Denmark is on its way to introducing a world-first tax on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture in 2030.
Central to the proposals – announced by the Danish government on 24 June – is the plan to charge farmers for emissions from their livestock.
This carbon tax would cost around €100 (£85) annually per cow, according to the Financial Times.
The proposal is one part of a wider agreement between the government and different agriculture and environmental groups aimed at helping the country meet its climate goals for 2030 and beyond.
As a major producer of dairy and pork, one-quarter of Denmark’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explains the agriculture tax plans, the possible impacts on farmers and the effect it could have on cutting Denmark’s emissions.
- How will the tax work?
- How will this tax help Denmark meet its climate targets?
- How was the agreement reached?
- What will the tax mean for Danish farmers?
- Are other countries planning to introduce a carbon tax on agriculture?
How will the tax work?
Under the proposed plans, Danish landowners will pay a levy based on their emissions from “livestock, fertiliser, forestry and the disturbance of carbon-rich agricultural soils”, the Copenhagen Post reported.
The effective cost of the tax paid by farmers will amount to 120 Danish kroner (£14/$18) per tonne of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) emitted when the tax is implemented in 2030. It will rise to 300 kroner (£34/$44) per tonne of CO2e from 2035 onwards.
The true cost of these taxes is actually higher (300 kroner per tonne of CO2e in 2030 and 750 kroner per tonne from 2035 onwards), but the government will also implement a 60% deduction. The aim of this “basic tax break” is to “limit the impact of the measure on production costs”, says EurActiv. It adds that, in the long run, “the most climate-efficient farms could be close to paying no tax”.
The proceeds of the levy “are to be pooled in a fund to support the livestock industry’s green transition for at least two years after the tax comes into effect”, according to the Guardian.
The tax is just one element of a wider agreement on a “Green Denmark”. This was signed by a “green tripartite”, namely, a three-party agreement between the Danish government, conservation groups and the Danish industrial and agricultural sectors.
The agreement aims to “form the long-term basis for a historic reorganisation and transformation of Denmark’s land and of food and agricultural production”.
Under the deal, Denmark will relinquish some agricultural lands to provide more space for nature and biodiversity. Those lands will comprise heaths, meadows, river valleys and bogs that had historically been converted to agriculture.
The country will plant 250,000 hectares of new forests by 2045 and set aside 140,000 hectares of lowlands to protect their carbon-rich soils by 2030. It will also acquire strategic agricultural lands and distribute or sell them to private and public investments to “contribute to large nature areas” or “installation of renewable energy” and boost technologies and measures to cut emissions, the agreement says.
All these targets will be financed by a new Denmark’s Green Area Fund, which amounts to 40bn kroner (£4.6bn/$5.9bn). Denmark’s government will also use EU agricultural subsidies for the technology transition.
Finally, the agreement also aims to improve Denmark’s coastal waters and freshwater and reduce nitrogen fertiliser use.
The Danish parliament still needs to approve the plan, but Reuters noted that “political experts expect a bill to pass following the broad-based consensus”.
How will this tax help Denmark meet its climate targets?
According to Denmark’s most recent national inventory report, the agricultural sector is the country’s second-largest source of emissions, after the energy sector.
Agriculture contributes around 28% of Denmark’s total greenhouse gas emissions, the report says, and accounts for more than 80% of methane and nitrous oxide emissions specifically.
A “major part” of these emissions stem from livestock production, the report says. Denmark has more than 15,000 livestock farms containing millions of cows, pigs and other animals.
The country’s high agriculture emissions “cannot continue”, the climate minister Lars Aagaard said in a statement about the CO2-cutting proposals, adding that a “great deal of work awaits” to implement these plans.
By 2030, the country is aiming to cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by 70% and agriculture and forestry emissions by 55-65%.
The new proposals are estimated to cut 1.8m tonnes of CO2e emissions in 2030, according to the government.
This will help Denmark meet its 2030 climate goals and “take a big step closer to becoming climate neutral in 2045”, tax minister Jeppe Bruus said in a statement.
The agreement will also boost forests, large wetlands and nature protection, according to the president of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation, Maria Reumert Gjerding.
Prof Søren Petersen, a soil microbiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, agrees that the plan “could lead to substantial reductions in agricultural emissions” if implemented correctly. He tells Carbon Brief:
“It is my impression that there is a real interest in promoting climate-smart solutions and developing solutions that achieve real reductions in emissions.”
Petersen says that the agreement highlights the “need to speed up” new climate technologies and measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. He adds:
“Perhaps the greatest barrier at the moment is that many technologies with potential for greenhouse gas mitigation have not yet been sufficiently documented, or that the source is highly variable and difficult to quantify.”
He notes that it is often “difficult to measure” agricultural emissions, adding:
“If we can arrive at a set of criteria for documenting emissions, and effects of mitigation measures, and if such criteria can also be accepted in the international review of the national inventory, then I do think there is potential for developing several technologies for use at farm level.
“But tangible impact will require land use changes, as well as mitigation technologies.”
Niklas Sjøbeck Jørgensen, senior advisor on food and bioresources at Green Transition Denmark, an environmental thinktank, says the agreement is “an important step in a greener direction”.
But, he says, it “fails by maintaining problematic animal production”, adding in a statement:
“Unfortunately, the CO2 tax is correspondingly lagging behind, as the floor deduction of 60% and large technology subsidies maintain the current intensive form of animal production.”
How was the agreement reached?
The Danish government and the other members of the green tripartite reached this “historic agreement” after almost five months of talks, Politico reported.
Agreeing the tax “has been a very difficult journey”, Martin Kristian Brauer, chief economist at the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, one of Denmark’s largest organisations representing farmers and part of the green tripartite, tells Carbon Brief.
Brauer says his organisation had been against the tax from the beginning of the negotiations since “the risk connected to such a tax is far too big for the sector”. But over the past two years, they have worked on identifying those risks, listening to farmers’ concerns and negotiating with the government. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Although we have many [farmers] in Denmark still oppos[ing] this tax, I think we reached a point where we can live with it.”
Brauer says that broad participation of the different sectors was fundamental to allowing this “very difficult issue” to turn “into real politics”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“That was an agreement among all the parties. It was not just closing a lot of agricultural farms and thereby reducing emissions. The goal was to make a new regulation, where Danish agriculture meets climate goals, but [also having] the possibility to develop…an economically sustainable sector.”
Members of the tripartite agreed that the country “must have a strong and competitive” agricultural sector “with attractive business potential and jobs”, according to a statement by the Danish Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The agreement also stated that the new Green Area Fund would attempt to “facilitate a land conversion that mitigates the economic consequences for Danish agriculture”.
Brauer points out that there will be subsidies to incentivise farmers to enrol in the programme. The Green Area Fund, according to the agreement, will support private afforestation, the conservation of aquatic ecosystems and drinking water and the conversion of other lands, including wetlands and lowlands.
What will the tax mean for Danish farmers?
Petersen tells Carbon Brief that the agricultural CO2 tax proposal is “quite flexible and lenient on farmers”.
He notes that the gradual increase in the cost farmers will pay from 2030 to 2035 will “buy time for farmers to adjust, and for researchers to deliver the documentation of the effects of potential mitigation measures”.
In fact, farmers that comply with proven climate solutions “can avoid the tax”, according to a statement by Søren Søndergaard, president of the Danish Agriculture and Food Council.
The agreement provides a number of climate measures already available for farms from fertiliser use to livestock feed management. It also states that Denmark’s government will document and look for new climate technologies and measures for the agricultural sector.
Feed additives may be used to reduce direct emissions from livestock, Brauer notes. He tells Carbon Brief:
“That is an additive put into the feed and when the cows eat [it], emissions are reduced by maybe 20 or 30%.”
Another part of the agreement is land conversion and management. The territorial reorganisation will be planned and implemented by local governments, with the participation of coastal water councils and river basin management groups, the agreement says.
Brauer, from the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, says that land conversion does not mean farmers will lose their lands, instead, they will receive a subsidy to “convert the land”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The farmer in Denmark in the future will be not just an agricultural farmer, he will actually be a land manager and will have some areas which [are] going to be traditional agricultural farming, forests and maybe wetlands. So he will have a portfolio of different kinds of lands in his state that will all generate some income.”
The agreement points out that farmers’ participation in setting aside carbon-rich shallow soils and reducing nitrogen emissions is voluntary, but they can obtain financial incentives from the new fund for doing so.
Brauer adds that for those goals, each Danish region is mandated to reach certain targets. He says:
“If that area does not meet these goals together, then there will be a mandatory regulation set up for each farmer, pushed from the government.”
Regarding how small producers would be impacted, the agreement mentions that it is being analysed how to determine when a producer or farm will be subject to taxation, through a threshold that aims “to exempt farms with relatively low greenhouse gas emissions to ensure that the total administrative and economic costs of the tax are commensurate with the potential CO2e reductions”.
Are other countries planning to introduce a carbon tax on agriculture?
Denmark is the first country to introduce this kind of legislation, although other countries have considered it and, until recently, New Zealand was pioneering similar moves.
Around half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, primarily livestock. To tackle this, in 2022 the previous government planned to include agriculture in the country’s emissions trading scheme from 2025 onwards.
Under this scheme, the government sets a limit for the amount of greenhouse gases companies in certain sectors can emit. Companies whose emissions fall under the limit can sell their extra allowances to other organisations. These limits reduce over time, in line with climate targets.
Some New Zealand farmers protested these plans and the government received pushback from farm lobby groups.
In June this year, the country’s relatively new centre-right government scrapped plans for the so-called “burp tax” – a reference to the methane produced by livestock. This fulfilled a “pre-election pledge by [New Zealand prime minister] Christopher Luxon’s National Party”, Al Jazeera said at the time.
The government said it would instead invest hundreds of millions of dollars on emissions-reduction technology and boost funding for an agricultural greenhouse gas research centre.
Agriculture minister Todd McClay said that the government is “committed to meeting our climate change obligations without shutting down Kiwi farms”.
The Green and Labour parties criticised the government’s decision, Radio New Zealand reported.
In the EU, there have been on-and-off discussions about bringing agriculture into the bloc’s emissions trading system.
In March, Carbon Pulse reported that the EU was “testing the waters” on either creating a new emissions trading system for agriculture or revising existing rules.
Since then, a new European parliament was elected and the next European Commission line-up will be finalised this summer.
The EU’s climate advisory board earlier this year recommended introducing emissions pricing for agriculture and land use.
Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said she hopes Denmark’s planned agriculture carbon tax will “pave the way forward regionally and globally” for similar moves, the Financial Times reported.
Brauer says that farmers in Denmark are “quite concerned” about the tax as it may lead to Danish products being “a little bit more expensive than a product from Germany or from elsewhere”. He adds:
“If we get some kind of regulation in the whole EU, this difficulty would disappear.”
The post Q&A: How Denmark plans to tax agriculture emissions to meet climate goals appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: How Denmark plans to tax agriculture emissions to meet climate goals
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Absolute State of the Union
‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.
COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.
OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.
SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.
Around the world
- RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
- HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
- BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
- ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
- COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
- SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.
$467 billion
The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
- Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.
Spotlight
Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?
This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.
Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.
Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.
Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:
“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”
Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.
Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:
“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”
Conservative gear shift
For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.
Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.
Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.
Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:
“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”
Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)
Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:
“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”
But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:
“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”
UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Global ‘greenlash’?
All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.
At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.
Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.
She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.
Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:
“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.
RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.
Coming up
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
- 3 March: UK spring statement
- 4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
- 5 March: Nepal elections
Pick of the jobs
- The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
- China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
- University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
- TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
The Lincolnshire constituency held by Richard Tice, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of the hard-right Reform party, has been pledged at least £55m in government funding for flood defences since 2024.
This investment in Boston and Skegness is the second-largest sum for a single constituency from a £1.4bn flood-defence fund for England, Carbon Brief analysis shows.
Flooding is becoming more likely and more extreme in the UK due to climate change.
Yet, for years, governments have failed to spend enough on flood defences to protect people, properties and infrastructure.
The £1.4bn fund is part of the current Labour government’s wider pledge to invest a “record” £7.9bn over a decade on protecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from flooding.
As MP for one of England’s most flood-prone regions, Tice has called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
He is also one of Reform’s most vocal opponents of climate action and what he calls “net stupid zero”. He denies the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed, falsely and without evidence, that scientists are “lying”.
Flood defences
Last year, the government said it would invest £2.65bn on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) schemes in England between April 2024 and March 2026.
This money was intended to protect 66,500 properties from flooding. It is part of a decade-long Labour government plan to spend more than £7.9bn on flood defences.
There has been a consistent shortfall in maintaining England’s flood defences, with the Environment Agency expecting to protect fewer properties by 2027 than it had initially planned.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has attributed this to rising costs, backlogs from previous governments and a lack of capacity. It also points to the strain from “more frequent and severe” weather events, such as storms in recent years that have been amplified by climate change.
However, the CCC also said last year that, if the 2024-26 spending programme is delivered, it would be “slightly closer to the track” of the Environment Agency targets out to 2027.
The government has released constituency-level data on which schemes in England it plans to fund, covering £1.4bn of the 2024-26 investment. The other half of the FCERM spending covers additional measures, from repairing existing defences to advising local authorities.
The map below shows the distribution of spending on FCERM schemes in England over the past two years, highlighting the constituency of Richard Tice.
By far the largest sum of money – £85.6m in total – has been committed to a tidal barrier and various other defences in the Somerset constituency of Bridgwater, the seat of Conservative MP Ashley Fox.
Over the first months of 2026, the south-west region has faced significant flooding and Fox has called for more support from the government, citing “climate patterns shifting and rainfall intensifying”.
He has also backed his party’s position that “the 2050 net-zero target is impossible” and called for more fossil-fuel extraction in the North Sea.
Tice’s east-coast constituency of Boston and Skegness, which is highly vulnerable to flooding from both rivers and the sea, is set to receive £55m. Among the supported projects are beach defences from Saltfleet to Gibraltar Point and upgrades to pumping stations.
Overall, Boston and Skegness has the second-largest portion of flood-defence funding, as the chart below shows. Constituencies with Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs occupied the other top positions.
Overall, despite Labour MPs occupying 347 out of England’s 543 constituencies – nearly two-thirds of the total – more than half of the flood-defence funding was distributed to constituencies with non-Labour MPs. This reflects the flood risk in coastal and rural areas that are not traditional Labour strongholds.
Reform funding
While Reform has just eight MPs, representing 1% of the population, its constituencies have been assigned 4% of the flood-defence funding for England.
Nearly all of this money was for Tice’s constituency, although party leader Nigel Farage’s coastal Clacton seat in Kent received £2m.
Reform UK is committed to “scrapping net-zero” and its leadership has expressed firmly climate-sceptic views.
Much has been made of the disconnect between the party’s climate policies and the threat climate change poses to its voters. Various analyses have shown the flood risk in Reform-dominated areas, particularly Lincolnshire.
Tice has rejected climate science, advocated for fossil-fuel production and criticised Environment Agency flood-defence activities. Yet, he has also called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
This may reflect Tice’s broader approach to climate change. In a 2024 interview with LBC, he said:
“Where you’ve got concerns about sea level defences and sea level rise, guess what? A bit of steel, a bit of cement, some aggregate…and you build some concrete sea level defences. That’s how you deal with rising sea levels.”
While climate adaptation is viewed as vital in a warming world, there are limits on how much societies can adapt and adaptation costs will continue to increase as emissions rise.
The post Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
Greenhouse Gases
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Food inflation on the rise
DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.
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NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.
‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.
El Niño looms
NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”
WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”
CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.
News and views
- DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
- SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
- NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
- COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
- FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
- TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.
Spotlight
Nature talks inch forward
This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.
The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.
The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.
The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.
Money talks
Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.
Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.
Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.
Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).
Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:
“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”
Monitoring and reporting
Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.
Parties do so through the submission of national reports.
Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.
A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.
Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:
“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”
Watch, read, listen
NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.
COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.
HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.
‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.
New science
- Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
- Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food
In the diary
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean | Brasília
- 5 March: Nepal general elections
- 9-20 March: First part of the thirty-first session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) | Kingston, Jamaica
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz.
Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
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