A record-breaking amount of new offshore wind capacity has been secured at the UK’s latest auction for renewable energy projects.
Five fixed-foundation projects, amounting to 8.25 gigawatts (GW), secured fixed-price “contracts for difference” (CfDs) to supply electricity for an average of £91 per megawatt hour (MWh).
Additionally, two floating offshore wind projects with a combined capacity of 192.5 megawatts (MW) won contracts, securing a “strike price” of £216/MWh.
This new capacity, totalling 8.4GW, marks a significant increase from last year’s sixth auction, when 5.3GW had been secured as part of a bounce back from the “failed” fifth round.
While the latest auction saw offshore wind prices rising by around 10% since the previous round, analysis suggests that the outcome will, nevertheless, be roughly “cost neutral” for consumers.
Contrary to simplistic and misleading comparisons made by some opposition politicians and media commentators, this is because CfD payments would be balanced by lower wholesale costs.
The government welcomed the “stonking” results, saying that it put the country “on track” to reach its 2030 targets for clean power, create jobs and bring new investment.
Below, Carbon Brief looks at the auction results, what they mean for bills and the implications for the UK’s target of “clean power by 2030”.
- What happened in the seventh CfD auction round?
- What does the record offshore-wind auction mean for bills?
- What does AR7 mean for reaching clean power by 2030?
What happened in the seventh CfD auction round (AR7)?
The UK government announced the results of the seventh auction round (AR7) for new CfDs on 14 January 2026, hailing the outcome as a “historic win”.
The CfD scheme was introduced in 2014 and offers fixed-price contracts to generators via a “reverse auction” process. The first auction was held in 2015.
Projects bid to secure contracts to sell electricity at a fixed “strike price” in the future.
If wholesale prices are lower than this set amount, the project receives a payment that makes up the difference.
However, if the market prices are higher than this level, then the project pays back the difference to consumers. For example, according to a report from thinktank Onward, between November 2021 and January 2022, CfD projects paid back £114.4m to consumers.
For the seventh auction round, the results have been split into two, as part of reforms to help expedite the process for offshore wind. As such, the publication of results on 14 January covers fixed-foundation offshore wind and floating offshore wind.
A second set of results will be released between 6-9 February 2026, covering technologies including large-scale solar and onshore wind.
A total of 17 fixed-foundation offshore wind projects totalling 24.8GW of capacity were competing for contracts at this auction, meaning many have missed out.
Still, a record 8.4GW of offshore wind secured contracts, making it the biggest ever offshore wind auction in Europe, according to industry group WindEurope.
This includes 8,245 megawatts (MW) of fixed-foundation offshore wind and 192.5MW of floating offshore wind, which, collectively, will generate enough to power more than 12m homes.
As such, there was an increase of more than 3GW in offshore wind capacity compared to the sixth allocation round, as shown in the chart below.
(The 2.4GW Hornsea 4 scheme, which had been awarded a CfD at the previous auction round, went on to be cancelled in May 2025, with developer Ørsted citing cost inflation.)
This follows on from the “fiasco” of the fifth allocation round in 2023, where no offshore-wind projects secured contracts due to the limit on prices set by the government.
Carbon Brief analysis suggests that the capacity secured in the latest auction will generate around 37 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity each year, around 12% of the nation’s total demand.
With onshore wind and solar results still to come, this means that projects with CfDs will generate some 135TWh of power by the time they are all completed, or nearly half of current demand.
When the current Labour government took office in 2024, a number of changes were made to encourage offshore wind capacity bids. This included separating the technology from solar and onshore wind into a separate “pot”, an allowance for “permitted reduction” projects in AR6 and a significant increase to the “budget” for the auction overall.
Since then, there have been continued reforms to help meet the government’s target of decarbonising power supplies by 2030. (See: What does AR7 mean for clean power by 2030.)
This includes extending the contracts from 15 years to 20 years, relaxing eligibility requirements related to planning consent and legislating to allow the secretary of state for energy – currently, Ed Miliband – to see anonymised bid information ahead of setting a final budget for that technology.
Initially, the government set a total budget of £900m for fixed-foundation offshore wind projects and £180m for floating offshore wind.
The budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind projects was then raised to £1,790m.
(Note that the “budget” is a notional limit on the amount of CfD levies that can be added to consumer electricity bills. This does not come from government coffers and – as explained below – it does not translate into an equivalent increase in consumer costs, because CfD projects also reduce wholesale electricity prices, which make up the bulk of bills.)
Ahead of the auction, the maximum “administrative” strike price was set at £113/MWh for offshore wind and £271/MWh for floating offshore wind.
The four winning fixed-foundation offshore wind projects in England and Wales secured a strike price of £91.20/MWh in 2024 prices and the one in Scotland £89.49/MWh, as shown in the table below. This comes out at a blended average of £90.91/MWh.
| Projects (fixed-foundation) | Capacity (MW) | Owners | Strike price (2024 prices) | Delivery year (phase one) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awel y Mor | 775 | RWE, SWM, Siemens Financial Services | £91.20/MWh | 2030/31 |
| Dogger Bank South | 3,000 | RWE, Masdar | £91.20/MWh | 2030/2031 |
| Norfolk Vanguard East | 1,545 | RWE | £91.20/MWh | 2029/2030 |
| Norfolk Vanguard West | 1,545 | RWE | £91.20/MWh | 2028/2029 |
| Berwick Bank | 1,380 | SSE Renewables | £89.49/MWh | 2030/2031 |
The two floating offshore-wind projects will see a strike price of £216.46/MWh, shown below.
| Projects (floating) | Capacity | Owners | Strike price (2024 prices) | Delivery year (phase one) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pentland | 92.5 | CIP, Eurus Energy, Hexicon | £216.46/MWh | 2029/2030 |
| Erebus | 100 | TotalEnergies, Simply Blue Energy | £216.46/MWh | 2029/2030 |
These prices are around 19% below the maximum level set ahead of the auction – a figure that had been cited by opposition politicians as “proof” that the round would be a “bad deal” for consumers.
Successful projects include RWE’s Awel Y Mor (775MW), the first Welsh project to win a CfD contract in more than a decade.
Dogger Bank South in Yorkshire and Norfolk Vanguard in East Anglia – which will be two of the largest offshore windfarms in the world – at 3GW and 3.1GW, respectively – both secured contracts.
Additionally, Berwick Bank in the North Sea became the first new Scottish project to win a CfD since 2022. At 4.1GW, the project being developed by SSE Renewables is the largest planned offshore-wind project in the world.
The projects are located around the UK, which is expected to ease grid connections. Nick Civetta, project leader at Aurora Energy Research, noted in a statement:
“83% of the capacity connects in areas of high power demand and greater network capacity, lowering the cost of managing the system.”
In terms of companies, German developer RWE has dominated the auction outcome, with 6.9GW of the capacity being developed overall.
What does the record offshore-wind auction mean for bills?
The auction results arrive at a moment of intense interest in energy bills, which remain significantly higher than before the global energy crisis in 2022.
The government, along with much of the energy industry, said the new offshore wind projects would lower bills, relative to the alternative of relying on more gas.
Meanwhile opposition politicians and right-leaning media used misleading figures to argue that gas power is cheap or that the new offshore wind projects would add large costs to bills.
Broadly speaking, there is some evidence to suggest that electricity bills will rise over the years to 2030 – largely as a result of investment in the grid – before starting to decline.
However, this is the case whether the UK pushes forward with its efforts to expand clean power or not – and is mainly dependent on the timing of electricity network investments and the price of gas.
At the same time, electricity demand is starting to rise as the economy electrifies – as shown in the figure below – and many of the UK’s existing power plants are nearing the end of their lives.
This means that new electricity generation will be needed, whether from offshore wind, gas-fired power stations or from other sources.
Adam Berman, director of policy and advocacy at industry group Energy UK, said ahead of the auction that renewables were the “cheapest” source of new supplies.
Similarly, Pranav Menon, senior associate at consultancy Aurora Energy Research, tells Carbon Brief that the key question is how to meet rising demand most cost-effectively. He says:
“Here, it is quite clear that the answer is renewables (up to a certain price and volume), given that new-build gas is much more expensive…(even after accounting for costs and intermittency for renewables).”
The government said that the price for offshore wind secured through AR7 was “40% lower than the cost of building and operating a new gas power plant”. It added:
“Britain has taken a monumental step towards ending the country’s reliance on volatile fossil fuels and lowering bills for good, by delivering a record-breaking offshore wind result in its latest renewables auction.”
In a similar vein, Dhara Vyas, head of Energy UK said in a statement that the results would “deliver lower bills”. She added:
“Today’s auction results will deliver critical national infrastructure that will strengthen our energy security and deliver lower bills, as well as provide jobs, investment and economic growth right across Great Britain.”
These statements rely on updated government estimates of the cost of different electricity-generating technologies, published alongside the auction results.
They also rely on two studies published by Aurora and another consultancy, Baringa, both commissioned by renewable energy firms involved in the auction.
The government’s new cost estimates reflect the inflationary pressures that have hit turbines for gas-fired generation, as well as offshore wind supply chains.
Carbon Brief analysis of the latest and previous figures suggests that the government thinks the cost of building a gas-fired power station has more than doubled. (Reports from the US point to even steeper three-fold increases in gas turbine costs.)
As such, building and operating new gas-fired power stations would be relatively expensive, at £147/MWh, according to the government. (This assumes the gas plant would only be operating during 30% of hours in each year, in line with the current UK fleet.)
While the offshore wind prices secured in AR7 are around 10% higher than in AR6, at £91/MWh, they would still be considerably lower than the cost of a new gas plant.
However, these figures for new gas and for offshore wind in AR7 do not reflect the wider system costs of keeping the electricity grid running at all times.
In late 2025, Baringa concluded that a strike price of up to £94.50/MWh for up to 8GW of offshore wind would be “cost neutral”. This does not include system balancing costs, which the study argues are relatively modest for each additional gigawatt of capacity.
Carbon Brief understands that, when taking this into account, the “cost neutral” price for further offshore capacity would be reduced by a few pounds. This implies that the AR7 result at £91/MWh is likely to be in or around the “cost-neutral” range, based on Baringa’s assumptions.
Also, in late 2025, Aurora concluded that new offshore wind could be secured at “no net cost to consumers”, provided that contracts were agreed at no more than £94/MWh.
In contrast to Baringa’s work, this study is based on what an Aurora press release describes as a “total system cost analysis”. This means it takes into account the cost of dealing with the variable output of offshore wind, such as system balancing and backup.
In an updated note following the results of the auction, Aurora said that it would “generate net consumer savings of just over £1bn up to 2035”. This is relative to a scenario where no offshore wind had been procured at the latest auction.
(In its pre-auction analysis, Aurora pointed to a reduction in consumer electricity bills of around £20 per household per year by 2035, relative to relying on more gas power instead.)
Writing on LinkedIn, Aurora data analyst Ivan Bogachev said that this was the case, even though it might appear to be “counterintuitive”. He added:
“Moreover, AR7 projects are primarily clustered in areas which see few network constraints, limiting any contribution to higher balancing costs.”
In contrast, Conservative shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho and right-leaning media commentators cited misleading figures to claim that the auction was “locking us in” to high prices.
Coutinho has repeatedly cited a figure for the cost of fuel needed to run a gas-fired power station in summer 2025 – some £55/MWh – as if this is a fair reflection of the cost of electricity from gas.
However, this excludes the cost of carbon, which gas plants must pay under the UK emissions trading system and the “carbon price support”. It also ignores the cost of building new gas-fired capacity, which as noted above has soared in recent years.
Dr Callum McIver, a researcher at the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, tells Carbon Brief that “you can’t credibly strip out the cost of carbon” and that the £55/MWh figure is not an “apples-to-apples” comparison with the AR7 result.
McIver says that a fairer comparison would be with a new-build gas plant, which, according to the latest DESNZ cost of generation report, would come in at £147/MWh – and would remain at £104/MWh, even if the cost of carbon is ignored.
UKERC director Prof Robert Gross, at Imperial College London, tells Carbon Brief that Coutinho’s £55/MWh figure for gas is “unrealistically low” because it is below current wholesale prices, which averaged around £80/MWh in 2025.
Gross adds that, as well as ignoring carbon pricing, the figure is also for “existing and not new gas stations, which we will need and which will need to recover much increased CAPEX [capital cost]”.
Another factor often not taken into account by those criticising the price of renewable energy contracts is that these projects reduce wholesale prices, as noted in Aurora’s modelling.
Separate analysis published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank finds that wholesale power prices would have been 46% higher in 2025 – at £121/MWh rather than £83/MWh – if there had been no windfarms generating electricity.
This is because windfarms push the most expensive gas plants off the system, reducing average wholesale prices. This is a well-known phenomenon known as the “merit order effect”.
What does AR7 mean for reaching clean power by 2030?
Offshore wind is expected to be the backbone of the UK’s electricity mix in 2030, making the stakes for this CfD auction particularly high.
Under the National Energy System Operator’s (NESO) independent advice to the government, half of electricity demand will be met by offshore wind by 2030. It says this requires between 43GW and 51GW of generating capacity from the technology.
This advice informed the government’s action plan for meeting 100% of electricity demand with clean power by the end of the decade, which also sets a target of 43-50GW of offshore wind.
Currently, the UK has around 17GW of installed offshore wind capacity, leaving a gap of 27-34GW to the government’s target range.
A further 10GW of capacity already had a CfD prior to the latest auction, excluding the cancelled Hornsea 4 project. The additional 8.4GW contracted in AR7 means the remaining gap to the minimum 43GW end of the government’s range is just 7GW, as shown below.
Speaking to journalists after the auction results were announced, Chris Stark, who is head of “Mission Control” for clean power 2030, told journalists that securing 8.4GW in AR7 put the UK on track for its targets. He added:
“The result today actually takes us now to within touching distance of the goals that we set for 2030 – more to come on that, as I mentioned, with the onshore technologies and the storage projects up and down this country.
“But this is, I think, a real endorsement for the steps that Ed Miliband has taken to bring about that goal of clean power by 2030, it will bring huge benefits to people here in the UK.”
There remain a number of challenges with the delivery of these offshore-wind projects – including securing a grid connection – that could threaten delivery before 2030.
Writing on LinkedIn, Bertalan Gyenes, consultant at LCP Delta, says that with a third of the new capacity set to deliver before 2030, a “swiftly delivered and ambitious [allocation round eight] would put DESNZ within touching distance of its targets”. However, he adds:
“The job is not over yet, the windfarms need to be connected, the network upgraded, consenting pipelines de-clogged – there can be no more delays and certainly no cancellations like what we had seen with Hornsea 4 after last year’s auction.”
McIver wrote on LinkedIn that the auction result “takes us into the goldilocks zone that just about keeps CP30 targets alive, if AR8 can similarly deliver”. He added:
“OK, looking at delivery years [for the contracted projects], maybe we’re aiming for roughly CP33 [clean power by 2033] now? Maybe that would be no bad thing.”
Within the briefing for journalists, Stark highlighted a number of steps undertaken by the government over the past 18 months to ease the challenges around the expansion of the renewable energy sector.
This includes removing “zombie projects” from the queue for connecting projects to the electricity network and announcing £28bn in investment for gas and electricity grids.
As such, the auction results fit within a “host of policies” designed to make the ambitious clean power by 2030 target possible, said Stark.
The second half of the CfD results, covering technologies such as onshore wind and solar, are expected out next month. DESNZ’s action plan set a range of 27-29GW and 45-47GW of capacity for the two technologies, respectively, if the country is to meet its 2030 clean-power target.
The post Q&A: What UK’s record auction for offshore wind means for bills and clean power by 2030 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What UK’s record auction for offshore wind means for bills and clean power by 2030
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.
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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.
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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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