On Sunday, Mexicans chose Claudia Sheinbaum as their new leader – blazing a trail not just by electing the country’s first female president but also by putting a climate scientist at the helm of a major nation.
Sheinbaum, an energy engineer who worked unpaid on two major reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will take control of the world’s 14th biggest economy on December 1, for a term due to last until 2030.
While IPCC climate scientists have been appointed as environment ministers in countries like Chile and Egypt, Climate Home was unable to identify any who have served as a national leader.
As Sheinbaum courted votes across the country of 127 million grappling with a drought, heatwave and smog, she promised to invest nearly $14 billion in clean energy and boost electric buses and trains.
“We have to speed up the promotion of renewable energies,” she told a group of Mexican businessmen in April. “We are working on the national energy plan not only through 2030, but to 2050”.
Deep scepticism
But some fellow Mexican climate scientists and political analysts told Climate Home they were sceptical about whether she will deliver on her green promises.
They criticised her record as mayor of Mexico City, a position she held from 2018 to 2023, and said her climate ambition would be held back by her close ties to current pro-fossil fuel President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) and her ideological aversion to private-sector energy.
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Political risk analyst Carlos Ramirez, a partner at Integralia Consultants, told Climate Home that “there is no question that her commitment to climate change is real”, adding “that is a welcome shift from what we have seen so far [under the current government]”.
But, he said, “there will be López Obrador ghosts haunting her – his legacy will mean that she cannot move much from what we are seeing now, and the people who surround him will be watching her closely.”
If she did opt for bigger green changes, “she would have to pay a political price for that,” he noted. “So far she has not given any evidence that she will do so.”
Emissions expert
Sheinbaum grew up in Mexico City with scientists for parents. She signed up to study physics herself, earning undergraduate and masters degrees at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
In the early 1990s, she spent four years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, doing a PhD on energy emissions and environmental problems in Mexico City’s transport sector before joining UNAM’s staff.
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Following a stint as the environment secretary of then Mexico City Mayor López Obrador, she returned to UNAM and helped write the emissions reduction sections of the flagship IPCC assessment reports in 2007 and 2014. Her research on Mexican manufacturing and cement emissions was cited and – like all IPCC authors – she worked long hours unpaid.
Mexico City Mayor
Sheinbaum then went back into politics with López Obrador’s new left-wing party MORENA and was selected as its candidate for mayor of Mexico City in 2018, a position she held until she resigned last year in order to run for the national presidency.
As mayor, she promoted solar power. But UNAM climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota said she had seen no sign of Sheinbaum attempting to solve the city’s serious air pollution problem.
Another UNAM climate scientist, Xochitl Cruz Núñez, who worked with Sheinbaum on the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, told Climate Home that Sheinbaum’s climate work as mayor was “minimal”.
Greenpeace activists protest with mariachi musicians and a cake with bicycle lanes, outside Mayor Sheinbaum’s office in March 14, 2019. (REUTERS/Henry Romero)
Cruz Núñez criticised the city’s diesel-powered bus system, water scarcity and increased urbanisation under Sheinbaum’s leadership, saying it had caused “uncontrolled” construction in surrounding conservation areas.
AMLO’s legacy
Mexico previously enjoyed a reputation as a front-runner on climate action, passing one of the developing world’s earliest climate change laws in 2012. But some of that progress was reversed during López Obrador’s presidency.
The outgoing president dismantled climate policies and institutions and promoted energy sovereignty through domestic fossil fuel production, putting power back into the hands of state-owned companies: electricity utility CFE and oil and gas giant PEMEX.
His government invested billions of dollars into oil and gas infrastructure, and blocked private investment into renewables. Today, Mexico is one of only two G20 countries without a net zero emissions target and has watered down its 2030 emissions reduction goal.
Sheinbaum became MORENA’s candidate for the presidency largely because of López Obrador’s support for her, winning the national election on Sunday partly thanks to his track record as the country’s most popular modern president.
Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum before a manifesto presentation on November 20, 2017. (REUTERS/Henry Romero)
Political analyst Ramirez said Sheinbaum’s political alignment with López Obrador hinders the chances of her pursuing more ambitious climate action.
“Sheinbaum is speaking loudly about bringing renewables back into the system but at the same time – and here is where the problems begin – she wants to give continuity to the energy policy of López Obrador,” he said.
“She has a strong ideological view that [state-owned] CFE and PEMEX should lead the energy transition,” he added. “This is a contradiction. I think it will be a very slow process and eventually fail.”
Cruz Núñez noted that Sheinbaum intends to maintain state stewardship over oil and electricity, while mobilising public resources for renewables, but questioned whether this alone could work. “My opinion is that private investment is required if renewable energy is to be introduced at the level needed for Mexico to fulfill its promises under the Paris Agreement,” she added.
Despite her alliance with AMLO, Sheinbaum has disagreed with him in the past. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, she promoted mask-wearing, testing and vaccinations in Mexico City while the president played down the risks.
Cruz Núñez expressed hope that, having won the election, Sheinbaum will take advantage of her new independence from López Obrador to establish a clear programme for cutting Mexico’s emissions and adapting to climate change.
“I believe she knows enough about climate change and the need to solve it,” she added.
(Reporting by Daisy Clague, editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)
The post Mexico elects a climate scientist as president – but will politics temper her green ambition? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Mexico elects a climate scientist as president – but will politics temper her green ambition?
Colombia wants countries to discuss options for a global agreement to ensure that the extraction, processing and recycling of minerals – including those needed for the clean energy transition – don’t harm the environment and human wellbeing.
The mineral-rich nation is proposing to create an expert group to “identify options for international instruments, including global and legally-binding instruments, for coordinated global action on the environmentally sound management of minerals and metals through [their] full lifecyle”.
Colombia hopes this will eventually lead to an agreement on the need for an international treaty to define mandatory rules and standards that would make mineral value chains more transparent and accountable.
The proposal was set out in a draft resolution submitted to the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) earlier this week and seen by Climate Home News. UNEA, which is constituted of all UN member states, is the world’s top decision-making body for matters relating to the environment. The assembly’s seventh session will meet in Kenya in December to vote on countries’ proposals.
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Soaring demand for the minerals used to manufacture clean energy technologies and electric vehicles, as well as in the digital, construction and defence industries have led to growing environmental destruction, human rights violations and social conflict.
Colombia argues there is an “urgent need” to strengthen global cooperation and governance to reduce the risks to people and the planet.
Options for a global minerals agreement
The proposal is among a flurry of initiatives to strength global mineral governance at a time when booming demand is putting pressure on new mining projects.
Colombia, which produces emeralds, gold, platinum and silver for exports, first proposed the idea for a binding international agreement on minerals traceability and accountability on the sidelines of the UN biodiversity talks it hosted in October 2024.
Since then, the South American nation has been quietly trying to drum up support for the idea, especially among African and European nations.
Its draft resolution to UNEA7 contains very few details, leaving it open for countries to discuss what kind of global instrument would be best suited to make mineral supply chains more transparent and sustainable.
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Colombia says it wants the expert group to build on other UN initiatives, including a UN Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, which set out seven principles to ensure the mining, processing and recycling of energy transition minerals are done responsibly and benefit everyone.
The group would include technical experts and representatives from international and regional conventions, major country groupings as well as relevant stakeholders.
It would examine the feasibility and effectiveness of different options for a global agreement, consider their costs and identify measures to support countries to implement what is agreed.
The resolution also calls for one or two meetings for member states to discuss the idea before the UNEA8 session planned in late 2027, when countries would decide on a way forward.
No time to lose for treaty negotiations
Colombia’s efforts to advance global talks on mineral supply chains have been welcomed by resource experts and campaigners. But not everyone agrees on the best strategy to move the discussion forward at a time when multilateralism is coming under attack.
Johanna Sydow, a resource policy expert who heads the international environmental policy division of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, said she had hoped that the resolution would explicitly call for negotiations to begin on an international minerals treaty.
“Treaty negotiations take a long time. If you don’t even start with it now, it will take even longer. I don’t see how in two or three years it will be easier to come to an agreement,” she told Climate Home.
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Despite the geopolitical challenges, “we need joint rules to prevent a huge race to the bottom for [mineral] standards”. That could start with a group of countries coming together and starting to enforce joint standards for mining, processing and recycling minerals, she said.
But any meaningful global agreement on mineral supply chains would require backing from China, the world’s largest processor of minerals, which dominates most of the supply chains. And with Colombia heading for an election in May, it will need all the support it can get to move its proposal forward.
‘Voluntary initiative won’t cut it’
Juliana Peña Niño, Colombia country manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, is more optimistic. “Colombia’s leadership towards fairer mineral value chains is a welcome step,” she told Climate Home News.
“At UNEA7, we need an ambitious debate that gives the proposed expert group a clear mandate to advance concrete next steps — not delay decisions — and that puts the voices of those most affected at the centre. One thing is clear: the path forward must ultimately deliver a binding instrument, as yet another voluntary initiative simply won’t cut it,” she said.
More than 50 civil society groups spanning Latin America, Africa and Europe previously described Colombia’s work on the issue as “a chance to build a new global paradigm rooted in environmental integrity, human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, justice and equity”.
“As the energy transition and digitalisation drive demand for minerals, we cannot afford to repeat old extractive models built on asymmetry – we must redefine them,” they wrote in a statement.
Main image: The UN Environment Assembly is hosted in Nairobi, Kenya. (Natalia Mroz/ UN Environment)
The post Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.
Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement
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Climate Change
DeBriefed 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Shattered climate consensus
FRACKING BAN: UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has announced that the government will bring forward its plans to permanently ban fracking, in a move designed to counter a promise from the hard-right Reform party to restart efforts to introduce the practice, the Guardian said. In the same speech, Miliband said Reform’s plans to scrap clean-energy projects would “betray” young people and future generations, the Press Association reported.
ACT AXE?: Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, pledged to scrap the 2008 Climate Change Act if elected, Bloomberg reported. It noted that the legislation was passed with cross-party support and strengthened by the Conservatives.
‘INSANE’: Badenoch faced a backlash from senior Tory figures, including ex-prime minister Theresa May, who called her pledge a “catastrophic mistake”, said the Financial Times. The newspaper added that the Conservatives were “trailing third in opinion polls”. A wide range of climate scientists also condemned the idea, describing it as “insane”, an “insult” and a “serious regression”.
Around the world
- CLIMATE CRACKDOWN: The US Department of Energy has told employees in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to avoid using the term “climate change”, according to the Guardian.
- FOREST DELAY: Plans for Brazil’s COP30 flagship initiative, the tropical forests forever fund, are “suffer[ing] delays” as officials remain split on key details, Bloomberg said.
- COP MAY BE ‘SPLIT’: Australia could “split” the hosting of the COP31 climate summit in 2026 under a potential compromise with Turkey, reported the Guardian.
- DIVINE INTERVENTION: Pope Leo XIV has criticised those who minimise the “increasingly evident” impact of global warming in his first major climate speech, BBC News reported.
€44.5 billion
The cost of extreme weather and climate change in the EU in the last four years – two-and-a-half times higher than in the decade to 2019, according to a European Environment Agency report covered by the Financial Times.
Latest climate research
- Fossil-fuelled climate change caused around 36% of Typhoon Ragasa’s direct damage to homes and properties in southern China, according to a rapid impact attribution study | Imperial Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment
- Some 86% of the global population are concerned about climate change, according to a survey of 280,000 people in 142 countries and regions | Climate Policy
- A global shift towards a “planetary health diet” could slash emissions and save tens of thousands of lives each day | EAT-Lancet Commission 2025 report
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Clean energy has met 100% of Great Britain’s electricity demand for a record 87 hours this year so far, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This is up from just 2.5 hours in 2021 and 64.5 hours in all of 2024. The longest stretch of time where 100% of electricity demand was met by clean energy stands at 15 hours, from midnight on 25 May 2025 through to 3pm on 26 May, according to the analysis.
Spotlight
‘Overshoot’ unknowns
As the chances of limiting global warming to 1.5C dwindle, there is increasing focus on the prospects for “overshooting” the Paris Agreement target and then bringing temperatures back down by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
At the first-ever Overshoot Conference in Laxenburg, Austria, Carbon Brief asks experts about the key unknowns around warming “overshoot”.
Sir Prof Jim Skea
Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and emeritus professor at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy
So there are huge knowledge gaps around overshoot and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). As it’s very clear from the themes of this conference, we don’t altogether understand how the Earth would react in taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
We don’t understand the nature of the irreversibilities and we don’t understand the effectiveness of CDR techniques, which might themselves be influenced by the level of global warming, plus all the equity and sustainability issues surrounding using CDR techniques.
Prof Kristie Ebi
Professor at the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment
There are all kinds of questions about adaptation and how to approach effective adaptation. At the moment, adaptation is primarily assuming a continual increase in global mean surface temperature. If there is going to be a peak – and of course, we don’t know what that peak is – then how do you start planning? Do you change your planning?
There are places, for instance when thinking about hard infrastructure, [where overshoot] may result in a change in your plan – because as you come down the backside, maybe the need would be less. For example, when building a bridge taller. And when implementing early warning systems, how do you take into account that there will be a peak and ultimately a decline? There is almost no work in that. I would say that’s one of the critical unknowns.
Dr James Fletcher
Former minister for public service, sustainable development, energy, science and technology for Saint Lucia and negotiator at COP21 in Paris.
The key unknown is where we’re going to land. At what point will we peak [temperatures] before we start going down and how long will we stay in that overshoot period? That is a scary thing. Yes, there will be overshoot, but at what point will that overshoot peak? Are we peaking at 1.6C, 1.7C, 2.1C?
All of these are scary scenarios for small island developing states – anything above 1.5C is scary. Every fraction of a degree matters to us. Where we peak is very important and how long we stay in this overshoot period is equally important. That’s when you start getting into very serious, irreversible impacts and tipping points.
Prof Oliver Geden
Senior fellow and head of the climate policy and politics research cluster at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and vice-chair of IPCC Working Group III
[A key unknown] is whether countries are really willing to commit to net-negative trajectories. We are assuming, in science, global pathways going net-negative, with hardly any country saying they want to go there. So maybe it is just an academic thought experiment. So we don’t know yet if [overshoot] is even relevant. It is relevant in the sense that if we do, [the] 1.5C [target] stays on the table. But I think the next phase needs to be that countries – or the UNFCCC as a whole – needs to decide what they want to do.
Prof Lavanya Rajamani
Professor of international environmental law at the University of Oxford
I think there are several scientific unknowns, but I would like to focus on the governance unknowns with respect to overshoot. To me, a key governance unknown is the extent to which our current legal and regulatory architecture – across levels of governance, so domestic, regional and international – will actually be responsive to the needs of an overshoot world and the consequences of actually not having regulatory and governance architectures in place to address overshoot.
Watch, read, listen
FUTURE GAZING: The Financial Times examined a “future where China wins the green race”.
‘JUNK CREDITS’: Climate Home News reported on a “forest carbon megaproject” in Zimbabwe that has allegedly “generated millions of junk credits”.
‘SINK OR SWIM’: An extract from a new book on how the world needs to adapt to climate change, by Dr Susannah Fisher, featured in Backchannel.
Coming up
- 7 October: International Energy Agency (IEA) renewables 2025 report launch
- 8-10 October: World summit of Indigenous peoples and nature, Abu Dhabi, UAE
- 9-15 October: International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 2025 congress, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Pick of the jobs
- UK government foreign, commonwealth and development office, senior climate policy adviser | Salary: CA$93,207. Location: Calgary, Canada
- Wellcome Trust, senior research manager, climate and health | Salary: £64,800. Location: London
- Bloomberg, product manager – climate, nature and sustainability regulations | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
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 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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