction | New York
- 24-28 August: World Water Week | Online and Stockholm, Sweden
- 26-29 August: Sixth forum of ministers and environment authorities of Asia Pacific | Nadi, Fiji
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 13 August 2025: Fossil-fuelled bird decline; ‘Deadly’ wildfires; Empty nature fund appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 13 August 2025: Fossil-fuelled bird decline; ‘Deadly’ wildfires; Empty nature fund
Last year, China started construction on an estimated 95 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity, enough to power the entire UK twice over.
It accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction in 2024.
The boom appears to contradict China’s climate commitments and its pledge to “strictly control” new coal power.
The fact that China already has significant underused coal power capacity and is adding enough clean energy to cover rising electricity demand also calls the necessity of the buildout into question.
Furthermore, so much new coal capacity provides an easy counterargument for claims that China is serious about the energy transition.
Did China really need more coal power?
And now that it is here, do all these brand-new power plants mean China’s greenhouse gas emissions will remain elevated for longer?
This article addresses four common talking points surrounding China’s ongoing coal-power expansion, explaining how and why the current wave of new projects might come to an end.
New coal is not needed for energy security
The explanation for China’s recent coal boom lies in a combination of policy priorities, institutional incentives and system-level mismatches, with origins in the widespread power shortages China experienced in the early 2020s.
In 2021, a “mismatch” between the price of coal and the government-set price of coal-fired power incentivised coal-fired power plants to cut generation. Furthermore, power shortages in 2020 and 2022 revealed issues of inflexible grid management and limited availability of power plants, when demand spiked due to extreme weather and elevated energy-intensive economic activity, compounded by coal shortages, reduced hydro output and insufficient imported electricity import.
Following this, energy security became a top priority for the central government. Local governments responded by approving new coal-power projects as a form of insurance against future outages.
Yet, on paper, China had – and still has – more than enough “dispatchable” resources to meet even the highest demand peaks. (Dispatchable sources include coal, gas, nuclear and hydropower.) It also has more than enough underutilised coal-power capacity to meet potential demand growth.
A bigger factor behind the shortages was grid inflexibility. During both the 2020 power crisis in north-east China and the 2022 shortage in Sichuan, affected provinces continued to export electricity while experiencing local shortages.
A lack of coordination between provinces and inflexible market mechanisms governing the “dispatch” of power plants – the instructions to adjust generation up or down – meant that existing resources could not be fully utilised.
Nevertheless, with coal power plants cheap to build and quick to gain approval, many provinces saw them as a reliable way to reassure policymakers, balance local grids and support industry interests, regardless of whether the plants would end up being economically viable or frequently used.
China’s average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50%, meaning total coal-fired electricity generation could rise substantially without the need for any new capacity.
At the same time as adding new coal, the Chinese government also addressed energy security through improvements to grid operation and market reforms, as well as building more storage.
The country added dozens of gigawatts of battery storage, accelerated pumped hydro projects and improved trading linkages between electricity markets in different provinces.
Though these investments could have gone further, they have already helped avoid blackouts during recent summers – when few of the newly-permitted coal power plants had come online. As such, it is not clear that the new coal plants were needed to guarantee security of supply in the first place.
President Xi Jinping has stated that “energy security depends on developing new energy” – using the Chinese term for renewables excluding hydropower and sometimes including nuclear. According to the International Energy Agency, in the long run, resilience will come not from overbuilding coal, but from modernising China’s power system.
New coal power plants do not mean more coal use and higher emissions
It may seem intuitive to imagine that if a country is building new coal power plants, it will automatically burn more coal and increase its emissions.
But adding capacity does not necessarily translate into higher generation or emissions, particularly while the growth of clean energy is still accelerating.
Coal power generation plays a residual role in China’s power system, filling the gap between the power generated from clean energy sources – such as wind, solar, hydro and nuclear – and total electricity demand. As clean-energy generation is growing rapidly, the space left for coal to fill is shrinking.
From December 2024, coal power generation declined for five straight months before ticking up slightly in May and June, mainly to offset weaker hydropower generation due to drought. Coal power generation was flat overall in the second quarter of 2025.
The chart below shows growth in monthly power generation for coal and gas (grey), solar and wind (dark blue) and other low-carbon power sources (light blue).
This illustrates how the rise in wind and solar growth is squeezing the residual demand left for coal power, resulting in declining coal-power output during much of 2025 to date.
Another way to consider the impact of new coal-fired capacity is to test whether, in reality, it automatically leads to a rise in coal-fired electricity generation.
The top panel in the figure below shows the annual increase in coal power capacity on the horizontal axis, relative to the change in coal-power output on the vertical axis.
For example, in 2023, China added 47GW of new coal capacity and coal power output rose by 3.4TWh. In contrast, only 28GW was added in 2021, yet output still rose by 4.4TWh.
In other words, there is no correlation between the amount of new coal capacity and the change in electricity generation from coal, or the associated emissions, on an annual basis.
Indeed, the lower panel in the figure shows that larger additions of coal capacity are often followed by falling utilisation. This means that adding coal plants tends to mean that the coal fleet overall is simply used less often.
As such, while adding new coal plants might complicate the energy transition and may increase the risk of unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions, an increase in coal use is far from guaranteed.
If instead, clean energy is covering all new demand – as it has been recently – then building new coal plants simply means that the coal fleet will be increasingly underutilised, which poses a threat to plant profitability.
China is not unique in its approach to coal power
The dynamics behind last year’s surge in coal power project construction starts speak to the logic of China’s system, in which cost-efficiency is not always a central concern when ensuring that key problems are solved.
If a combination of three tools – coal power plants, storage and grid flexibility, in this case – can solve a problem more reliably than one alone, then China is likely to deploy all three, even at the risk of overcapacity.
This approach reflects not just a desire for reliability, but also deeper institutional dynamics that help to explain why coal power continues to be built.
But that does not mean that such a pattern is unique to China.
The figure below shows that, across 26 regions, a peak in coal-fired electricity generation (blue lines) almost always comes before coal power capacity (red) starts to decline.
Moreover, the data suggests that once there has been a peak, generation falls much more sharply than capacity, implying that remaining coal plants are kept on the system even as they are used increasingly infrequently.
In most cases, what ultimately stopped new coal power projects in those countries was not a formal ban, but the market reality that they were no longer needed once lower-carbon technologies and efficiency gains began to cover demand growth.
Coal phase-out policies have tended to reinforce these shifts, rather than initiating them. In China, the same market signals are emerging: clean energy is now meeting all incremental demand and coal power generation has, as a result, started to decline.
Coal is not yet playing a flexible ‘supporting’ role
Since 2022, China’s energy policy has stated that new coal-power projects should serve a “supporting” or “regulating” role, helping integrate variable renewables and respond to demand fluctuations, rather than operating as always-on “baseload” generators.
More broadly, China’s energy strategy also calls for coal power to gradually shift away from a dominant baseload role toward a more flexible, supporting function.
These shifts have, however, mostly happened on paper. Coal power overall remains dominant in China’s power mix and largely inflexible in how it is dispatched.
The 2022 policy provided local governments with a new rationale for building coal power, but many of the new plants are still designed and operated as inflexible baseload units. Long-term contracts and guaranteed operating hours often support these plants to run frequently, undermining the idea that they are just backups.
Old coal plants also continue to operate under traditional baseload assumptions. Despite policies promoting retrofits to improve flexibility, coal power remains structurally rigid.
Technical limitations, long-term contracts and economic incentives continue to prevent meaningful change. Coal is unlikely to shift into the flexible supporting role that China says it wants without deeper reform to dispatch rules, pricing mechanisms and contract structures.
Despite all this, China is seeing a clear shift away from coal. Clean-energy installations have surged, while power demand growth has moderated.
As a result, coal power’s share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025. The chart below shows the monthly power generation share of coal (dark grey), gas (light grey), solar and wind (dark blue), and other low-carbon sources (light blue) from 2016 to the present.
When will the coal boom end?
About a decade ago, the end of China’s coal power expansion also looked near. Coal power plant utilisation declined sharply in the mid-2010s as overcapacity worsened. In response, the government began restricting new project approvals in 2016.
With new construction slowing and power demand rebounding, especially during and after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, utilisation rates recovered. Not long after, power shortages kicked off the recent coal building spree.
Now, there are new signs that the coal power boom is approaching its end. Permitting is becoming more selective again in some regions, especially in eastern provinces where demand growth is slowing and clean energy is surging. Meanwhile, system flexibility is advancing.
Compared to the late 2010s, the current shift appears more structural. It is driven by the rapid expansion of clean energy, which increasingly eliminates the need for large-scale new coal power projects.
Still, the pace of change will depend on how quickly institutions adapt. If grid operators become confident that peak loads can reliably be met with renewables and flexible backup, the rationale for new coal power plants will weaken.
Equally important, entrenched interests at the provincial and corporate levels continue to push for new plants, not just as insurance, but as sources of investment, employment and revenue. Through long-term contracts and utilisation guarantees, this represents institutional lock-in that may delay the shift away from coal.
The next major turning point will come when coal power utilisation rates begin to fall more sharply and persistently. With large amounts of capacity set to come online in the next two years and clean energy steadily displacing coal in the power mix, a sharp drop in coal power plant utilisation appears likely.
Once this happens, the central government might be expected to step in through administrative capacity cuts – forcing the oldest plants to retire – just as it did during overcapacity campaigns in the steel, cement and coal sectors around 2016 and 2017.
In that sense, China’s coal power phase-out may not begin with a single grand policy declaration, but with a familiar pattern of centralised control and managed retrenchment.
A key question is how quickly institutional incentives and grid operation will catch up with the dawning reality of coal being squeezed by renewable growth, as well as whether they will allow clean energy to lead, or continue to be held back by the legacy of coal.
The upcoming 15th five-year plan presents a crucial test of government priorities in this area. If it wants to bring policy back in line with its long-term climate and energy goals, then it could consider including clear, measurable targets for phasing down coal consumption and limiting new capacity, for example.
While China’s coal power construction boom looks, at first glance, like a resurgence,it currently appears more likely to be the final surge before a long downturn. The expansion has added friction and complexity to China’s energy transition, but it has not reversed it.
The post Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
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