As countries come under growing pressure to tackle planet-heating methane emissions from the fossil fuel sector, oil and gas producers in COP host nations Brazil and Azerbaijan are struggling to prevent large leaks of methane, data shared with Climate Home News shows.
Satellite observations detected “super-emitting” methane plumes in the two countries this year that were visible from space and linked to state oil companies in both cases. Brazil presided over this year’s COP30 climate talks, while COP29 was in Azerbaijan.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but has a shorter life span. If global warming is to stay below 1.5C, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that methane emissions from fossil fuels would need to fall by 75% by 2030.
At COP26 in 2021, a group of more than 100 countries announced their intention to cut methane emissions across all sectors by 30% from 2020 levels by the end of this decade. But a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) assessment shows they are instead set to rise 5% by 2030.
At COP30 this November, Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva said that reducing methane emissions “gives us an opportunity to keep the planet’s average temperature [rise] within 1.5C, decreasing the frequency, intensity and impact of extreme weather events and protecting lives”.
And last year, Rovshan Najaf, president of Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR, promised that the firm would achieve near-zero methane emissions in its oil and gas production by 2035.
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However, the latest data available from Azerbaijan’s SOCAR shows that the company’s methane emissions more than tripled from 2023 to 2024, when the country hosted COP29. SOCAR identified about 200,000 tonnes of methane emissions from its business activities in 2024.
Brazilian state-oil company Petrobras, meanwhile, did manage to reduce its methane emissions by more than half between 2015 and 2022, but they have since stayed stagnant, at about a million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emitted per year, the company’s annual sustainability data shows.
“Reducing methane has significant impacts on a country’s ability to meet its climate commitments,” said Tengi George-Ikoli, a methane expert with the National Resource Governance Institute (NRGI).
“Countries like Brazil and Azerbaijan, who have hosted COPs, should be seen to commit to those efforts more so than others,” she emphasised.
In 2025, UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) alerted countries globally – including Brazil and Azerbaijan – to around 2,200 instances linking their oil and gas production to super-emitting events.
Both Brazil and Azerbaijan have focal points that receive these IMEO alerts. But a recent report shows that 90% of the notifications did not even receive a response, and neither Brazil nor Azerbaijan are listed in the 25 successful cases that managed to reduce emissions thanks to this system.
Big plumes in Azerbaijan’s southern oil & gas hub
In Azerbaijan, persistent large-scale methane emissions have been detected over its southern coast – a hub for its oil and gas industry – during the past two years, according to satellite data from online monitoring platform Carbon Mapper.
When satellites passed over the region in mid-2024, as Azerbaijan prepared to host the COP29 climate summit, they spotted a handful of massive methane plumes, each releasing between 2,000 and 4,000 kilogrammes of methane per hour, dozens of times above the threshold for a “super-emitting” event.
According to Carbon Mapper’s data, methane emissions from the same locations still persisted a year later at comparable or even higher levels.
It is impossible to pinpoint precisely the source of those emissions without ground-level monitoring. But satellite data suggests that methane was released both from pipelines – which may be leaking – and compressor stations, which are facilities that help keep fossil gas flowing by boosting its pressure.
Throughout this year, large methane plumes have been observed by satellites emanating from a facility run by SOCAR in one of the world’s oldest oil fields, located just a few miles from Baku’s swanky waterfront boulevard.
In its 2025 sustainability report, SOCAR said it had expanded its methane emissions monitoring by using “leak detection AI tools”, drones and satellite technologies that “enabled more targeted, data-driven responses and supported the development of effective mitigation measures across operational sites”.
State oil firm in COP30 host nation linked to leaks
In Brazil, state-oil company Petrobras has been linked to three methane “super-emitting events” detected by satellites this year, which raises questions about emissions from its offshore oil and gas production facilities.
Three large methane plumes were detected in the Santos basin off the coast of Rio de Janeiro – which holds several of Brazil’s largest oil and gas fields – by Carbon Mapper on April 23.
Further analysis by environmental nonprofit SkyTruth, which specialises in satellite observations, revealed the plumes came from vessels in the Tupi field, which is majority-owned by Petrobras. Two of the vessels are operated by Dutch company SBM and the other by Petrobras.
The plumes in the Santos basin were large enough to be considered “super-emitting” methane events, on a scale similar to leaks in the same category detected in other parts of the world.
The US Environmental Protection Agency defines these as events with a rate of emissions of 100 kg of methane per hour. Two of the plumes detected in Brazil were above 300 and one was above 700 kg of methane per hour.
The events in Brazil are “particularly stunning” and could point to a more persistent issue, SkyTruth’s CEO John Amos told Climate Home, because the three plumes were detected during just one observation by a satellite orbiting the area.
“For one attempt to produce three positive plumes suggests that this could be a systematic problem offshore,” he said.
Petrobras says mitigation measures in place
Asked about these cases, Petrobras told Climate Home in a statement that the company is committed to reducing methane emissions as part of its decarbonisation strategy. It added that, because the plumes were detected by a single satellite observation, “the ability to draw broader conclusions about the consistency and magnitude of emissions over time is limited”.
The company also highlighted that its assets in the Santos basin perform “within the industry’s first quartile” for emissions per barrel of oil and noted that “initiatives such as recovering flare gas and performing leak detection and repair campaigns have helped to mitigate methane emissions”.
Petrobras also said that “during the period in question, operational conditions were under normal circumstances”.
Amos argued that if the sector considers such super-emitter plumes of methane – observable from space – “to be a consequence of ‘normal operating conditions’, then the offshore methane problem may be far worse than we anticipated”.
Just days before COP30, Petrobras executives co-chaired an offshore oil and gas conference in Rio de Janeiro. The discussions, the organisers wrote in a welcome letter, would focus on “traditional oil and gas technologies while highlighting the innovations essential for a more sustainable future” and would be “strategically positioned amid the ongoing energy transition”.
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As global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, with the United Nations admitting in November that an overshoot of the 1.5C warming limit is now inevitable, action on methane garnered growing attention at COP30.
New initiatives were launched at the climate summit in Belém to tackle methane emissions from the production of fossil fuels, which accounts for about a third of global emissions from this “super pollutant”, with other key sources being agriculture and waste management.
The UK launched a declaration to “drastically reduce” methane from the fossil fuel sector, which was endorsed by 11 countries including major oil and gas producers Canada, Norway and Kazakhstan. The actions it supports include more transparent monitoring, eliminating routine flaring and venting, and tracking progress towards near-zero methane emissions per unit of production.
The UK and Brazil also launched a three-year $25-million funding package to help developing countries tackle methane, among other “super pollutant” gases, which will benefit a first cohort of mostly fossil fuel-producing countries – among them Brazil, Kazakhstan, Mexico and Nigeria.
At last year’s COP29, the European Union championed an initiative that encouraged fossil fuel-producing countries to create roadmaps towards abating methane emissions from coal, oil and gas, including timelines, investment needs and the amount of emissions to be abated.
But, as a growing clutch of voluntary initiatives has failed to produce results at the scale and speed needed to rein in global warming in the short term, pressure is rising for a more accountable and comprehensive approach to the problem.
At COP30, Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley renewed her call for a legally binding methane pact to “pull the methane emergency brake” and “buy us some time”, starting with actions in the oil and gas industry.
NRGI’s George-Ikoli said the oil and gas sector could lead on cutting methane emissions because measures like zero flaring and venting, and eliminating leaks could bring in revenues for companies by enabling them to use or sell currently wasted gas.
Mottley wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian this month that the next step would be to convene heads of state from willing nations to develop “a roadmap in 2026 for binding measures for the oil and gas industry”. Negotiations could start by 2027, with a deal adopted “as soon as possible thereafter”, she proposed.
The post Recent COP hosts Brazil and Azerbaijan linked to “super-emitting” methane plumes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Recent COP hosts Brazil and Azerbaijan linked to “super-emitting” methane plumes
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
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The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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