In a cosy cinema room at the Bełchatów coal-fired power station in central Poland, a promotional video played to curious visitors boasts that the open-pit mine which feeds the power station is one of the largest holes ever dug in the ground.
The caverns of the Bełchatów coal mine are wide enough to fit around 5,000 full-sized football pitches and are rich in lignite – a soft, brown and wet type of coal which looks and feels like tree bark but is particularly damaging to human health when burned.
After more than 40 years of mining, the lignite is running out and plans are being made to wind down operations at the site.
PGE, the Polish state-owned utility which runs the mine and adjacent power plant – the largest and dirtiest in Europe – has a 45-year plan to turn the mining pits into the country’s deepest lake and the coal heaps into a series of hills for recreational use.
In 2070, PGE envisions visitors will be able to ski in the winter, golf, cycle, kayak, quad-bike, horse ride, climb and even scuba dive down to see the soon-to-be-underwater old mining machines.
PGE’s visualisation of what the redeveloped Bełchatów site will look like (Photos: PGE)
But local governments officials and researchers warn that the plans risk failing to deliver the green and economically fair transition deserved by Bełchatów communities whose livelihoods have depended on coal. They argue the plans could waste the site’s huge renewable energy potential while the tourist attraction fails to replace the at least 7,500 jobs that will be lost when the mine and power plant close, potentially driving away the region’s young people.
As deputy director of the Just Transition Fund Department of Łódź province where Bełchatów is located, Malgorzata Misiak’s job is to cushion the blow of the region’s transition away from coal and make sure the benefits of what replaces it are shared as equally as possible.
She told Climate Home PGE’s plan to let the mine gradually fill over decades overlooks the many more jobs that could be created in a much shorter time-frame with renewable energy investment.
Anabella Rosemberg, a senior adviser on just transition at Climate Action Network International, said: “PGE is pledging an investment on a timeline by which time all its executives will be retired, so won’t be held accountable if it fails. By then, the communities dependent on Bełchatów would have already joined the thousands considering that the transition is paid by poor people.”
Forum Energii analyst Aleksandra Gawlikowska-Fyk warned that PGE’s plan would also overlook the region’s need for clean energy.
PGE did not respond to a request from Climate Home for comment for this article, while a spokesperson for the white-collar Kadra trade union declined to comment by the time of publication.
Europe’s biggest polluter
Opened in what was then the Polish Peoples’ Republic in 1980, Bełchatów (pronounced Bel-hat-ov) grew to become the biggest coal mine and coal power station in Europe. It still employs about 7,500 people directly today and sustains many more jobs indirectly.
In recent years, the power plant has produced nearly a fifth of Poland’s electricity. Its importance to the nation’s energy security is such that, given the perceived threat from Russian spies, visitors including Climate Home News, are warned not to publish any photos of the site.
Because of its size, and coal’s status as the top polluting fossil fuel, Bełchatów is also by far Europe’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. Its power plant pumps out 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year – more than Mozambique’s total emissions.
But its coal is running out and because lignite is very difficult to transport, both the mine and power plant will soon shut down – although exactly when is unclear.
The local government’s 2021 just transition plan says the coal plant will gradually scale down operations through the 2030s until its closure in 2036, while mining will end by 2038.
For Misiak, this is the “official reality” – but in practice, things could turn out differently. “The real pace is dependent on many factors,” she said.
Two hours down the road from Bełchatów, Rybnik coal power plant was scheduled to close in 2030. Last month, PGE announced it would shut by the end of 2025 instead. The chair of Poland’s Solidarity trade union called it a “catastrophe for the region” as about 500 jobs will be lost at the plant, with more in the nearby mines and other suppliers.
People in Bełchatów fear the same fate, Misiak said. Researchers at the University of Łódź and a women’s community group called ‘Yes for Bełchatów’ conducted a survey of over 350 local women earlier this year for a report on the gender aspects of the region’s transition away from coal. It found they “are really afraid of negative consequences”.
From pits to ponds
Turning the mine into a leisure park offers a “nice picture” of what environmental rehabilitation can achieve, said Misiak. But the timescale involved is so long that it doesn’t offer the thousands of people who still earn their living from coal jobs any viable alternatives.
“People will not wait for work in tourism,” she said, adding “they will die” before then.
Even if the project did get off the ground, activities such as scuba diving and kayaking might not be an economic match for what the coal industry has been to the region in recent times, she said.
Over a lunch of dumplings and cheesecake in a hotel near the mine, Misiak delivered a presentation on Bełchatów’s transition to researchers who had travelled to Poland from around the world to learn about its approach to supporting communities affected by the shift away from coal.
The word “depopulation” followed by three exclamation marks stood out on one of her slides. The University of Łódź study found that young women in the region are already leaving for big cities inside Poland or going abroad, leaving behind an ageing community.
And the outflow of people could get worse. The researchers surveyed 65 women working in the energy industry – of which nearly a third said they were planning to leave the region when the mine and power plant shut down.
Listening to Misiak’s presentation in the hotel was Martha Mendrofa, of the Indonesian Institute for Essential Services Reform. Indonesian coal companies too have rehabilitated old mines as tourism assets, she said – from opening mining museums to eco-tourism experiences.
But the number of jobs and revenue generated has not met locals’ expectations nor made-up for the lost coal industry, she said.
The Geierswalder lake in Germany is on the site of an old coal mine, photographed on August 24, 2024 (Photo: IMAGO/Max Gaertner/via Reuters Connect)
In Germany and Australia, old coal mines have also been turned into lakes.
But converting the Polish site into a clean-energy generation hub would be a better long-term investment for the region, Misiak said.
A 2022 analysis by BloombergNEF (BNEF) lays out what replacing the coal mine and plant with solar and wind power, along with a bit of nuclear or gas generation, might look like.
It found that 6-11 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy capacity could be built on the site, exceeding the coal plant’s 5 GW. But currently PGE plans to install just 0.7 GW of renewables capacity. Gawlikowska-Fyk said this was “far less than needed in the region and far less than possible”.
The BNEF report said solar panels could be installed on the shallower edges of the mine and around the main pits. As rainwater fills the deeper pits, floating solar farms could also be considered. “PGE could go significantly beyond its current plan to build [0.6 GW] of solar at Bełchatów,” the BNEF report concluded. The region could produce 5-15 GW of wind power too, it found.
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Like all fossil-fuel power plants, Bełchatów is already equipped with infrastructure like transmission lines designed to transport electricity from where is is produced to where it is needed, such as the nearby steel mill in Częstochowa.
Permanently ending power generation on the site would let this expensive infrastructure go to waste, the BNEF analysis warned.
Outside of energy
Installing renewable energy infrastructure might create more local jobs than PGE’s lake plans, but even this might not be enough to replace lost coal employment, Misiak said.
Ensuring the region isn’t left behind in the energy transition would require attracting other investors and stimulating small businesses, she added.
Fortunately, Poland has access to European pots of funding for that purpose. The European Union’s Just Transition Fund is giving the province €369 million ($400m) to invest in activities like support for small businesses, research laboratories, retraining coal workers and deploying electric buses. Poland as a whole will get €3.85 billion ($4.16bn) to move to a lower-carbon economic model.
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The EU’s funds will stretch to pay for training, including driving lessons, to help local people find new jobs and cover entrepreneurs’ childcare so they can keep their businesses open longer, said Misiak.
The Polish government offers coal miners “generous” retraining opportunities, severance payments and pension schemes, she said, adding that the Belchatów miners will be comfortable in their retirement. But money isn’t everything – and many will feel “frustrated” at being jobless after years of hard graft, she explained.
Elsewhere around the world, governments are trying to transition communities away from coal without the huge resources Belchatów can tap into to help them.
Indonesia, for example, has a donor-backed Just Energy Transition Partnership bringing in billions of dollars from wealthy governments like the EU and international investors – but that money is likely to come mostly as loans for energy infrastructure. According to researcher Mendrofa, there is nothing like the EU’s Just Transition Fund with its emphasis on social justice.
“The money we do have right now is not really focused on the socioeconomic aspect of coal transitions,” she said, “so it’s very interesting for me to see how the money can be a catalyst for the economic transformations agenda.”
(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Chloe Farand and Megan Rowling)
The post Plans to turn Europe’s biggest coal mine into a leisure lake prove divisive appeared first on Climate Home News.
Plans to turn Europe’s biggest coal mine into a leisure lake prove divisive
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
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New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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