A controversial way of measuring how much methane warms the planet has stirred debate in recent years – particularly around assessing the climate impact of livestock farming.
The metric – known as GWP* (global warming potential star) – was designed to more precisely account for the warming impact of short-lived greenhouse gases, such as methane.
No country so far has used GWP* to measure emissions, but New Zealand is currently considering its use.
In June, a group of climate scientists from around the world wrote an open letter advising against this.
They argued that the metric “creates the expectation that current high levels of methane emissions are allowed to continue”.
Climate experts tell Carbon Brief that there is “no strong debate” on the science behind GWP* and that it can accurately assess the global warming effect of methane.
But many experts also firmly caution against its use in national climate targets, believing it could allow countries to prolong high levels of emissions at a time when they should be drastically cut.
Some researchers tell Carbon Brief that GWP* is an “accounting trick” and a “get-out-of-jail-free card for methane emitters”. A 2021 Bloomberg article called the metric “fuzzy methane math”.
Prof Myles Allen, one of the scientists who created GWP*, tells Carbon Brief that the metric is “nothing more” than one way of better understanding the climate impact of different actions as part of efforts to limit warming under the Paris Agreement.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explains the science behind GWP*, why the metric is so divisive and the ways in which its use has been considered.
- What is GWP*?
- What are the main controversies around using GWP*?
- Do any countries currently use GWP* to measure methane emissions?
- What do experts think about the use of GWP*?
What is GWP*?
Global warming is caused by a build up of greenhouse gases – mainly from burning fossil fuels – trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Different gases cause differing levels of warming and remain in the atmosphere for varying lengths of time. For example, carbon dioxide (CO2), the main contributor to warming, lingers for centuries, whereas other gases last decades or even millennia.
To account for these variables, scientists use a metric known as global warming potential (GWP), which assesses the warming caused by different gases compared to CO2, which has a GWP of 1.
Using GWP, emissions of other gases are calculated in terms of their “CO2 equivalent” over a given amount of time.
In their reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set out three GWP variants measured over 20 years (GWP20), 100 years (GWP100) and 500 years (GWP500).
GWP100 is the most common approach and is used to calculate emissions under the Paris Agreement.
Methane is a short-lived gas that only remains in the atmosphere for around 12 years before breaking down. But it causes a large burst of initial warming that is around 80 times more powerful than CO2, according to the IPCC.
This means that one tonne of methane causes the same amount of warming as around 80 tonnes of CO2, when measured over a period of 20 years.
When calculated over 100 years, methane’s shorter lifetime means it causes around 30 times more warming than CO2.
Some experts have criticised the use of GWP100, saying it does not sufficiently account for the fact that methane leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2 and does not actually last for 100 years. This is the issue that GWP* was designed to fix.
GWP* calculates the warming contributions of long- and short-lived gases at different rates, accounting for their varying lifetimes in the atmosphere.
One of the researchers behind GWP*, Dr Michelle Cain, explained in a 2018 Carbon Brief guest post that a constant rate of methane emissions can maintain stable atmospheric concentrations of the gas, assuming methane sinks remain constant as well.
In contrast, a constant rate of CO2 emissions “leads to year-on-year increases in warming, because the CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere”, Cain wrote. CO2 does not leave the atmosphere after a decade or so, as methane does, and continues to build over time until emissions stop.
Cain, formerly a researcher at the University of Oxford and now a senior lecturer at Cranfield University, added:
“For countries with high methane emissions – due to, say, agriculture – this can make a huge difference to how their progress in emission reductions is judged.”
Methane emissions that slowly decline or remain stable over time are calculated as contributing “no additional warming” to the planet, which is not the case with other GWP calculations.
The chart below shows simplified emissions scenarios for CO2 and methane, highlighting the different impacts they have on global warming over time.
The chart below shows how using the two different metrics – GWP* and GWP100 – affects the same emissions pathway throughout the 21st century, given the different warming impacts of greenhouse gases.
If, for example, a country emitted 4m tonnes of methane annually from 1990-2005, these emissions would now be considered “climate-neutral” using GWP*, as they are not actively contributing new warming to the atmosphere, but rather maintaining the existing levels of methane in the atmosphere in 1990.
This would not be the case under GWP100, which looks at the warming potential of emissions over the course of a century and does not account for their different atmospheric lifetimes.
GWP* can be used for other short-lived gases, such as some hydrofluorocarbons, but methane is the most significant short-lived gas when it comes to climate change.
The IPCC notes that converting methane emissions into CO2 equivalent using GWP100 “overstates the effect of constant methane emissions on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4” and understates the impact of new methane emissions “by a factor of 4-5 over the 20 years following the introduction of the new source”.
GWP* was created by several researchers, including Prof Myles Allen, the head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics at the University of Oxford. The concept was detailed in a 2016 study and first named in a 2018 study. It was further updated by the authors in 2019 and 2020.
Allen tells Carbon Brief that the researchers involved were “reluctant” to give their new metric a name, as it “was just a way of using reported numbers to calculate warming impact”. He adds:
“I think it’s really unfortunate that people have latched onto GWP*. It doesn’t matter. We could forget about GWP* entirely, we can just use a climate model to work out the warming impact…GWP* is a handy way of calculating the warming impact of activities. Nothing more.”
What are the main controversies around using GWP*?
Efforts to cut methane emissions are widely viewed as a “quick-win” to help limit the effects of climate change in the short term.
More than 100 countries signed a pledge, launched at COP26 in 2021, to cut global methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
Cutting methane would also help to counteract an acceleration in warming due to declining aerosol emissions, which are currently masking around half a degree of warming.
Experts Carbon Brief spoke to agree on the importance of cutting methane emissions, but disagree on whether GWP* helps or hinders these efforts.
The debate around the metric centres on the possible impacts of its use, rather than the soundness of the science behind it.
Prof Joeri Rogelj, a climate science and policy professor at Imperial College London, explains:
“At the global level, at any level, the method of GWP* actually provides a good, new way to translate the trajectory of methane emissions into equivalent emissions of CO2, or emissions of CO2 that would have an equivalent warming effect…The debate is on the application.”
Allen says he is a “little frustrated” that discussions around the use of GWP* have “become so emotive”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Every action we take has both a temporary impact on global temperature and a permanent one. How much is in both areas depends on the action. We need to know those two things in order to make decisions about choices of action in pursuit of a temperature goal…GWP* gives you a handy way of doing that.”
Below, Carbon Brief details some of the main discussion points and controversies around GWP*.
Carbon cycle
A misleading claim frequently made about livestock is that cows do not contribute much to global warming because the methane they emit eventually returns to the land through the carbon cycle – the set of processes in which carbon is exchanged between the atmosphere, land and ocean, as well as the organisms they contain.
Those in favour of using GWP* to measure methane emissions often also stress the difference between methane emissions that come from animals – known as biogenic methane – and methane from fossil fuels.
Rogelj tells Carbon Brief that biogenic and fossil-sourced methane are “slightly different, but that difference is really second-order” when it comes to climate change.
Methane warms the planet while it is in the atmosphere, so the “climate effect is exactly the same, irrespective of which source the methane comes from”, Rogelj adds.
The differences become more significant when methane breaks down in the atmosphere and oxidises into water vapour and CO2.
CO2 that originated from a cow can be reabsorbed by plants and the land. But the CO2 resulting from fossil methane – which stems from sources such as flaring from oil and gas drilling – stays in the atmosphere. Although fossil methane has a “bit of a longer effect”, Rogelj says:
“This is a bit of a red herring, because the main effect is, of course, the effect that the methane has while it is methane and not what the carbon molecule of that methane has after [the] methane has been broken down or oxidised to CO2.”
He adds that there are ways of reducing agricultural methane, such as “diet change” or “management measures”, but no way to remove the emissions “100%”.
The graphic below shows the digestive process through which a cow emits methane.
Agriculture also causes other significant environmental harms. It is responsible for around 80% of global deforestation and is a key driver of biodiversity loss and water pollution.
Prof Frank Mitloehner, a professor and air-quality specialist at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), is one of the main proponents of GWP*, frequently speaking about it in public presentations and discussions with the farming sector.
He tells Carbon Brief that, while animal agriculture can cause environmental harm, it is a “silly argument” to say these impacts are being ignored in carbon-cycle discussions.
He gives an example of discussions on deaths from car accidents excluding mentions of the emissions from cars, saying that these wider impacts are still important and can be discussed separately.
He adds that it is an “urban myth” that biogenic methane emissions are not a concern because of the carbon cycle.
‘No additional warming’
Under GWP*, methane emissions stop causing new warming once they reduce by 10% over the course of 30 years – around 3% each decade, or 0.3% each year.
These emissions are then described in research and policy as causing “no additional warming”.
For example, a 2021 study from Mitloehner and other UC Davis researchers, found that methane emissions from the US cattle industry “have not contributed additional warming since 1986”, based on GWP* calculations. It also said that the dairy industry in California “will approach climate neutrality” by the 2030s, if methane emissions are cut by just 1% annually.
(According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, methane emissions from enteric fermentation – the digestive process through which cows produce the greenhouse gas – increased by more than 5% over 1990-2022.)
However, many critics take issue with the “no additional warming” concept.
The main criticism is that, although a gradually reducing herd of cattle may stabilise methane emissions, it still emits the polluting gas. If animal numbers were instead drastically reduced, this would cut methane emissions and lower warming rather than maintaining current levels.
Dr Caspar Donnison, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, says the term no additional warming is “absolutely misleading” in the context of GWP*. He tells Carbon Brief:
“You just assume, on the face of it, that this means it has a neutral impact on the climate…But ‘no additional warming’ means that you’re still sustaining the warming that the herd is causing.”
Allen says that the debate focuses on the “stock of warming versus additional warming”. He compares it to accounting for historical emissions of CO2:
“If a country got rich by burning CO2, they’ve caused a lot of warming in the past. If they reduce their CO2 emissions to zero, then people are generally happy to call what they’re doing climate-neutral, even though they may be sitting on a huge heap of historical warming caused by their CO2 emissions while they were burning [fossil fuels].
“And yet, temperature-wise, that’s exactly the same thing as having a source of methane that’s declining by 3% per decade.”
Climate ambition
Another criticism around the use of GWP* is that countries or companies with high agricultural methane emissions could use the metric to make small emission reductions appear larger.
Dr Donal Murphy-Bokern, an independent agricultural and environmental scientist, believes that the metric can be used as a “get-out-of-jail-free card for methane emitters”. He adds:
“It’s all about saying carry on as we are; we’ll manage this by slightly reducing our emissions over a critical period in history, so as to appear at that critical period in history to be so-called ‘climate-neutral’.”
Mitloehner disagrees with this, noting that, while reductions in methane emissions appear significant under GWP*, increases also appear significant. He says:
“It is simply not true that GWP* is a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s not. If you reduce emissions, it makes your contributions look less. If you increase emissions, it makes your contributions much worse.”
Rogelj says he has not seen GWP* being used to advocate for the “highest possible ambition” in cutting methane emissions.
However, Allen says that “no metric tells you what to do”. He adds:
“How you measure emissions and how you measure warming has absolutely no bearing on whether you think a country has an obligation to undo some of the damage to the climate they’ve caused in the past.
“This is where the ‘free-pass’ argument makes no sense to me, because the existence of a method to calculate the warming impact of your emissions allows you to make decisions about emissions in light of their warming impact, sure, but it doesn’t tell you what the outcomes of those decisions should be.”
Allen adds that the livestock sector is “unsustainable globally”, with animal numbers and methane levels still rising.
The chart below shows how atmospheric methane concentrations have increased in recent decades.
Allen tells Carbon Brief:
“Do we need to eliminate livestock agriculture to stop global warming? No…[but] we do need to start decreasing it. And if we can decrease it faster than 3% per decade then that would help reduce warming that’s caused by other sectors or, indeed, undo some of the warming that the livestock sector has caused in the past.”
Mitloehner says considerations on the fairness of using GWP* are “real from a policy standpoint and they have to be addressed from a policy standpoint”. He adds:
“But, from a scientific standpoint – and that’s where I’m coming from – I think it’s not controversial.”
Baseline and historical emissions
The baseline year from which emissions reduction targets are set is significant, as it helps form the scope of climate ambition.
For example, high-emitting countries, such as the UK, have set 1990 as their baseline year for emissions-cutting targets, whereas many low-emitting countries may choose further back or more recent years, depending on their needs. Rogelj says:
“Because GWP* translates a change in emissions into either an instantaneous emission or instantaneous removal of CO2, your starting point becomes really important.
“If you start with very high emissions of methane and you did not in any way account for this high starting point, then even very minor, unambitious reductions in methane would result in creating credits for high-polluting countries.”
However, he notes that this is just one way of applying the metric and that there could be ways to avoid this “inequitable outcome”, such as applying GWP* globally and allocating each country a per-capita methane budget, instead of assessing based on national current or past emissions. (Rogelj and Prof Carl-Friedrich Schleussner discussed other possible GWP* equity measures in a 2019 study.)
The chart below, adapted from that study, shows how GWP* can significantly change the per-capita methane emissions of different countries. Some countries with high agricultural methane emissions, such as New Zealand, change from high to low per-capita emitters.
A 2025 study used a climate model to quantify future national warming contributions for Ireland under different emissions scenarios and found that “no additional warming” approaches, such as GWP*, are “not a robust basis for fair and effective national climate policy”.
Discussing baseline concerns, Allen says these considerations are the same for any other metric:
“It depends on how much account you want to take of [the] warming you’ve caused in the past – and at what point you want to take responsibility for the warming your actions had caused.”
He believes that most climate experts agree that it is good to understand the impact emissions have on global temperatures, but “where the controversy arises is about what you consider someone’s nominal emissions to be today”. He adds:
“This is where everybody gets upset, because if you use GWP*, then a livestock sector that’s reducing its emissions by 3% per decade – which most global-north livestock sectors are doing – it looks like their emissions are quite small.
“But that’s only a problem if you think that the main issue is working out whose fault global warming is, rather than working out what we should do about it.”
Communication
Many experts Carbon Brief spoke to took issue with how GWP* has been discussed by some of its proponents.
Murphy-Bokern criticises how Mitloehner and other experts communicate the metric. He says:
“The confusion arises from the activities of Mitloehner, in particular, where he presents the farming community – and the industry in general – with the idea that you can magic away the warming effect of methane simply by looking at the rate of change of methane emissions.”
Mitloehner says he has no regrets about his communication of GWP*, adding that he has “always emphasised to the livestock sector that reductions of methane are important”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“I’m proud because I have been able to take the livestock sector along with the understanding that reductions are needed and that they can be part of a solution if they understand that.”
The New York Times reported in 2022 that the research centre led by Mitloehner at the University of California, Davis “receives almost all its funding from industry donations and coordinates with a major livestock lobby group on messaging campaigns”. Other reports note his discussions about GWP* with stakeholders in various countries.
In response to these reports, Mitloehner says he believes it is important to work with the sector you are researching, adding that he receives both public and private funding. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The problem is not that they [the meat industry] are investing in research and communications and extension. The problem is that they are not putting in enough, because the public sector is withdrawing from this.
“Climate research is being slashed…If the government is not paying into research to quantify and reduce emissions – and those people who are critical of what we do say ‘oh, industry shouldn’t do it’ – then, I ask you, who should?”
Colin Woodall, the chief executive of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a US lobby group, said in 2022 that GWP* is the “methodology we need to make sure everybody is utilising in order to tell the true story of methane”, Unearthed reported. According to the outlet, he added:
“We’re working with our partners around the globe to ensure that everybody is working towards adoption of GWP*.”
Asked if he regrets anything about his communication of GWP*, Allen tells Carbon Brief:
“When we first introduced this – and, perhaps, this is one thing I do regret – I was, perhaps, a little naive in that I thought everybody would seize on focusing on [the] warming impact because it was, from a policy perspective, potentially much easier for the agricultural sector.
“I thought that this would actually be welcomed. But, sadly, it’s not been. And I think part of that is because of this narrative of blame.”
Do any countries currently use GWP* to measure methane emissions?
GWP* is not yet used by any country in methane emission reporting or targets. But it has been considered by New Zealand, Ireland and other nations with high agricultural emissions.
A 2024 statement from dozens of NGOs and environmental organisations called for countries and companies not to use GWP* in their greenhouse gas reporting or to guide their climate mitigation policies. They wrote:
“The risks of GWP* significantly outweigh the benefits.”
New Zealand
New Zealand is currently considering changing its biogenic methane target, including applying the “no additional warming” approach used in GWP*. If it does so, it could become the first country to adopt GWP*.
The nation is a major livestock producer and agriculture generates nearly half of all its greenhouse gas emissions.
The chart below shows that the agricultural sector is also responsible for more than 90% of the country’s methane emissions.
New Zealand has a legally binding target to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. However, biogenic methane has separate targets to reduce by 10% by 2030 and by 24-47% by 2050, compared to a baseline of 2017 levels.
In late 2024, a review from the nation’s Climate Change Commission recommended that the government change its 2050 greenhouse gas targets, including to increase the biogenic methane goal to a 35-47% reduction by 2050.
At the same time, an independent panel commissioned by the New Zealand government reviewed how the country’s climate targets would look under the “no additional warming” approach.
The resulting report, which did not look specifically at GWP*, but used a similar concept, found that a 14-15% cut in biogenic methane by 2050 would be “consistent with meeting the ‘no additional warming’ condition”, under mid-range global emissions scenarios that keep temperatures below 2C.
The government is “currently considering” these findings, a spokesperson for the Ministry for the Environment tells Carbon Brief in a statement.
The spokesperson says that the report is “part of the body of evidence” that the government will use in its response to the Climate Change Commission’s review, which it must publish by November 2025.
Cain, the Cranfield University lecturer who co-created GWP*, wrote in Climate Home News in 2019 that New Zealand reducing biogenic methane by 24% would “offset the warming impact” of the rest of the country’s emissions, adding:
“New Zealand could declare itself climate-neutral almost immediately, well before 2050 and only because farmers were reducing their methane emissions. That’s a free pass to all the other sectors, courtesy of New Zealand’s farmers.”
A report on GWP* by the Changing Markets Foundation found that, in 2020, 16 industry groups in New Zealand and the UK “urged” the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to use GWP* to assess warming impacts.
Australia
The Guardian reported in May 2024 that Cattle Australia, a cattle producer trade group, was “lobbying the red-meat sector to ditch its net-zero target in favour of a ‘climate-neutral’ goal that would require far more modest reductions in methane emissions”.
Cattle Australia’s senior adviser and former chief executive, Dr Chris Parker, tells Carbon Brief in a statement that the organisation is “working with the Australian government to ensure methane emissions within the biogenic carbon cycle are appropriately accounted for in our national accounting systems”. He adds:
“We believe GWP* offers a more accurate way of assessing methane’s temporary place in the atmosphere and its impact on the climate. Australian cattle producers are part of the climate solution and we need policy settings to enable them to participate in carbon markets.”
Australia’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water did not respond to Carbon Brief’s request for comment.
Ireland
Internal documents assessed for the Changing Markets Foundation’s GWP* report “suggest” that Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has advocated for GWP* “at the international level”, including at the UN’s COP26 climate summit in 2021.
Allen and Mitloehner were involved in a 2022 Irish parliamentary discussion on methane, in which Allen advocated for the country to “be a policy pioneer” by using GWP* in its methane reporting alongside standard methods.
The country’s coalition government, formed earlier this year, pledged to “recognise the distinct characteristics of biogenic methane” and also “advocate for the accounting of this greenhouse gas to be re-classified at EU and international level”.
A spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine tells Carbon Brief that this does not refer to using GWP* specifically. They say the country is “in favour of using accurate, scientifically validated and internationally accepted emission measurement metrics”, adding:
“It is important that the nature of how biogenic methane interacts in the environment is accurately reflected in how it is accounted for. This does not mean the use of the metric GWP*.”
In December 2024, Ireland’s Climate Change Advisory Council proposed temperature neutrality pathway options to the government that do not specifically refer to GWP*, but use the same concept of no “additional warming”.
The Irish Times reported that this was “in part to reduce potential disruption from Ireland’s legal commitment to achieve national ‘climate neutrality’ by 2050”.
The climate and energy minister, Darragh O’Brien, said he has “not formed a definitive view” on this, the newspaper noted, and that expert views will feed into ongoing discussions on the 2031-40 carbon budgets, which are due to be finalised later in 2025.
In an Irish Times opinion article, Prof Hannah Daly from University College Cork, described the temperature neutrality consideration as “one of the most consequential climate decisions this government will make”. She wrote that the approach “amounts to a free pass for continued high emissions” of livestock methane.
Paraguay
Paraguay mentioned GWP* in a national submission to the UN in 2023 after agribusiness representatives “pushed” to adopt the metric, according to Consenso, a Paraguayan online newsletter.
The country’s National Directorate of Climate Change told Consenso for a separate article related to GWP* that it is “aware” of questions around the metric, but that it “has the option of using other measurement systems” for emissions reporting.
UK
The National Farmers’ Union, the main farming representative group in England and Wales, is in favour of using GWP* to measure agricultural methane emissions.
Carbon Brief understands that the UK government is not currently considering using GWP* in addition to, or instead of, GWP100 in its emissions reporting.
What do experts think about the use of GWP*?
Most experts Carbon Brief spoke to agreed that GWP* could be a useful metric to apply to global methane emissions, but that it is difficult to apply equitably in individual countries or sectors. Rogelj believes that are are some contexts in which GWP* could be used, but adds:
“You cannot just take targets that were set and discussed historically with one greenhouse gas metric in mind – GWP100 under the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework on Climate Change] and the Paris Agreement and all that – [and] then simply apply a different metric to it. They change meaning entirely.
“So, if one would like to use GWP*, one should build the policy targets and frameworks from the ground up to take advantage of the strengths of that metric, but also put in place safeguards that ensure that the weaknesses and limitations of that metric do not result in unfair or undesirable outcomes.”
A 2022 study says that using GWP* in climate plans “would ask countries to start from scratch in terms of their political target setting processes”, calling it a “bold ask” for policymakers.
It adds that achieving net-zero emissions, as measured with GWP*, “would only lead to a stabilisation of temperatures at their peak level”.
However, a 2024 study found that GWP* gives a “dynamic” assessment of the warming impact of emissions that “better aligns with temperature goals” than GWP100, when measuring methane emissions from agriculture.
Allen believes that criticism over the use of GWP* is similar to “saying it’s a meaningless question” to consider the warming impact of a country or company’s actions. He adds:
“That seems a very strange position to me, because we need to know how different activities are contributing to global warming because we have a temperature target.
“In saying GWP* is a bad thing, what people are actually saying is it’s a bad thing to know the warming impact of our actions, which is a very strange thing to say.”
He says that such metrics help countries to make informed decisions on climate action, but that “we can’t expect metrics to make these decisions for us”.
Murphy-Bokern notes that GWP* could be useful in modelling global, rather than national, methane emissions to avoid high-emitting countries making small methane cuts to achieve “no additional warming”, rather than significantly reducing these emissions.
He says the metric would be particularly useful if global emissions were close to zero, as a way to target the final remaining emissions. But, he adds:
“We are so far away from that very happy situation, that the discussion now with GWP* is a huge distraction from the key objective, which is to reduce emissions.”
Mitloehner – and every expert Carbon Brief spoke with – agrees with this wider point. He says:
“The main point is we need to reduce emissions. In the case of livestock, we need to reduce methane emissions. And the question is how do we get it done? And how do we quantify the impacts that [that reduction] would have accurately and fairly? The other issues are issues that politicians have to answer.”
The post Q&A: What the ‘controversial’ GWP* methane metric means for farming emissions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What the ‘controversial’ GWP* methane metric means for farming emissions
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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