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Swan River at Sunset. Image: Fernando de Sousa on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Nature is not only mother to us all, but our shared witness. Because truly, we are never alone when in the hallowed company of the elements, and life of the earth.

Sometimes, it is the immensity of things which reaches inside you—oceans, sky and sun, or the curve of the terrestrial distance—while at other moments it is the intensity of intimate association at a smaller scale, like a single tree you know as a friend, or a specific combination of scent, stone, water and light, felt uniquely in situ.

In both great and small manifestations, the natural world solemnly and playfully attends our lives as we go about our business on this, our singular living planet.

I felt this sense of nature incarnated as an attentive companion acutely this week, when walking between meetings along the Swan River.

If you grow up in Perth, even in one of the outer suburbs as I did, the Swan River, or Derbal Yerrigan in the language of the Whadjuk Noongar People, is always there as a presence.

The bits I know best feel like a kind of emotional map of the journey through the years, as evocative as any diary. This patch, where I threw a cricket ball around with my best mate in the early evening, laughing at the joy of being alive as the spinning pill arced against the twilight; that slight bend in the path, imprinted with the ambivalent tension of being about to sit university exams; there, the site years ago, of running around at the feet of my Dad, as young as I can remember him; here, a spot that summons the sense of exhausting exhilaration when fecklessly going for a run in the mid-day western heat; and above all that cherished place, I will always associate with love, newly declared and found to be returned.

And other things too, inchoate layers of pleating fragments; thoughts and feelings without number, that will always be evoked in my mind by the sweep of the Swan

What is most evocative or sacred to us is always bound to feeling, rather than the product of any rational calculus. It is also true, though, that geography as memory is complicated by change—something that is a constant in nature; wildly accelerated by human intervention; and now spiralling into the violently unpredictable, because of global heating.

Derbal Yerrigan has no doubt always been changing, in the countless days that the river has flowed since time immemorial; but never altered or transformed in the way has occured since colonisation and industrialisation; nor in the way that is happening now.

I troubled about this while making my way along the Swan this week, and watched as an Australasian darter (Anhinga novaehollandiae) perched on the river wall and spread its wings interstitially, as if gesturing to signify the bonds between the land, water and sky. At that moment, I abruptly remembered that my gaze was not solitary, because far and high in the air behind me were the lidless eyes of the city skyscrapers, including the dark towers of the fossil fuel giants, Woodside and Chevron, staring down with abject contempt for the future.

I suspect like many of us, I feel a perpetual mental struggle between the dissonance of the everyday, which, even despite spring temperatures soaring 15 degrees Celsius above average, still has a normalcy to it that is discordant with what we know about the realities of global warming, and the forecasts of what is to come. The Swan, like all rivers, now faces its most violent test yet of rising temperatures and extreme unnatural events.

The attendance of nature to our lives is not passive. If we think only of ‘the environment’ just as subject, we miss the point of both our own embeddedness in this world, and of the agency of life itself. Every species on earth has an innate energy to flourish and reproduce. The Swan River will keep on rolling, with all of the intense hydrological power at its command. Given half a chance nature will resurge and rebound in wood and feather, tooth and maw.

Our conscious task, I think to myself, but mentally addressing both the bird and the river, is to purposefully draw on the power of this meaning; an internal strength derived from the preciousness of our memories imbricated in place. 

I pause and offer a silent pledge to the River: you’ve always been there for us. And in the activism, ingenuity, campaigning and commitment of millions of determined people across Australia and the world, all of whom are dedicated to stopping the destruction of nature and the climate and of securing a return to flourishing, so we will be there for you.

Q & A

Greenpeace campaigns are always solution-led, and one of the questions I have been asked a lot over the years is about our systemic solution for Western Australia to reduce emissions at an emergency speed and scale, and get off gas.

This week, it was terrific to be in Perth, joining colleagues to help launch a comprehensive decarbonisation plan for the state, Power Shift: WA’s Electrified Future written in collaboration with Springmount Advisory.

This report comprehensively shows how WA’s economy can be aligned with the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C, and breaks down the transition pathway WA can take across energy, industry, transport and agriculture to achieve this. It highlights the challenges and opportunities across each sector, and provides policy level solutions to achieve these ambitions using only already-existing technologies. You can check out the report here.

River of Life

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UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo 

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The UK has abandoned projects worth tens of millions of pounds that were meant to help protect Congo rainforests and support local people.

Together, these initiatives would have made up around half of the £200m that the UK pledged to support conservation in the Congo basin – the world’s second-largest rainforest.

When it hosted COP26 in Glasgow, the UK led a new initiative to end forest loss, which included a collective pledge by 12 donors of “at least” $1.5bn (£1.1bn) for Congo rainforest nations by 2025.

Development minister Jenny Chapman revealed last week that, as of 2024, the UK had only provided £39.8m towards this goal.

Alongside the US and much of Europe, the UK has significantly cut its aid budget in recent years, leading to much of its Congo rainforest spending being cancelled or reappraised.

The government says it still plans to “prioritise” rainforest regions, including the Congo basin, but civil society groups and MPs are concerned about the lack of “ring-fenced” forest funding in the UK’s new aid strategy.

COP pledge

At COP26, the UK – led by then prime minister Boris Johnson – launched the “Glasgow leaders’ declaration”, with a goal to “halt and reverse forest loss” by 2030. This was backed by more than 140 nations.

The UK also made various funding pledges, including £200m to protect the Congo basin, £350m for tropical forests in Indonesia and “up to £300m” for the Amazon.

These commitments target the world’s three largest rainforests, all of which face major forest loss due to threats such as agriculture, logging and climate change.

The Congo basin is the planet’s largest forested carbon sink. Yet, its six host nations are among the poorest in the world and face significant funding barriers.

This has global ramifications. An official UK assessment warned that “degradation or collapse” of the Amazon or Congo rainforests “threaten UK national security and prosperity”.

Forest cuts

Following successive aid cuts introduced by both the Conservative and then Labour governments – tracking a global trend – the UK’s Congo funding is under threat.

The Congo basin forest action programme (CBFA) was launched by the UK at COP27. It was explicitly set up to provide “roughly half” of the UK’s £200m Congo pledge.

CBFA set out to “empower central African nations”, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with support for “community forests” and other measures to curb forest loss.

Now, after reporting delays, the UK has slashed the CBFA as part of the Labour government’s recent aid cuts, intended to free up money for defence spending.

Its original £90m budget has now been reduced to £18.8m. Government data shows that £15m of this has already been spent.

This is not the only Congo project that has been dropped due to this latest round of aid cuts.

The Congo part of the biodiverse landscapes fundchampioned by the previous government and worth at least £12.3m – has been closed, just two years into its seven-year schedule.

Government documents reveal more Congo forest funding is at risk as the UK scales back its aid budget, including the UK’s two largest remaining projects in the region.

One initiative, intended to “incubate forest-friendly enterprises” in DRC, faces “reduc[ed] budgets”. Officials working on the other, while more optimistic, reported that the project may be forced to operate in fewer countries as the cuts set in.

Documents also reveal the difficulties that come when operating in the Congo, including “complex political economies and, in Gabon, a military coup – which “complicated matters”.

‘Breaking promises’

Damian Fleming, a senior director of forests at WWF International tells Carbon Brief:

“Tropical forest countries are making long-term policy and development choices in expectation that international partners will honour their commitments.”

In a series of recent parliamentary responses, Chapman revealed that the UK had only spent £39.8m on Congo forest finance, as of 2024. (She declined to provide any information on the Indonesia and Amazon regional goals.)

Despite being presented as the UK’s “contribution” to the £1.1bn-by-2025 global goal agreed at COP26, the £200m target has a deadline of 2029.

Therefore, while the collective goal has been met, the UK’s contribution so far has been relatively small.

Zac Goldsmith, a former Conservative minister who oversaw the forest targets at COP26, tells Carbon Brief that, in his view, the UK has “discarded” its regional pledges:

“We have gone from being perhaps the leader on protecting nature internationally to breaking promises to countries around the world for whom the environment is an existential issue.”

Future targets

The Labour government says it has met the five-year “climate finance” target of £11.6bn that expires this year.

Ministers also say the government has met “and exceeded” the £3bn and £1.5bn sub-goals for “preserving nature” and forests, respectively, within the £11.6bn. These are the funding streams that include support for the Congo basin and other rainforests.

The UK has funded a variety of projects in line with its forest goals, including mangrove restoration in Indonesia, support for carbon-offsetting projects in Brazil and promoting “forest stewardship” among farmers in Cameroon.

Chapman has stated that the UK will continue to “prioritise” the Congo rainforest, in line with its new plan for aid spending in Africa. The UK even helped to launch a new “call to action” for Congo basin funding at COP30 last year.

The UK government also says it supported the creation of Brazil’s flagshipTropical Forest Forever Facility” (TFFF). However, so far it has not provided any funding for the facility.

When the government announced a new climate finance pledge for 2026 onwards, it stressed that nature would still be a “focus” and said it would also generate billions in “climate and nature positive investments”. Nevertheless, it dropped the “ring-fenced” amounts for nature and forests that had appeared in its previous pledge.

The UK, alongside other developed countries, has pledged to provide biodiversity finance to developing countries, under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) – a non-binding global pact to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030.

Sarah Champion, chair of the international development committee of MPs, says “sub-pledges” for nature and forests are a “cost-effective and impactful” way to ensure this finance is provided, alongside climate finance. She tells Carbon Brief that she was “concerned” about the move away from this approach:

“When the minister recently appeared before the international development committee, I was concerned to hear her characterise this shift as a ‘gamble’.”

A government spokesperson tells Carbon Brief:

“We remain committed to providing finance for forests, including in the Congo basin, as a core element of our overall climate funding.”

A shorter version of this article was first published in Cropped, Carbon Brief’s fortnightly newsletter that provides a digest of food, land and nature news, on 15 July 2026. Subscribe for free.

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UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo 

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Cropped 15 July 2026: Uganda starves | Trump opens endangered habitats | UK cuts rainforest aid

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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

Global drought and heat

DRY THEN WET: A recent heatwave and months of low rainfall has led to a prolonged drought for Uganda, resulting in at least 16 deaths from hunger and significant crop losses, reported BBC News. Bastille Post Global suggested that “a developing El Niño later this year could bring heavier rainfall to parts of the region, raising the risk of flooding in areas now struggling with drought”.

FUNDING FOOD: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) have appealed for $200m in funding to help African nations deal with the impact of El Niño, stated Deutsche Welle. This would target 22 high-risk countries with measures, including “cash transfers, climate-resilient seeds, livestock protection and flood control.” The Guardian explained how El Niño could still “cause a severe shock to global food prices lasting into 2028”.

FARMING FEARS: Extreme weather has devastated agriculture across the world. India saw its driest June in 12 years, reported BBC News, and France has had a “double-digit production” decline, according to Le Monde. The Financial Times reported that farmers in the UK are mitigating the impacts of extreme heat by eliminating “chemicals and intensive ploughing to improve soil quality so it retains water”.

EURO FIRES: Wildfires have spread across Europe, with Spain reporting at least 12 deaths so far, according to the Guardian, and France experiencing road closures, said Reuters. Wildfire Today reported that the most extreme conditions are “across France, Spain and northern Portugal, the Alpine arc extending into northern Italy, the south of the UK and south-east Ireland”. CNN explained how “the climate crisis is driving hotter, drier weather, which is setting the stage for fiercer fire seasons”.

Endangering species

REDEFINING HARM: The Trump administration “reversed decades of longstanding environmental law protecting endangered species…opening up sensitive habitats…to drilling, mining, farming and real estate development”, reported CNN. According to the story, the change “redefines what constitutes ‘harm’” to endangered species, which historically prohibited habitat modification or degradation. Agence France-Presse reported that US environmental groups sued the Trump government over the move, arguing that it had violated “common sense, biological science and federal law”.

OPEN SEASON: Reuters reported that the change “limits the reach of the 50-year-old Endangered Species Act” (ESA), which is a “key regulatory consideration” when granting permits for “oil and gas, mining, electric transmission and ​other operations on federal lands and water”. Legal scholars told the New York Times the US government “was acting without conducting scientific research into the impact” of the change, while the National Mining Association “applauded the announcement”.

News and views

  • INTERNATIONAL WATERS: After a significant delay, the UK ratified the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (BBNJ), also known as the High Seas Treaty. Oceanographic detailed how this will allow for “marine protected areas across international waters for the first time”, but also stressed that the “hard part” starts now. 
  • SCOPE-FREE: The world’s largest meat supplier JBS “scrapped a key climate goal” in its net-zero plan that accounts for its suppliers’ emissions, “which make up the vast bulk of the company’s environmental footprint”, reported the Financial Times. The company told the paper it was difficult to control these “indirect” emissions.
  • DEEP TROUBLE: Pacific gray whales are facing a “catastrophic die-off” as sea-ice loss threatens their food sources, said the Guardian. Separately, conservationists warned that more than half of all molluscs that “cluster around underwater vents” could face extinction from deep-sea mining, reported Reuters.
  • ETHANOL PUSHBACK: India’s new rules to promote 100% ethanol fuel and make ethanol-blended fuel mandatory at pumps “triggered a political row”, reported the Times of India. While the Indian government defended the push to automobile owners, a Hindu editorial and an Indian Express comment warned against incentivising fuels made from “water-intensive” sugarcane and rice. 
  • AMAZON ACTION: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell to its lowest level in a decade, but president Lula’s plans to “end illegal deforestation by 2030” could be hampered if he is not re-elected, reported Al Jazeera. Meanwhile, Colombia’s outgoing environment minister warned of greater environmental and climate risk under the incoming government, said the Associated Press
  • WAR WORRIES: The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned of the impact of the Iran war on Africa’s clean cooking efforts as disruption in the strait of Hormuz has stunted supplies and increased prices of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), explained Climate Home News

Spotlight

UK ‘discards’ Congo rainforest funding

Amid worldwide cuts to aid spending, Carbon Brief explores how the UK is backtracking on funding for the Congo basin – the world’s second-largest rainforest.

The UK has abandoned projects worth tens of millions of pounds that were meant to help protect Congo rainforests and support local people.

Together, these initiatives would have made up half of the £200m that the UK pledged to support forest conservation in the Congo basin.

When it hosted COP26 in Glasgow, the UK led a new initiative to end forest loss, which included a collective pledge of “at least” $1.5bn (£1.1bn) for Congo rainforest nations by 2025.

Development minister Jenny Chapman revealed last week that, as of 2024, the UK had only provided £39.8m towards this goal.

COP pledge

At COP26, the UK – led by then prime minister Boris Johnson – launched the “Glasgow leaders’ declaration”, with a goal to “halt and reverse forest loss” by 2030.

The UK also made various regional funding pledges, including £200m for the Congo basin, £350m for tropical forests in Indonesia and “up to £300m” for the Amazon.

All of these rainforests face major forest loss. The Congo basin is the planet’s largest forested carbon sink, but its six host nations are among the poorest in the world and face significant funding barriers.

This has global ramifications. An official UK assessment warned that “degradation or collapse” of the Amazon or Congo rainforests “threaten UK national security and prosperity”.

African elephant pictured in Congo.
African elephant pictured in Congo. Credit: BIOSPHOTO / Alamy Stock Photo

Forest cuts

Following successive aid cuts introduced by both Conservative and Labour governments – tracking a global trend – the UK’s Congo funding is under threat.

The Congo basin forest action programme (CBFA) was explicitly set up to provide “roughly half” of the UK’s £200m Congo pledge.

Now, after reporting delays, the UK has slashed the CBFA as part of the Labour government’s aid cuts. Its £90m budget has been “quietly reduced by 79% to £18.8m”, according to the Times.

This is not the only Congo project that has been dropped due to aid cuts. The Congo part of the biodiverse landscapes fund – worth at least £12.3m – has closed five years early.

Official documents reveal more Congo forest funding is at risk, including the UK’s two largest remaining projects in the region. One initiative, intended to “incubate forest-friendly enterprises” in DRC, faces “reduc[ed] budgets”.

Documents also show the difficulties operating in the Congo, including “complex political economies and, in Gabon, a military coup – which “complicated matters”.

‘Breaking promises’

Damian Fleming, a senior forests director at WWF International told Carbon Brief:

“Tropical forest countries are making long-term policy and development choices in expectation that international partners will honour their commitments.”

In a parliamentary response, Chapman said that the UK had spent £39.8m towards its £200m Congo target, as of 2024.

Despite being described as the UK’s contribution to the £1.1bn-by-2025 global goal agreed at COP26, the £200m target has a deadline of 2029. Therefore, while the collective goal has been met, the UK’s contribution was relatively small.

Zac Goldsmith, a former Conservative minister who oversaw the forest targets at COP26, told Carbon Brief that, in his view, the UK has “discarded” its regional pledges:

“We have gone from being perhaps the leader on protecting nature internationally to breaking promises to countries around the world.”

The Labour government says it has met its overarching “climate finance” goals and still intends to “prioritise” the Congo rainforest.

However, civil society groups and MPs are concerned about the lack of “ring-fenced” forest funding in the UK’s new aid strategy.

Watch, read, listen

TOXIC TROUBLES: DeSmog unpacked a new report that said Northern Ireland is being turned into a “toxic” pig and poultry farming “sacrifice zone” to satiate the UK’s meat appetite.

NEED TO NOAA: Laid-off scientists from the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched Climate.Us – an independent, public-backed version of the climate information website shut down by Trump last year.

DRY FRUIT: A Dialogue Earth long read looked at how climate change is impacting apricot harvests in the “stark, high-altitude desert” region of Ladakh, India.

READING ALOUD: A London Review of Books podcast discussed Robin Wall Kimmerer’s influential book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, weighing its compelling themes and where it veers into “scientific overreach”.

New science

  • Climate change could cause Indigenous peoples in the Amazon to lose 28-34% of their plant species and 18-23% of their associated services | Nature
  • Biodiversity in forests can act as a “buffer” against compound extreme weather events | Nature Communications
  • Zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia’s palm oil sector have had “no additional impacts” on reducing forest loss | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In the diary

This edition of Cropped was written by Jess Milligan, Josh Gabbatiss and Aruna Chandrasekhar. Cropped is edited by Dr Giuliana Viglione. This edition was edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org.

The post Cropped 15 July 2026: Uganda starves | Trump opens endangered habitats | UK cuts rainforest aid appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks

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Climate and environment campaigners have urged the Kenyan government to halt plans for a proposed 700,000-barrel-per-day oil refinery backed by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, warning the project threatens one of East Africa’s most ecologically sensitive coastlines. 

The refinery, which is planned to be situated in Lamu County on Kenya’s northern coast, will be East Africa’s largest refining project and is expected to take up to three years to build. Once finished, it would supply refined petroleum products to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, among others, helping to reduce the region’s dependence on imported fuels.

Campaigners are questioning the viability of such a large refinery at a time when renewable energy and electric transportation are expanding rapidly.

Mohamed Adow, director of a Kenya-based climate and energy think-tank Power Shift Africa, said the decision to give Dangote the green light for the refinery is “an extraordinary act of environmental recklessness and economic short-sightedness”, arguing it would tie Kenya to “yesterday’s energy system” just as global demand for petroleum products faces increasing uncertainty. 

    Campaigners argue the refinery risks coming online just as transport – the largest market for petrol and diesel – is beginning to electrify across the continent.

    Kenya launched a National Electric Mobility Policy earlier this year to speed up the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) and reduce the country’s roughly $5 billion annual fuel import bill. Ethiopia has already banned imports of non-electric vehicles and now has more than 100,000 EVs on its roads, while Rwanda is expanding its electric mobility programme with plans to convert its fleet of around 100,000 motorcycles to electric.

    Adow said the project risks billions of dollars in investment in infrastructure that could become obsolete as the world moves away from oil.

    “Building a refinery today assumes decades of robust demand for fuels that much of the world is actively trying to phase out,” he said in a statement. 

    Ecological concerns

    Lamu – the proposed site for the project – is home to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Lamu Old Town and an archipelago containing extensive mangrove forests, coral reefs and seagrass beds that support fisheries, tourism and coastal livelihoods.

    Locating the refinery in Lamu would “place one of Africa’s largest fossil fuel developments in one of the continent’s most ecologically sensitive and culturally significant coastal regions,” Power Shift Africa said.

    Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

    Sherelee Odayar, oil and gas campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, warned that a refinery of this scale could increase the risk of habitat destruction, marine pollution, oil spills and air pollution in one of East Africa’s most fragile coastal ecosystems.

    She said the risks stem not only from the refinery itself – including storage tanks, pipelines and fuel handling facilities – but also from the large volumes of crude oil that would need to be shipped into Lamu and refined products exported by sea. Increased tanker traffic and fuel transfers, she said, would raise the likelihood of accidents in ecologically sensitive coastal waters.

    Odayar added that Lamu’s low-lying, flood-prone coastline could compound those risks by damaging infrastructure and carrying contaminants from storage facilities into nearby fishing grounds and marine ecosystems.

    “Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass beds are not expendable; they support fisheries, livelihoods and coastal protection,” Odayar added.

    She said Kenyan authorities should suspend any approvals until an independent environmental and social impact assessment is completed, with genuine public participation and transparent scrutiny of the long-term economic, health and ecological risks.

    “Any review must assess cumulative impacts on Lamu’s mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds and fishing livelihoods, alongside the wider economic risk of locking Kenya into costly fossil fuel infrastructure as the global energy transition accelerates”.

    Dangote Group declined to answer questions from Climate Home News when contacted by phone.

    Technological change threaten project’s future

    The Kenya refinery would replicate Dangote’s 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Lagos, currently Africa’s largest, which has plans to more than double capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028.

    Adow of Power Shift Africa said projects like this represent “a breathtaking failure to recognise where the global economy is heading”, pointing out that the East African refinery risks arriving when Africa is experiencing an unprecedented clean energy boom. 

    Referencing Africa’s solar boom, global electric vehicles uptake and the International Energy Agency’s projection that global oil demand is set to enter a decline later this decade, the think-tank founder said African governments risk anchoring the continent’s future to an industry facing mounting economic uncertainty.

    Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

    The organisation said the project faces a bigger threat aside from environmental opposition and that is technological change. “The danger is not simply that the refinery will pollute, it is that it will become obsolete long before it has paid for itself,” he added.

    Kenyan President William Ruto said the project will create about 60,000 jobs for Kenyans and supply refined fuel to eight East and Central African countries.

    GreenPeace Africa’s Odayar said the promise of ‘thousands of jobs’ cannot be used to hide the true cost of the investment which is that large fossil fuel projects often create temporary jobs while undermining existing livelihoods in fishing, tourism and small-scale local economies.

    “The enormous capital required for a project of this scale could instead help accelerate Kenya’s renewable energy future through solar, wind, geothermal, storage and better energy access,” she added.

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