So-called “debt-for-nature swaps” have regained prominence in recent years as part of efforts to raise finance for conservation efforts across biodiverse developing countries.
These “swaps” are financial agreements in which a conservation organisation or government reduces, restructures or buys a developing country’s debt at a discount in exchange for investment in local conservation activities.
Despite a biodiversity “finance gap” estimated at $700bn per year, little finance has been forthcoming from developed countries to help debt-distressed lower-income countries meet their biodiversity and climate targets.
One expert, who helped Ecuador negotiate a debt conversion deal in 2023, tells Carbon Brief that these swaps are “a very tangible strategy that is starting to be proven”.
He adds that they are one of the “big sustainable financing tools that can help” support global-south countries in following through on international treaties.
However, critics are less optimistic about the feasibility of debt-for-nature swaps.
Another expert tells Carbon Brief that the swaps are “far too small to have any impact at all” on the debt of developing countries and that they are “not even marginal to a solution at the current level of their size”.
Additionally, she says, “there’s no evidence that they have worked for nature”.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief examines how debt-for-nature swaps work, the criticism they have received and whether they can alleviate biodiversity loss and climate change in developing countries.
- Where did the idea of debt-for-nature swaps come from?
- How do debt-for-nature swaps work?
- How are they gaining traction in nature finance and conservation policy?
- What are some of the chief criticisms of debt-for-nature swaps?
- Can debt-for-nature swaps be done better?
Where did the idea of debt-for-nature swaps come from?
The idea of debt swaps emerged in response to the global debt crisis of 1982-83 brought on by multiple shocks to the world economy.
The 1979-80 “oil shock”, for example, more than doubled the real price of oil for the oil-importing developing countries, raising interest rates on debt and reducing how much foreign exchange they could raise to service their debts.
This mushrooming crisis led to the creation of a secondary market for developing country debt in 1982, where loans to developing countries could be traded at a market-determined price.
This paved the way for “swaps” of various kinds, where banks could trade their foreign debt at a discount and reduce their financial exposure to precarious loans, while private investors could gain a foothold in new markets that were otherwise closed off to them.
In 1984, ecologist Dr Thomas Lovejoy – then a vice president of science at WWF – wrote a column in the New York Times advocating for swaps where the local currency raised would go towards conservation.
Unlike previous debt swaps driven by a profit motive and giving multinationals “equity” in a country, debt-for-nature swaps were supposed to benefit the debtor country. Lovejoy’s column is widely recognised as one of the “catalysts” for debt-for-nature swaps.
Three years later, in 1987, US-based Conservation International entered into the first-ever debt-for-nature agreement with Bolivia.
In exchange for the Bolivian government’s commitment to grant maximum legal protection to nearly 4m hectares in the Amazon Basin, Conservation International bought $650,000 worth of debt from a swiss bank for $100,000. Bolivia also agreed to provide $250,000 in local currency for management activities in the Beni Reserve.
Even early proponents of debt-for-nature swaps acknowledged that they were “no panacea” for environmental issues in the least-developed countries. Nevertheless, they continued to be popular and have seen a resurgence in the post-Covid era.
How do debt-for-nature swaps work?
In its simplest sense, a debt-for-nature swap involves:
- An indebted, biodiverse developing country.
- A creditor or a group of creditors, such as other governments or private bondholders.
- International conservation organisations, to buy back the debt.
- Local conservation organisations, to implement the swap.
International conservation organisations or private foundations based in the global north have initiated or brokered most debt-for-nature swaps.
Other actors and intermediaries involved in swaps can include commercial banks, multilateral development banks, private finance institutions, insurance companies and legal and financial advisors.
Today, there are many different kinds of debt-for-nature deals in progress, but swaps can broadly be classified as “private”, involving commercial debt, or “public”, involving the debt between governments.
Private debt swaps
In private debt swaps, NGOs offer to buy back part of a government’s commercial debt from private creditors at a significant discount compared to the debt’s face value.
The indebted country then commits to repaying this debt – in whole or in part and generally in local currency. The amount generated by this payment – the difference between the price paid in local currency and the discounted price the NGO buys the debt for – is then put into an environmental protection fund administered by the conservation NGO.
While this was the model for most debt-for-nature swaps until 2008, arrangements have grown more complex in recent years.
The “buy-back” of debt claims by NGOs, for instance, has grown to take the form of various kinds of bonds – essentially, an IOU or loan issued by a government or company, whereby the issuer promises to pay back the face value of the loan on a set date, with regular interest.
For example, the Nature Conservancy set up a trust fund in 2015 which issued a $15.2m “blue bond” that private philanthropic funds paid into. This sum was then lent to the Seychelles government, which used it to buy back $21.6m of debt from the Paris Club of developed country creditors.
In exchange, Seychelles pledged to protect 30% of its marine area and 15% of high-biodiversity regions, along with upgrading its marine mapping and fisheries policies.
Despite a total debt reduction of only $1.4m, the island state committed to investing $5.6m in marine conservation and $3m towards an endowment trust fund.
Public debt swaps
Swaps of debt between countries in exchange for conservation commitments are known as “public debt-for-nature swaps”.
Here, the indebted, biodiverse country restructures or buys back debt from a lender country at a reduced price. The interest or a percentage of the buy-back price then goes toward environmental protection.
The first such swap took place in 1988 between Costa Rica and the Netherlands to finance a 4,000-hectare reforestation programme.
These bilateral debt-for-nature swaps have seen a resurgence in the past year or so.
In January 2023, for instance, Portugal signed an agreement to swap up to $140m of Cape Verde’s debt for investments in a special environmental and climate fund, with more debt relief determined by how its former colony meets key climate and nature goals.
In September last year, the US and Peru entered into a swap agreement covering more than $20m of Peru’s debt to the US. The money will go towards a conservation fund to protect three priority areas in the Amazon rainforest and provide grants to local communities and NGOs.
How are swaps gaining traction in nature finance and conservation policy?
Since the 1980s, 145 debt-for-nature swaps worldwide have written off $3.7bn from the face value of debt globally, according to a 2022 report by the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Most of the debt swaps – $2.4bn of the total – have occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Carbon Brief has compiled a list of debt swaps that have taken place around the world. This is based on data from the African Development Bank report, along with reports from governments, conservation organisations and the media. It is not an exhaustive list.
The map below shows where swaps have taken place. The circles indicate the financial size of the debt involved in the swap, while the colours show the decade in which the swap was completed.
Debt-for-nature swap deals around the world over 1987-2023. The size of the circles corresponds to the face value of debt being swapped for conservation investments by countries, while the colour of the circles corresponds to the decade in which the swaps took place. Source: Carbon Brief analysis of African Development Bank (2022) and media and conservation organisations reports (2022), WWF Center for Conservation Finance (2003) and Eurodad (2023). Debt values not adjusted for inflation.
At the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, debt-for-nature swaps featured at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change for the first time. They were included in the negotiating text after Indonesia introduced “external debt swap/relief” as a source of finance.
At COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, the Sustainable Debt Coalition Initiative was established with the support of 16 countries. It asked for debt swaps and other mechanisms to tackle both climate change and financial stability concerns.
At COP28 in Dubai last year, eight multilateral development banks, including the Green Climate Fund and the Global Environment Facility, announced a working group to boost the effectiveness, accessibility and scalability of sustainability-linked sovereign finance, including debt-for-nature swaps.
In the announcement, the development banks acknowledged that the burden of debt owed by the developing countries “greatly hinder[s] their ability to meet their global climate and nature commitments”.
The debt issue is also being addressed in other international meetings.
During the April 2024 World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings, the Vulnerable Twenty Group (V20) – made up of 68 heavily indebted, climate-vulnerable countries – called for additional reforms to the international financial system. They proposed several measures, including increased representation in the global financial system and greater access to concessional finance, or finance provided at lower interest rates than commercial finance, including debt-for-nature swaps.
Eva Martínez, a human rights lawyer and programme officer at the Centre for Economic and Social Rights (CEDES) in Ecuador, tells Carbon Brief that swaps will also feature at this year’s G20 summit in Brazil. She explains:
“There is a working document on the new financial architecture…There are [also] references to [debt swaps] for food sovereignty, debt-for-health swaps. The spectrum is broadening.”
What are some of the chief criticisms of debt-for-nature swaps?
Since their inception, debt-for-nature swaps have attracted considerable concern over whether they are effective for either debt relief or conservation.
As with biodiversity offsets and nature-based solutions, debt-for-nature swaps have been criticised for putting a price on nature and “reducing” it to a financial commodity.
Another complication is that “biodiversity is really cheap”, Dr Rebecca Ray from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center tells Carbon Brief. As a result, creating and maintaining new protected areas is often a small fraction of a country’s sovereign debt. She adds:
“This means a little bit of debt swapped goes a really long way to fund new natural protected areas, but it doesn’t go very far on the debt. And so it’s not the most efficient way to discharge debt, even though countries are particularly facing debt stress right now.
”Repaying debt is hard for countries all around the world due to problems that are not their fault.”
These countries need “immediate debt relief that is fast and large”, Ray points out, but biodiversity conservation projects “tend to cost a lot less money and take a lot more time”.
The following sections provide an overview of some of the other criticisms of debt-for-nature swaps.
Conditionality, sovereignty and additionality
The earliest controversy around debt-for-nature swaps was a perceived fear of foreign interference, sovereignty and a “return to the colonial system”.
The first swap in Bolivia in 1987, for instance, “unilaterally titled” the land to be protected in the Amazon before Indigenous communities could obtain land tenure claims. In 1989, Brazil’s then-president Jose Sarney rejected debt-for-nature swaps stating: “[The] Amazon is ours… [a]fter all, it is situated in our territory.”
Entering into a debt-swap agreement “immediately results in a loss of autonomy and sovereignty” over the resolution of public debt, argues Mae Buenaventura, senior programme manager on debt and green economy at the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD). She tells Carbon Brief:
“Lenders determine the terms of the swap, meaning that they can impose conditions on borrowing governments on how they should invest the freed-up funds and can work towards privileging the lender and private corporations.”
This, Mae and other critics say, gives lenders in the global north “more control” in a developing country than if the debt were to be cancelled outright.
They point out that debt-for-nature swaps also inherently come with conditions attached for conservation measures and can, thus, be described as conditional debt relief.
Others fear that swaps could open the door to “tied-aid” methods, where aid must be spent on services from the lending country, such as swaps being coupled with carbon credits.
However, Ray sees significant evolution in governments’ and creditors’ understanding of the need to put traditional communities that depend on biodiversity front and centre in the planning process.
She cites the success of the 2015 Seychelles debt-for-nature swap, where the Seychelles government undertook a multi-year “deep consultation” process to understand threats to the livelihoods of small fishing communities living on remote islands. Ray says:
“This was a way that got community buy-in, obviously, because this was protecting the livelihoods of those fishing communities, but also recognising that traditional communities frequently don’t just live off of biodiversity, but they have to help protect the biodiversity in order to survive.”
Another criticism of swaps is that they do not create new, “additional” biodiversity funds from the global north. They also run the risk of being “double counted”, if the original loan being restructured in a swap had already been counted towards meeting aid targets.
Frederic Hache, co-founder of the independent thinktank of the EU Green Finance Observatory, tells Carbon Brief:
“The reality is that no global-north country has any intention of dispersing significant amounts of new grant money…All you get is these conditional financial instruments designed to benefit primarily global private investors.”
Scale, fees and forgiveness
The biggest criticism of debt swaps from all the experts Carbon Brief spoke to is their size relative to the looming sovereign debt of biodiversity-rich countries.
The graphic below compares the size of debt swaps (small, dark blue circle) to the amount that indebted developing countries have paid to service their debts (large, light blue circle) over the past three decades.
Between 1987 and 2023, low- and middle-income countries paid more than US$7.6tn in debt service versus $8.4bn treated through debt-for-nature swaps. Source: World Bank International Debt Report (2023) and Eurodad calculations based on the data from the World Bank International Debt Statistics.
The Seychelles marine biodiversity swap, for instance, was considered “one of the largest in history at the time”, but only amounted to $23m. Ray says:
“That’s pennies, in comparison to the billions of dollars that countries like Sri Lanka are currently negotiating for debt restructuring…[Swaps] only make sense as part of a broader package of debt relief to meet the current crisis.”
According to Prof Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, while debt swaps imply debt reduction, they “are far too small to have any impact at all” on countries’ debt. Sometimes, she says, swaps are not even a reduction, but instead allow countries some leeway in rescheduling their debt payments. Ghosh adds:
“It’s not even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s pretending to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, with big creditor countries refusing to really make the kinds of interventions that would make a difference in reducing the sovereign debt while pretending to do something about climate and conservation finance. And they’re not.”
According to Carbon Brief analysis, among all the debt-for-nature swaps that have taken place, Poland’s 1992 swap allocated the highest amount of resources to nature conservation, totalling over $500m. Ecuador’s 2023 swap, which saw the largest amount of debt swapped at $1.1bn, had the second-highest investment in conservation, allocating more than $400m for this purpose.
The chart below shows the 20 countries that have been the target of the largest debt swaps (light blue) and the amount of that money earmarked for conservation funds (dark blue).
High transaction costs, which are driven up by lengthy, complex, multilateral negotiations, the number of agents involved and intermediary fees, also eat into conservation savings.
Others point out that other real-world challenges, such as unstable exchange rates along with high inflation, can “erode and undermine the real value” of a country’s conservation commitments. For example, in Zambia, funds generated by a $2.2m debt swap in 1989 were exhausted in a year “due to the rapid devaluation” of the local currency.
Human rights
Sandra Guzmán, founder and general coordinator of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean (GFLAC), tells Carbon Brief that it is not possible to generalise the impacts of debt-for-nature swaps. She adds:
“A swap with the World Bank, a swap with the IDB [Inter-American Development Bank] or a swap with a commercial bank is very different. Not all swaps are done in the same way because it depends on the institutions involved.”
The 2007 debt-for-nature swap between Costa Rica and the US is an example of a swap where public information on its activities in Indigenous and local communities is available.
This swap involved more than 200 rural communities. One of the projects in the KéköLdi Indigenous territory, in south-eastern Costa Rica, helped the community reintroduce native iguanas and transmit ancestral knowledge to youth. Guzmán tells Carbon Brief:
“It has been said to be one of the most effective [swaps] because of the size of the debt cut and the conservation programme that Costa Rica promoted.”
However, not all debt-for-nature swaps have been so clear about the impacts on Indigenous and local communities.
Martínez, of CEDES Ecuador, tells Carbon Brief that the Galapagos debt-for-nature swap – signed last year to cancel $1.1bn of Ecuador’s debt in exchange for investing $450m to protect Galapagos islands – did not undergo a consultation process with Indigenous peoples and local communities. This could impact the economic, social, cultural and environmental rights of these communities, Martínez said.
The Climate Bonds Initiative published a report in 2023 analysing debt-for-nature swaps in the Seychelles, Belize, Barbados and Ecuador.
Daniel Costa, senior sustainability debt analyst at Climate Bonds Initiative, tells Carbon Brief that most of the analysed swaps do not mention how they involve local communities. He adds:
“This is what we would like to see further as these transactions are developed.”
Governance
Other criticisms of debt-for-nature swaps are the inadequate governance conditions that debtor countries may have. Governance refers to how swaps are implemented in the countries, the institutions and stakeholders involved and the structure of negotiations.
For example, the 2023 Galapagos swap had “serious limitations” in monitoring and enforcement, lack of transparency and accountability and “little clarity on potential fiscal risks for Ecuador”, according to recent analysis by the Latin American Network for Economic and Social Justice (Latindadd) and other organisations.
The analysis also revealed a lack of public information on the conservation fund and whether these actions have contributed to capacity-building at the local level.
The decision on which conservation activities will be implemented with a debt-for-nature swap varies from transaction to transaction, notes Costa, of Climate Bonds Initiative. These activities are often managed by funds, whose members include conservation organisations in addition to the government, he adds.
Carola Mejía, climate justice, transitions and Amazon coordinator at Latindadd, tells Carbon Brief that while swaps may be potentially scalable, they need to be improved in many ways. She says swaps must be built on principles such as transparency, respect for sovereignty and fairness in negotiation.
Guzmán, of GFLAC, tells Carbon Brief:
“Not all countries will have the same capacities in terms of governance, structures, human, financial and institutional capacities. There are severely indebted countries that need [debt] cancellation; there are countries that can do swaps because they have economies that can move towards those scenarios; and there are countries with greater financial capacity that may not [need] swaps, but other types of financing.”
Greenwashing
Civil society organisations and researchers have also raised concerns about the potential for “greenwashing” in some debt-for-nature swaps.
Mejía says countries in the global north are not meeting their climate finance and biodiversity commitments, but are promoting swaps as “the big solution”. This carries the risk of greenwashing, Mejía adds, as rather than creating positive action for the environment, swaps are generating more loans and debt.
For example, the $30m swap between Indonesia and the US made in 2009 in exchange for conserving rainforests on the island of Sumatra had several shortcomings, according to a 2011 study. The swap did not free up additional resources for the Indonesian government and was “too insignificant to create indirect (positive) economic effects”, the study says.
In the 2023 Galapagos swap, although the IDB provided an $85m guarantee to support the debt agreement for 18.5 years, the Latindadd report found that “there have been no additional international commitments or disbursements so far”.
Debt-for-nature swaps have also been questioned for not directly benefiting citizens and for transferring power over the management of the funds and the implementation of conservation projects to creditors.
The Gabon Blue Conservation was created as part of the swap where Gabon received $500m in exchange for protecting 30% of its oceans. This foreign-owned conservation organisation receives a 20% administration fee, which “immediately reduces the savings for the country by a [fifth]”, a report by the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements says.
Moreover, the report adds, “it is hard to see evidence that” the marine spatial plan, mandated by the Nature Conservancy for this swap, empowers marginalised groups, including fishers, for decision-making around coastal management.
Hache tells Carbon Brief:
“From a geopolitical perspective, swaps are great. It’s a way to gain access and control to land resources that will prove possibly precious in the future. This is…diplomacy by other means.”
Can debt-for-nature swaps be more effective?
Debt-for-nature swaps are being reviewed for their effectiveness again at a time when biodiverse, developing countries struggling with debt payments are having to find the financial resources to meet biodiversity and climate targets.
According to the latest World Bank debt report, low- and middle-income countries owed their foreign lenders $9tn in 2022. The same year, these countries paid a record $443.5bn to pay down these debts, with these payments diverting government spending away from critical development priorities, as well as climate and nature spending.
A 2023 study found that 67 countries at risk of defaulting on their loans collectively host 22% of global “biodiversity priority areas”, such as relatively intact but vulnerable forests, grasslands, deserts and mangroves. For 35 of these countries, it estimated that all of their unprotected biodiversity priority areas could be protected for a fraction of their national debt.
Debt-for-nature swaps and debt-for-climate swaps could free up more than $100bn of debt in developing countries, according to a recent analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
Ray, from Boston University, says that swaps can help create space for countries to make climate-adaptation plans that also help preserve livelihoods that depend on biodiversity, such as fishing or collecting forest produce.
She adds that this can “interrupt a vicious cycle between natural capital and volatile financial capital”, where economic crises and extreme weather events drastically reduce climate adaptation and biodiversity budgets.
But, in order to create this breathing room for biodiversity, swaps need to accomplish multiple things, she tells Carbon Brief:
“You need a lot of time. You need political capital and institutional capacity to centre the communities who have traditionally been the stewards of biodiversity and find a way to make sure that not only is their access to biodiversity uninterrupted, but that they are accountable for that job and rewarded for it. And a real commitment to accountability from everyone involved to make sure these projects actually help support biodiversity and communities.”
Ray points to the case of “blue bonds” for marine conservation, a label that multinational bank Barclays called “misleading” in 2023. According to Barclays, while “the point of a green bond is that 100% of the proceeds raised are spent on” marine projects, in blue bonds floated, each extra party “takes a cut from the proceeds”.
Other experts Carbon Brief spoke to had differing views, suggesting that debt-for-nature swaps would not just require improvements in governance, but in reforming the architecture of international finance.
Guzmán says:
“[Swaps] are initially going to open up your fiscal space, but are not going to solve the financing problem for countries. What we need to fundamentally change is the operation of financial institutions and the type of loans and the conditions they give for those loans, i.e., lower interest rates and much more appropriate treatment. That is really what is going to help sustainable financing.”
To Ghosh, creditors are often “unwilling to make very large commitments of debt reduction”. She adds:
“You have to do something about sovereign debt on its own, which means you have to be serious about the debt reductions. That’s independent of whether you’re linking this conditionality with nature, because without dealing with the sovereign debt, you are not going to generate a green transition in any of these countries. They simply can’t afford it.”
Ghosh suggests solutions that could change the “landscape of debt”, including a standstill on debt during debt negotiations – where the amount of debt stays the same instead of accruing interest while parties come to a resolution – and involving all creditors: private, public and multilateral.
To Hache, the “devil lies in the details” of debt-for-nature swaps. He says:
“It’s about the proportion of the budget allocated to conservation. It’s about the real amount of debt forgiveness compared to where the debt was trading, compared to its nominal value earlier…Ultimately, you also have to compare it to the real alternative, which is debt forgiveness, and you kill any chances of debt forgiveness, loss and damages by endorsing or accepting these deals.”
The post Q&A: Can debt-for-nature ‘swaps’ help tackle biodiversity loss and climate change? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Can debt-for-nature ‘swaps’ help tackle biodiversity loss and climate change?
Greenhouse Gases
Analysis: Reform-led councils threaten 6GW of solar and battery schemes across England
Reform UK’s local-election victories in May 2025 could put 6 gigawatts (GW) of new clean-energy capacity at risk, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
The hard-right populist party took control of 10 English councils in last month’s local elections and has said it will use “every lever” to block new wind, solar and battery projects.
Those 10 areas have jurisdiction over 5,076 megawatts (MW) of battery schemes, 786MW of solar and 56MW of wind, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis of industry data.
While Reform has also pledged to “ban” battery systems, councils do not have direct control over these projects, which are determined by local planning authorities.
It could still influence local planning decisions, planning experts tell Carbon Brief.
However, this is likely to prove a “nuisance” with “limited effect” in terms of the government’s targets for clean power overall, according to one planning lawyer.
Opposing net-zero
Reform UK’s leaders are openly sceptical about the causes and consequences of human-caused climate change. The party is also explicitly opposed to the UK’s net-zero target, which, at a global level, is the only way to stop warming from getting worse, according to scientists.
The party has pledged to “scrap net-zero” if it ever takes power at the national level, falsely asserting that this would free up billions of pounds of public money for tax cuts and welfare programmes.
(Its assertions ignore the fact that the large majority of the investments needed to reach net-zero are expected to come from the private sector, rather than government funds. They also do not account for the economic benefits of lower fossil fuel use or avoided climate impacts. The party’s misleading claims have been widely dismissed by economists.)
Reform UK has also said it would “ban” battery storage projects and impose new taxes on solar and wind power installations.
As it stands, the party only has five MPs in parliament. However, its success in the recent English local elections and favourable polling numbers have raised its profile in UK politics and given it new powers in some areas.
To assess the potential impact of these new powers on clean-energy expansion, Carbon Brief looked at data for 10 local councils where Reform UK won overall control, shown in the map below, including Durham, Kent and Derbyshire, as well as two mayoralties.
(The analysis does not include Warwickshire, where no party gained a majority in the elections. However, a subsequent vote saw the party’s local head selected to lead the county council. He has announced plans to “dumb down” net-zero initiatives in the county.)
Following the election, Richard Tice, Reform MP and deputy leader, said the party would use “every lever” available to block new renewable-energy projects in the areas it now controls.
At the heart of this commitment is Lincolnshire, the location of Tice’s own constituency, Boston and Skegness, which now also has a Reform-run council and a Reform mayor.
The rural county is the site of several large-scale solar project proposals, which have faced a strong backlash from some local people.
This mirrors a wider trend of opposition to solar and battery projects by campaigners, who say they are concerned about, what they allege, could be the impact on the local countryside and farmers.
However, such views are not the norm. Survey data shows overwhelming public support for solar and other renewables across the UK, even if projects are built in people’s local areas.
Analysis by thinktank the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit also noted that by rejecting net-zero-related projects, Reform UK could threaten thousands of jobs and millions of pounds of investment in areas such as Lincolnshire.
Capacity at risk
In total, some 5,862MW of solar and storage capacity is currently seeking local planning authority planning approval across the 10 Reform-controlled councils, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows. This is broken down by council area in the figure below.
This includes a series of smaller proposed solar farms, each with a capacity of less than 50MW, meaning they need local planning approval.
(The threshold for local planning approval, currently 50MW, is set to rise to 100MW in 2026.)
Solar farms above this capacity threshold go through the “nationally significant infrastructure planning” (NSIP) process. These large-scale projects are then assessed by energy secretary Ed Miliband, who can grant or deny a development consent order.
Local planning authorities (LPAs) are guided by the national planning policy framework (NPPF), rather than the politics of the county councils under which they sit.
However, the Reform-controlled councils overseeing these authorities will likely attempt to assert influence over approvals.
Gareth Phillips, partner at Pinsent Masons law firm and specialist in renewable energy planning and project development, tells Carbon Brief that, while county councils are not responsible for determining planning applications, they do have influence over the outcome.
He tells Carbon Brief:
“[Councils are an] important consultee, required to respond to statutory consultation…which gives the opportunity for county-council members to influence the planning decision…In the case of Reform, it is possible that its elected members may seek to rally support for opposing planning applications, perhaps leading campaigns against the proposals. The risk here is that it may give the perception of credence to opposing views.”
Phillips says that in addition to influencing planning authority decisions, county councils could issue new strategic planning guidelines for their areas. He explains:
“It will be for the LPA to decide what, if any, weight to place on the county council’s views, when determining the planning application. Over time, it’s possible that Reform-led county councils may propose so-called ‘core strategies’, i.e. planning documents setting out strategic level requirements and policy applicable to development proposals in its jurisdiction. Similarly, that policy would be a matter for the LPA to consider and decide how much weight to apply when determining planning applications.”
This risk is mitigated to some extent by the core strategies within the NPPF and the “national policy statements” for energy, he notes.
As such, while local planning authorities will be required to determine the approval or rejection of an application on the basis of wider policy considerations, Reform-led councils could still affect the decision. “Reform-led county councils would have a voice and opportunity to influence planning decisions,” says Philips.
Stand-alone battery energy-storage projects do not have a capacity cap for being processed by local planning authorities, following changes to the regulations in 2020.
However, a number of storage projects that are co-located with solar will be judged under the NSIP process, meaning councils will be unable to block their construction.
Solar strife
Carbon Brief’s analysis looks at projects that have submitted planning permission requests in the 10 Reform-controlled counties, using Solar Energy UK’s SolarPulse database for solar and storage.
The analysis also covers relevant onshore wind projects, based on data from the government’s renewable energy planning database.
(Solar Energy UK notes that the SolarPulse database does not include solar projects with a capacity of less than 5MW.)
The analysis shows that there is 1,866MW of proposed solar capacity awaiting planning permission in Lincolnshire, by far the largest pipeline, as shown in the chart below.
The majority of this capacity is subject to national-level approval as it is above the NSIP threshold. Nevertheless, the county still has the most solar-power projects awaiting permission from the local planning authority, some 166MW.
(A key reason Lincolnshire dominates this picture for solar power development is due to grid capacity. The county was home to several large-scale coal-fired power plants, such as West Burton, which have shuttered in recent years as part of the UK’s transition away from coal. This means there is more capacity for new generators to connect to the grid in the county than in many others, where the system is currently more constrained.)
Overall, the bulk of the proposed capacity at risk is battery storage, which has seen a surge in applications and installations in recent years.
There was 5,013MW of battery storage capacity in operation as of December 2025 and another 5,115MW under construction, according to trade association RenewableUK. It says an additional 40,223MW had planning approval and a further 77,354MW was under development.
Impact of rejection
Overall, even if local planning authorities under the 10 Reform UK-run councils were to reject all of the nearly 6GW of proposed solar and storage capacity in their areas, it would have a limited impact on the UK’s wider solar, storage and wind targets.
If built, the 786MW of proposed solar would generate 757 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity. On average, a household in the UK uses 2,700 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity each year, meaning these solar farms would be able to power the equivalent of around 280,000 homes – some 1% of the national total.
If all of this proposed solar were rejected and the electricity were generated from gas-fired power stations instead, it would result in an extra 0.3m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per year. (This is equivalent to less than a tenth of 1% of the UK’s annual total.)
In total, the potential 757GWh of solar power could help displace around £60m of gas per year, based on wholesale prices in 2025 to date.
Private investment could also be impacted. Each 1MW of solar would attract around £1m of investment, meaning the 786MW of capacity would bring roughly £786m into the Reform-led counties. This would have an impact on local supply chains and “community benefit” schemes.
Similarly, battery schemes with four hours of storage capacity also require around £1m of investment per megawatt. This means another £5bn of investment – some 5,076MW of capacity – could be at risk under Reform-led councils.
The total investment at risk for solar and storage is, therefore, close to £6bn.
While a large amount of potential new solar and storage capacity is being proposed in the Reform-led council areas and some could be put at risk as a result, it is also the case that some of these developments could fail for other reasons.
According to research from consultancy Cornwall Insight in February, the current battery storage “connection queue” is double the grid’s requirement for 2030. This means there are many more projects in the queue to gain access to the electricity network than needed.
The government’s plan for reaching its target of “clean power 2030” sets a guideline of 27GW of storage capacity by the end of this decade, whereas some 61GW of battery projects are seeking a grid connection over the same period.
This means the UK would have enough options to meet its 2030 storage requirements even if some proposed battery projects fail due to Reform-led councils, says Ed Porter, global director of industry for battery analysts Modo Energy. He tells Carbon Brief:
“With more than 50GW of battery projects with planning consent, projects could be targeted in Reform areas, but the UK would still have sufficient options to meet clean-power 2030 targets, subject to the achievable build out rate of storage projects.”
The main outcome of Reform-led refusals would be to block profitable projects that could reduce consumer costs and cut CO2 emissions, Porter adds.
Still, there is no guarantee that all of these projects – and the solar proposals – would have received planning permission if Reform UK had not been elected in the relevant areas.
According to figures from Solar Media Market Research, the local authority refusal rate for proposed solar-power projects rose to almost 25% in 2024, the highest on record. This is up from 15% in 2022 and 20% in 2023.
However, the majority of projects that are refused by local authorities still end up being approved. Over the past five years, some 80% of projects that went to appeal were subsequently approved, according to Solar Media. All 12 of the solar projects that have gone to appeal in 2025 to date have been approved.
Battery energy-storage refusals hit a high of 22% in 2024, according to Solar Media. However, in 2025 so far, this has dropped to 9%.
Connections challenge
Even if Reform UK-led councils are unable to block clean-energy developments outright, the party’s pledge to “fight [developers] every step of the way” could still make the process more challenging.
One key way this could hamper the development of renewable energy technologies is by forcing them to go through the appeals process, extending the time it takes to gain planning permission by as much as a year.
Following changes to the grid connections queue, new connection agreements include strict delivery deadlines for obtaining planning permission.
As such, if a project ends up going to appeal – and is, therefore, delayed – it could risk missing deadlines and having its grid connection agreement terminated.
Additionally, with the capacity limit for NSIPs set to change in December, more projects – solar projects between 50MW and 100MW – will go to local planning authorities for approval. This will increase the number that could be threatened by Reform UK’s influence.
Ultimately, though, there is limited renewable-energy capacity seeking planning permission in Reform-controlled counties, more than enough capacity in planning nationally to meet targets, plus the role of the council in what is – or is not – approved is limited.
Planning lawyer Philips concludes that Reform-led councils are only likely to cause a “nuisance”, with “limited effect”. He says:
“In summary, there is the potential for Reform-led county councils to cause a nuisance for renewable energy projects in the planning process, but this will be limited in effect.
“I’m not concerned about this because of the weight of policy support there is for those projects, which should serve to mitigate the influence Reform could otherwise have.”
The post Analysis: Reform-led councils threaten 6GW of solar and battery schemes across England appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Reform-led councils threaten 6GW of solar and battery schemes across England
Greenhouse Gases
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
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