Federal prosecutors in Brazil’s Pará state have filed a lawsuit calling for the immediate suspension and cancellation of a multi-million-dollar contract between the state and a coalition of foreign governments and companies for the sale of carbon credits from the Amazon forest.
The prosecutors argued, among other things, that the deal – valued at up to $180 million – is invalid because Pará lacks a legally approved system to create and sell CO2 emissions reductions from lowering deforestation.
They requested that Pará be ordered to pay R$200 million ($35.5 million) in moral damages to society “due to the premature commercialisation of environmental assets originating from the territories of Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities without required free, prior and informed consultation.”
The public interest lawsuit, filed in early June, seeks to stop the federal government from authorizing Pará to work directly with international certifiers until the state’s carbon credit system is made compliant with Brazilian law. Named in the suit are the federal government, Pará state and CAAPP, the state’s public-private carbon asset company.
The September 2024 contract between Pará and the LEAF Coalition – a partnership involving US retail giants Amazon and Walmart, and the US, UK and Norwegian governments, among others – promises payment for emissions reductions under a state-administered forest carbon market system, called REDD+, which Pará says is still “in construction”.
Traditional communities, for their part, have said the timeline for consulting them on that new REDD+ system is too short, given its complexity, and are pushing for a larger share of proceeds from the scheme. On May 28, Pará’s environmental agency SEMAS launched consultations with forest communities under a protocol put together by the state.
‘Advance sale’ of credits questioned
LEAF’s intermediary, the nonprofit group Emergent, told Climate Home by email that it is aware of the lawsuit, adding that it agrees with the Government of Pará that the carbon credit deal “is fully aligned with Brazil’s new carbon market law”.
“It stands to deliver critical climate finance to the State of Pará and leads the way for other states in Brazil,” said Eron Bloomgarden, CEO of Emergent. “Proceeds from the agreement will be shared with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on the front line of the fight against deforestation, supporting communities, providing livelihoods and protecting forests and nature.”
Prosecutors, however, argue that the contract constitutes an illegal “advance sale” of carbon credits for emission reductions that have not yet been verified, while SEMAS’ rollout of REDD+ lacks transparency.
Global forest loss hits “frightening” record high with climate-fuelled fires
In September, Pará’s communications agency celebrated the “sale” of carbon credits from the LEAF deal. The contract states that Emergent “intends to resell” credits to corporations and governments.
Advance sales and resales of credits are prohibited under Brazil’s 2024 federal carbon market law, which established the Brazilian Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System.
SEMAS maintains that the contract “was a pre-agreement”, telling Climate Home it will only be executed once carbon credits are generated, beginning in 2026. “Therefore, it does not fall under the prohibitions, as it constitutes a legally valid arrangement and does not infringe on rights, since no funds have yet been disbursed,” the agency added in emailed comments.
Ronaldo Amanayé of the Amanayé Indigenous people, treasurer of the Indigenous Peoples Federation of Pará (FEPIPA), took a different view. “They say it’s a ‘symbolic agreement’. But it’s a pre-sale,” he told Climate Home.
Experts said that without a finalised REDD+ system – and in the absence of a state law regulating carbon credits from reduced deforestation – the contract relies prematurely on emissions reductions from traditional territories.
“Pará committed to selling something that wasn’t theirs to sell,” said Carlos Ramos, a researcher with the Family Farming Amazonian Institute (INEAF).
Aurélio Borges, treasurer of Malungu (Coordination of Quilombola Associations of Pará), said, “it’s our carbon stock”. “We keep the forest standing. We need to be in control of the process.” Instead, he added, “the state goes and does something and shows us the document later.”
Unfinished REDD+ system, limited consultation
Critics argue that the LEAF contract itself has already produced negative social impacts – including loss of forest peoples’ bargaining power to negotiate carbon credit prices, accelerated timelines and pressure to comply, and divisions between leaders and communities – and say consultation should have been carried out earlier.
In 2023, prosecutors urged Pará to implement environmental and social safeguards via a REDD+ system before entering into any carbon contracts. But that recommendation was not followed.
The LEAF contract, for example, sets a $15/tonne carbon price without input from traditional communities, Ramos noted.
Draft allocations for REDD+ projects, such as LEAF, show that Pará’s government would retain 15% of proceeds, more than the 14% proposed for Afro-descendant quilombola communities, whose lands are home to the some of the forests storing the carbon. “We think (the government’s share) is high,” Borges said in an interview.
Amanayé also said the 24% earmarked for Indigenous communities should be larger.
There is particular concern among environmentalists about a planned 7% allocation of Pará’s REDD+ funds to agribusiness, which is known to be Brazil’s main driver of deforestation. Prosecutors have called for removal of this REDD+ provision.
Borges proposed a registry of illegal deforesters to ensure that they do not benefit, adding that he fears draft provisions for “restorative agriculture” could channel more funds to agribusiness.
Though Pará’s deforestation dipped in 2023-2024, it remains Brazil’s top-deforesting state, a title it has held for nine years.
Under REDD+, “who will keep the forest standing, as contracts promise?” queried a representative of the State Public Prosecutor’s Office, who asked to remain anonymous. The office co-authored an April recommendation to cancel the contract.
Pará often doesn’t punish illegal deforestation, Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazil-based Climate Observatory, told Climate Home.
He noted that in May, Pará Governor Helder Barbalho tried to reverse a federal anti-deforestation operation suspending the activities of some of Pará’s rural properties that had committed illegal deforestation. Barbalho said in a social media video that this would be done “in line with environmental legislation, so that production goes hand in hand with preservation”.
Yet, amid Pará’s weak track record on deforestation, Ramos highlighted fears that the Pará carbon credit deal could become more of a strategy to generate financial assets than conserve forests.
Under pressure to join REDD+
Another contentious issue is the process by which forest communities were selected to participate in the REDD+ planning process. Three voluntary organisations – Malungu, FEPIPA and CNS – were appointed on behalf of hundreds of communities, many of whom “feel these organisations don’t represent them”, according to the State Public Prosecutor’s Office representative.
These same associations are slated to manage REDD+ funds coming from the state, making it unclear how frontline communities who preserve forests will obtain access to the money.
Federal prosecutors charged in their lawsuit that community participation had been limited to financial discussions, rather than shaping the system. Meanwhile, the state, “by all indications, intends to approve its REDD+ system before COP30, which has created considerable pressure on Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities in Pará to hastily approve the system,” they wrote.
The COP30 UN climate summit will take place in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém in November.
This time limit, said traditional leaders interviewed by Climate Home, has led to what they described as “extreme harassment” to join the fledgling REDD+ system – an accusation rejected by SEMAS.
Community consultation protocols side-stepped
The leaders, however, told Climate Home they had experienced coercive tactics. At an April 28 meeting, they said SEMAS had told quilombola leaders that rejecting the state’s consultation protocol could result in exclusion from public services. Leaders cited threats to housing programmes and land titles, among others.
Prosecutors confirmed this in their lawsuit, noting it “has created pressure within the territories regarding acceptance of the proposal”. SEMAS denied issuing threats and said participation in the REDD+ system is voluntary.
SEMAS confirmed, nonetheless, that it had set a consultation window of five days for 17 quilombola territories to decide jointly whether to be part of the REDD+ system.
“That’s not going to happen,” leader Maria José Brito of São José de Icatu Quilombo told SEMAS at the April meeting. “We want to be consulted, but according to our community consultation protocol.”
“It’s shameful”: Amazon Indigenous people call for oil drilling ban at COP30
Community protocols often require multi-step processes and internal assemblies to reach decisions in keeping with traditional practices. Consultation on issues that will impact Indigenous and traditional people must respect traditional decision-making processes, according to ILO Convention 169.
Leader Rute Santos, also of the Icatu Quilombo, described the Pará state protocol as “throwing our protocol in the trash. We don’t accept that.”
Pará’s REDD+ approach “has divided leaders and communities,” noted Santos, threatening the social fabric as it tries to force rushed decisions.
Others said they had been excluded from key meetings. “They keep you in the dark,” said leader Manoel Liduino of Terra da Liberdade Quilombo.
The state’s strategy amounts to “take it or leave it”, both Santos and Liduino said, making it hard for their peoples to participate in shaping Pará’s REDD+ development. SEMAS responded that the process had so far been “fully participatory”.
Carbon sovereignty concerns
There are also questions of legal coherence. Brazil’s 2024 law defines carbon credits as a “civil fruit” that are attached to the underlying piece of land, suggesting that they cannot be resold or transferred.
The LEAF contract, by allowing resale, “violates Brazil’s sovereignty” to define its carbon sinks, said Talanoa Institute’s Amazonian public policy analyst Wendell Andrade. Pará, meanwhile, may violate federal jurisdiction by promising credits from Indigenous and conservation area lands that belong to the Brazilian state, say prosecutors.
The Pará state project is among the world’s first “jurisdictional” carbon credit schemes, set up to cover a whole state or country.
SEMAS responded that “the jurisdictional system is not a project that will enter territories causing harm or adverse effects to traditional communities.”
The Amazon rainforest emerges as the new global oil frontier
Chief Yuna Miriam Tembé of the Tembé people believes that REDD+ is effectively a way of enabling continued carbon emissions by business. “Why are the federal and state governments selling our forests so that mega-industries can keep polluting?” she asked. “Polluting the environment (with carbon) is a crime, causing the death of countless lives, people, the land, rivers, fish, animals, the forest, birds and all living beings.”
She questioned what she sees as efforts to limit forest peoples’ ancestral uses of land, like clearing small plots for cassava cultivation – a point SEMAS did not clarify when asked. “Even though the territory is ours, the state uses these carbon credit contracts to try to restrict our freedom of movement within these spaces. That is unacceptable,” Tembé said.
“We cannot accept privatisation being imposed inside our own home (territory),” she added – a sentiment echoed by Santos.
Local confusion about REDD+
As the Pará state consultations on its REDD+ programme got underway, many community members told Climate Home they do not understand what carbon credits are, despite being asked to accept the short five-day consultation period.
“Even as a movement leader,” said Liduino, “I don’t understand what REDD+ is.”
As of May, the state’s REDD+ “transparency” web page hosted only technical documents. SEMAS told Climate Home it would explain REDD+ to communities during the first two days of consultation.
The Talanoa Institute’s Andrade said carbon credits and forest carbon are “still something nebulous that a large portion of Pará’s population doesn’t understand”.
Putting information on the SEMAS website “doesn’t make the process transparent,” he added. “Transparency should be a coordinated set of communication strategies using accessible language levels that match the understanding of different segments of society,“ he said.
The post Pará’s Amazon forest carbon deal in doubt as prosecutors move to block it appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pará’s Amazon forest carbon deal in doubt as prosecutors move to block it
Mariana Paoli, from Brazil, is the Global Advocacy Lead at Christian Aid and Iskander Erzini Vernoit, from Morocco, is the Executive Director at the IMAL Initiative for Climate and Development.
Government negotiators in Bonn will discuss in the coming two weeks how to put into practice an idea that emerged from the corridors of the COP29 climate talks: “the Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 Trillion”.
This exercise, that aims to propose approaches for scaling climate finance flows for developing countries to over a trillion dollars per year by 2035, is due to be presented at COP30 in Brazil this November. The origins of its mandate offer insights into its perils – as well as its promise.
Brazil seeks early deals on two stalled issues at Bonn climate talks
Initially, negotiators from the G77+China countries united behind Africa’s call for $1.3 trillion as the replacement for the $100-billion goal for annual mobilisation of climate finance by developed countries for developing nations, set 15 years ago. Faithful to this, some G77 countries originally called for a roadmap to indicate actions that developed countries might take to raise public finance resources for this provision and mobilisation for the Global South.
There were, however, those in the Global North who pushed for a broader, less well-defined $1.3 trillion target that would include other sources and types of finance. These forces ultimately won the day, resulting in a final decision on $1.3 trillion that calls for “all finance” from “all … sources”, establishing a “roadmap” process toward this.
Exceedingly disappointing for the Global South, this new formulation obfuscates the responsibility of wealthy historical emitters to pay their fair share of public finance to tackle a proble they have caused and risks shifting the burden to developing countries.
Loss and damage threat
In this context, the Roadmap to 1.3T has the potential to be a milestone in the global governance of climate finance. Yet it faces risks and opportunities, being essentially at the discretion of Azerbaijan and Brazil as the COP29 and COP 30 presidencies.
There is a very real risk that the Roadmap will fall short of sending a strong signal of what level of ambition is required, in terms of public finance from contributor countries. If that happens, the Roadmap could entrench injustice, increase debt burdens, and delay urgent action on climate change.
In terms of injustice, poorer countries, while largely not responsible for climate change, could face loss and damage of $450 billion-$900 billion per year before 2030, not including the costs of reducing emissions and adapting to global warming.
Loss and damage fund to hand out $250 million in initial phase
Within this, Africa’s nomadic pastoral communities are one real-life example of those whose livelihoods and way of life are being destroyed by the choices of others. The COP29 decision on the new climate finance goal disregarded their needs by not including a target for loss and damage funding, but the Roadmap need not.
Heavy debt burden
The Roadmap must not ignore that external debts are at record highs, with repayment costs now higher than capacities for repayment in two-thirds of developing countries, according to UNCTAD.
In 2023, African governments paid around 17% of their revenues on servicing debts, the highest levels in decades, equalling 15% of African export earnings. By comparison, after the Second World War, inspired by the work of Keynes and others, it was decided to cap Germany’s debt repayments at 3% of its exports earnings, to allow recovery.
In this context, Global South countries may lack the fiscal space to invest in essential climate action – or may prioritise other areas, such as healthcare or education.
COP30 President-designate Andrea Corrêa do Lago is correct in his assertion that there is too often a denial of the economic benefits of climate action – yet Global South countries are not always able to pursue economically beneficial investments. Markets are not always efficient, economic benefits do not always equal revenues for investors , and the cost of capital is higher in Global South countries, heightening the need for support, especially with upfront costs.
Framework to scale up finance
Of course, in addition to underscoring the necessity of rich countries increasing their provision of grant-equivalent public funds for poorer countries, for the reasons cited above, the Roadmap can point to opportunities to build the architecture for scaling finance.
Reforming the international financial architecture is important, but, to achieve this, wealthy countries must relinquish their current hegemony and drop their resistance to reform in the negotiations for a UN tax convention and in those around the potential UN sovereign debt workout mechanism that could be agreed at the upcoming Financing for Development (FFD) Conference in Seville.
Climate shocks and volatile currencies hike debt burden for poor countries
Further additions to the financial architecture could include country platforms, aimed at unlocking finance, particularly private investment – but these require resourcing to administer and will only reaffirm the need for catalytic public resources, whether for technical assistance, project preparation, or making finance more affordable.
Of course, current politics are not conducive to increasing international provision of grant-equivalent finance, with recent short-sighted decisions taking overseas aid even further away from the global target for countries to provide assistance equal to 0.7% of their gross national income, established over fifty years ago, despite public support.
Naturally, Global South countries should not hold their breath waiting for others to come to their senses, but should do what they can, including South-South cooperation.
Bold signal needed
And yet, if global temperature goals are not to slip out of reach, if climate action is to be enhanced and injustice and indebtedness curtailed, richer countries must step up on finance. Will the Roadmap affirm this? The COP presidencies have yet to give a firm indication, though have called for inputs from finance ministers and other key groupings through ongoing consultations.
To be successful, there must be a willingness to depart from the status quo — just as was demonstrated with the Paris Agreement and the UAE Consensus, which set ambitious goals to limit global temperature rise and accelerate energy transition, respectively. Even amid uncertainty, these agreements raised the standard for ambition instead of passively allowing low expectations to go unchallenged.
A comparable approach is now needed for international public finance – the Baku-to-Belem Roadmap must send a bold signal of what is required, lest a key opportunity be lost.
The post A COP30 roadmap to inaction or ambition on climate finance? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Trump’s latest climate rollback
RULES REPEALED: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun dismantling Biden-era regulations limiting pollution from power plants, including carbon dioxide emissions, reported the Financial Times. Announcing the repeal, climate-sceptic EPA administrator Lee Zeldin labelled efforts to fight climate change a “cult”, according to the New York Times. Politico said that these actions are the “most important EPA regulatory actions of Donald Trump’s second term to date”.
WEBSITE SHUTDOWN: The Guardian reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate.gov website “will imminently no longer publish new content” after all production staff were fired. Former employees of the agency interviewed by the Guardian believe the cuts were “specifically aimed at restricting public-facing climate information”.
EVS TARGETED: The Los Angeles Times reported that Trump signed legislation on Thursday “seeking to rescind California’s ambitious auto emission standards, including a landmark rule that eventually would have barred sales of new gas-only cars in California by 2035”.
UK goes nuclear
NEW NUCLEAR: In her first spending review, UK chancellor Rachel Reeves announced £14.2bn for the Sizewell C new nuclear power plant in Suffolk, England – the first new state-backed nuclear power station for decades and the first ever under a Labour government, BBC News reported. The government also announced funding for three small nuclear reactors to be built by Rolls-Royce, said the Times. Carbon Brief has just published a chart showing the “rise, fall and rise” of UK nuclear.
MILIBAND REWARDED: The Times described energy secretary Ed Miliband as one of the “biggest winners” from the review. In spite of relentless negative reporting around him from right-leaning publications, his Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) received the largest relative increase in capital spending. Carbon Brief’s summary has more on all the key climate and energy takeaways from the spending review.
Around the world
- UN OCEAN SUMMIT: In France, a “surge in support” brought the number of countries ratifying the High Seas Treaty to just 10 short of the 60 needed for the agreement to become international law, according to Sky News.
- CALLING TRUMP: Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he would “call” Trump to “persuade him” to attend COP30, according to Agence France-Presse. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that the country’s environmental agency has fast tracked oil and highway projects that threaten the Amazon.
- GERMAN FOSSIL SURGE: Due to “low” wind levels, electricity generation from renewables in Germany fell by 17% in the first quarter of this year, while generation from fossil-fuel sources increased significantly, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
- BATTERY BOOST: The power ministry in India announced 54bn rupees ($631m) in funding to build 30 gigawatt-hours of new battery energy storage systems to “ensure round-the-clock renewable energy capacities”, reported Money Control.
-19.3C
The temperature that one-in-10 London winters could reach in a scenario where a key Atlantic ocean current system “collapses” and global warming continues under “intermediate” emissions, according to new research covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- A study in Science Advances found that damage to coral reefs due to climate change will “outpace” reef expansion. It said “severe declines” will take place within 40-80 years, while “large-scale coral reef expansion requires centuries”.
- Climatic Change published research which identified “displacement and violence, caregiving burdens, early marriages of girls, human trafficking and food insecurity” as the main “mental health” stressors exacerbated by climate change for women in lower and middle-income countries.
- The weakening of a major ocean current system has partially offset the drying of the southern Amazon rainforest, research published in Environmental Research has found, demonstrating that climate tipping elements have the potential to moderate each other.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Aerosols – tiny light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – absorb or reflect incoming sunlight and influence the formation and brightness of clouds. In this way they have historically “acted as an invisible brake on global warming”. New Carbon Brief analysis by Dr Zeke Hausfather illustrated the extent to which a reduction in aerosol emissions in recent decades, while bringing widespread public health benefits through avoided deaths, has “unmasked” the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The chart above shows the estimated cooling effect of aerosols from the start of the industrial era until 2020.
Spotlight
How Carbon Brief turns complex research into visuals
This week, Carbon Brief’s interactive developer Tom Pearson explains how and why his team creates visuals from research papers.
Carbon Brief’s journalists will often write stories based on new scientific research or policy reports.
These documents will usually contain charts or graphics highlighting something interesting about the story. Sometimes, Carbon Brief’s visuals team will choose to recreate these graphics.
There are many reasons why we choose to spend time and effort doing this, but most often it can be boiled down to some combination of the following things.
Maintaining editorial and visual consistency
We want to, where possible, maintain editorial and visual consistency while matching our graphical and editorial style guides.
In doing this, we are trying to ease our audience’s reading experience. We hope that, by presenting a chart in a way that is consistent with Carbon Brief’s house style, readers will be able to concentrate on the story or the explanation we are trying to communicate and not the way that a chart might have been put together.
Highlighting relevant information
We want to highlight the part of a chart that is most relevant to the story.
Graphics in research papers, especially if they have been designed for a print context, often strive to illustrate many different points with a single figure.
We tend to use charts to answer a single question or provide evidence for a single point.
Paring charts back to their core “message”, removing extraneous elements and framing the chart with a clear editorial title helps with this, as the example below shows.
Ensuring audience understanding
We want to ensure our audience understands the “message” of the chart.
Graphics published in specialist publications, such as scientific journals, might have different expectations regarding a reader’s familiarity with the subject matter and the time they might be expected to spend reading an article.
If we can redraw a chart so that it meets the expectations of a more general audience, we will.
Supporting multiple contexts
We want our graphics to make sense in different contexts.
While we publish our graphics primarily in articles on our website, the nature of the internet means that we cannot guarantee that this is how people will encounter them.
Charts are often shared on social media or copy-pasted into presentations. We want to support these practices by including as much context relevant to understanding within the chart image as possible.
Below illustrates how adding a title and key information can make a chart easier to understand without supporting information.
When we do not recreate charts
When will we not redraw a chart? Most of the time! We are a small team and recreating data graphics requires time, effort, accessible data and often specialist software.
But, despite these constraints, when the conditions are right, the process of redrawing maps and charts allows us to communicate more clearly with our readers, transforming complex research into accessible visual stories.
Watch, read, listen
SPENDING $1BN ON CLIMATE: New Scientist interviewed Greg de Temmerman, former nuclear physicist turned chief science officer at Quadrature Climate Foundation, about the practicalities and ethics of philanthropic climate-science funding.
GENDER HURDLES: Research director Tracy Kajumba has written for Climate Home News about the barriers that women still face in attending and participating in COPs.
OCEAN HEATWAVES: The New York Times presented a richly illustrated look at how marine heatwaves are spreading across the globe and how they affect life in the oceans.
Coming up
- 16-26 June: Bonn climate talks, Bonn, Germany
- 16 June: 79th meeting of the World Meteorological Organization executive council, Geneva, Switzerland
- 17 June: International Energy Agency (IEA) Oil 2025 report launch
Pick of the jobs
- Inside Climate News, California environmental reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Southern California
- Natural Resources Wales, lead marine and energy policy advisor | Salary: £45,367-£50,877. Location: Wales
- Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, senior manager, climate | Salary: £82,000. Location: London/hybrid
- Green Party,social media and digital content officer | Salary: £33,211. Location: London/remote
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 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The UK’s chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the green light this week to the Sizewell C new nuclear plant in Suffolk, along with funding for “small modular reactors” (SMRs) and nuclear fusion.
In her spending review of government funding across the rest of this parliament, Reeves pledged £14.2bn for Sizewell C, £2.5bn for Rolls-Royce SMRs and £2.5bn for fusion research.
The UK was a pioneer in civilian nuclear power – opening the world’s first commercial reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria in 1956 – which, ultimately, helped to squeeze out coal generation.
Over the decades that followed, the UK’s nuclear capacity climbed to a peak of 12.2 gigawatts (GW) in 1995, while electricity output from the fleet of reactors peaked in 1998.
The chart below shows the contribution of each of the UK’s nuclear plants to the country’s overall capacity, according to when they started and stopped operating.
The reactors are dotted around the UK’s coastline, where they can take advantage of cooling seawater, and many sites include multiple units coded with numbers or letters.
Since Sizewell B was completed in 1995, however, no new nuclear plants have been built – and, as the chart above shows, capacity has ebbed away as older reactors have gone out of service.
After a lengthy hiatus, the Hinkley C new nuclear plant in Somerset was signed off in 2016. It is now under construction and expected to start operating by 2030 at the earliest.
(Efforts to secure further new nuclear schemes at Moorside in Cumbria failed in 2017, while projects led by Hitachi at Wylfa on Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire collapsed in 2019.)
The additional schemes just given the go-ahead in Reeves’s spending review would – if successful – somewhat revive the UK’s nuclear capacity, after decades of decline.
However, with the closure of all but one of the UK’s existing reactors due by 2030, nuclear-power capacity would remain below its 1995 peak, unless further projects are built.
Moreover, with the UK’s electricity demand set to double over the next few decades, as transport, heat and industry are increasingly electrified, nuclear power is unlikely to match the 29% share of generation that it reached during the late 1990s.
There is an aspirational goal – set under former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson – for nuclear to supply “up to” a quarter of the UK’s electricity in 2050, with “up to” 24GW of capacity.
Assuming Sizewell B continues to operate until 2055 and that Hinkley C, Sizewell C and at least three Rolls-Royce SMRs are all built, this would take UK capacity back up to 9.0GW.
Methodology
The chart is based on data from the World Nuclear Association, with known start dates for operating and retired reactors, as well as planned closure dates announced by operator EDF.
The timeline for new reactors to start operating – and assumed 60-year lifetime – is illustrative, based on published information from EDF, Rolls-Royce, the UK government and media reports.
The post Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades
Hanwha Qcells Launches EcoRecycle for Solar Panel Recycling
DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research
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