The UK government has set out a long-awaited plan explaining how it will cut emissions in the 2030s, on its legally bound path to net-zero by the middle of the century.
Under the Climate Change Act, the government must lay out “carbon budgets” that set limits on the UK’s emissions over five-year periods.
In 2021, the government announced it would cut emissions by 78% by 2035 under its sixth carbon budget, but the “delivery plan” detailing how this would be achieved proved contentious.
The new “carbon budget and growth delivery plan” (CBGD) is the third draft, after the previous two delivery plans were successfully challenged in court.
Unlike previous versions, in this plan the government concludes that it has sufficient climate policies to achieve its sixth carbon budget and “96-99%” of its international obligations under the Paris Agreement.
This is in spite of the government scaling back its expectations for various climate policies, including clean-hydrogen production, tree-planting and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The CBGD plan comes amid a fractured political consensus in the UK on climate action, with the Conservative party vowing to repeal the Climate Change Act and the hard-right Reform UK party repeatedly attacking net-zero.
Below, Carbon Brief gives an overview of the 363 pages of documents included in the plan, what it says about meeting UK emissions targets and what it means for individual sectors.
- Why is there a new ‘carbon budget delivery plan’?
- What does the new delivery plan say?
- How does the new delivery plan meet the UK’s emissions targets?
- What does the delivery plan mean for the UK economy?
Why is there a new ‘carbon budget delivery plan’?
This is the third version of the sixth carbon budget delivery plan produced by the UK government, with the previous two having been ruled unlawful by the High Court.
The then-Conservative government passed the sixth carbon budget in 2021, legislating an emissions cut of 78% below 1990 levels by 2035. Carbon budgets are interim targets that act as “stepping stones” on the pathway to net-zero emissions by 2050.
However, in July 2022, the High Court ruled that the government had breached sections 13 and 14 of the Climate Change Act in adopting the delivery plan for the budget.
These sections refer to the government’s duty to prepare and adopt policies to meet its climate targets and publish on these policies so that parliament and the public can “scrutinise” them.
It ruled that the then-secretary of state Kwasi Kwarteng had “insufficient knowledge” to adopt the plan, as he did not know what emissions savings individual policies would be responsible for.
The plan also lacked “critical information” on a number of elements – for example, the reason for a shortfall in the emissions cuts, according to the claimants Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and Good Law Project.
The High Court ordered the government to revise its strategy to correct these errors and a new plan was published in March 2023.
Once again, this was challenged in the High Court. The same claimants argued that the government did not consider “delivery risk” in a lawful way or publish sufficient information to allow meaningful scrutiny of its net-zero policies, among other breaches of sections 13 and 14.
In May 2024, the court sided with the claimants, finding that the secretary of state – by that time Claire Coutinho – had not been adequately informed about the delivery risks associated with the proposed policies. It also called for transparent, evidence-based policies to meet the carbon budget.
The government was given a new deadline of May 2025 to publish another version of the delivery plan. This was later extended to October 2025, as a result of last year’s general election.
What does the new delivery plan say?
The new plan includes an overview document highlighting the government’s key political messages and a 238-page report laying out the details of expected emissions cuts.
The government emphasises how its policies will help the UK to “take back control of our energy” by expanding domestic renewables – cutting bills and boosting jobs in the process.
It also highlights how Labour’s climate plans will improve “quality of life and health”, plus help to “protect our natural environment”.
Other components of the delivery plan include a “technical annex” with details of modelling and accounting, an “investor prospectus” that outlines net-zero investment opportunities in the UK and a methane action plan, with sectoral plans for cutting the greenhouse gas.
The plan confirms that the government has all the climate policies in place to meet the UK’s fourth and fifth carbon budgets, covering the period 2023-2032.
Crucially, it also establishes that the government has enough extra policies in the pipeline to ensure 100% of the emissions cuts required for the sixth carbon budget are also achieved.
This is a step up from the plan released by the previous Conservative government, which only covered 97% of the cuts required for the period 2033-2037.
The new report explains that 76% of emissions cuts for the sixth carbon budget are covered by policies that have already been “implemented, adopted or planned”.
The remaining emissions cuts come from 169 additional proposals and policies that have been modelled by the government for the coming years, ranging from electrified steel plants to accelerated rates of tree-planting. The plan also accounts for another 12 “early-stage” proposals.
In addition to its domestic carbon-budget goals, the UK also has international climate targets under the Paris Agreement, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
Unlike carbon budgets, which provide flexibility by allowing a set amount of emissions over a five-year period, the UK’s NDC goals involve specific emissions-reduction targets for single years, compared to a 1990 baseline.
The government calculates that its plans will cut emissions by 66% below 1990 levels by 2030 and 81% by 2035. These reductions are just shy of the UK’s NDC targets for 2030 and 2035 – representing 96% and 99% of the required cuts, respectively.
(Notably, the 2030 NDC target is more ambitious than the UK’s domestic climate target for that period, as the latter was set prior to the UK committing to net-zero emissions by 2050.)
In the delivery plan, the government says it will “seek to improve delivery and, where appropriate, will explore further measures, to ensure that the UK will meet its international commitments”.
The CBGD plan also considers the risk that government climate programmes underdeliver – for example, due to slow consumer uptake of low-carbon technologies.
Part of the legal case against the previous iteration of the plan was centred on its lack of adequate information about delivery risk. The new strategy appears to include a more extensive consideration of risk, stressing that there are “mechanisms in place to monitor and mitigate risks for each individual policy”.
It also states that the emissions savings for each policy are “credible” because, in cases where risks could not be avoided, the government revised down the emissions savings.
As a result, it concludes
“We, therefore, have confidence that each and every proposal and policy will deliver its planned scenario emissions savings.”
How does the new delivery plan meet the UK’s emissions targets?
The government’s CBGD plan lays out what it describes as a “credible level of emission savings”, enabling the UK to hit all of its upcoming domestic carbon budgets under the Climate Change Act.
Yet, a striking aspect of the plan is that the government has, in fact, significantly scaled back its expectations for several important sectors.
Government forecasts of low-carbon hydrogen production and peatland restoration are among the elements that have been downgraded since the 2023 plan. Expectations for biofuel-crop planting have also dropped to zero hectares in the near term.
Some of these policy areas have underperformed so far, such as tree-planting, or are less-established technologies, such as industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS).
These deployment assumptions have been highlighted in red in the table below. The relatively few sectors that have seen ambition ramped up are highlighted by Carbon Brief in green, while those that have remained steady since 2023 are grey.
Comparison of sectoral deployment assumptions in the new carbon budget delivery plan (2025), compared to previous versions from 2023 and 2021. Source: DESNZ. Chart: Carbon Brief
The rolling back of expectations for key emissions-cutting policies raises the question of how the new plan can still put the UK on track to meet its sixth carbon budget, which covers the period 2033-2037.
First, the “baseline” emissions from which future reductions are calculated is considerably lower in 2025 than it was in the 2023 delivery plan.
This is largely because a set of policies that were previously “under development” have now been integrated into the baseline, as they are considered “implemented or developed”.
These include the zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate to encourage electric-car sales and the “sustainable aviation fuel” (SAF) mandate to drive the uptake of “clean” aviation fuels.
Together with some modelling adjustments, these changes reduced baseline emissions by 46.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) during the sixth carbon budget period. This shrinks the emissions gap that must be filled by upcoming climate policies and proposals.
Crucially, there are also three new categories of emissions savings that the Labour government has introduced, all of which further reduce this gap.
First, the government has captured the impact of various societal shifts that could affect decarbonisation, using the term “wider factors” to describe such changes. As an example, it mentions “developments in digital technologies including AI”.
Together, the plan states that these factors could “credibly” cut emissions by an extra 99MtCO2e in the sixth carbon budget period.
Second, the government also has a new category termed “other early-stage policies and proposals”. These are ideas deemed too preliminary to fully model, except for the sixth carbon budget period, during which the government estimates they could contribute an extra 43MtCO2e in emissions cuts.
Among these proposals are marine CO2 removals, saltmarsh restoration and policies to boost the market for “low-carbon industrial products”.
Finally, another 24MtCO2e over the sixth carbon budget period comes from what the government calls “cascade effects”. These “occur when changes in one system propagate through connected systems” – for example, when the uptake of net-zero technology becomes a “social norm”, the plan explains.
The combined impact of these three additional factors – none of which were considered in the 2023 plan – can be seen in the chart below.
Collectively, these components help to cut the remaining emissions during the sixth carbon budget period by 34MtCO2e, compared to the 2023 plan, in the government’s forecast. This is enough to meet the target, according to the government, rather than breaching it by 32MtCO2e as the previous plan did.
What does the delivery plan mean for the UK economy?
The CBGD plan includes an overview of how the government plans to make changes across different sectors of the economy, in order to bring down their emissions in the 2030s.
Transport
The transport sector continues to be the UK’s biggest source of emissions, accounting for 26% of the country’s total, the CBGD plan says. This figure rises to 35% when the UK’s contribution to international aviation and shipping is considered.
In 2023, road travel accounted for around 90% of domestic transport emissions, the plan continues, chiefly from journeys by petrol cars and vans.
After entering power in July 2024, the Labour government met a manifesto pledge to reinstate a 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles.
This target was originally set by the Conservative government under Boris Johnson’s leadership in 2020, but then delayed to 2035 by Rishi Sunak in 2023 as part of a wider rollback of net-zero policies.
Johnson’s government had also pledged to introduce a zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate to set specific sales targets for car manufacturers in the lead up to the ban.
The ZEV mandate came into force in January 2024. Labour’s CBGD plan notes that it is “driving sales that made the UK Europe’s largest zero-emission car market in 2024 and the third largest globally”.
However, despite growing numbers of EVs on UK roads, the market is currently set to miss the ZEV mandate for 2025. In May, EVs accounted for 21.8% of new car registrations, below the 28% target set by the ZEV mandate.
In April this year, the government made some “tweaks” to the ZEV mandate, including introducing rules allowing manufacturers to count hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles towards their pure EV sales goals.
In a letter to the transport secretary, the Climate Change Committee warned that the changes “could encourage a greater role for hybrid vehicles and a reduction in emissions savings”.
In addition, Labour’s CBGD plan sets out less ambitious targets for the total proportion of ZEV cars on UK roads than previous strategies set out under the Conservatives in 2021 and 2023.
Namely, the CBGD plan sets targets of 21% of all cars being ZEV by 2030 and 48% by 2035. This compares to targets of 24% by 2030 and 53% by 2035 set under the 2021 net-zero strategy.
The government’s new CBGD plan notes that key risks to delivering its planned cuts to transport emissions include that “zero emission cars and vans do not displace their petrol and diesel counterparts at the rate we forecast”. This is as a result of lower than anticipated demand or “wider global supply chain challenges”.
Another key risk could be “unanticipated growth in travel demand”, with this being “most acute for our projections of emissions from cars, vans and air travel”, the plan says.
Commentators have noted a lack of new action in the plan to tackle emissions from rising demand for air travel in the UK.
Juliet Michaelson, director of climate charity Possible, said in a statement that the plan “still lacks realistic thinking on the most difficult to decarbonise areas, such as aviation”.
Colin Walker, head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), added that the government is continuing to “pin its hopes for cutting aviation emissions on sustainable aviation fuels and technological innovations that are still very much in their infancy”, while “failing to encourage ultra-frequent flyers from making more sustainable choices”.
Heat and buildings
Buildings remain one of the biggest sources of emissions in the UK, accounting for 74MtCO2e in 2023, or 17% of the country’s emissions.
This is predominantly due to the use of gas in heating systems, with 85% of UK homes using the fossil fuel to keep warm, according to the NGO Nesta.
However, efforts to decarbonise emissions from heating, in particular, have been viewed as contentious in some sections of the UK media, with outlets often referencing the “fury” of the public at policies dubbed “boiler bans” or “boiler taxes”.
One of the most significant policies to cut emissions in the sector is the “warm homes plan”, which the government is planning to publish “shortly”. The plan was set to be published in October, but is now expected after the autumn budget in November.
The scheme was first announced in spring 2025 by the newly appointed Labour government, with the goal of lifting more than a million households out of fuel poverty by 2030. During the spending review over the summer, the government said £13.2bn would be allocated to the scheme.
The policy is set to support the rollout of heat pumps and heat networks, alongside energy efficiency measures and other technologies, such as solar and batteries. More details are set to follow when the warm homes plan is published.
Beyond this, the CBGD plan includes other previously announced policies, such as the “boiler upgrade scheme”, which provides vouchers of up to £7,500 to support the rollout of heat pumps. The plan notes that the budget for this scheme has been almost doubled this financial year to £295 and funding will continue to increase each year up to 2029/30.
The delivery plan states that the government’s “vision is that, over the next decade, low-carbon solutions will become the natural choice for all households”.
It adds that, by the early 2030s, the government expects that more than one million existing homes will transition to low-carbon heating, as part of the “normal cycle of replacing an existing heating appliance (such as a gas boiler) at the end of its life”. By 2035, low-carbon heating will represent the majority of all heating-system replacements.
This new target seems to take over from the previous goal of 600,000 installations a year by 2028, which was included in the previous two versions of the CBGD plan. While the number of installations has been increasing, the UK has consistently fallen short of the level needed to meet this goal.
Additionally, the delivery plan removes the controversial “ban” on the sale of gas boilers in 2035, set under the previous Conservative government. The government notes that it will “continue to refine” its approach in coming years and consider additional interventions if needed.
The delivery plan’s technical annex notes that the modelling does not include any use of hydrogen for heating at present, but that the government will consult on it further in the future. It adds:
“As hydrogen is not yet a proven technology for home heating, any role would come much later and would likely be limited. If we conclude that hydrogen could play a role then some of the savings to be delivered by heat pump deployment in on gas grid homes could instead be delivered through hydrogen heating.”
Industry, CCS and hydrogen
In 2023, the UK’s industry emissions were 64MtCO2e, equivalent to 15% of total territorial emissions, the government says.
According to the CBGD plan, this represents a 12% decrease from 2019 levels and a 60% drop from 1990 levels.
The plan notes that the industrial sector “has a significant contribution to make to enable carbon budgets to be met”.
In June, the government set out a 10-year industry strategy, which it says aims to “drive long-term sustainable, inclusive and secure growth through securing investment into crucial sectors of the economy”.
The plan says that the government will also set out a “refreshed industrial decarbonisation plan”, which will “set the strategic direction for our approach to working with industry towards a competitive and low-carbon industrial base in the UK”.
It continues that the government is “looking at what could be delivered with further government action on resource and energy efficiency, fuel switching and CCUS [carbon, capture, utilisation and storage]”.
The plan says that the government is supporting fuel-switching and energy efficiency through its industrial energy transformation fund, which was launched in 2020 with plans to support the deployment of projects until 2028. (In July, the government confirmed that it is closing the fund to new applicants.)
In June, Miliband confirmed that £200m will be provided to progress the Acorn carbon capture and storage (CCS) scheme in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
Despite this, the CBGD plan is less ambitious on both industrial resource efficiency and industrial CCS than previous net-zero strategies under the Conservatives in 2021 and 2023.
The government’s 2021 net-zero strategy set a target of industrial resource efficiency providing 11MtCO2e in savings by 2035. However, the CBGD plan has a target of just 5.4MtCO2e.
In addition, the 2021 net-zero strategy targeted 7MtCO2e of industrial CCS by 2035. The CBGD plan targets just 4.3MtCO2e.
The CBGD also cuts back a separate target for engineered greenhouse gas removal (GGR) techniques to provide 5MtCO2 in emissions savings by 2030, first made in the 2021 net-zero strategy.
(Engineered GGRs are technological methods for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, such as by using giant fans to suck the gas out of the air.)
The CBGD revises down this target to just 0.51MtCO2 a year from 2028-32.
Commenting on this decision, Prof Steve Smith, a GGR scientist at the University of Oxford, posted on LinkedIn, saying:
“This revision is reflective of the fact that little-to-no removal tech has actually been deployed in the UK since the 5Mt target was set. 2030 is really not far away in project development terms. We know from 20 years of experience with emission reductions that plans often fall behind (e.g. home insulation, CCS). Sensible strategy involves pursuing new technologies while being live to the risk of over-optimism in them.”
On hydrogen, the CBGD plan says the government is continuing to “support the rollout of hydrogen production to meet demand across sectors requiring hydrogen to decarbonise”.
It notes that, as part of the autumn 2024 budget, the government confirmed support for 11 green hydrogen projects and shortlisted another 27 projects for potential approval in April 2025.
However, the CBGD also significantly reduces ambition on clean hydrogen production, compared to previous net-zero strategies.
The CBGD targets 4 terawatt hours (TWh) of clean hydrogen production by 2030 and 24TWh by 2035. This compares to 40TWh by 2030 and 80-140TWh by 2035 under the 2021 net-zero strategy.
On LinkedIn, Harry Smith, an industrial emissions expert at the consultancy Aether, posted that the “deployment of low-carbon hydrogen no longer meets the 2030 targets set out in the 2021 UK hydrogen strategy”.
A new hydrogen strategy is due to be published this autumn.
Electricity
The power sector now makes up 10% of the UK’s emissions, accounting for around 44MtCO2e in 2023. Of this, gas combustion makes up around 75%.
Overall, the sector has decarbonised significantly, with CO2 emissions per unit of electricity falling by more than two-thirds in a decade, according to previous Carbon Brief analysis.
This is due to the rollout of renewable energy technologies and the closure of coal-fired power plants.
However, the UK has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. While this is due predominantly to gas prices – which set the wholesale cost of electricity 98% of the time – it remains a challenge for driving decarbonisation through electrification.
The cost of electricity in the UK is a key focus of the CBGD plan, which notes:
“The price disparity between electricity and gas needs to be addressed to make it more attractive for consumers to install clean technologies like heat pumps. Over this parliament, the government will be working relentlessly to translate the much cheaper wholesale costs of clean power into lower bills for consumers. This will be core to every decision we make. We will set out our plan in due course.”
The new CBGD plan does not include “rebalancing” the cost of gas bills relative to electricity, as the previous delivery plan did. It also does not consider shifting levies away from electricity bills.
Instead, the focus is broadly on the expansion of clean-power technologies, predominantly through pre-existing policies.
This includes investing in 80 power networks and enabling infrastructure projects, costing an estimated £40bn annually in the coming years. The plan recognises that the electricity network “must undergo unprecedented expansion”. (It is worth noting that, with or without net-zero targets in place, the UK’s grid would need constant investment and upgrades.)
The government also notes that it will work to “ensure appropriate planning arrangements, acceleration of grid connections and strong supply chains” to underpin this.
For example, the “strategic spatial energy plan” was commissioned to the National Energy System Operator in October 2024 and aims to “support a more actively planned approach” to electricity infrastructure.
The CBGD plan often points to the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, published in December 2024, which set out the government’s approach to decarbonising the electricity sector by 2030.
It states that the government is investing “record amounts in clean energy, climate and nature”, including £63bn in capital funding.
The plan specifically highlights a final investment decision that was taken earlier this year to build Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk, with £14.2bn in funding allocated to the project. The government has also brought in reforms to the upcoming contracts for difference renewable energy subsidy auction to “maximise competition between bidders and reduce the costs to consumers”.
In addition, the first projects by the government’s new, publicly owned clean-energy company, Great British Energy, have also now been launched.
To support the rapid expansion of power-sector infrastructure, the plan notes that the “urgent need for change means we must undertake a wide-ranging reform programme”.
Finally, the plan notes that “hydrogen to power” has the “potential to play a key role” in the electricity system, along with other technologies that offer flexibility, such as power CCUS and energy storage.
Farming and land use
In 2023, agriculture and other land use accounted for 11% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions, when international aviation and shipping is included, the CBGD plan says.
It adds that cow and sheep farming “currently make up the largest share of these emissions”.
The CBGD lists some of the government’s major policies for cutting emissions from agriculture and land use.
This includes the environment land management schemes (Elms), a post-Brexit project to pay farmers to cut CO2 emissions and protect nature on their land, first introduced by Boris Johnson’s government in 2020.
The CBGD plan says that “half of all farmed land” is now under Elms and that spending for the schemes will increase from £800m in 2023-24 to £2bn by 2028-29.
The National Farmers Union (NFU) has previously called the claim that spending had increased “misleading”, as farmers were originally promised a figure of £2.4bn a year from Elms after Brexit, the Guardian reported.
The largest of the Elms schemes is the sustainable farming initiative, the CBGD plan says.
In May, the government was forced to reverse a decision to close applications for the scheme after the NFU threatened legal action, according to Edie.
More widely, Labour’s plans to introduce an inheritance tax on farmers when businesses are worth more than £1m has caused mass protests across the country in recent months.
The CBGD plan revises down its deployment assumptions for the percentage of farmers taking up low-carbon practices, when compared to net-zero strategies from the Conservatives in 2021 and 2023.
Previous net-zero strategies set an assumption of 75% of farmers taking up low-carbon practices by 2030 and 85% by 2035. The CBGD sets assumptions of 67% by 2030 and 74% by 2035.
The Climate Change Committee has said the government must have a comprehensive plan for restoring peatlands if it is to meet the UK’s net-zero goal.
Healthy peatlands are carbon-rich habitats that support a range of species. However, some 80% of the UK’s peatlands are degraded, with the carbon they release accounting for 5% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
The CBGD plan says that, under the Elms landscape recovery scheme, 35,000 hectares of peatlands will be restored, in addition to the 30,000 hectares targeted for restoration under a separate nature for climate peatland grant scheme.
However, the CBGD also revises down its deployment assumptions for peatland restoration, compared to previous net-zero strategies.
The 2021 net-zero strategy assumed that just over 10,000 hectares of peatlands would be restored in 2030. The CBGD plan has a lower figure of just under 8,000 hectares for the same date.
The CBGD plan also significantly revises down expectations for tree-planting, compared to previous strategies.
The 2021 net-zero strategy assumed that 40,000 hectares of new trees would be planted in 2030. The CBGD has a much lower number of 7,455 hectares for 2030.
Tom Cantillon, senior analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), noted in a statement that the CBGD plan “seems to reduce ambition” on restoring peatlands and planting trees. He adds:
“With climate change worsening flooding in the UK, unless we work with nature by planting more trees and restoring habitats like peatlands to capture rainfall, people’s homes and farmers’ fields will be at ever greater risk.”
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Q&A: The UK government’s ‘carbon budget delivery plan’ for 2035
Amid stalled talks on finance, adaptation and fossil fuel transition at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil’s Amazon region, governments agreed to an ambitious Just Transition package combining the strongest rights- and inclusion-based language yet seen in the UN climate process with a new global mechanism to support countries reshaping their economies.
The COP30 decision also confirmed that Just Transition must take a whole-of-society and whole-of-economy approach – covering mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and finance – a broad scope that observers said marked a significant step forward for the process.
Delegates described the outcome in the city of Belém as a rare convergence of political will, technical facilitation and years of groundwork by civil society and governments.
For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity
The decision also places stronger emphasis on the social and economic foundations of transition than many observers had expected. The text links Just Transition explicitly to poverty eradication and decent work, and recognises the need for just energy transitions as part of implementing the Global Stocktake – including the transition away from fossil fuels.
Finance provisions were also firmer than in previous drafts, with governments agreeing that support for Just Transition should prioritise grants and non-debt-creating instruments, a framing long pushed by developing countries and civil society.
Civil society kept the issue alive
The Work Programme on Just Transition, launched in 2022, remained low-profile across several COP cycles. Unions, youth networks, feminist groups, social movements and environmental organisations continued refining proposals and pushing negotiators even when political attention was limited – while activists also took to the streets across the world calling for a Just Transition.
As momentum built toward COP30, these groups began referring to their proposal as the Belém Action Mechanism – the “BAM” – signalling the level of institutional ambition they believed the process required. Alongside this sustained organising, unions stressed that Just Transition had to move beyond principles and into practice.
Key governments shifted earlier than expected
As colourful activists danced and chanted “We want the BAM!” in the COP30 conference centre, a key moment arrived on day two, when the G77+China group of developing countries came out early and clearly signalled its support for establishing a Just Transition mechanism. This leadership was widely described as the turning point that made an ambitious outcome possible.
The EU followed at the end of the first week, tabling a “bridging proposal” in the form of a Just Transition Action Plan. From that point, civil society campaigns intensified across the Global North, aimed at shifting governments that had so far resisted any new institutional arrangements.
COP30: Spain’s unions say just transition means renewing communities beyond jobs
The UK – initially identified by observers as the main hold-out – faced sustained campaigning, including an NGO sign-on letter and direct engagement with ministers. The political shift became visible inside the talks when Ed Miliband signalled support for the EU plan during the High-Level Ministerial Roundtable.
That shift extended beyond the UK. Canada, previously quiet on new institutional arrangements, began describing itself as “open to options” after targeted domestic media coverage. Australian civil society leveraged the country’s COP31 bid to draw attention to the need for coordination institutions, while NGOs in Belém maintained pressure on Swiss negotiators.
The push for the mechanism reached the highest level of the UN system. After a meeting with civil society, UN Secretary-General António Guterres added his voice of support for the mechanism and urged COP30 to operationalise a Just Transition aligned with 1.5°C.
Facilitators and ministers closed the gaps
Last year at COP29 in Baku, the Just Transition track ended without an outcome partly because no ministers were mandated to land one. Belém took a different approach: Mexico’s Alicia Bárcena and Poland’s Krzysztof Bolesta were appointed as ministerial leads and played a central role in balancing strong rights language with the institutional detail.
Technical co-facilitators Joseph Teo of Singapore and Federica Fricano of Italy were credited with producing a clear, workable draft that helped bridge divides. Delegates said its readability – unusual for UNFCCC text – helped maintain trust. UNFCCC secretariat staff supported the process with rapid revision work through the second week.
Brazil’s presidency and the significance of place
Brazil made Just Transition one of its three priorities, ensuring the track remained visible amid wider disputes.
The signal came early: at Climate Action Network’s Annual Strategy Meeting in Rio de Janeiro in February, attended by more than 170 climate justice activists, COP30 President Ambassador André Correa do Lago and COP30 CEO Ana Toni told participants that Just Transition would be a “vital” issue for COP30. The presidency also guided parties toward addressing the issue of “institutional arrangements” during the Pre-COP.
“Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30
Belém’s context also mattered. The region is a long-standing focal point for debates over livelihoods, extractivism and environmental protection, grounding negotiations in lived realities.
A symbol of this was the People’s March on the streets of Belém, with over 50,000 people participating, and thousands more across the world. The message of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon was clear: a Just Transition cannot be designed about them or around them – it must be shaped with them, and how transition minerals are managed is central to this.
What the decision changes
The final text sets out principles for rights-based, inclusive transitions and establishes a global mechanism to support countries in implementing these principles – elevating the mechanism to a structural component of how climate action will be delivered in the Paris Agreement era.
The agreement also reinforces the expectation that social and economic dimensions must be central to national climate plans, not appended to them.
A just transition for renewables: Why COP30 must put people before power
The work starts now
Civil society will remain closely engaged as the mechanism takes shape, arguing that its effectiveness will depend on whether it reflects the realities facing workers, communities and families in transitions already underway.
The next phase will hinge on the operational details governments agree in the months ahead. Key questions include the design of the committee, what form secretariat support will take, and whether civil society and trade unions will have a formal seat in its work.
Parties will also need to decide whether the mechanism should help convene a wider network of practitioners. Its first workplan, the identification of support needs, and clarification of how it will interact with existing UNFCCC bodies, will shape how effective it becomes – with decisions expected at COP31.
The post How Belém launched the Just Transition mechanism appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/12/10/how-belem-built-a-new-just-transition-mechanism/
Climate Change
EU weakening of corporate sustainability rules ‘jeopardises’ climate action, critics say
The European Union’s decision to dilute its corporate sustainability rules could hurt the bloc’s efforts to fight climate change and risks rewarding companies with a poor track record, environmental NGOs and clean energy advocates say.
In a deal clinched in the early hours of Tuesday, EU leaders, the European Commission and the Parliament agreed a series of amendments to the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which will require larger companies to identify and address any environmental or human rights violations in their supply chains.
The amendments, which still need formal approval by the Parliament and EU member states, mean the due diligence requirements will apply to far fewer companies than initially targeted and maximum penalties will be reduced from 5% to 3% of a company’s annual global turnover.
In another change, the EU also scrapped a requirement for companies to publish climate transition plans setting out how they would make their business model compatible with the Paris Agreement.
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Brazil’s Lula requests national roadmap for fossil fuel transition
After countries failed to formally back a global energy transition roadmap at COP30, Brazil’s president takes the initiative by mandating a national plan
The EU Commission said the changes, which follow months of corporate lobbying, US pressure and interventions by France and Germany, will remove all requirements for many smaller companies and introduce greater flexibility for larger companies, which will help to ease administrative burdens on businesses and drive investment.
But climate campaigners and clean tech industry representatives said the watered down rules were a setback for European efforts to clean up supply chains and reduce emissions.
“By deleting the climate transition plan implementation, the EU is weakening the key legislative frameworks for businesses to prepare for climate risks and global challenges that can severely affect their operations and value chains,” said Julia Otten, who works on corporate due diligence at Frank Bold, a sustainability NGO and law firm.
“This is counter-productive for businesses, weakens accountability, and jeopardises the EU’s own plans and objectives on climate and the industrial transition,” she added.
“Extremely disappointing”
Industry leaders in clean energy technologies say that the changes undermine their sector’s climate efforts and risk putting companies that prioritise sustainability at a disadvantage.
Rachel Owens, CEO of the Solar Stewardship Initiative, a multistakeholder scheme that has set out standards for what transparent and sustainable solar value chains should look like, told Climate Home News the move was “extremely disappointing”.
Requiring companies to set out their climate transition plans would have demonstrated that the production of solar panels and other renewable energy technologies and the energy they generate have much lower emissions than their fossil fuel alternatives, she said.
For Maurice Loosschilder, global head of sustainability at Signify – a multinational company that manufactures LED lighting systems that help reduce energy consumption – the removal of the climate transition plans from the law will make it more difficult to align businesses and their supply chains with the EU’s climate goals and could reduce incentives for innovation.
Because of its large size, Signify still falls under the law’s requirement. But Loosschilder said he was concerned that the company could lose its competitive edge when faced with small companies for which the same sustainability rules do not apply.
Intense lobbying
The agreement reached on Tuesday followed intense lobbying by industry and governments.
In a letter addressed to EU leaders, the US and Qatar warned that investment and energy supplies to the EU would be harmed if the CSDDD came into effect in its original form.
Documents obtained by the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (Somo) show how 10 major companies lobbied to dilute the regulation. This included oil and gas majors ExxonMobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies as well as metals and minerals producer Nyrstar, a subsidiary of commodity trading giant Trafigura Group.
Total Energies defended its advocacy in Brussels and in European capitals as being “in full compliance with applicable laws and regulations”. The other companies did not respond to Somo’s requests for comment.
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NGO Global Witness accused EU leaders of giving in to lobbying by the fossil fuel industry.
“Major oil and gas giants will now be able to dodge their responsibility to act on [the] climate, largely thanks to intense US political and corporate pressure,” Beate Beller, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, told Climate Home News.
The EU’s about-face also weakens efforts to clean up the supply chains of technologies needed for the energy transition such as electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels.
“Clean tech cannot be ‘clean’ if the raw materials behind it are mined under weakened standards. This is what made the spirit of the CSDDD so promising: it paired climate transition plans to cut fossil-fuel dependence with robust human-rights and environmental due diligence across clean-tech supply chains,” she added.
Lower bar on supply chain oversight
The rules will now only apply to companies established in the EU with at least 5,000 employees and a net global turnover of 1.5 billion euros. It had originally applied to companies with at least 1,000 employees and turnover of 450 million euros. Member states have until July 2028 to transpose the requirements into national law.
When assessing their supply chains, companies will need to follow a risk-based approach and focus on areas that carry the biggest potential for harm. For example, an EV maker might focus on the production of the battery, which requires a range of different minerals whose extraction and processing carry high risks.
However, companies are no longer required to carry out comprehensive mapping of their direct and indirect suppliers. Instead, they will need to conduct “a general scoping exercise” based on “reasonably available information”.
Johannes Blankenbach, a senior researcher at the Business and Human Rights Centre, told Climate Home News that it is important that companies identify risks beyond their direct suppliers.
That’s because the most severe risks typically lie further up the supply chain, for example, where raw materials are sourced or extracted from the ground, he said.
In addition, harmonised rules across the EU to allow victims of harms to take companies to court have been removed, which will make it more difficult for communities to find legal remedies, Blankenbach added.
While the EU Commission said the less onerous requirements should help drive investment, Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council, a trade body for the solar industry, said investors in solar farms wanted guarantees about the origin of solar panels and battery storage equipment.
“They want to know where it was made, and they want to know that it was properly made according to the highest environmental, social and governance standards,” she said, citing industry initiatives to boost supply chain transparency and standards such as the Solar Stewardship Initiative.
She said the initiative had been spurred by both the EU’s plan to tighten due diligence laws as well as industry concerns over the use of forced labour in the production of polysilicon used in solar panels in China’s Xinjiang region.
The post EU weakening of corporate sustainability rules ‘jeopardises’ climate action, critics say appeared first on Climate Home News.
EU weakening of corporate sustainability rules ‘jeopardises’ climate action, critics say
The past three years have been exceptionally warm globally.
In 2023, global temperatures reached a new high, after they significantly exceeded expectations.
This record was surpassed in 2024 – the first year where average global temperatures were 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Now, 2025 is on track to be the second- or third-warmest year on record.
What has caused this apparent acceleration in warming has been subject to a lot of attention in both the media and the scientific community.
Dozens of papers have been published investigating the different factors that could have contributed to these record temperatures.
In 2024, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) discussed potential drivers for the warmth in a special section of its “state of the global climate” report, while the American Geophysical Union ran a session on the topic at its annual meeting.
In this article, Carbon Brief explores four different factors that have been proposed for the exceptional warmth seen in recent years. These are:
- A strong El Niño event that developed in the latter part of 2023.
- Rapid declines in sulphur dioxide emissions – particularly from international shipping and China.
- An unusual volcanic eruption in Tonga in 2022.
- A stronger-than-expected solar cycle.
Carbon Brief’s analysis finds that a combination of these factors explains most of the unusual warmth observed in 2024 and half of the difference between observed and expected warming in 2023.
However, natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate may have also played a role in the exceptional temperatures, alongside signs of declining cloud cover that may have implications for the sensitivity of the climate to human-caused emissions.
An unusually warm three years
Between 1970 and 2014, average surface temperatures rose at a fairly steady rate of around 0.18C per decade.
Set against this long-term trend, temperature increases during the period from 2015 to 2022 were on the upper end of what would be expected.
The increases seen in 2023, 2024 and 2025 were well outside of that range.
The high temperatures of the past three years reflect a broader acceleration in the rate of warming over the past decade.
However, the past three years were unusually warm, even when compared to other years in the 2010s and 2020s.
Record-breaking warmth in 2023 meant that it beat the prior warmest year of 2016 by 0.17C – the largest magnitude of a new record in the past 140 years.
The year 2024 then swiftly broke 2023’s record, becoming the first year where average global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The 10 months of data available for 2025 indicates that the year is likely to be slightly cooler than 2023 – though it is possible it may tie or be slightly warmer.
The figure below shows global surface temperatures between 1970 and 2025. (The figures for 2025 include uncertainty based on the remaining three months of the year.)
It includes a smoothed average based on temperature data for 1970-2022 that takes into account some acceleration of warming – and then extrapolates that smoothed average forward to 2023-25 to determine what the expected temperature for those years would have been. (This follows the approach used in the WMO’s “state of the global climate 2024” report.)
This approach calculates how much warmer the past three years were than would be expected given the long-term trend in temperatures.
It shows that 2023 was around 0.18C warmer than expected, 2024 was a massive 0.25C warmer and 2025 is likely to be 0.11C warmer.
Researchers have identified a number of potential drivers of unexpected warmth over 2023-25. Here, Carbon Brief looks at the evidence for each one.
A weirdly behaving El Niño event
El Niño is a climate pattern of unusually warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the tropical Pacific that naturally occurs every two to seven years. Strong El Niño years generally have warmer global temperatures, with the largest effect generally occurring in the months after El Niño conditions peak (when SSTs reach their highest levels in the tropical Pacific).
A relatively strong El Niño event developed in the latter half of 2023, peaking around November before fading in the spring of 2024.
This event was the fourth-strongest El Niño ever recorded, as measured according to SSTs in the Niño 3.4 region in the central tropical Pacific. However, it was notably weaker than the El Niño events in both 1998 and 2016.
This can be seen in the chart below, which shows the strength of El Niño events (red shading) since the 1980s. (The blue shading indicates La Niña events – the opposite part of the cycle to El Niño, which results in cooler SSTs in the tropical Pacific.)
(It is worth noting that measuring the strength of El Niño events is not entirely straightforward. Other tools used by scientists to monitor changes to El Niño – such as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) multivariate ENSO index – show the 2023-24 event was much weaker than indicated in the Niño 3.4 dataset.)
Global surface air temperatures tend to be elevated by around 0.1-0.2C in the six months after the peak of a strong El Niño event – defined here as when SSTs in the Niño 3.4 region reach 1.5C above normal.
The figure below shows the range of global temperature change for the 12 months before and 22 months after the peak of all 10 strong El Niño events since 1950. The light line represents the average of past strong El Niño events, the dark blue line the temperature change observed during the 2023-24 event and the shaded blue area the 5-95th percentile range.
The figure shows the 2023-24 El Niño was quite unusual compared to other strong El Niño events since 1970. Global temperatures rose to around 0.4C above expected levels – which is on the high side of previous El Niños.
The heat also came early, with high temperatures showing up around four months before the El Niño event peaked. This early heat is unlike any other El Niño event in modern history and is one of the reasons why 2023’s global temperatures were so unexpectedly warm.
Global temperatures remained elevated for a full 18 months after the El Niño peaked, well after conditions in the tropical Pacific shifted into neutral conditions – and even after mild La Niña conditions developed at the end of 2024 and into early 2025.
This figure does not explain how much of this unusual heat was actually caused by El Niño, compared to other factors, but it does suggest that El Niño behaviour alone does not fully explain unusually high temperatures in recent years.
Based on the historical relationship between El Niño and global temperatures, Carbon Brief estimates that El Niño contributed a modest 0.013C to 2023 temperatures and a more substantial 0.128C to 2024 temperatures, albeit with large uncertainties. (See “methodology” section at the end for details.)
However, it is possible that this 2023 estimate is too low. There are some suggestions in the literature that 2023-24 El Niño’s early warmth may have been caused by the rapid transition out of a particularly extended La Niña event. There are indications that temperatures have spiked in similar situations further back in the historical temperature record.
Falling sulphur dioxide emissions
Sulphur dioxide (SO2) is an aerosol that is emitted into the lower atmosphere by the burning of coal and oil. It has a powerful climate cooling effect – Carbon Brief analysis shows that global emissions of SO2 have masked about one-third of historical warming.
Global SO2 emissions have declined around 40% over the past 18 years, as countries have increasingly prioritised reducing air pollution, including through the installation of scrubbers at coal plants.
These declines have been particularly concentrated in China, which has seen a 70% decline in SO2 emissions since 2007. In addition, a rule introduced for international shipping in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has resulted in an 80% decline in the sulphur content of shipping fuel used around the world.
The decline of SO2 emissions is shown in the figure below.
Shipping in particular has been suggested as a potential culprit for recent temperatures, given that ships emit SO2 over oceans where the air tends to be cleaner and so emissions have a bigger effect.
Seven of the eight studies that have explored the temperature impact of the IMO regulations have suggested a relatively modest effect, in the range of 0.03-0.08C. However, one study – led by former NASA scientist Dr James Hansen – calculated a much stronger effect of 0.2C that would explain virtually all the unusual warmth of recent years.
The figure below shows Carbon Brief’s estimate of the global average surface temperature changes caused by the low-sulphur shipping fuel rules, using the estimates produced by all eight studies. The central estimate (dark blue line) is relatively low, at around 0.05C, but the uncertainty range (light blue shading) across the studies remains large.
Overall, Carbon Brief’s analysis finds that around 0.04C of warming over 2020-23 and 0.05C of warming over 2020-24 can be attributed to SO2 declines from shipping and other sources.
However, this approach might slightly overstate the effects of SO2 on the exceptional temperatures of the past three years, as shipping and other SO2 declines would have had some effect on 2021 and 2022 as well.
It is also worth noting that the total effects of SO2 declines on global temperatures have been considerably larger and are estimated to be responsible for around one-quarter of all warming since 2007.
However, these SO2 decreases occurred over a long period of time and do not clearly explain the recent spike in temperatures.
An unusual volcanic eruption in Tonga
In early 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano erupted spectacularly, sending a plume 55km into the atmosphere. This was by far the most explosive volcanic eruption since Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991.
This was a highly unusual volcanic eruption, which vaporised vast amounts of sea water and lofted it high into the atmosphere. Overall, around 146m metric tonnes of water vapour ended up in the stratosphere, which is the layer of the atmosphere above the troposphere.
Water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. While it is short-lived in the lower atmosphere, it can stick around for years in the stratosphere, where it has a significant warming effect on the climate.
The figure below shows the concentration of water vapour in the stratosphere between 2005 and mid-2025. It shows how the 2022 eruption increased atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas by around 15%. More than half the added water vapour has subsequently fallen out of the upper atmosphere.
Most early studies of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano focused specifically on the effects of stratospheric water vapour. These tended to show strong warming in the lower stratosphere and cooling in the middle-to-upper stratosphere, but only a slight warming effect on global surface temperatures of around 0.05C.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai had much lower sulphur emissions than prior explosive eruptions, such as Pinatubo and El Chichon. However it put 0.5–1.5m tonnes of sulphur into the stratosphere – the most from an eruption since Pinatubo.
Studies that included both sulphur and water vapour effects tend to find that the net effect of the eruption on surface temperatures was slight global cooling, concentrated in the southern hemisphere.
By using the estimates published in a 2024 study published in Geophysical Research Letters, which used the FaIR climate emulator model, Carbon Brief estimates that the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption cooled global surface temperatures by -0.01C in 2023 and -0.02C in 2024.
This suggests that the eruption was likely only a minor contributor to recent global surface temperatures.
A stronger-than-expected solar cycle
The source of almost all energy on Earth is the sun. Over hundreds of millions of years, variations in solar output have a big impact on the global climate.
Thankfully, over shorter periods of time the sun is remarkably stable, helping keep the Earth’s climate habitable for life. (Big changes – such as ice ages – have more to do with variations in the Earth’s orbit than changes in solar output.)
However, slight changes in solar output do occur – and when they do, they can influence climate change over shorter periods of time. The most important of these is the roughly 11-year solar cycle, which is linked with the sun’s magnetic field and results in changes in the number of sunspots and amount of solar energy reaching Earth.
The figure below shows a best-estimate of changes in total solar irradiance since 1980, based on satellite observations. Total solar irradiance is a measure of the overall amount of solar energy that reaches the top of the Earth’s atmosphere and is measured in watts per metre squared.
The 11-year solar cycle is relatively modest compared to the sun’s total output, varying only a few watts per metre squared between peak and trough – amounting to around 0.01% of solar output. However, these changes can result in variations of up to 0.1C in global temperatures within a decade.
The most recent solar cycle – solar cycle 25 – began around 2020 and has been the strongest solar cycle measured since 1980. It was stronger than most models had anticipated and likely contributed to around 0.04C global warming in 2023 and 0.07C in 2024.
Putting together the drivers
By combining earlier estimates of different factors contributing to 2023 and 2024 global surface temperatures, about half of 2023’s unusual warmth and almost all of 2024’s unusual warmth can be effectively explained.
This is illustrated in the figure below, which shows the five different factors discussed earlier – El Niño, shipping SO2, Chinese SO2, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and solar cycle changes – along with their respective uncertainties.
The sum of all the factors is shown in the “combined” bar, while the actual warming compared to expectations is shown in red.
The upper chart shows 2023, while the lower one shows 2024.
It is important to note that the first bar includes both El Niño and natural year-to-year variability; the height of the bar reflects the best estimate of El Niño’s effects, while the uncertainty range encompasses year-to-year variability in global temperatures that may be – at least in part – unrelated to El Niño.
The role of natural climate variability
Large natural variability to the Earth’s climate is one of the main reasons why the combined value of the different drivers of expected warmth in 2023 has an uncertainty range that exceeds the observed warming – even though the best-estimate of combined factors only explains half of temperatures.
Or, to put it another way, there is up 0.15C difference in global temperatures year-on-year that cannot be explained solely by El Niño, human-driven global warming, or natural “forcings” – such as volcanoes or variations in solar output.
The figure below shows the difference between actual and expected warming in the global temperature record for every year in the form of a histogram. The vertical zero line represents the expectation given long-term global warming and the other vertical lines indicate the warming seen in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The height of each blue bar represents the number of years over 1850-2024 when the average global temperature was that far (above or below) the expected level of warming.
Based on the range of year-to-year variability, temperatures would be expected to spike as far above the long-term trend as they did in 2023 once every 25 years, on average. The year 2024 would be a one-in-88 year event, whereas 2025 would be a less-unusual, one-in-seven year event.
These likelihoods for the past three years are sensitive to the approach used to determine what the longer-term warming level should be.
In this analysis, Carbon Brief used a local smoothing approach (known as locally estimated scatterplot smoothing) to determine the expected temperatures, following the approach used in the WMO “state of the climate 2024” report.
This approach results in a warming of 1.28C in 2023 and 1.30C in 2024, against which observed temperatures are compared.
Other published estimates put the longer-term warming in 2024 notably higher.
Earlier this year, the scientists behind the “Indicators of Global Climate Change” (IGCC) report estimated that human activity caused 1.36C of recent warming in 2024. They also found a slightly lower overall warming level for 2024 – 1.52C, as opposed to the WMO’s 1.55C – because they looked exclusively at datasets used by IPCC AR6. (This meant estimates from the Copernicus/ECMWF’s ERA5 dataset were not included.)
Based on climate simulations, the IGCC report finds the likelihood of 2024’s warmth to be a one-in-six year event and 2023’s a one-in-four event.
Using the same assumptions as the IGCC, Carbon Brief’s approach calculates that 2024 would be a less-common, one-in-18 year event.
However, the IGCC estimate of current human-induced warming is based on the latest estimates of human and natural factors warming the climate. That means that it already accounts for additional warming from low-sulphur shipping fuel, East Asian aerosols and other factors discussed above.
Therefore, the results from these two analyses are not necessarily inconsistent: natural climate variability (including El Niño) played a key role – but this came in addition to other factors. Natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate alone would have been unlikely to result in the extreme global temperatures seen in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
A cloudy picture
Even if unusual recent global warmth can be mostly attributed to a combination of El Niño, falling SO2 emissions, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, solar cycle changes and natural climate variability, there are a number of questions that remain unanswered.
Most important is what the record warmth means for the climate going forward. Is it likely to revert to the long-term average warming level, or does it reflect an acceleration in the underlying rate of warming – and, if so, what might its causes be?
As explained by Carbon Brief in a 2023 article, climate models have suggested that warming will speed up. Some of this acceleration is built into the analysis presented here, which includes a slightly faster rate of warming in recent years than has characterised the period since 1970.
But there are broader questions about what – beyond declining SO2 and other aerosols – is driving this acceleration.
Research recently published in the journal Science offered some potential clues. It found a significant decline in planetary reflectivity – known as albedo – over the past decade, associated with a reduced low-level cloud cover that is unprecedented in the satellite record.
The authors suggest it could be due to a combination of three different factors: natural climate variability, changing SO2 and other aerosol emissions and the effects of global warming on cloud reflectivity.
Natural climate variability seems unlikely to have played a major role in reduced cloud cover, given that it was relatively stable until 2015. However, it is hard to fully rule it out given the relatively short satellite record.
Reductions in SO2 emissions are expected to reduce cloud reflectivity, but the magnitude of the observed cloud reflectivity changes are much larger than models simulate.
Models might be underestimating the impact of aerosols on the climate. But, if this were the case, it would indicate that climate sensitivity might be on the higher end of the range of model estimates, because models that simulate stronger aerosol cooling effects tend to have higher climate sensitivity.
Finally, cloud cover might be changing and becoming less reflective as a result of warming. Cloud responses to climate change are one of the largest drivers of uncertainty in future warming. One of the main reasons that some climate models find a higher climate sensitivity is due to their simulation of less-reflective clouds in a warming world.
The Science study concludes that the 2023 heat “may be here to stay” if the cloud-related albedo decline was not “solely” caused by natural variability. This would also suggest the Earth’s climate sensitivity may be closer to the upper range of current estimates, it notes.
Methodology
Carbon Brief built on work previously published in the IGCC 2024 and WMO state of the global climate 2024 reports that explores the role of different factors in the extreme temperatures in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The impact of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the temperatures was estimated using a linear regression of the annual mean global temperature anomaly on the Feb/Mar Niño 3.4 index. This resulted in an impact of −0.07C, 0.01C and 0.13C for 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively (with a 95% confidence interval of ±0.13 ºC).
It is important to note that the uncertainties in the ENSO response estimated here also incorporate other sources of unforced internal (modes of variability in other basins such as AMV), and potentially some forced variability. The bar in the combined figure is labelled “El Niño and variability” to reflect this.
For details on calculations of the temperature impact of shipping and Chinese SO2 declines, see Carbon Brief’s explainer on the climate impact of changing aerosol emissions.
Solar cycle 25 was both slightly earlier and slightly stronger than prior expectations with a total solar irradiance anomaly of 0.97 watts per metre squared in 2023 relative to the mean of the prior 20 years. This resulted in an estimated radiative forcing of approximately 0.17 watts per metre squared and an estimated global surface temperature increase of 0.07C (0.05C to 0.10C) with a one- to two-year lag based on a 2015 study. Thus, the impact on 2023 and 2024 is around 0.04C and 0.07C, respectively (+/- 0.025C). This is a bit higher warming than is given by the FaIR model, as the 2015 study is based on global models that have ozone responses to the UV changes, which amplifies the temperature effects a bit.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption added both SO2 and water vapour to the stratosphere (up to 55km in altitude). The rapid oxidation of SO2 to sulphate aerosol dominated the radiative forcing for the first two years after the eruption. As a result, the net radiative forcing at the tropopause was likely negative; −0.04 watts per metre squared and −0.15 watts per metre squared in 2022 and 2023, respectively, implying a temperature impact of -0.02C (-0.01C to -0.03C) calculated using the FaIR model.
The post Analysis: What are the causes of recent record-high global temperatures? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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