At Climate Home News, we found this year a pretty depressing one to cover, shaped as it was by Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science and action at home and abroad – and rounded off by the UN declaring global warming will break through the key 1.5C limit the world set itself in 2015.
But it wasn’t all bad. Nobody had decided to follow the US out of the Paris Agreement by the time it turned 10 this month. Anti-climate candidates in Canada and Australia, backed by Trump, lost elections convincingly. And 2025 may also have been the year carbon dioxide emissions fell for the first time.
What’s more, our reporting this year saw results in the real world. After we revealed that Chilean doctors believe pollution from copper mines in the northern hub of Calama is causing autism, campaigners sued state-owned mining company Codelco. The case is ongoing.
One of the lawyers representing the campaigners said “when [Climate Home News] revealed our silent suffering and our fight, we felt we had finally been heard and had entered the national conversation thanks to international media coverage. That was the final push to file the lawsuit.”
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Below are nine of our best stories this year and, if that’s not enough, here’s nine more from 2024.
1. Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand
In the year of trade wars, Trump extended Biden-era tariffs on solar panels from China to neighbouring countries. Nicha Wachpanich spoke to some of those workers who subsequently lost their jobs making panels at Chinese-run factories in Thailand and found that the US levies and bad behaviour by bosses had combined to crush their dreams of a better life.
2. Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs
Trump being Trump, and axing US climate finance, is no reason to let other wealthy donor nations off the hook. We examined the latest spreadsheets for annual adaptation aid and found Japan is counting support for massive infrastructure projects in its figures, despite them having only a dubious role in helping people adapt to climate change.
Our reporter Tanbirul Miraj Ripon visited one such project – the Matarbari port in Bangladesh. He found that the port handles coal and gas imports and has destroyed locals’ homes and livelihoods. Despite this, on paper it represents $363 million in Japanese climate adaptation finance, the biggest single climate resilience project being funded by a wealthy country in 2023.
3. Ethiopia’s bold EV ambitions hit bumps in rural areas
Other nations are trying hard to go green but finding it tricky. This year, Ethiopia hosted the Africa Climate Summit, was selected as the host of COP32 and opened the continent’s biggest hydropower dam.
It plans to use some of this clean power to charge electric vehicles, after banning imports of cars with internal combustion engines (even as the European Union is softening its own 2035 ban on ICEs). While that will reduce Ethiopia’s already tiny emissions and its fossil fuel import bills, it won’t be easy in a nation where only half the population has electricity access, as Solomon Yimer and Vivian Chime reported.
4. Ending poverty and gangs: How Zambia seeks to cash in on the global drive for EVs
Other African governments are trying to cash in on their minerals, which big players like China, the US and increasingly Saudi Arabia want for green technologies and/or making equipment for wars.
Pamela Kapekele went to look at the situation in Zambia’s Copperbelt province – where you can probably guess what they produce! She found that good tax regulations and working conditions will be needed if locals are to see the benefits of surging demand for the metal.
Later in the year, an acid spill from a copper-mine tailings dam that contaminated the country’s main river showed the value of environmental regulation too. Reporting from Nigeria’s lithium and South Africa’s platinum mines also highlighted the challenges of making minerals mining and processing cleaner and fairer for communities.
5. Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?
Some sectors – like international aviation and shipping – tend to fall outside the scope of national media, and it’s a gap we’ve aimed to fill. Together with Singapore’s Straits Times, we tracked the supply chain for what the airline industry calls “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF) and found that virgin and barely used palm oil – which threatens rainforests – is being passed off as waste cooking oil and used to power planes in Europe.
Malaysia is a particular hotspot for this fraud, as government subsidies there make virgin palm oil cheap in the shops – and it can be sold for a higher price as “used” cooking oil, providing a profit motive for flipping it. Our investigation was picked up by the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Malaysian authorities, who have since launched a crackdown on this kind of fraud.
But with verification of the materials used for SAF relying on just a handful of commercial auditors conducting mainly paper-based checks, airlines currently cannot know for sure if their green jet fuel is actually sustainable. Their advertising to passengers should – but often doesn’t – reflect this uncertainty.
6. Brazil’s environment minister suggests roadmap to end fossil fuels at COP30
Our reporting was often prescient this year. We called it correctly that the US would leave the Paris Agreement but not the UNFCCC, that Argentina would not follow America out of Paris, that Ethiopia rather than Nigeria would be chosen as COP32 host and that petrostates would try to kill a new green shipping framework at the International Maritime Organization.
We are also pretty sure we were the first – at least in English – to pick up on Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva’s proposal for COP30 to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels, which she aired back in June at London Climate Week. That proposal was pushed by President Lula at the start of COP30, dominated much of the conversation at the summit and will continue to be discussed throughout 2026.
8. PR firm working for Shell wins COP30 media contract
In the summer of 2025, our crack investigative reporter Matteo Civillini got the scoop on how the Brazilian government, via a contract tendered by the UN, was working with Edelman on international media relations for the COP30 climate summit while the global PR giant was simultaneously engaged in promoting Shell’s fossil fuel interests in Brazil.
This story was picked up by a range of other media, and amplified calls for agencies whose clients include fossil fuel firms to be excluded from the climate negotiations. Advocacy group Clean Creatives was inspired by Matteo’s reporting to launch a campaign against Edelman’s COP involvement. That culminated in an open letter from influencers and creators with a combined audience of over 24 million calling for Edelman to be dropped. The drumbeat on this theme is likely to get louder in 2026.
8. “House of cards”: Verra used junk carbon credits to fix Shell’s offsetting scandal
And talking of smoke and mirrors, just when we thought the murky web of carbon offsetting linking oil and gas major Shell to sham rice-farming projects in China couldn’t get any more convoluted, it did exactly that.
By combing through the records of carbon-credit registry Verra – the world’s biggest – Matteo confirmed that nearly a million bogus offsets from 10 disqualified methane reduction projects had been compensated for with the same number of junk credits from another four such projects that were also axed by Verra.
“It’s frankly unbelievable that Verra considers it appropriate to compensate for hot air credits with other hot air credits,” Jonathan Crook, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told us. “To pretend this is a satisfactory resolution is both absurd and deeply alarming.”
Verra insists the replacement credits were technically available to plug the gap left by the first batch – even though the second set, too, now need to be swapped out. Shell is keeping its distance, saying it does not manage or operate “the projects in question” despite being earlier involved in the Chinese rice-farming programmes as their “authorised representative”. Mind-boggling indeed!
9. Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries
In what was on balance a bad year, we brought you some hope too. A landmark advisory opinion on climate change and human rights from the International Court of Justice in The Hague was stronger than anyone imagined and may open the door to lawsuits against polluting countries and companies in 2026.
Other good news stories included analysts suggesting China’s fossil fuel use could peak this year, the UN’s loss and damage fund launching its first call for proposals, South Korea and Morocco moving to phase out coal and a boom in imports of solar panels to Africa.
Hope came too from ordinary people and their ingenuity – like the untrained Jordanians interviewed by Yamuna Matheswaran, hooking up solar panels to old Tesla batteries, lowering both their electricity bills and their carbon emissions into the bargain.
The post Nine of our best climate stories from 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
It smells like rotten eggs, releases toxic gases, endangers sea life and scuttles vacations. Scientists, startups and communities are trying to figure out what to do with it all.
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Aynsley O’Neill with Inside Climate News’ Teresa Tomassoni.
Why Beaches Are Swamped With Sargassum, the Stinky Seaweed Menace
Osprey Orielle Lake is founder and executive director of The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) and a steering committee member of the Fossil Fuel Treaty.
Around the world, women are leading some of the most powerful efforts to stop fossil fuel expansion and implement the just transition the climate crisis demands.
In the Ecuadorian Amazon, Nemonte Nenquimo, an Indigenous Waorani woman, led a successful lawsuit for the Waorani against the Ecuadorian government to protect their territory and the Amazonian rainforest from oil extraction. Ecuador’s courts ruled in favor of the Waorani, setting a legal precedent for Indigenous rights and prompting similar legal fights worldwide.
In the heart of Cancer Alley in the Gulf South of the United States, Sharon Lavigne, founder of Rise St. James, took on fossil fuel polluters and won. After stopping a Formosa petrochemical facility in her parish, she continues to organize communities to stop fossil fuels, bringing awareness to the severe health impacts caused by the industry.
An initial cornerstone for an upcoming government convening on fossil fuel phaseout is the Fossil Fuel Treaty, which was founded by Tzeporah Burman. She won the 2019 Climate Breakthrough Award for her bold Treaty vision, which has now taken center stage in international climate action.
These women are not anomalies, they are part of a broader movement. Women the world over are stopping harmful projects and building regenerative futures. They are defending land, water, climate, and health. They are redefining what leadership looks like in a time of crisis.
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Research has found that countries with higher representation of women in parliament are more likely to ratify environmental treaties. One prominent cross-national study found that CO2 emissions decrease by approximately 11.51 percent in response to a one-unit increase in each countries’ scoring on the Women’s Political Empowerment Index. When women are incorporated into disaster planning or forest management, projects are more resilient and effective.
Yet because of persistent gender inequality, women – particularly Indigenous, Black and Brown women and women in low-income and frontline communities – are often disproportionately harmed by fossil fuel extraction and pollution. At the same time, they are also indispensable leaders of equitable solutions.
Bold, transformative solutions needed
Although the climate crisis may not be in the headlines recently, the crisis is increasing at lightening speed. From 2023 to 2025, the world crossed a dangerous threshold, marking the first three-year global average that exceeded the crucial 1.5°C guardrail, the very limit scientists identified as critical to avoid the worst catastrophic tipping points.
This is not a eulogy for 1.5°C, but an alarm about a narrowing window. The data makes clear that we still have an opportunity to hold long-term warming below that life-affirming threshold. What is required now is not incrementalism and business as usual but bold and transformative solutions from grassroots movements to the halls of government.
At the top of the list in tackling the climate crisis is the urgent need for a global phaseout of fossil fuel extraction and production. Coal, oil, and gas remain the primary driver of the climate crisis, and fossil fuel pollution is responsible for one in five deaths worldwide. The simple but challenging fact is, there is no way forward without a phaseout.
In 2023, at the U.N. Climate Summit in Dubai (COP28), governments agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels.” The language was historic but nonbinding, and implementation has been severely hindered. Most governments are doubling down and increasing production across coal, gas, and oil. At COP30 in Brazil, while 80 countries called for fossil fuel language in the final outcome text, governments ultimately left without any commitments to a phaseout.
Women’s assembly for fossil fuel phaseout
In response to this stalled progress, Colombia and the Netherlands are convening the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, bringing together governments committed to advancing cooperation toward a managed, equitable phaseout. Occurring outside the formal UN climate negotiations, the gathering reflects a growing recognition that progress often requires voluntary alliances of ambitious nations.
The urgency of this moment demands more than policy tweaks. It calls for a restructuring of the systems that fueled the crisis such as economic models that externalize harm, energy systems that prioritize profit over people, and governance structures that marginalize frontline communities. How we navigate this transition will shape the world our children inherit, and evidence shows that women’s leadership is vital to ensure a healthy and equitable outcome.
Colombia aims to launch fossil fuel transition platform at first global conference
As governments, civil society and global advocates prepare for the conference in Colombia, women’s leadership must not be an afterthought. It needs to be central to the agenda, inspired by equity, justice and care.
That is why the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network is convening global women leaders to advance strategies, proposals, and projects at the public Women’s Assembly for a Just Fossil Fuel Phaseout to be held virtually on March 31 to call for transformative action in Colombia. All are welcome.
A livable future depends on bold action now, and on women leading the way at this critical moment.
The post Why women’s leadership is central to unlocking the global phaseout of fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.
Why women’s leadership is central to unlocking the global phaseout of fossil fuels
American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.
Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System
Why Beaches Are Swamped With Sargassum, the Stinky Seaweed Menace
Why women’s leadership is central to unlocking the global phaseout of fossil fuels
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