China’s central government listed “boosting consumption…and stimulating domestic demand” as its first “major task” for 2025, at the recently closed “two sessions”.
As part of this focus – and amid slowing economic growth – the State Council made specific mention of China’s “two new” (两新) policy.
The policy was first announced in 2023, but was heavily promoted last year. President Xi Jinping reportedly “stressed the importance” of a national recycling company as part of the policy in 2024, because it “facilitates green, low-carbon and circular development”.
Carbon Brief explains what the policy is, how it works and what its impact will be. An abridged version of the article appeared in China Briefing on 20 March.
What is ‘two new’?
The “two new” policy is short for “large-scale equipment upgrades and trade-in of consumer goods”. It is designed to boost domestic demand to prop up growth, at the same time as improving the efficiency of equipment so as to lower emissions.
According to the Communist party’s leading magazine on ideology Qiushi, the idea was first raised in 2023 at an economic conference held by the State Council for “improving technology, energy consumption, emissions and other standards”.
It became well-known after Xi reiterated the idea in early 2024. In March 2024, the policy then became an “action plan – a document illustrating specific methods for executing a political goal.
Prof Bai Quan, director of energy transition at the Academy of Macroeconomic Research – a research institution under the direct supervision of the State Council – told Carbon Brief in 2024 that there are four aspects of “two new”:
- Updates to equipment such as large boilers, turbines, heat pumps and lighting used for manufacturing;
- Trade-in of consumer goods, including fridges and air conditioners;
- Recycling of old or high-emission items;
- Improving standards for product efficiency and emissions, as well as for recycling, “to prevent people from re-purchasing outdated equipment with low energy efficiency”.
He added that the first three aspects directly “promote carbon reduction” and the last one “indirectly serves energy saving and carbon reduction goals”.
Under the policy, government subsidies are provided for manufacturers and consumers to trade-in old inefficient goods and purchase new ones. Other financial and tax support is given to recyclers to increase recycling.
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In 2025, the State Council updated the “two new” policy and increased the funds available to consumers and businesses.
It also expanded the range of trade-in products, adding more and older petrol cars for instance, as well as pledging to release a more detailed trade-in standard covering 294 items by the end of the year.
Li Gang, an official from the Ministry of Commerce, is quoted by the state news agency Xinhua saying at the press conference on the expansion that it would “help stimulate consumer spending and boost domestic demand. All enterprises, domestic or foreign-funded, private or state-owned, are welcome to participate in the scheme.”
How does equipment upgrade work?
A fundamental mechanism of “two new” is providing funding that enables consumers and businesses to trade-in and upgrade goods, as well as recycling the old equipment.
For example, under the policy, a consumer can trade in an old, inefficient petrol car and receive subsidies to upgrade to a new electric vehicle (EV) instead.
The government “work report” delivered by premier Li Qiang at the “two sessions” says that “ultra-long special treasury bonds totaling 300bn yuan ($41bn) will be issued to support consumer goods trade-in programmes” in 2025.
Meanwhile, another 700bn yuan ($96bn) will be allocated for a sister programme, known as “two major [projects]” (两重), which supports infrastructure construction, including roads and railways.
In a more detailed “two new” paper, the State Council says it will provide about 90% of the funds and the rest shall be covered by local governments.
A sum of cash will be given when old “high-emission” goods, such as ships, trucks, tractors and buses, are sent for recycling, depending on the age and emission levels. Some discounts will also be given when purchasing new lower-emission replacements.
Separately, companies can apply for a low-interest loan for large-scale equipment upgrades.
The State Council paper also eases the rules around low-interest loans for equipment upgrades, making it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to access them.
According to the paper, projects that can apply funds from the cash pool include “equipment renewal in the field, as well as energy conservation, carbon reduction and safety transformation in key industries”, such as transports and agriculture.
The policy also allocates around 7.5bn yuan ($1bn) for the “recycling and treatment of waste electrical and electronic products”. This extends beyond the list of trade-in items.
How does ‘two new’ support recycling?
As the world’s largest renewable energy producer, China has so far built some 1,408 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity. About 35m tonnes of waste from decommissioned wind and solar equipment will need to be recycled in China by 2030.
A research paper in the journal Waste Management suggests building up sufficient capacity to recycle this waste could generate “significant economic benefits”.
However, Shanghai-based outlet the Paper reports that only a limited number of recyclers are on the market, due to the high costs and long payback periods.
Despite Beijing issuing policies in 2023 and 2024 to encourage businesses, a stronger recycling market is needed for “advancing” the “two new”, according to prof Du Huanzheng, director of the Circular Economy Research Institute of Tongji University.
In 2024, a state-owned recycling company, China Resources Recycling Group, was established to handle scrap steel, EV batteries and decommissioned renewable energy equipment.
But “challenge[s]” remain for private recyclers, Bai told Carbon Brief. One obstacle is missing a “first receipt”, which is the purchase receipt from manufacturers that enables recyclers to claim value-added tax deductions, he said.
A supporting policy for the “two new” from 2024 allows qualified recyclers to use their purchasing invoice in place of “first receipt” for tax claims.
Bai said this policy “solved the problem” and “is a very important incentive to meet the 2027 goals” of the “two new” policy.
The 2027 goals, written by the State Council, include a 25% increase in new equipment investment across key sectors and a doubling in the share of cars being recycled:
“By 2027, the scale of equipment investment in industries such as industry, agriculture, construction, transportation…will increase by more than 25% compared with 2023; the energy efficiency of major energy-consuming equipment in key industries will basically reach the energy-saving level, and the proportion of production capacity with environmental protection performance reaching Class A will be greatly increased…The amount of scrapped cars recycled will increase by about one-fold compared with 2023.”
How does trade-in work under ‘two new’?
Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), tells Carbon Brief that this is not the first time China used subsidies and “similar initiatives” to “stimulate consumption, address product oversupply and enhance energy efficiency”.
In 2025, the categories of eligible trade-in goods under “two new” is expanding from eight to 12, including mobile phones and fridges that are closely related to daily usage. Up to 500 yuan ($70) subsidies apiece can be applied when purchasing new digital products from 2025.
Electric vehicles (EVs), which can greatly decarbonise road transport, remain on the list. In addition, scrappage subsidies have been extended to more and newer types of petrol cars – including cars registered from 2012-14 rather than 2011-2013.
Li adds that the latest expansion of the policy “highlights the rapid pace of industrial upgrades in China and the mutually reinforcing dynamics of industrial productivity, a favorable regulatory framework, and the sheer scale of the Chinese market”.
Bloomberg says that “the cash-for-clunkers program gave a big boost to sales – especially of EVs and hybrids – after its introduction last year” and “manufacturers and investors had been eagerly waiting to see whether the subsidy” would be renewed in 2025.
The buyer rebates for vehicles, including EVs and more efficient petrol cars, remain at the same level as in the second half of 2024, after a rise last August.
Buyers can receive up to 20,000 yuan ($2,730) for EVs and plug-in hybrids or 15,000 yuan ($2,073) for petrol cars with an engine smaller than two litres.
(The Chinese EV industry receives a complicated range of subsidies, read more in Carbon Brief’s Q&A on the sector.)
What is the impact?
Xinhua says that the trade-in scheme boosted sales of cars in 2024, with new energy vehicles (NEVs, mainly EVs and plug-in hybrids) accounting for more than 60% of the new vehicles bought under the initiative in 2024.
Meanwhile, products certified with the “highest energy-efficiency level” made up more than 90% of sales by revenue under the home appliance trade-in scheme, adds the report.
An analysis by Goldman Sachs says the trade-in subsidies have “accelerated” the rising share of NEVs in Chinese car sales. It says the policy will help raise the NEV share from 48% in 2024 to about 60% in 2025.
Subsidies for NEVs under “two new” have amounted to 90bn yuan ($12bn), accounting for about 60% of the total “trade-in money”, according to Goldman Sachs.
In his 2024 analysis for Carbon Brief, Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), wrote that the trade-in subsidy scheme would “free up household cash for other types of spending, but it also directs household spending in the most energy-intensive direction”.
He tells Carbon Brief that the policy, after the 2025 expansion, is still a “much more limited measure than the kinds of income transfers that would be needed to substantially boost the role of household consumption in driving economic growth”. He adds:
“[It] targets the most energy-intensive part of household spending, purchases of energy-intensive manufactured goods, while leaving out spending on services and other less energy intensive sectors.”
Lynn Song, chief economist for Greater China from market research firm ING, tells Carbon Brief that it is “hard to quantify [the impact of ‘two new’] until we have more specifics rolled out such as what level of subsidies will be applied”. He says:
“The 300bn budget for the programme sounds a little small at first thought – under 1% of total retail sales last year – but it will boost sales beyond the 300bn [yuan] spent, so it should result in a fairly significant bump in my view.
“Looking at last year’s performance once the policies started ramping up in the second half of the year, we saw autos and home appliances easily outperform the headline retail sales growth.”
Song adds that the trade-in subsidies under “two new” can “lead to improved demand for these categories this year”.
In his 2024 interview with Carbon Brief, Bai called the “two new” a “sign” of the government using policy support to stimulate lower-carbon consumption. He added:
“Another vital policy is the ‘guidelines to ramp up green transition of economic, social development’… It is a blueprint of China’s transition in industry, building [construction], transportation, energy and many other areas. Together with the ‘two new’, which is an implementation document for this top-level design, we now have both a direction and a manual for the energy transition.”
The guideline aims to “achieve ‘remarkable results’ in the green transition” by 2030 and establish a “green, low-carbon and circular development economic system” by 2035.
(Read more about the guideline in China Briefing.)
An official release says that the “two new” policy “saved about 28m tonnes of standard coal and reduced carbon dioxide [CO2] emissions by about 73m tonnes” in 2024. It says the “effect” of supporting the low-carbon transition was “obvious”.
The post Q&A: How China’s ‘two new’ policy aims to help cut emissions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: How China’s ‘two new’ policy aims to help cut emissions
At 12.33pm on Monday 28 April, most of Spain and Portugal were plunged into chaos by a blackout.
While the initial trigger remains uncertain, the nationwide blackouts took place after around 15 gigawatts (GW) of electricity generating capacity – equivalent to 60% of Spain’s power demand at the time – dropped off the system within the space of five seconds.
The blackouts left millions of people without power, with trains, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and internet access failing across the Iberian peninsula.
By Tuesday morning, almost all electricity supplies across Spain and Portugal had been restored, but questions about the root cause remained.
Many media outlets were quick to – despite very little available data or information – blame renewables, net-zero or the energy transition for the blackout, even if only by association, by highlighting the key role solar power plays in the region’s electricity mix.
Below, Carbon Brief examines what is known about the Spanish and Portuguese power cuts, the role of renewables and how the media has responded.
What happened and what was the impact?
The near-total power outage in the Iberian Peninsula on Monday affected millions of people.
Spain and Portugal experienced the most extensive blackouts, but Andorra also reported outages, as did the Basque region of France. According to Reuters, the blackout was the biggest in Europe’s history.
In a conference call with reporters, Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica set out the order of events.
Shortly after 12.30pm, the grid suffered an “event” akin to loss of power generation, according to a summary of the call posted by Bloomberg’s energy and commodities columnist Javier Blas on LinkedIn. While the grid almost immediately self-stabilised and recovered, about 1.5 seconds later a second “event” hit, he wrote.
Around 3.5 seconds later, the interconnector between the Spanish region of Catalonia and south-west France was disconnected due to grid instability. Immediately after this, there was a “massive” loss of power on the system, Blas said.
This caused the power grid to “cascade down into collapse”, causing the “unexplained disappearance” of 60% of Spain’s generation, according to Politico.
It quoted Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who told a press conference late on Monday that the causes were not yet known:
“This has never happened before. And what caused it is something that the experts have not yet established – but they will.”
The figure below shows the sudden loss of 15GW of generating capacity from the Spanish grid at 12.33pm on Monday. In addition, a further 5GW disconnected from the Portuguese grid.
The Guardian noted in its coverage that “while the system weathered the first event, it could not cope with the second”.
A separate piece from the publication added that “barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout”.
El País reported that “the power cut…paralysed the normal functioning of infrastructures, telecommunications, roads, train stations, airports, stores and buildings. Hospitals have not been impacted as they are using generators.”
According to Spanish newswire EFE, “hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets, forced to walk long distances home due to paralysed metro and commuter train services, without mobile apps as telecommunications networks also faltered”.
It added that between 30,000 and 35,000 passengers had to be evacuated from stranded trains.
The New York Times reported that Portuguese banks and schools closed, while ATMs stopped working across the country and Spain. People “crammed into stores to buy food and other essentials as clerks used pen and paper to record cash-only transactions”, it added.
Spain’s interior ministry declared a national emergency, according to Reuters, deploying 30,000 police to keep order.
Both Spain and Portugal convened emergency cabinet meetings, with Spain’s King Felipe VI chairing a national security council meeting on Tuesday to discuss an investigation into the power outage, Sky News reported.
By 10pm on Monday, 421 out of Spain’s 680 substations were back online, meaning that 43% of expected power demand was being met, reported the Guardian.
By Tuesday morning, more than 99% of the total electricity supply had been recovered, according to Politico, quoting Red Eléctrica.
In Portugal, power had been restored to every substation on the country’s grid by 11.30pm on Monday. In a statement released on Tuesday, Portuguese grid operator REN said the grid had been “fully stabilised”.
What caused the power cuts?
In the wake of the power cuts, politicians, industry professionals, media outlets, armchair experts and the wider public scrambled to make sense of what had just happened.
Spanish prime minister Sánchez said on the afternoon of the blackout that the government did not have “conclusive information” on its cause, adding that it “[did] not rule out any hypothesis”, Spanish newspaper Diario Sur reported.
Nevertheless, some early theories were quickly rejected by officials.
Red Eléctrica, “preliminarily ruled out that the blackout was due to a cyberattack, human error or a meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon”, El País reported the day after the event.
Politico noted that “people in the street in Spain and some local politicians” had speculated about a cyberattack.
However, it quoted Eduardo Prieto, Red Eléctrica’s head of system operation services, saying that while the conclusions were preliminary, the operator had “been able to conclude that there has not been any type of intrusion in the electrical network control systems that could have caused the incident”.
The Majorca Daily Bulletin reported that Spain’s High Court said it would open an investigation into whether the event was the result of a cyberattack.
Initial reporting by news agencies blamed the power cuts on a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”, citing the Portuguese grid operator REN, according to the Guardian. The newspaper added that REN later said this statement had been incorrectly attributed to it.
The phenomenon in question was described as an “induced atmospheric vibration”.
Prof Mehdi Seyedmahmoudian, an electrical engineer at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, explained in the Conversation that this was “not a commonly used term”.
Nevertheless, he said the phenomenon being described was familiar, referring to “wavelike movements” in the atmosphere caused by sudden changes in temperature or pressure.
In general terms, Reuters explained that power cuts are often linked to extreme weather, but that the “weather at the time of Monday’s collapse was fair”. It added that faults at power stations, power distribution lines or substations can also trigger outages.
Another theory was that a divergence of electrical frequency from 50 cycles per second (Hz), the European standard, could have caused parts of the system to shut down in order to protect equipment, France 24 explained.
Some analysts noted that “oscillations” in grid frequency shortly before the events in Spain and Portugal could be related to the power cuts. Tobias Burke, policy manager at Energy UK, explained this theory in his Substack:
“The fact these frequency oscillations mirrored those in Latvia…at the other extreme of the Europe-spanning ENTSO-E network, might suggest complex inter-area oscillations across markets could be the culprit.”
This phenomenon can be seen in a chart shared by Prof Lion Hirth, an energy researcher at Hertie School, on LinkedIn.
With many details still unknown, much of the media speculation has focused on the role that renewable energy could have played in the blackouts. (See: Did renewable energy play a role in the cut?)
Many of the experts cited in the media emphasised the complexity of determining the cause of the outages. Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute Europe, was quoted by the Associated Press stating:
“There’s a variety of things that usually happen at the same time and it’s very difficult for any event to say ‘this was the root cause’.”
Nevertheless, there are several efforts now underway to determine what the causes were.
Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, announced on Tuesday that the government would set up an independent technical commission to investigate the blackouts, while stressing that the problem had originated in Spain, according to Euractiv.
Finally, EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen has indicated that the EU will open a “thorough investigation” into the reasons behind the power cuts, BBC News noted.
Did renewable energy play a role in the blackouts?
As commentators began to look into the cause of the blackout, many pointed to the high share of renewables in Spain’s electricity mix.
On 16 April, Spain’s grid had run entirely on renewable sources for a full day for the first time ever, with wind accounting for 46% of total output, solar 27%, hydroelectric 23% and solar thermal and others meeting the rest, according to PV Magazine.
Spain is targeting 81% renewable power by 2030 and 100% by 2050.
At the time of the blackout on Monday, solar accounted for 59% of the country’s electricity supplies, wind nearly 12%, nuclear 11% and gas around 5%, reported the Independent.
The initial “event” is thought to have originated in the south-western region of Extremadura, noted Politico, “which is home to the country’s most powerful nuclear power plant, some of its largest hydroelectric dams and numerous solar farms.”
On Tuesday, Red Eléctrica’s head of system operation services Eduardo Prieta said that it was “very possible that the affected generation [in the initial ‘events’] could be solar”.
This sparked further speculation about how grids that are highly reliant on variable renewables can be managed so as to ensure security of supply.
Political groups such as the far-right VOX – which has historically pushed back against climate action such as the expansion of renewables – also pointed to the blackout as evidence of “the importance of a balanced energy mix”.
However, others rejected this suggestion, with EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen telling Bloomberg that the blackout could not be pinned on a “specific source of energy”:
“As far as we know, there was nothing unusual about the sources of energy supplying electricity to the system yesterday. So the causes of the blackout cannot be reduced to a specific source of energy, for instance renewables.”
Others have sought to highlight that, while it was possible solar power was involved in the initial frequency event, this does not mean that it was ultimately the cause of the blackout.
Writing on LinkedIn, chief technology officer of Arenko, a renewable energy software company, Roger Hollies, noted:
“The initial trip may well have been a solar plant, but trips happen all the time across all asset types. Networks should be designed to withstand multiple loss of generators. 15GW is not one power station, this is the equivalent of 10 large gas or nuclear power stations or 75 solar parks.”
Others pointed to what they said was insufficient nuclear power on the grid – a notion that prime minister Sánchez rejected, according to El País.
Speaking on Tuesday, he said that those arguing the blackouts showed a need for more nuclear power were “either lying or showing ignorance”, according to the newspaper. It said he highlighted that nuclear plants were yet to fully recover from the event.
One key aspect of the transition away from electricity systems built around thermal power stations burning coal, gas or uranium is a loss of “inertia”, the Financial Times highlighted.
Thermal power plants generate electricity using large spinning turbines, which rotate at the same 50 cycles per second (Hz) speed as the electrical grid oscillates. The weight of these “large lump[s] of spinning metal” gives them “inertia”, which counteracts changes in frequency on the rest of the grid.
When faults cause a rise or fall in grid frequency, this inertia helps lower the rate of change of frequency, giving system operators more time to respond, noted Adam Bell, director of policy at Stonehaven, in a post on LinkedIn.
Solar does not include a spinning generator, and therefore, critics pointed to the lack of inertia on the grid due to the high levels of the technology as a cause of the blackout.
As Bell pointed out, this ignores the inertia provided by nuclear, hydro and solar thermal on the grid at the time of the blackout, alongside the Spanish grid operator having built “synchronous condensers” to help boost inertia and grid stability.
Bell added:
“A lack of inertia was therefore not the main driver for the blackout. Indeed, post the frequency event, no fossil generation remained online – but wind, solar and hydro did.”
While the ultimate cause of the blackouts remains to be seen, they have highlighted the need for an increased focus on grid stability, particularly as the economy is electrified.
A selection of comments from experts published in Review Energy emphasises the need for further resilience to be built into the grid as it transitions away from fossil fuels.
How has the media responded to the power cut?
As the crisis was still unfolding and its cause remained unknown, several climate-sceptic right-leaning UK publications clamoured to draw a link between the blackouts and the nations’ reliance on renewable energy.
It comes as right-leaning titles have stepped up their campaigning against climate policy over the past year.
On Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph carried a frontpage story headlined: “Net-zero blamed for blackout chaos.”
But the article contradicted its own headline by concluding: “What exactly happened remains unclear for now. And the real answer is likely to involve several factors, not just one.”
None of the experts quoted in the piece blamed “net-zero” for the incident.
The Daily Telegraph also carried an editorial seeking to argue renewable energy was the cause of the blackouts, which claimed that “over-reliance on renewables means a less resilient grid”.
The Daily Express had an editorial (not online) claiming that the blackout shows “relying on renewables is dim”.
Additionally, the Standard carried a comment by notorious climate-sceptic commentator Ross Clark breathlessly blaming the blackout on “unreliable” renewables, with a fear-monguering warning that the “same could happen in the UK”.
The Daily Mail published a comment by Rupert Darwall, a climate-sceptic author who is part of the CO2 Coalition – an organisation seeking to promote “the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives” – which claimed that the blackout showed “energy security is being sacrificed at the altar of green dogma”.
Climate-sceptic libertarian publication Spiked had a piece by its deputy editor Fraser Myers titled: “Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by net-zero.” The article claimed that “our elites’ embrace of green ideology has divorced them from reality”.
In Spanish media, Jordi Sevilla, the former president of Red Eléctrica, wrote in the financial publication Cinco Días that, while it is not known what caused the blackout, it is clear that the country’s grid “requires investments to adapt to the technical reality of the new generation mix”. He continued:
“In Spain, in the last decade, there has been a revolution in electricity generation to the point that renewable technologies ([solar] photovoltaic and wind, above all) now occupy the majority of the energy mix. This has had very positive impacts on CO2 emissions, lower electricity prices and increased national autonomy.
“But there is a technical problem: photovoltaic and wind power are not synchronous energies, whereas our transmission and distribution networks are designed to operate only with a minimum voltage in the energy they transport. Therefore, to operate with current technology, the electrical system must maintain synchronous backup power, which can be hydroelectric, gas or nuclear, to be used when photovoltaic and wind power are insufficient, either due to their intermittent nature (there may be no sun or wind) or due to the lack of synchronisation required by the generators to operate.”
For Bloomberg, opinion columnist Javier Blas said that “Spain’s blackout shouldn’t trigger a retreat from renewables”, but shows that “an upgraded grid is urgently needed for the energy transition”. He added:
“The world didn’t walk away from fossil-fuel and nuclear power stations because New York suffered a massive blackout in 1977. And it shouldn’t walk away from solar and wind because Spain and Portugal lost power for a few hours.
“But we should learn that grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources.”
The post Q&A: What we do – and do not – know about the blackout in Spain and Portugal appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What we do – and do not – know about the blackout in Spain and Portugal
The co-organizers of the meeting sharing four sentences about their work with Pope Francis, with CCL’s Danny Richter taking a picture in the background.
Reflecting on the legacy of Laudato Si
By Danny Richter
After sharing a joke over lunch, Paul and I clinked glasses. I am, rather improbably, referring to Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry who coined the term “Anthropocene” to refer to the geologic period of time in which humans have had a substantial impact on our environment. Even more improbably, we were sitting next to each other inside Vatican City, two of 86 invited participants in the first ever joint meeting between the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Though none of us knew it then, the contents of these proceedings, stretched over five days, would go on to form the substance of “Laudato Si,” Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment published in 2015. With the recent passing of Pope Francis, it seemed appropriate to reflect on my experience at that meeting in the Vatican, and the legacy that Laudato Si has had since.
When I say “improbable,” I’m really referring to my own presence there. It was the spring of 2014, and I had graduated with my Ph.D. in Oceanography the year before. I was the Legislative and Science Director for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a position I’d started just over a year before. At the time, CCL had about 3,000 members, and our largest D.C. conference to date had attracted perhaps 400 people.
I managed an invitation as an “observer” to this meeting because I asked one of my grad school professors, Dr. Ram Ramanathan, if I could come. It turned out that he was one of the organizers of the conference. When I asked, I had been envisioning the meeting would be something like the rather large scientific conferences I had attended in the past, where individuals would give presentations on their work as part of a themed session, and there would be time to take questions and mingle, and then everyone moved on to the next talk. After the conference, perhaps the proceedings would be published, but that would be about it.
Instead, only 86 people were invited to this conference — 43 speakers, 28 observers, and 15 members of the Pontifical Academies. The list was quite distinguished, including four Nobel laureates, assuming you don’t count all the IPCC authors who shared a portion of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Nothing in my time in academia or in D.C. would have distinguished me sufficiently to attend on my merits alone.
But there I was. As I mentioned, none of us knew that the series of 20-minute talks we listened to and the discussions that followed during 11-hour days would eventually become Laudato Si. As I reviewed the blogs I wrote for CCL at the time, I was struck by the uncertainty of where this was all heading, as well as my own skepticism that any lasting or meaningful result would come of this. Yet, the first time I read Laudato Si, it was immediately obvious that those talks had greatly informed the writing of the document. For many of the talks, it was 1 to 1 — what was said by the invited speakers ended up directly in the encyclical.
To understand its impact, it’s essential to consider the context in which this encyclical was released. It was published in May of 2015. Barack Obama was president, John Boehner was Speaker of the House, and America was already six years removed from the last (unsuccessful) major efforts to arrive at comprehensive climate legislation. On Sept. 17 of that year, Rep. Chris Gibson of New York and 10 of his Republican colleagues submitted what we informally called “the Gibson Resolution” that did indeed say that climate change is real, humans have had an impact, and Congress should act to address this. CCL was a heavy supporter of this effort, and it felt like a big deal.
A week later, Pope Francis addressed the U.S. Congress at the invitation of Speaker Boehner, highlighting messages of stewardship from his groundbreaking encyclical “Laudato Si” earlier that year. CCL took an active part in handing out a copy of Laudato Si to every congressional office ahead of that talk, delivering 540 copies to the Hill. Speaker Boehner wore a green tie, and the next day he announced he was stepping down as Speaker of the House. In 2015, bipartisan action on climate was actually more difficult to believe in than it is now. The contrast is especially sharp when contrasting the modesty of the Gibson Resolution with the Conservative Climate Caucus standing at 69 members, the climate provisions in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) having passed with robust margins in 2021, and 21 House Republicans signing a letter to their own leadership calling to protect the clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Paris Climate Agreement would be signed later that year. It has become the bedrock agreement for globally coordinated efforts to address climate change. The UN Millennium Development goals would be renamed “Sustainable Development Goals” at the end of 2015, a fact that was previewed for us in the Vatican in 2014. The caliber of people in the room during these discussions was such that it’s not a stretch at all to imagine such a renaming was entangled with the writing and publication of the encyclical. Achim Steiner, the UNEP Executive Director and under-secretary-general of UN, was a speaker in attendance.
Laudato Si is rather unclear on the topic of a carbon price, but my reading of it is that a carbon tax can pass muster, but a cap-and-trade system is suspect, based on the brief skepticism expressed towards carbon credits. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement of support for the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act in 2019, which remains on their website. While the U.S. still doesn’t have a carbon price, every other developed economy in the world does have one. The International Maritime Organization just last week voted to place a price on global shipping. Especially since the EU CBAM went into place, adoption of carbon pricing (and border adjustments) around the world is accelerating.
As you might expect, Laudato Si places a strong emphasis on the burden climate change, and the underlying processes driving it, places on the poor. President Biden’s presidency and legislative record are marked by his commitment to environmental justice, most notably the Justice 40 principle that manifested in the way he structured his administration and in the Inflation Reduction Act. Of course, President Biden was only the second Catholic president in U.S. history. Yet, the language of the encyclical and the language of the environmental justice movement in the U.S. strike me as oddly orthogonal. There is less overlap than I’d expect.
Within the Church, progress feels like a slow burn. Curricula have been developed and outreach has been pursued by Catholic organizations such as the Catholic Climate Covenant, whose former Executive Director, Dan Misleh, was a fellow observer with me at the Vatican meeting. However, these have taken a very long time to catch on, and implementation in the U.S. has been patchy. Very anecdotally, as an American Catholic who is in the pews most Sundays, I’ve probably heard a priest mention Laudato Si in a sermon fewer times in the last 10 years than there have been years setting a new temperature record. Last year was the first year to exceed 1.5 degrees C.
What does this all amount to? Within the Church, Laudato Si continues to be a living document that, at least to me, seems to be exerting more influence over time. Globally, Laudato Si was perhaps wind in the sails of the global consciousness ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement, which continues to be a foundational accord to which all subsequent meetings refer back to in global climate negotiations. The commitments it has inspired fall short of its own ambition, but it does continue to inspire ambition. In the United States, Laudato Si perhaps played a significant role in shifting the zeitgeist away from climate denial, and toward hope. Though its major theme is the impact of poor stewardship on the poor, that has not broken through in the United States, at least not in a way that rhymes with the language of the encyclical.
These, at least, are the reflections of someone who was there at the beginning. My friend Paul is no longer with us, having passed in 2021. Walter Munk, the researcher who figured out how the tides worked in time to advise the Allies ahead of the D-Day invasion was also at our table for that lunch has also passed. So too, now, has Pope Francis.
He met us on the last day of the Conference. We waited for 30 minutes for him to arrive, in the Roman sun a stone’s throw from St. Peter’s Basilica. I reflected at the time about how interesting it was to observe what people who had steered the world’s consciousness do when they have 30 minutes to kill. Turns out, they do what other people do. They make idle chit chat, crack jokes, complain, and turn tourist. Underlining the uncertainty of what these five days of effort would yield, the organizers of the conference got to speak to Pope Francis, and they were allowed four sentences. Though such limited interaction fueled my doubts at the time, in light of what has happened since, it’s pretty clear that Pope Francis was always on our side. He wanted that conference to be a success, and he wanted Laudato Si to be a meaningful document that pushed the world toward action. I cannot speak to whether its impact had the effect he hoped it would, but to me at least, it seems as if it has played a positive role in moving the world away from denial, toward action, and toward considering the direct connection between people and the environment, and especially the poor.
Connect with CCL’s Catholic Action Team on CCL Community.
The post Reflecting on the legacy of Laudato Si appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.
The “vast majority” of the UK government’s plans to prepare for climate hazards have made virtually no progress over the past two years, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC).
In that time, the world has experienced the hottest year on record, while England has seen its wettest ever 18-month stretch between 2022 and 2024.
(Climate adaptation – outside of some issues such as defence – is mostly a devolved matter, with separate plans in place from the administrations for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.)
The previous government introduced a new adaptation strategy for England in 2023, covering plans for rising temperatures and more extreme weather in the country.
However, in its latest analysis of the government’s progress, the CCC states that the current approach to adaptation in England is “not working” and requires “urgent strengthening”.
The government is failing to make “good” progress in adapting to climate change on any of the 46 outcomes measured by the committee, ranging from better healthcare during heatwaves to preparing financial institutions for climate risk.
The report marks the latest in a series of appraisals by the CCC that have repeatedly identified large gaps in the nation’s adaptation efforts.
This time, with a relatively new Labour government that has said it will act on adaptation, the committee says its report “must serve as the turning point”.
But the CCC also says it is “seriously concerned” that the government will cut funding for adaptation, ultimately leading to much higher future costs as temperatures continue to rise.
- Climate adaptation is ‘vital’
- What progress has been made?
- What does the CCC recommend?
- How prepared are different sectors for climate change?
Climate adaptation is ‘vital’
There is “unequivocal evidence” that climate change is already making extreme weather in the UK “more likely and more extreme”, the CCC says.
The report lays out major risks facing the country, noting that the number of properties at risk from flooding is set to increase from 6.3m today to 8m by 2050. Roads and railways at risk from flooding could increase from a third of the total length to half over the same timeframe.
At least 59% of top-quality farmland is already at risk from flooding, the report says, adding that this could also increase over the coming decades.
Meanwhile, annual heat-related deaths could increase “several times over” to pass 10,000 in an average year by 2050, the CCC says.
It also cites an Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) report from 2024 that concludes the UK’s GDP could be around 3% lower by 2074, even under the Paris Agreement’s “below 2C” goal. It says this could increase to 5% in a “below 3C” scenario, according to the OBR.
High-quality climate adaptation is therefore “vital to ensure that these risks are managed most efficiently and at least cost”, according to the committee. Otherwise, government policy could “lock in” risks or even make them worse.
The CCC reports on adaptation progress in England every two years, as required under the 2008 Climate Change Act. These reports have consistently highlighted adaptation as an issue that has been “underfunded and ignored” by successive governments.
There have been a few major developments since the committee’s last report.
Notably, the previous Conservative government launched its third national adaptation programme (NAP3), which is the cornerstone of the nation’s adaptation policy, in summer 2023. (NAP3 covers adaptation policy in England, as well as non-devolved issues that affect the whole UK, such as defence.)
In a highly critical initial appraisal of the programme, the CCC concluded that it fell “far short of what is needed” and “must be strengthened”. NAP3 has also faced an ultimately unsuccessful legal challenge from activists, arguing that it breached people’s human rights.
Another big development since the committee’s last report is Labour winning the general election in 2024. The CCC acknowledges that the new government “inherited a NAP that fell short of the task”, but says it finds “little evidence of a change of course”.
What progress has been made?
The report looks at both the “policies and plans” underpinning climate adaptation, as well as the actual “delivery and implementation” of those plans. It states:
“Whilst there is some evidence of policies and plans improving [since 2023], it is clear that NAP3 has been ineffective in driving the critical shift towards effective delivery of adaptation.”
The CCC assesses the planning and delivery of 46 outcomes from adaptation policy across five overarching themes. It scores them using roughly the same monitoring framework used in its last report in 2023.
It notes that 11 policies and plans have improved over the past two years, including a new adaptation strategy from the Ministry of Justice and a green finance strategy.
Over the same period, it says four have gotten worse, among them investment in flood protection projects, as “plans no longer align with their stated objectives”.
The lack of significant improvement between 2023 and 2025, based on the CCC’s scoring system, can be seen in the chart below.
As for the government actually delivering on its plans, the CCC says the “vast majority of our outcomes have received the same score as in 2023, most at low levels”.
The small number of improvements mainly relate to the latest round of implementation of the “adaptation reporting power”, which allows the government to ask infrastructure providers to disclose how they deal with climate risks.
The chart below, which compares the scores given to different adaptation outcomes between 2023 and 2025, demonstrates the lack of progress in the intervening years.
The CCC concludes that none of the outcomes could be classified as making “good” progress, in terms of delivery. Only four of them saw improvements over this period.
It highlights the water supply as an area where there has been backsliding over the past two years, noting that “continued slow rate of leakage reduction is now clearly inconsistent with meeting the sector’s targets”.
The CCC also points out that “tracking progress on adaptation remains challenging due to limited national-scale, up-to-date and relevant data”.
While there has been an improvement since 2023, nine of the 46 assessed outcomes for England still lacked enough evidence to assess progress, the report says.
These include important areas such as the impact of climate change on food supplies and the vulnerability of telecommunications and information and communication technology (ICT) assets.
In addition, ahead of NAP3, the CCC recommended – as part of its 2023 progress report – a list of 89 actions to close what it viewed as “policy gaps in government’s adaptation planning”.
It suggested that these could be dealt with either in NAP3 itself, or as part of other policy programmes.
However, only four of these recommendations have been achieved, with a further 14 seeing “partial progress”.
The report highlights food security, community preparedness and buildings as some of the areas where the government did not follow through on its recommendations.
What does the CCC recommend?
The CCC’s report echoes previous advice that, despite some improvements in NAP3 on previous efforts, the nation’s climate adaptation strategy needs an overhaul:
“The UK’s current approach to adaptation policy making is not working. Adaptation is not the cross-government priority that it needs to be, which is holding back delivery.”
NAP3 covers a five-year period from 2023 to 2028. With the latest report coming at a halfway point in this cycle, the committee says it “must serve as the turning point” for the government on climate adaptation.
As part of the “urgent strengthening” suggested in the report, the committee sets out key areas that it says should be improved.
“Adaptation” can mean different things in different contexts. The CCC stresses the need for a set of “specific and measurable sectoral targets” that can be used to guide progress, with clarity on how to monitor them and who is responsible.
The government has signalled its intention to strengthen adaptation objectives. The committee says that such objectives “must” be developed as a priority, no later than the end of 2025.
The CCC report highlights the “data gaps” that need to be closed, with “monitoring and evaluation…still not treated with sufficient urgency”. It says the government should direct relevant agencies to collect data on climate risks and the delivery of adaptation measures.
Adaptation is a topic that affects every area of government, from healthcare to education. Yet the CCC highlights that there is not enough coordination of activities between departments and says this should be improved.
In order to carry out adaptation policies, the CCC also stresses that the government “needs to ensure sufficient funding is available” as it undertakes its spending review. Baroness Brown, chair of the CCC’s adaptation committee, told journalists in a press briefing:
“We are seriously concerned that resilience and climate adaptation may be cut in the spending review. [The] government needs to recognise that this is not a future problem, this is today’s problem…I know the government is under a lot of pressure to make cuts, but this isn’t the easy one.”
Given the cost of future climate risk, the committee stresses that ignoring adaptation would not, ultimately, save money. In fact, acting early would “minimise the overall costs of tackling climate change”, it explains.
In the press briefing, CCC chief executive Emma Pinchbeck emphasised the “real need” for the government to think about the future when implementing key policies, such as home-building programmes and other major infrastructure developments.
“If you think about potential waste in terms of investment into the NHS, if we then have to retrofit hospitals to make them cooler,” she said, as an example.
How prepared are different sectors for climate change?
The CCC progress report looks at specific outcomes broken down across five broad sectors.
Within these, it highlights key problems and makes specific recommendations for each area.
Land, nature and food
The CCC highlights various “foundational” strategies covering farming and land that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is expected to publish in the coming months, including the land-use framework and the food strategy.
Delays in publishing such documents have “hampered” adaptation progress. However, the report highlights them as opportunities to set out clear objectives and responsibilities for the sector.
As it stands, important issues such as boosting climate-resilient farming and protecting food supply chains are rated “insufficient” for both government planning and implementation.
The CCC highlights the relatively new “environmental land management schemes” (Elms), which constitute England’s successor to the EU’s farm payments policy.
The report says these schemes lack guidance for climate adaptation, adding that the government should provide “certainty” about how much farmers will be paid for such measures.
As for the fishing industry, the report has downgraded its climate-adaptation plans, noting that they “no longer look credible”. It says the government’s marine strategy, published earlier this year, “does not include any specific or targeted adaptation actions”.
Infrastructure
According to the CCC, when the government publishes its 10-year infrastructure strategy, it should set out “clear resilience standards” for new infrastructure projects.
It also notes that major funding packages – for new roads and electricity networks, for example – should include incentives to fund climate adaptation.
Two out of the three adaptation policies that are scored as “good” are in the infrastructure sector, namely the plans for maintaining reliability in the road and rail networks.
Despite this, actual progress in improving transport resilience is largely “stagnant”, the committee says. It highlights increased flooding on railways and an increased number of roads deemed “susceptible” to flooding.
This is also the sector that has seen the most improvement in terms of delivery and implementation. The water, energy, telecommunications and transport sectors are all described as improving the identification and management of “interdependencies”.
This refers to better evidence of links between different sectors, which is being unveiled via adaptation reporting power. Notably, none of the sectors that have seen improvements are rated as “good”, indicating they still have work to do in this area.
Built environment and communities
Flooding is highlighted as the key risk facing many communities around England.
While the Environment Agency-led flood defence programme has been successful, “its budget in real terms is shrinking as risks are escalating, meaning delivery is falling short of targets and the condition of flood defence assets is declining”, according to the CCC.
The government’s investment programme needs “long-term” targets for cutting the risk posed by floods and coastal erosion, supported by sufficient funds, the report concludes.
It also recommends a “long-term cross-sector plan to manage future heat risk and drive joined-up action”.
The CCC is currently unable to track many of the important measures around heat risk, such as how many buildings are overheating, due to a lack of data.
Overall, none of the efforts to implement better protections for homes and communities have seen any positive change since 2023, despite this being a record period of heat and flooding.
Health and wellbeing
The CCC notes that there are only “limited” policies and plans in place to protect population health and healthcare delivery in the face of escalating climate hazards.
Extreme heat is the main risk identified in this context. As it stands, there are long-term, increasing trends of heat-associated deaths and overheating in hospital settings, the committee says.
In this context, the report recommends that the government develop an “improved climate and public health adaptation plan” that builds on the existing adverse weather and health plan.
Also, as part of the government’s decade-long plan to improve the NHS, the CCC says any upgrades must “make it more resilient to climate extremes today and in the future”.
Economy
The committee says that while businesses can take action to protect their own affairs from climate change, “barriers remain” and adaptation finance “remains nascent”.
It therefore highlights an important role for the government in removing these barriers, providing high-quality information and “correcting market failures”.
The report recommends setting up a portal for adaptation-related data that can be accessed by companies.
It also says the government should ensure that the UK’s sustainable disclosure requirements incorporate “adaptation-related disclosure”, to better prepare the private sector for climate risks.
The CCC also points out that an adaptation finance “deliverables and action plan”, promised for 2024, has not been produced. Among other things, this plan should lay out ways to “mobilise” private investment into adaptation projects, it adds.
The post CCC: England’s approach to climate adaptation is ‘not working’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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