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.
Confusion reigned in Antalya on Wednesday morning as some delegates heeded the Turkish organisers’ warning to get to the COP31 venue before 7am today. Others saw a later UN clarification that this wasn’t necessary, and many more decided not to chance it and work from their hotel rooms.
Additional restrictions seem to have been put in place so that the 40 or so world leaders due to speak could be ferried from the airport to the venue and so that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan could plant some symbolic olive trees without ordinary COP delegates ruining the photo op.
The list of world leaders speaking today is considerably shorter than the (already short) list from just six days ago, with the leaders of Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, the Netherlands and Sweden among those dropping out.
Still on there are the co-hosts Erdoğan and Australia’s Albanese plus Brazil’s recently re-elected President Lula and the European Commission head Ursula Von der Leyen. The leader of rainforest-rich DR Congo and the vice president of clean energy and coal superpower China will also speak, as well Barbados’s Mia Mottley and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister Abdulaziz bin Salman.
While the leaders of big-emitting countries have not turned up, there will be plenty of voices from the frontlines of climate change with heads of government from desertifying Mauritania, water-stressed Iraq, the sinking Marshall Islands and drought-hit Somalia all speaking.
Today is also “Zero Waste” Day, with First Lady Emine Erdoğan holding an afternoon roundtable on her pet topic. Before COP, Climate Home News visited a landfill and zero waste education centre in Ankara to find out how well – or otherwise – Türkiye is doing in its pursuit of waste reduction.
Türkiye pushes “zero waste” at COP31, but is it delivering at home?
We’re watching out for any news on the country’s single-use plastics ban, which has been introduced to parliament but not yet – after some lobbying from the plastics industry – got the president’s signature.
The post COP31 Bulletin Day 3: With the people stuck outside, world leaders jet in appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 Bulletin Day 3: With the people stuck outside, world leaders jet in
The amount of public funding pledged to help developing countries tackle climate change has dropped by more than 70% in 2026, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Developed countries are required under UN climate treaties to provide “climate finance” and have traditionally announced multi-year pledges to feed into their global commitments.
Most of these pledges expired in 2025 and, since then, the US has withdrawn from international climate efforts and many European aid budgets have been cut.
A civil-society tracker shows that only five nations have announced new multi-year pledges, including just one major donor – the UK.
Germany, France and Japan are among the key contributors that have so far failed to set out plans for new climate finance, while none is expected from the US.
As a result, the total amount of public climate finance pledged over the next few years amounts to just $11.7bn a year in spending, down from recent levels of around $40bn.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that global conflict, fiscal constraints and the rise of the far right are all making it harder for developed-country governments to pledge new funds.
As the COP31 summit in Turkey gets underway, developing countries are stressing their urgent need for new finance, after nations agreed to a new global target just two years ago.
Missing pledges
Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries are obliged to provide climate finance to help developing countries cut their emissions and prepare for climate disasters.
This financial assistance can be channelled through multilateral development banks, UN climate funds and investments “mobilised” from the private sector.
But a large chunk is also expected to come directly from the public coffers of developed countries – primarily their foreign-aid budgets. This public spending has made up roughly a third of climate finance flowing to developing countries in recent years.
The EU, the US and others agreed just two years ago that they would “take the lead” on scaling up annual climate finance from $100bn in the early 2020s to $300bn by 2035.
Donor countries have traditionally supported such goals by announcing multi-year targets that indicate how much they plan to spend on climate finance.
Nearly all of these pledges expired in 2025 – and hardly any major donors have announced new ones to replace them, covering the period out to 2030.
This lack of new commitments is captured in a tracker of old and new financial commitments by climate NGOs NRDC and E3G.
Carbon Brief analysis of this data, based on an annualised breakdown of targets, shows that developed countries had previously pledged around £42bn a year in public finance.
As the chart below shows, based on current pledges, this has fallen by around 71% to £11.8bn, on average, over the remainder of the 2020s.
Not all contributors announced public climate-finance pledges in advance for the pre-2026 period. Some did not hit their stated targets, while others exceeded them.
While official data for 2025 is not yet available, bilateral public finance reached £43.9bn in 2024, broadly in line with the amount pledged by developed countries.
Big contributors
International climate finance has been consistently dominated by five nations – Japan, Germany, France, the US and the UK.
These countries – together with the EU – have provided around 90% of all the bilateral, public climate finance going to developing countries in recent years.
Of these key players, only the UK has announced a new pledge, committing £6bn ($8bn) of aid between 2026-27 and 2028-29, plus £6.7bn ($8.9bn) from outside its aid budget.
This accounts for half of all the annual funds pledged from 2026 onwards – averaging $5.7bn a year.
The European Commission makes up most of the remainder, with an average annual contribution of $4.5bn promised out to 2027.
Rather than a new pledge, this is due to the commission promising to spend €28bn ($31.8bn) over its 2021-2027 budget period. Its post-2027 contribution is currently being discussed as part of wider EU budget negotiations.
Canada has promised to spend CA$5.3bn ($4.1bn) by 2030, averaging $860m a year. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium have also pledged relatively small sums.
Overall, despite developed countries committing to scale up climate finance, these new pledges are either less ambitious – or only slightly more ambitious – than previous ones. This can be seen in the chart below.
The UK’s pledge appears more ambitious, but this