Climate change, war and mismanagement are putting Iran’s water supply under major strain, experts have warned.
The Middle Eastern country has faced years of intense drought, which scientists have found was made more intense due to human-caused climate change.
In recent years, Iranian citizens have protested against the government’s management of water supplies, pointing the blame at decades of poor planning and shortsighted policies.
As water supplies run low, authorities warned last year that several of Iran’s major cities – including the capital, Tehran – could soon face “water day zero”, when a city’s water service is turned off and existing supplies rationed.
Meanwhile, recent air strikes on desalination plants in Iran and Bahrain are driving wider questions about how the war might exacerbate water insecurity across the Middle East.
One expert tells Carbon Brief the conflict is “straining an already-fragile [water] system” within Iran.
In this article, Carbon Brief looks at how conflict is combining with climate change and unsustainable use to place pressure on Iran’s water supplies.
- How close are Iran’s major cities to a ‘water day zero’?
- What role is climate change playing?
- What other factors are involved?
- How could attacks on desalination plants impact water supplies in the Middle East?
- What policies could help Iran avoid a ‘water day zero’?
How close are Iran’s major cities to a ‘water day zero’?
Iran is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world and is currently in the grips of an unprecedented, multi-year drought.
The country’s hot and dry climate means that freshwater is scarce. However, many Iranian citizens also blame decades of government mismanagement for the present-day water shortages.
In January, the Guardian explained that over multiple decades, Iranian officials abandoned the country’s “qanat aquifer system”, which consists of tens of thousands of tunnels dug into hillsides across the country that lead to underground water storage. This system has been “supplying [Iran’s] cities and agriculture with freshwater for millennia”, the newspaper said.
To replace the aquifer system, the government built dozens of dams over the second half of the 20th century, which together hold around a quarter of the country’s total water resource, according to the Guardian. However, it added:
“But by putting major dams on rivers too small to sustain them, the authorities brought short-term relief at the cost of longer-term water loss: evaporation from reservoirs increased while upland areas were deprived of water, now trapped behind the dams.”
Yale Environment 360 noted in December that “in the past half century, around half of Iran’s qanats have been rendered waterless through poor maintenance or as pumped wells have lowered water tables within hillsides”.
Agriculture is responsible for 90% of Iran’s water use. Over 2003-19, Iran lost around 211 cubic kilometres of groundwater – around twice the country’s annual water consumption – largely due to unregulated water pumping for farming.
The images below show how Lake Urmia in the north-west of the country – once the largest lake in the Middle East – has almost completely dried up since 2001 as water that feeds that lake has been diverted.
Towards the end of 2025, Iran’s Meteorological Organisation warned that the main dams supplying drinking water to major cities, such as Tehran, Tabriz and Mashhad, were close to “water day zero”.
The term “water day zero” has been used by academics, media and governments to describe the moment when a city or region’s municipal water supply becomes so depleted that authorities have to turn off taps and implement water rationing. It has been used to describe water crises in Cape Town, South Africa and Chennai, India.
In a televised national address in November, Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly said the government had “no other choice” but to relocate the capital due to “extreme pressure” on water, land and infrastructure systems.
(This came after the government announced in January it would relocate its capital to the southern coastal region of Makran, citing Tehran’s enduring overpopulation, power shortages and water scarcity.)
Tehran is home to 10 million people and consumes nearly a quarter of Iran’s water supplies.
The water shortages have fuelled nation-wide protests, which have been often-violently suppressed by the government.
Prof Kaveh Madani, former deputy vice-president of Iran and the director of the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, tells Carbon Brief that recent rainfall means the threat of “water day zero” has subsided in Iran in recent months.
However, he stresses that a combination of climate change and “local human factors” mean “many, many places in Iran are in ‘water bankruptcy’ mode”.
“Water bankruptcy” is when water systems have been overused to the point they can no longer meet demand without causing irreversible damage to the environment, according to Madani’s own research.
What role is climate change playing?
Iran is currently facing its sixth year of consecutive drought conditions.
An update posted in November by the National Iranian American Council quoted Mohsen Ardakani – managing director of Tehran Water and Wastewater Company – as saying:
“We are entering our sixth consecutive drought year. Since the start of the 2025-26 water year (about a month ago), not a single drop of rain has fallen anywhere in the country.”
The country’s most recent “water year”, which ran from September 2024 to September 2025, was one of the driest on record. Over the 12-month period, the country recorded 81% less rainfall than the historical average.
Meanwhile, temperatures in Iran can soar above 50C in the hot season, pushing the limits of human survivability and exacerbating water loss through evaporations from reservoirs of water.
Multiple attribution studies have shown that climate change is making the country’s hot and dry conditions more intense and likely.
In 2023, the World Wealth Attribution service (WWA) carried out an analysis on the drought conditions in Iran over 2020-23.
This study investigated agricultural drought, which focuses on the difference between rainfall amounts and levels of evapotranspiration from soils and plants.
The study explored how often a drought of a similar intensity would have occurred in a world without warming and how often it could occur in the climate of 2023. The researchers found that the drought would have been a one-in-80 year event without global warming, but a one-in-five year event in 2023’s climate.
They added that if the planet continues to heat, reaching a warming level of 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, Iran could expect a drought of 2023’s severity, on average, every other year.
The graphic below illustrates these results, where a pink dot indicates the number of years in every 81 with an event like the 2020-23 drought over Iran.
The box on the left shows how often such a drought would be expected in a pre-industrial climate, in which there is no human-driven warming. The box in the centre shows 2023’s climate, which has warmed 1.2C as a result of human-caused climate change. The box on the right shows a world in which the climate is 2C warmer than in the pre-industrial period.
Two years later, WWA carried out another study on drought in Iran, this time focusing on the five-year drought over 2021-25. The authors found an “even stronger impact” of climate change than their previous analysis.
A range of other attribution studies for Iran over the past five years have concluded that climate change made heatwaves and droughts over the region more intense and likely.
Meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO’s) “state of the climate in the Arab region 2024” report warned about the impact of climate change on water security across the region.
In a statement, WMO secretary general Prof Celeste Saulo warned that “droughts are becoming more frequent and severe in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions”.
What other factors are involved?
Climate change is not the only – or even the primary – driver of water scarcity in Iran.
Madani explains:
“We have both the human factors and the climatic factors…A lot of times, local human factors are much more important and significant than the global factors.”
For example, Madani says, the country has experienced large population growth, but its population is concentrated in “a very few large metropolitan” areas, meaning it can struggle to provide enough water to those places. He also points to inefficient agricultural practices and overreliance on technological solutions, including dams and desalination plants.
The vast majority of the country’s water stress comes from its agricultural sector, which accounts for more than 90% of Iran’s water use.
Dr Assem Mayar, an independent researcher focused on water resources and climate security, tells Carbon Brief that Iran’s arid climate means that it uses more water per unit area for cultivating crops than other countries. This issue is compounded by government policies promoting domestic agriculture, he says:
“[Iran’s] government tries to be self-reliant in [the] food sector, which consumes the most share of water in the country.”
Both of the country’s main water sources – surface water and groundwater – are overexploited, Mayar says.
A 2021 study on the drivers of groundwater depletion in Iran found that between 2002 and 2015, Iran’s aquifers were depleted by around 74 cubic kilometres – 1.6 times larger than the amount of water stored in Iran’s largest lake, Lake Urmia, at its highest recorded levels.
The study also found that some basins had experienced depletion rates of up to 2,600% in that timeframe.
Groundwater aquifers naturally “recharge” as water percolates down from the surface. However, a 2023 study also found that this rate of recharge has been declining since the early 2000s.
When groundwater or other resources are extracted from the ground in high quantities, the land above the aquifer can compact and the aquifers themselves can collapse, leading to “subsidence” as the land surface sinks. Iran is one of the countries with the largest subsidence rates in the world, according to a 2024 study.
In late 2025, BBC News reported that Iran had begun “cloud seeding” – injecting salt particles into clouds to promote condensation, in an effort to “combat the country’s worst drought in decades”.
The country has been employing the technique since 2008 and reports that rainfall increased by 15% in the targeted areas as a result.
However, this does little to address the root of the problem, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Prof Nima Shokri, director of the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics at Hamburg University of Technology, tells Carbon Brief:
“Iran’s water crisis stems primarily from decades of policy choices that prioritised ideological and geopolitical objectives over sustainable resource management. A costly foreign policy posture and prolonged international isolation have limited access to foreign investment, modern technology and diversified economic development.
“Domestically, this has translated into policies that encouraged groundwater-dependent agriculture, expanded irrigated land without enforceable extraction limits, maintained heavy energy and water subsidies and underinvested in wastewater reuse, leakage reduction and monitoring systems.”
How could attacks on desalination plants impact water supplies in the Middle East?
A pair of attacks on desalination plants has led to significant media speculation around how the conflict might exacerbate freshwater supplies, both in Iran and across the Middle East.
On Saturday 7 March, Iran accused the US of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.
Describing the attack on the critical water infrastructure as “blatant and desperate crime”, foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said water supply in 30 villages had been impacted.
The next day, Bahrain government said Iran had caused “material damage” to one of its desalination plants during a drone attack.
David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the Daily Mail that attacks on water plants in Gulf states by Iran could be designed to “impose costs” that push them to intervene or call for the end of the war.
There has been a boom in desalination across the Middle East in recent decades, as water-scarce countries have turned to the technology – which transforms seawater into freshwater – to boost freshwater supplies.
Collectively, the Middle East accounts for roughly 40% of global desalinated water production, producing 29m cubic metres of water every day, according to a 2026 review. This is shown in the chart below.
Iran has more than 163 desalination plants. However, it is less reliant on these plants than smaller countries in the region with fewer water reserves.
In a 2022 policy paper, the Institut Français des Relations Internationales noted Kuwait, Qatar and Oman sourced 90%, 90% and 86% of drinking water from desalination plants, respectively.
In contrast, an official from Iran’s state-run water company told the Tehran Times in 2022 that just 3% of the country’s drinking water came from desalination plants. (Iran’s water supply is sourced primarily from groundwater and rivers and reservoirs.)
Shrokri says the ongoing conflict is “hitting water security” in Iran through “direct and indirect” attacks on critical infrastructure – including desalination plants, power stations and water networks. He adds:
“The conflict is straining an already fragile system inside Iran. The country entered the war with severe drought, depleted groundwater and shrinking reservoirs, so any disruption to energy systems, industrial facilities or supply chains can quickly cascade into water shortages.”
Shokri also highlights that attacks on desalination plants in the Gulf could have serious consequences for major cities – including Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi – “rely heavily” on desalinated seawater for drinking water. He says:
“Without desalination plants, large parts of the region’s modern urban system will struggle to exist. The ripple effects would extend far beyond drinking water. Sanitation systems would begin to fail, public health risks would rise and economic activity could slow dramatically.”
Experts have pointed out that attacks on electricity infrastructure could also impact provision of drinking water, given desalination plants are energy-intensive and often co-located with power plants.
Dr Raha Hakimdavar, a hydrologist at Georgetown University, told Al Jazeera that attacks on desalination plants could also impact domestic food production in the long-term, if groundwater is diverted away from agriculture and towards households.
What policies could help Iran avoid a ‘water day zero’?
Experts tell Carbon Brief that the conflict could make chronic water shortages in Iran more likely – even if hostilities are unlikely to directly force a “water day zero”.
Shokri says:
“The war could accelerate the timeline, but it didn’t create the risk of day zero. Iran’s water system was already under extreme pressure from long-term mismanagement and distorted policy priorities. Conflict simply reduces the margin for error.”
Mayar says the war is “unlikely to force day zero nationwide”, but could bring forward “localised day‑zero conditions in already stressed regions”. These effects could be felt most acutely in Iran’s islands and cities that are already “facing chronic shortages”, he continues.
Since agriculture is such a large contributor to the country’s water usage, potential solutions must focus on that sector, experts say.
Mayar says the government should “phase out subsidy policies that encourage overuse”.
In 2018, researchers at Stanford University released a “national adaptation plan for water scarcity in Iran”, as part of a programme looking at the country’s long-term sustainable development.
That report lays out two sets of adaptation actions: those that work to improve the efficiency of water use and those that end water-intensive activities. Among the specific actions recommended by the report are reusing treated wastewater, reducing irrigated farming and enhancing crop-growing productivity through technological solutions.
The adaptation report concludes:
“The underlying solution to address Iran’s water problem is obvious: consumption should be regulated and reduced, water productivity should be improved and wastewater should be treated and reused in the system.”
Meanwhile, Shokri argues that the “main obstacle” to water reform in Iran is not technical capacity, but “government-set national priorities”. He explains:
“Significant public resources are directed toward non-civil spending and external commitments, leaving limited room for sustained investment in water management and environment…Real progress will require shifting attention and resources toward water security, environmental protection and long-term economic resilience.”
The post Q&A: How climate change and war threaten Iran’s water supplies appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: How climate change and war threaten Iran’s water supplies
Computer models that use artificial intelligence (AI) cannot forecast record-breaking weather as well as traditional climate models, according to a new study.
It is well established that AI climate models have surpassed traditional, physics-based climate models for some aspects of weather forecasting.
However, new research published in Science Advances finds that AI models still “underperform” in forecasting record-breaking extreme weather events.
The authors tested how well both AI and traditional weather models could simulate thousands of record-breaking hot, cold and windy events that were recorded in 2018 and 2020.
They find that AI models underestimate both the frequency and intensity of record-breaking events.
A study author tells Carbon Brief that the analysis is a “warning shot” against replacing traditional models with AI models for weather forecasting “too quickly”.
AI weather forecasts
Extreme weather events, such as floods, heatwaves and storms, drive hundreds of billions of dollars in damages every year through the destruction of cropland, impacts on infrastructure and the loss of human life.
Many governments have developed early warning systems to prepare the general public and mobilise disaster response teams for imminent extreme weather events. These systems have been shown to minimise damages and save lives.
For decades, scientists have used numerical weather prediction models to simulate the weather days, or weeks, in advance.
These models rely on a series of complex equations that reproduce processes in the atmosphere and ocean. The equations are rooted in fundamental laws of physics, based on decades of research by climate scientists. As a result, these models are referred to as “physics-based” models.
However, AI-based climate models are gaining popularity as an alternative for weather forecasting.
Instead of using physics, these models use a statistical approach. Scientists present AI models with a large batch of historical weather data, known as training data, which teaches the model to recognise patterns and make predictions.
To produce a new forecast, the AI model draws on this bank of knowledge and follows the patterns that it knows.
There are many advantages to AI weather forecasts. For example, they use less computing power than physics-based models, because they do not have to run thousands of mathematical equations.
Furthermore, many AI models have been found to perform better than traditional physics-based models at weather forecasts.
However, these models also have drawbacks.
Study author Prof Sebastian Engelke, a professor at the research institute for statistics and information science at the University of Geneva, tells Carbon Brief that AI models “depend strongly on the training data” and are “relatively constrained to the range of this dataset”.
In other words, AI models struggle to simulate brand new weather patterns, instead tending forecast events of a similar strength to those seen before. As a result, it is unclear whether AI models can simulate unprecedented, record-breaking extreme events that, by definition, have never been seen before.
Record-breaking extremes
Extreme weather events are becoming more intense and frequent as the climate warms. Record-shattering extremes – those that break existing records by large margins – are also becoming more regular.
For example, during a 2021 heatwave in north-western US and Canada, local temperature records were broken by up to 5C. According to one study, the heatwave would have been “impossible” without human-caused climate change.
The new study explores how accurately AI and physics-based models can forecast such record-breaking extremes.
First, the authors identified every heat, cold and wind event in 2018 and 2020 that broke a record previously set between 1979 and 2017. (They chose these years due to data availability.) The authors use ERA5 reanalysis data to identify these records.
This produced a large sample size of record-breaking events. For the year 2020, the authors identified around 160,000 heat, 33,000 cold and 53,000 wind records, spread across different seasons and world regions.
For their traditional, physics-based model, the authors selected the High RESolution forecast model from the Integrated Forecasting System of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. This is “widely considered as the leading physics-based numerical weather prediction model”, according to the paper.
They also selected three “leading” AI weather models – the GraphCast model from Google Deepmind, Pangu-Weather developed by Huawei Cloud and the Fuxi model, developed by a team from Shanghai.
The authors then assessed how accurately each model could forecast the extremes observed in the year 2020.
Dr Zhongwei Zhang is the lead author on the study and a researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He tells Carbon Brief that many AI weather forecast models were built for “general weather conditions”, as they use all historical weather data to train the models. Meanwhile, forecasting extremes is considered a “secondary task” by the models.
The authors explored a range of different “lead times” – in other words, how far into the future the model is forecasting. For example, a lead time of two days could mean the model uses the weather conditions at midnight on 1 January to simulate weather conditions at midnight on 3 January.
The plot below shows how accurately the models forecasted all extreme events (left) and heat extremes (right) under different lead times. This is measured using “root mean square error” – a metric of how accurate a model is, where a lower value indicates lower error and higher accuracy.
The chart on the left shows how two of the AI models (blue and green) performed better than the physics-based model (black) when forecasting all weather across the year 2020.
However, the chart on the right illustrates how the physics-based model (black) performed better than all three AI models (blue, red and green) when it came to forecasting heat extremes.
The authors note that the performance gap between AI and physics-based models is widest for lower lead times, indicating that AI models have greater difficulty making predictions in the near future.
They find similar results for cold and wind records.
In addition, the authors find that AI models generally “underpredict” temperature during heat records and “overpredict” during cold records.
The study finds that the larger the margin that the record is broken by, the less well the AI model predicts the intensity of the event.
‘Warning shot’
Study author Prof Erich Fischer is a climate scientist at ETH Zurich and a Carbon Brief contributing editor. He tells Carbon Brief that the result is “not unexpected”.
He adds that the analysis is a “warning shot” against replacing traditional models with AI models for weather forecasting “too quickly”.
The analysis, he continues, is a “warning shot” against replacing traditional models with AI models for weather forecasting “too quickly”.
AI models are likely to continue to improve, but scientists should “not yet” fully replace traditional forecasting models with AI ones, according to Fischer.
He explains that accurate forecasts are “most needed” in the runup to potential record-breaking extremes, because they are the trigger for early warning systems that help minimise damages caused by extreme weather.
Leonardo Olivetti is a PhD student at Uppsala University, who has published work on AI weather forecasting and was not involved in the study.
He tells Carbon Brief that “many other studies” have identified issues with using AI models for “extremes”, but this paper is novel for its specific focus on extremes.
Olivetti notes that AI models are already used alongside physics-based models at “some of the major weather forecasting centres around the world”. However, the study results suggest “caution against relying too heavily on these [AI] models”, he says.
Prof Martin Schultz, a professor in computational earth system science at the University of Cologne who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the results of the analysis are “very interesting, but not too surprising”.
He adds that the study “justifies the continued use of classical numerical weather models in operational forecasts, in spite of their tremendous computational costs”.
Advances in forecasting
The field of AI weather forecasting is evolving rapidly.
Olivetti notes that the three AI models tested in the study are an “older generation” of AI models. In the last two years, newer “probabilistic” forecast models have emerged that “claim to better capture extremes”, he explains.
The three AI models used in the analysis are “deterministic”, meaning that they only simulate one possible future outcome.
In contrast, study author Engelke tells Carbon Brief that probabilistic models “create several possible future states of the weather” and are therefore more likely to capture record-breaking extremes.
Engelke says it is “important” to evaluate the newer generation of models for their ability to forecast weather extremes.
He adds that this paper has set out a “protocol” for testing the ability of AI models to predict unprecedented extreme events, which he hopes other researchers will go on to use.
The study says that another “promising direction” for future research is to develop models that combine aspects of traditional, physics-based weather forecasts with AI models.
Engelke says this approach would be “best of both worlds”, as it would combine the ability of physics-based models to simulate record-breaking weather with the computational efficiency of AI models.
Dr Kyle Hilburn, a research scientist at Colorado State University, notes that the study does not address extreme rainfall, which he says “presents challenges for both modelling and observing”. This, he says, is an “important” area for future research.
The post Traditional models still ‘outperform AI’ for extreme weather forecasts appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Traditional models still ‘outperform AI’ for extreme weather forecasts
Christopher Wright is the principal analyst at CarbonBridge, a decarbonisation consulting firm.
The Santa Marta Conference has rightly been hailed as a pivotal opportunity to re-imagine the world’s relationship with fossil fuels. However, the sixty-odd countries gathered this week represent only 15% of the world’s total fossil fuel production, and a small but critical handful of nations in attendance remain deeply committed to expanding their fossil fuel output.
While the discussions at Santa Marta have focused on overcoming economic dependency on fossil fuels, the reality on the ground for many of these countries is that fossil fuel production continues to rise. Despite the rapid global growth of renewable electrification, fossil fuel output has similarly increased.
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Santa Marta: Ministers grapple with practicalities of fossil fuel phase-out
Around 60 governments that want to make progress on transitioning away from coal, oil and gas are meeting in Colombia to work out how they can do it an equitable way -
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This trend is evident even among the countries gathered at Santa Marta, where according to a CarbonBridge analysis, net fossil fuel production has grown over the last five years, particularly driven by expansions in oil and gas output.
Across all countries gathered in Santa Marta, approximately 14 countries are responsible for the lion’s share of oil production, which has increased by 4% since 2020. Similarly, just eight countries account for 96% of the conference’s natural gas production, which has collectively grown by 5% over the past decade.
While coal production has seen a slight decline since 2020, recent production increases in Turkey and Pakistan, with renewed growth in Australia, could similarly see increased production in the near future.
However, most surprisingly, only six countries present at Santa Marta account for over 80% of fossil fuel production among all nations in attendance: Canada, Australia, Brasil, Mexico, Norway and Nigeria.
For these nations, the transition journey ahead is complex. All six countries are aiming to significantly expand renewable energy capacities, and Norway stands as a global leader in electric vehicle adoption.
However, fossil fuel production is not merely a domestic concern for these countries; it plays a central role in their international exports, and remains a foundational pillar of their economic utures. In fact, a deeper look into trends and regulatory frameworks across this suite of countries indicates that their current trajectories are geared toward continued fossil fuel expansion.
Canada
In Canada, oil and gas production continues to climb, with 2025 marking a year of record highs. Oil production rose by 4% to reach 5.34 million barrels per day (MMb/d), while natural gas production surged by 3.4%, reaching 8.2 billion gigajoules. And only yesterday, Shell made a $13.5 bln bet on Canada’s oil and gas future.
Led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, Canada is set to implement an industrial carbon pricing scheme and could double Canada’s clean energy capacity over the next two years. However, he has also been vocal about his support for new oil and gas expansions, new pipeline developments, and has even set a goal to transform Canada’s largely non-existent liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry over the next 15 years, with aspirations to rival the production capacity of the US by 2040.
Brazil
Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras has committed to a massive USD $109 billion expansion of their production to 2030. This hefty investment follows a record 11% production increase in 2025, with Petrobras pumping out 3.77 million barrels per day. Despite hosting the UN climate negotiations last year and generating 89% of the country’s electricity from low-carbon sources in 2025, Brazil’s drive for fossil fuel expansion highlights the gap between national climate transitions and critical export opportunities.
Australia
Australia, the world’s second-largest coal exporter, faces a similar dislocation between its domestic electricity transition and its export economy, as it prepares to assume a leadership role at COP31. Australia is home to the world’s highest solar power per capita and leads the world in home battery rollouts. However, it remains critically dependent on fossil fuel exports, even as questions arise over long-term demand. Currently, gas export volumes, which dipped in 2025, are projected to reach record levels by 2027; pending legal action against the Barossa, Scarborough, and Browse expansions. While thermal coal production is projected to decline slightly through 2030, increases in metallurgical coal are expected to offset these declines, in part due to recent pro-mining regulatory shifts in Queensland.
Mexico
Mexico is one of three major oil producers that make up over 60% of the conference’s annual oil production. However, its oil industry recorded the largest output declines of any major producer in Santa Marta over the last decade. The state-owned oil company Pemex, currently carries close to $100 billion in debt, and was granted $12bn in debt support from the government last year. When combined with import shifts from the US, and potential competition from Venezuela, there is a real chance that Mexico’s oil production could decline further going forward. However, the goal right now from Pemex and the Mexican government, is to increase current production by close to 10% by 2030.
Nigeria
Nigeria’s national oil company, NNPCL, has similarly seen declines over the last decade, but is now pursuing a $60 billion partnership to expand its oil and gas output and solidify its role as one of Africa’s largest fossil fuel producers. This comes even as the federal government was granted $800,000 to explore opportunities to transition away from oil expansion last year.
Norway
In contrast to these countries, Norway stands as one of the few major oil producers at the conference projected to decrease its fossil fuel output. With a forecasted 15% reduction in oil and gas production by 2030, Norway appears to be taking early steps toward a transition. However, the decline in production is more a reflection of the age of its existing oil fields than a proactive shift in government policy. Despite acknowledging the need to diversify its economy, the Norwegian government continues to explore new oil and gas fields, plans to launch new licensing rounds, and hopes to spur on further oil and gas investments, which have almost doubled since 2017.
For these nations, the road ahead is fraught with complexities. While the Santa Marta conference offers an opportunity for dialogue, and renewable energies will undoubtedly continue to expand, the largest fossil fuel producers gathered in Colombia remain structurally focused on growth, rather than phase-downs.
Dollars and cents continue to drive economic decisions, especially in the midst of a global energy crisis. Despite growing calls to utilise this opportunity to reshape development pathways, countries most economically embedded in existing energy markets will need far more convincing, before turning their backs on billions in fossil fuel revenues.
The post Six nations at Santa Marta could shape fossil fuel futures appeared first on Climate Home News.
A group of leading climate scientists has called on governments to develop roadmaps for phasing out fossil fuels “anchored in science and justice”, alongside the launch of a separate panel of experts that will give scientific advice on how to navigate the energy transition.
Unveiled on Friday in Santa Marta, Colombia, a set of a dozen policy recommendations, summarising the Santa Marta Academic Dialogue, is intended to feed into ministerial discussions on equitable ways to reduce dependence on coal, oil and gas during next week’s “First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels”.
The policy insights urge countries to create “whole-of-government” plans to “dismantle legal, financial and political barriers” to the energy transition.
Sixty countries head to Santa Marta to cement coalition for fossil fuel transition
Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said the push for a global transition away from fossil fuels offers “a light in the tunnel” during a “very dark moment” of geopolitical conflict and climate extremes.
“Science is here to serve,” Rockström told a packed Santa Marta Theatre. “We’re today launching the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition (SPGET) as a service, as a global common good for all countries, all sectors, all regions to connect to the best science enabling a transition away from fossil fuels.”
Draft roadmap for Colombia
Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres said the new SPGET panel “addresses a longstanding shortcoming” in international climate science, by creating a scientific body dedicated solely to overcoming the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.
“It’s a first-of-its-kind, designed to organise in the next five years the scientific evidence that allows cities, regions, countries and coalitions to take the big leap,” Vélez told the event in Santa Marta.
As an example of how countries can move forward – even when their economies are closely tied to the production and use of dirty energy – a group of European scientists presented a draft roadmap to phase out fossil fuels in Colombia, with inputs from the Colombian government. It will be used as a basis for further consultation in the Latin American nation to define the way forward.
To phase out fossil fuels, developing countries need exit route from “debt trap”
Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds and co‑author of the roadmap, said it shows “a clear pathway to economic and societal benefit”, with average annual investment of $10.6 billion producing net economic benefits of $23 billion per year by 2050.
The document says fossil fuels in Colombia can be phased out through energy efficiency measures, coupling renewable generation with energy storage, and switching to electrified transport. But, it adds, the government will need to plan for reduced revenue from fossil fuel exports, which roughly half by the mid-2030s.
“What matters now is moving beyond headline targets to create credible, policy-relevant roadmaps, enabling a just and effective transition,” Forster said in a statement. Brazil is also working on a national roadmap for its own economy, as well as leading a voluntary process to produce a global roadmap.
IPCC hobbled by politics
Currently, the world’s top climate science body – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – requires countries to sign off on each “summary for policymakers” of its flagship science reports. This has led to a politically fraught process that has increasingly seen some oil-producing governments making efforts to weaken its recommendations.
In a bid to focus scientific debates on the phase-out of fossil fuels, the new SPGET was created based on a mandate from last year’s COP30. It is also meant to come up with scientific recommendations at a faster pace than the IPCC’s seven-year cycle.
Natalie Jones, senior policy advisor at the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD), called the new scientific panel “historic”, as it will be “more specific, more targeted and potentially more agile” with its advice on phasing out coal, oil and gas than the IPCC’s exhaustive scientific synthesis reports.
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The panel will be co-chaired by Cameroonian economist Vera Songwe, PIK’s chief economist Ottmar Edenhofer and Gilberto M. Jannuzzi, professor of energy systems at Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas. It will be composed of between 50 and 100 scientists divided into four working groups: transition pathways, technological solutions, policies and finance.
Under the 12 insights for the Santa Marta process, the other group of scientists recommended banning new fossil fuel infrastructure, mandating “deep cuts” in methane emissions, implementing carbon levies on imports, and de-risking clean energy investments via interventions from central banks, among others.
Co-author Peter Newell, professor of international relations at the UK’s University of Sussex, said “there are many different challenges along the way – and not all of them have to do with lack of evidence”, but the phasing out of fossil fuels “is one part of the story and it’s important to address it”.
The original version of this story incorrectly reported that the new Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition had called on governments to develop roadmaps for phasing out fossil fuels “anchored in science and justice”. This appeal came from a separate group of scientists that worked on recommendations ahead of the Santa Marta conference. The article has now been amended.
The post Climate scientists call for fossil fuel transition roadmaps appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/04/25/climate-scientists-call-for-fossil-fuel-transition-roadmaps/
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