Prof Louise Heathwaite CBE became the executive chair of the National Environment Research Council (NERC), the UK’s main agency for funding natural science research, in March 2024.
She was the chair of the Science Advisory Council of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and has previously served as chief scientific adviser to the Scottish Government for Rural Affairs, Food and Environment. She is a leading hydrochemist.
- On realising human’s environmental impact: “When the ozone hole was being discussed. So I knew from a long, long time ago that we were doing damage.”
- On funding climate research: “You can’t look at climate research just as climate research. It’s a nexus. It’s thinking about climate change, the implications for biodiversity loss and other changes like pollution.”
- On funding solar geoengineering: “A few years ago, I think this council and many others would not have gone into solar geoengineering in any sense. We’re getting closer and closer to 2050. That starts you looking for more extreme routes.”
- On Brexit’s impact on UK research: “I think that led to some breakage of communication and links with people working in Europe particularly.”
- On reaching net-zero in the farming sector: “So far, that vision hasn’t been much beyond ‘we’re going to plant trees everywhere, and cows are bad’.”
- On transforming land-use in the UK: “We do need it, but it’s hard to see who’s going to really have the oversight.”
- On lack of public attention on biodiversity loss compared to climate change: “I think pollution and biodiversity loss are lagging behind as it’s much more complex to understand that system.”
Carbon Brief: You have a long standing career as a hydrologist and a pollution expert, when did you first become aware that humans were having a large impact on the natural world through pollution and agriculture?
Prof Louise Heathwaite: Before I went to university – well before I went to university. At school I studied maths, economics and geography and put it together in that sort of sense. Then I went on to do an environmental science degree at the University of East Anglia. At that point, there were only two places you could do environmental science, UEA or Lancaster. Lancaster was far too close to home for me [Heathwaite is from Leeds]. UEA were doing some really cutting edge science. That’s when the ozone hole was just being discussed. So I knew from a long, long time ago that we were doing damage. So it’s been with me all that time. And that progression with working with the Natural Environment Research Council started at that point. I went from doing a degree to doing a PhD at Bristol and that was funded by NERC.
CB: What was your PhD in?
LH: I was looking at peatlands, wetland hydrology and hydrochemistry. I was looking at the impact of [peatland] drainage on water quality. The place I was working was the first SSSI [site of special scientific interest] ever declared in the country. It was a place called West Sedgemoor in the Somerset Levels. It was a real interesting challenge there, looking at the difference between what the [wildlife charity] RSPB wanted to do to protect that site versus the farming community, who wanted to actually farm that site, and how you get some sort of shared understanding. It was really fascinating. And underneath that there were some real chemistry questions to answer as to why the river was getting polluted and what the issues were. And it wasn’t anything to do with the farming community at all. It was to do with the geology of the site. Really interesting.
CB: This year, you became the executive chair of NERC. What are the key areas of climate research that NERC is looking to fund?
My perspective is you can’t look at climate research just as climate research. I think there are three parts to this, it’s a nexus. It’s thinking about climate change, the implications for biodiversity loss and other changes like pollution. So I always argue you’ve got to think of it through that three-way nexus. The direction of travel I’m trying to take NERC through in terms of our forward look is developing thinking that I’m starting to call “beyond carbon”. So when you talk to communities like the financial industry, what they’re looking for when they want to understand biodiversity loss is another metric, like carbon, that can tell them how to deal with the problems. [We need to] get to the realisation that, for biodiversity loss, there is no single metric. And a lot of what the climate change drivers are doing are causing feedback loops, which damage biodiversity, create other sorts of challenges, and how do we understand that? So there’s a whole load of work to do in that sort of space. So that’s one bit where climate change is a real driver. The other bit is around national security and health. Your floods, your droughts, risk for wildfires, risk for temperature and heat and what that does to people. That’s another area.
Then the third area you might think will be quite unusual for NERC, which is starting to look at what we’re calling “responsible innovation”. So NERC has just got a call out around solar radiation management. Now, a few years ago, I think this council and many others would not have gone into solar geoengineering in any sense. But the position we’re getting into now is we’re getting closer and closer to 2030 and to 2050 and trying to get to things like net-zero. That starts you looking for more extreme routes. I think it’s important that a research council tries to understand what the implications are of anybody following those extreme routes. I need to be clear, we’re not doing out-of-door experiments, it’s more around modelling and maybe some laboratory work to try and understand that. But if we don’t understand solar radiation management, or we don’t understand the sort of interventions you might do in the oceans, then we’re not going to be able to advise on the implications. And, with the Natural Environment Research Council, we’ve got everything at our fingertips, really, because we do deep ocean to upper atmosphere. We do pole to pole. We do air, land, water. And that captures the global capacity. And so actually addressing those climate change challenges sits right in our remit, at a very difficult time, really.
CB: How has NERC research funding been impacted by Brexit? Does NERC have all the resources it needs at the moment?
Brexit or everything else after Brexit? We’ve had Brexit, then we have Covid, and then we had Ukraine and inflation and all of those things. From a Brexit context, and this is a personal view, I think that led to some breakage of communication and links with people working in Europe particularly. Now we’re part of Horizon again [the EU’s €96bn research programme], I can see that coming back, which is absolutely fantastic, it’s really important. I think also within NERC, all of those issues that I just mentioned have also led us to perhaps start looking [at] more UK-wide, rather than global and international science. That’s something I want to change. That international science is absolutely critical, particularly as we’ve got many of our scientists working with the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and IPBES [Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services]. And we’ve got the new UN Environment Programme around pollution and waste. So those three areas I mentioned before, we’ve now got intergovernmental panels which are actually looking at them. I think of our opportunity as to how we bring them together and think about it as a system.
CB: You recently stood down as the chair of the Science Advisory Council for Defra. What did it entail, how often were you briefing ministers and what kind of information were you sharing with them?
LH: So this was the highest level advisory committee within Defra, but part of our role was very particularly to help support and advise the chief scientific adviser [CSA], so that they were getting the best sort of advice. So the way that that worked was to basically take challenges from across Defra and [answer questions such as] are we doing this right? What’s your advice? How could we do this sort of thing? And get that [answered] by a wide range of people on the committee. [This was] to actually ensure two things: that the right sort of questions were being asked of the science and the right sort of evidence was being gathered, and that evidence was being used effectively. So the route was really to make sure that the CSA had a group of “critical friends”, in a sense, but also was [well] informed. Briefing ministers was the CSA’s job. Acting as a science advisory committee [and] actually making sure that the CSA and others in Defra were actually being coherent in their messages around the science – it was fascinating. But I’d been on Defra’s Science Advisory Council before, so that was really exciting. I’ve been a chief scientific adviser in the Scottish Government for Rural Affairs, food and environment before, so that fitted really well with that role. But it’s an important entity providing that sort of independent advice, that critical friend bit, is always important.
CB: Farming and land use have been a weak spot in UK climate plans, and now agriculture is a bigger emitter than power plants, for example. What do you think is needed to help the farming sector get to net-zero?
LH: I guess let’s start with the end point, getting to net-zero by 2050. It’s going to be a challenge to ever get to [actual] zero [emissions]. And what does getting to the “net” in net-zero mean? We need to have that national security of still being able to turn the lights on. I think that’s important. By setting targets and target dates, this is the bit I mentioned about geoengineering, it tends to get more and more desperate measures because you’ve got a target. I tend to think of it more as a transition. How do we transition, both in terms of behaviours, but also in terms of the science and the interventions we can put in to actually get to those sorts of places? So that seems to me to be really, really important and how we actually capture that moving forward is critical.
CB: So how do we transition the farming sector?
LH: That is always going to be a challenge because you’ve got two things. One, I think we need to look at farming and the farming community and landowners as being part of the solution, not the problem. Think of them as custodians of land and of the environment. Therefore, you start having a different conversation, which isn’t, “this is wrong, having cows and sheep is wrong”. But: “How do we actually get to a better place where we can have a shared understanding of what the environment’s about? What alternative livelihoods do people have?” Even down to evaluating whether we pay the right sort of amount for the meat we want to eat. So if people were prepared to pay more but eat less of it, that might actually change the economics of how farming might work. But none of that works if you go to the supermarket and buy something that’s been shipped in from some other country, either. So I think it’s a conversation, a shared conversation, about what the vision is for the future. And I think, so far, that vision hasn’t been much beyond “we’re going to plant trees everywhere, and cows are bad”. You’ve got to turn it into “we’ve got a fabulous landscape, we’ve got a very dense population, we want to do all these other things with our land, how can we actually have a conversation to get us to the right place?” And that’s not going to be easy, but what I’m seeing is now much more cross-government thinking about how to get there.
If you actually mapped out all the policies that we want to achieve from our land, we haven’t got enough area, nowhere near enough area, to actually achieve them. So we’ve got to think about the nature of the interventions and what we achieve. It’s a really exciting space. From my perspective, coming from where I came from as a scientist, understanding how those changes might impact on other parts of the system. So like the freshwater environment, which is always the bucket in which all the problems end, and then we pass that on to the marine environment, and we pass it up to the atmospheric environment, how can we actually get a more sustainable solution there? So it’s an opportunity, But if you turn it into a problem, all you do is back people into a corner.
CB: The new Labour government has come in, and it has a lot on its in-tray when it comes to food, land in nature, including a land-use framework and its international nature pledge under the UN biodiversity convention. Which of these documents would you like to see being published soon, and what sort of details do you think will be critical for those documents?
LH: Big question, massive question. I’ll probably answer this a bit tangentially because it’s really a matter of how you can achieve what you can achieve. This government has got a very strong focus on delivery for people quickly. And there are some quite exciting and quite interesting projects around clean energy by 2030, as an example. So what does that mean for things like land use that we’ve just been talking about, biodiversity and all of those things? Is it a really good pledge, but the ones around the land-use strategy are really, really challenging. Because, say, clean energy for 2030, if we can make that work, we’ll need to make sure we get the transition mechanisms in place to move energy around from generation points to to where it actually needs to be delivered. If we can do that for energy, we can probably do that for land. So we do need it, but it’s hard to see who’s going to really have the oversight. And everybody wants a piece of this pie. But all the things that this new government is wanting can’t be achieved without some joined-up thinking. So I put that quite high.
I also think making clear our commitment to work in the international space [is important]. My council, the National Environmental Research Council, is the one that thinks at long timescales, large scales, global. So actually having that international presence and keeping our science cutting edge and curiosity driven is just so important in that sort of space. So I’d be articulating that through the new government that the research and innovation part is really, really critical, because that’s where you’ve actually got that curiosity driving new thinking, but you’ve also got the innovation which takes that new thinking and now converts it into something useful. Some of it’s shovel-ready now, but actually, some of it’s going to take time to actually get us there.
CB: So, finally, we touched on this before, but the issues of pollution and biodiversity loss tend to receive less attention at a national and international level than climate change. Why do you think that is and how can that be addressed?
LH: I think it’s only that climate change has been thought of as being doable – because it’s carbon, and we’ve got that single metric – and therefore business and industry can buy into that and they can think about how to build it into their business models. The reason I think pollution and biodiversity loss are lagging behind is it’s much more complex to understand that system and we’re only getting together now with the science to actually help us do that and develop those metrics. But there is no single metric to say we can understand biodiversity loss. It’s going to take some more systematic thinking. And one of the really good things I think about where NERC is now placed within UKRI [UK Research and Innovation, a government department] is that we’ve got that cross-research council thinking, which allows you to pull from all the various disciplines to get a solution.
The post The Carbon Brief Interview: Prof Louise Heathwaite appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Valley Link would connect a potential nuclear reactor and fossil fueled-powered plants to serve suburban data centers.
GOOCHLAND, Va.—Deborah Blackburn leaned on her cane in a line to enter the Central High Cultural and Educational Complex, angst-ridden over a giant transmission line proposal for reasons that are common refrains here: It’s all to benefit data centers in Northern Virginia, and it will disrupt the rural character here outside Richmond.
Residents Wrangle Over Transmission Line Proposal for Rural Virginia
A major change in the way that China measures its core climate goal has effectively halved the growth in the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the past five years.
The revised measure of “carbon intensity”, the amount of CO2 per unit of economic output, implies that China’s emissions have only gone up by 7% from 2020-2025.
This is just half of the 14% rise indicated by previous official statistics.
On paper, the revision creates a gap of 700m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) per year, equivalent to the total emissions of Germany or South Korea.
While China has never officially defined how it measures carbon intensity, it has now made what appears to be a retrospective change, with the effect of making targets easier to meet.
The shift means that China officially came close to meeting its carbon-intensity target for 2020-2025, whereas official statistics had previously pointed towards falling well short.
The new definition of carbon intensity has not been made public, but plausible approaches to calculating the metric do not seem to be sufficient to explain the Germany-sized gap.
The apparent gaps or inconsistencies in China’s new carbon accounting also mean that China could meet its international climate pledges for 2030, even if its emissions go up, whereas the previous measure would have required them to fall.
This article explains how the metric appears to have shifted, what changes might potentially explain the revision and what the revised measure implies for China’s climate goals.
Measuring carbon intensity
Reducing carbon intensity – CO2 emissions per unit of GDP – has been China’s key climate commitment since the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.
At that time, the country pledged to cut its carbon intensity to 48% below 2005 levels by 2020. This was followed up by a 2030 target of a 60-65% reduction, announced in 2014, which was then upgraded to more than 65% in 2021.
Since carbon intensity was made a key progress indicator in China’s 14th five-year plan for 2021-25, the country has reported reductions in carbon intensity every year in its statistical communique, issued at the end of February.
Neither China’s international climate pledges (its nationally determined contributions, NDCs) nor other official documents have ever set out a definition of carbon intensity, despite it being a cornerstone of the country’s climate commitments.
However, until this year, it was possible to closely reproduce the reported numbers, based on a straightforward interpretation of what carbon intensity means.
But the types of emissions that are included in the carbon-intensity metric have now changed.
Previously, it was possible to reproduce the reported carbon-intensity data by combining official GDP data with estimates of emissions from the use of fossil fuels. The latter could be estimated based on the officially reported consumption of coal, oil and gas, multiplied by China’s official emissions factors for the CO2 per unit of energy from each fuel.
The previous carbon-intensity measure apparently included emissions from the use of fossil fuels to generate energy, as well as their use as chemical feedstocks, so-called “non-energy uses”. However, it did not include non-fossil fuel CO2 emissions from industrial processes, such as the production of cement, as shown by the “old scope” in the figure below left.
Based on the annually reported progress against this old scope, China’s carbon intensity had fallen by a total of 12.4% from 2020-2025.
This was well short of the 18% target set for these years under the 14th five-year plan.
In September 2025, Huang Runqiu, head of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, acknowledged this gap, saying that meeting China’s carbon-intensity targets had become “more challenging” due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and trade tensions.
Yet the 15th five-year plan, published in March 2026, reported that China had cut its carbon intensity by 17.7% over the same period – just shy of the 18% target.
As such, it is clear that there has been a major shift in the way that China measures its carbon intensity, specifically in terms of which types of emissions are included.
Moreover, the revised numbers imply that – rather than missing it by a large margin – China officially came close to meeting its carbon-intensity target for the 14th five-year plan.
A footnote in China’s latest statistical communique offers a brief description of carbon intensity as relating to the CO2 emissions from “energy activities and industrial production”.
This indicates that the carbon-intensity calculation now includes industrial process emissions and excludes non-energy uses of fossil fuels, shown by the “new scope” in the figure above.
In comments sought by Carbon Brief, Ryna Cui, associate research professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, who was not involved in the analysis, agrees that the changes to the carbon-intensity methodology are “unclear”. However, she notes that “limited data” makes it challenging to fully verify the nature and impact of the changes.
The revision mirrors a recent change made to the way that China measures its “energy intensity”, the energy use per unit of economic output. In 2024, energy intensity was changed to exclude non-energy use of fossil fuels and energy use from non-fossil fuels.
This exclusion also created a major incentive for expanding the chemical industry and the non-energy use of fossil fuels.
As for the change in carbon-intensity metric, this follows the highly energy-intensive pattern of economic growth during and after the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s “zero-Covid” policy.
Germany-sized gap
The shift in the way that China is measuring its carbon intensity has implications for estimates of the country’s emissions, which are only reported officially some years later.
Changes in carbon intensity and GDP are reported far more quickly – and can be used to estimate changes in China’s CO2 emissions.
China’s total emissions from energy and industrial processes were 11.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) in 2020. Based on the originally reported changes in carbon intensity and GDP, its fossil-fuel CO2 emissions had grown 14% by 2024, an increase of 1,430m tonnes (MtCO2).
In contrast, the newly reported carbon-intensity figures imply that China’s CO2 emissions only grew by 7% between 2020 and 2025, up just 690MtCO2, as shown by the figure below.
The gap between these figures amounts to 730m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2), equivalent to the annual emissions of Germany or South Korea.
On paper, therefore, the change in the carbon-intensity metric effectively halves the rate of growth in China’s CO2 emissions over the past five years.
Decoding the new carbon-intensity methodology
The change in the carbon-intensity metric could have other significant implications, explored below, making it important to understand how it is being calculated.
Yet, while there are some indications of what the new approach entails, these changes do not seem to account for the magnitude of the revision.
The new scope includes industrial-process emissions. One of the largest sources of these emissions, the cement industry, has been contracting due to a slowdown in real estate and infrastructure construction.
This reduction in emissions is one reason why China’s carbon intensity has improved more quickly under the new scope than under the old one.
In addition, the new scope excludes non-energy use of fossil fuels – largely relating to the chemicals industry – where there has been rapid growth over the past five years.
This is another factor in carbon intensity improving faster under the new scope.
Indeed, China’s chemicals industry drove more than half of the growth in its total fossil-fuel use in the past five years, including 40% of coal use and all of oil use. As a result, non-energy use reached 13% of the total consumption of fossil fuels in 2025, up from 7% in 2020, after growing at an average annual rate of 13%.
The figure below illustrates the impact of these changes in scope. It shows the change in China’s emissions from 2020-2025 due to the use of fossil fuels for energy, its industrial-process emissions and non-energy use of fossil fuels.
The first few rows show changes based on the consumption of fossil fuels overall, amounting to a combined 1,430MtCO2 rise in emissions.
This compares with the 690MtCO2 rise implied by the new carbon-intensity metric, leaving that Germany-sized 730MtcO2 gap in emissions. The new scope explains some of this gap.
In terms of industrial processes, the 30% fall in cement production could account for a 300MtCO2 fall in China’s CO2 emissions. In addition, the amount of carbon stored in products, such as plastics, asphalt and rubber, could account for an estimated 100MtCO2 fall in emissions.
On the other hand, emissions from the incineration of plastics increased by an estimated 40% and from metals industry processes by 10%, with aluminium production having expanded by 21%. Together, these would have increased emissions by an estimated 60MtCO2.
In total, the changes in emissions from fossil-fuel use, industrial processes, carbon retained in products and waste incineration add up to a combined 1,070MtCO2 rise from 2020-2025, shown in the penultimate row of the figure below.
Again, this revised total – based on the change in scope of the carbon-intensity metric – goes some way to explaining the Germany-sized gap in China’s CO2 emissions.
However, the new carbon-intensity figures imply that China’s CO2 emissions only increased by 690MtCO2, as shown in the final row of the figure below. This leaves a residual gap of around 380MtCO2, which does not appear to be accounted for by the data available.
One way to make the numbers add up would be to assume that the amount of carbon embedded in chemical-industry products has increased by the equivalent of 500MtCO2.
However, the reported output of major chemical-industry products cannot account for this level of embedded carbon. The figure below shows that the increase in output of major chemical products only explains around a 110MtCO2 increase in retained carbon.
Much of the increase in the production of plastics was cancelled out by a contraction in the use of bitumen for asphalt, due to lower road-building activity.
Furthermore, the 14th five-year plan for 2021-25 had a target of raising the share of waste incineration to 65% of urban residential waste treatment capacity, up from 45% in 2020.
So, while plastics production did go up, resulting in increased amounts of retained carbon, a larger share of this retained carbon was being incinerated, meaning its carbon would quickly be released back into the atmosphere.
One reason why carbon retained in products has grown more slowly than the amount of fossil fuels used in chemicals production is that the fastest growth has been in the coal-based chemicals industry.
Coal-based processes have a much lower conversion efficiency than oil- and gas-based production, with process emissions that are typically multiple times as high.
For example, these emissions are 10 times as high for the production of olefins – a key plastics feedstock – from coal as compared with oil or gas. The process is reported to require 3.75 tonnes of standard coal per tonne of product. This implies that only 30% of the carbon in the coal is retained in the product, with the other 70% being emitted in the process.
There are also chemical processes that use fossil fuels as a feedstock, but where the end product does not contain carbon. One example is ammonia, a key building block for fertiliser, where production grew by 52% from 2020 to 2025.
Neither the change in scope of the carbon-intensity calculation, nor the change in the amount of carbon retained in products, is sufficient to explain the size of the revision in the newly reported numbers. There must be another explanation.
There are two options. Either the new scope broadly aligns with what is outlined above, but also excludes a subset of the CO2 emissions. Or the scope does not exclude any of the CO2, but there are gaps in the monitoring of some energy or industrial-process emissions.
Either explanation would mean that China is not accounting for some of its CO2 emissions. It would also mean that the improvement in carbon intensity for 2020-2025 is over-reported.
China’s latest officially reported emissions inventories reinforce the second of the two options above, namely, that there are gaps in emissions reporting from the chemical industry.
From 2018 to 2021, the latest year for which China has reported on its emissions, the CO2 output of chemical-industry processes only increased by 13%. Over the same period, non-energy use of fossil fuels increased by 29%, according to data reported to the International Energy Agency by the Chinese government.
One factor in these apparent gaps could be that China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is required to publish data on carbon intensity very quickly, since it is a key indicator in the country’s five-year plans.
On the other hand, detailed greenhouse gas emissions inventories and energy statistics are only published years later, by the environment ministry and NBS, respectively.
What the change means for China’s targets
The change in the definition of carbon intensity has the effect of weakening China’s climate targets and introducing more uncertainty into tracking progress.
On the basis of China’s new numbers, it will require less effort to hit the 2030 target for a 65% reduction in carbon intensity on 2005 levels, as per China’s Paris pledge.
This target can now be met even if CO2 emissions go up between 2025 and 2030, whereas the previous metric would have required a reduction.
It will also require less effort to hit the 17% target in the 15th five-year plan.
The apparent gaps in the CO2 emissions numbers for 2025 could affect the delivery of China’s other key climate pledges, such as the commitment to peak CO2 emissions before 2030. They could also allow the chemical industry’s CO2 emissions to continue climbing rapidly, while still officially meeting the 2030 goals for CO2 intensity.
Moreover, the apparent gaps or inconsistencies in China’s new carbon accounting also mean that China would be able to officially meet its target to peak its CO2 emissions by 2030, even if its overall CO2 emissions do not actually reach a peak.
The apparent gaps could also affect the delivery of China’s newer target to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035 and beyond.
Nevertheless, researchers and analysts can still monitor progress by calculating China’s CO2 emissions independently.
China’s reporting on fossil-fuel consumption, the output of plastics and other carbon-containing products, as well as manufacturing of commodities with substantial process emissions, provides a basis for tracking emissions under the new scope.
While under the UN’s climate framework China is free to use any definition it wants to meet its own nationally determined climate pledges, retrospective changes to methodology or inconsistent accounting could erode the value of the country’s commitments.
Moreover, it will, ultimately, have to close any gaps in its emissions data and reporting, under the transparency rules of the Paris Agreement.
China’s next transparency report to the UN, due by the end of this year, should also provide more clarity on the methodology and data underlying the revised numbers.
This underscores the importance of monitoring, reporting and verification for industrial process emissions. “Mass balances” based on fossil-fuel consumption and product output could be used as a check on CO2 emissions reporting. Finally, China’s emissions data could also be made more granular and clearly defined.
Carbon Brief has approached the National Bureau of Statistics and Ministry of Ecology and Environment for comment.
The University of Maryland’s Cui tells Carbon Brief that in general, China’s climate goals are “improv[ing]” in terms of their coverage and scope. However, she adds:
“The issue is…the ambiguity and inconsistency in the coverage, definition and method between target setting and progress tracking, which can lead to large uncertainties and room for manipulation. It highlights the importance of transparency in national climate targets, following the UNFCCC’s international transparency framework, which should also be applied as best practices for domestic targets.”
About the data
The calculations in this analysis are based on China’s total coal, oil and gas consumption from energy statistical yearbooks covering the years until 2023, with data for 2024 and 2025 taken from the latest statistical communiques.
“Originally reported” CO2 emissions were back-calculated from carbon-intensity reductions and GDP growth given in annual statistical communiques. The revised emissions for 2020, 2024 and 2025 are similarly back-calculated from the reductions in carbon intensity from 2020 to 2025 and from 2024 to 2025, as reported in the 15th five-year plan outline and the 2025 statistical communique, respectively, combined with annually reported GDP growth.
Cement process emissions up to 2024 are from Robbie Andrews’ estimates, scaled to 2025 based on year-on-year change in total cement output.
Process emissions from the metals industry are based on calculating emissions for aluminium, silicon, lead, zinc and crude steel from the bottom-up, using industrial output data and IPCC default emission factors scaled to the reported total in 2021. For steel, the calculations are based on typical quicklime use in basic-oxygen and electric-arc furnaces.
Emissions from the incineration of plastics are based on a peer-reviewed estimate of plastics incineration in 2022, combined with growth rates in the overall power generation from waste-to-energy plants. The analysis assumes that the share of plastics in the energy content of the incinerated waste stayed constant over this period, which is a conservative assumption given the rapid rise in plastics production.
Total non-energy use of fossil fuels in 2020, 2024 and 2025 is available from an NEA data release, with data for 2021-2023 found in the China energy statistical yearbook 2025.
The mix of coal, oil and gas within non-energy use is based on the energy statistical yearbook data up to 2023, with the increase in coal in 2024 and 2025 based on Wind Financial Terminal data on coal consumption in the chemical industry. Gas use, which is relatively minor, is assumed to have grown on trend and oil is calculated as the residual.
Primary plastics, rubber, and urea output data are from NBS industrial statistics. The production of solvents, lubricants and waxes, as well as the use of bitumen in construction, is from energy statistical yearbooks. The analysis assumes no change in output from 2023 to 2025, given the lack of clear trends.
The post Analysis: China’s new carbon metric leaves Germany-sized gap in its emissions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: China’s new carbon metric leaves Germany-sized gap in its emissions
At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites across the UK have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding over the past five years, a Carbon Brief investigation reveals.
Maternity centres, surgical theatres, a neonatal intensive-care unit and even entire hospital buildings have been disrupted by heavy rainfall or encroaching floodwaters.
Carbon Brief submitted freedom-of-information (FOI) requests to 162 NHS trusts, which show that while many flood-related shutdowns were brief, some lasted for weeks or months.
In total, 148 trusts responded to these requests with reports of 67 flood-related shutdowns, giving detailed data for 30 incidents that resulted in a total of 3,000 days of closures.
Reports of flooding at NHS sites have been on the rise, according to NHS England data.
This comes as the UK experiences wetter winters, with periods of extreme rainfall that are increasingly linked to human-caused climate change.
These floods can exacerbate existing problems in a healthcare system that is already struggling with insufficient funding, old hospital buildings and a backlog of maintenance work.
Indeed, while there have been efforts to make UK hospitals more resilient to extreme weather, one expert tells Carbon Brief that such measures are difficult to implement when these institutions are struggling to keep their “heads above water”.
Rising floods
Floods pose a threat to people’s health, but they also threaten the UK’s healthcare infrastructure. Water can enter hospitals, paralyse ambulance services and damage equipment, placing strain on an already stretched NHS.
NHS records show that the number of flood incidents “caused by external weather events” in facilities across England has doubled since 2021, reaching nearly 400 in 2024-25.
Equivalent data is not available for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, although there have been reports of floods disrupting services across the whole UK.
As global temperatures rise and the atmosphere holds more moisture, UK winters are getting wetter. Attribution studies show climate change has increased the severity of recent rainfall and flooding events – including Storm Eunice in 2022 and Storm Babet in 2023.
There is also a risk of increased flooding when heavy rain hits after periods of intense drought, of the kind seen in recent years.
Environment Agency modelling suggests that a rising share of medical facilities in England will be at risk of flooding due to climate change. It says the share of sites at risk will increase from a quarter in 2024 to a third by the middle of the century.
Despite this apparent threat facing the UK’s healthcare system, there is limited information about the extent to which these floods are already disrupting NHS services.
Closed services
To build a fuller picture of NHS-wide flooding, Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to 162 trusts and health boards – the organisations in charge of health services – across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
They were asked for details of wards, departments or services that had been temporarily or permanently closed due to weather-related flooding, such as river floods or heavy rainfall, between 2021-22 and the start of 2026.
In total, 148 of these bodies responded with details of 67 incidents in which weather-related floods have triggered closures. The map below shows where these incidents were located, from hospital wards in Scotland to an eye unit on the south coast of England.
The 67 flooding-related disruptions reported by NHS trusts and health boards is likely an underestimate. Many trusts told Carbon Brief they did not record such detailed information or that collating it would be too time-consuming.
Nevertheless, the results provide an insight into the kind of risks facing NHS services as weather gets more extreme.
Among the closures were 13 accident and emergency (A&E) departments, urgent treatment centres and minor injuries units. There were also 10 hospital wards, 10 surgical theatres, five maternity units and a neonatal intensive-care unit affected by flooding.
Many trusts did not provide information about how long each closure lasted. However, the 30 incidents where timespans were provided add up to the equivalent of more than 3,000 days – or eight years – of closures across NHS sites.
The infographic below provides a snapshot of some notable closures from the dataset.
The entire Buckland Hospital site in Dover closed for two days in 2025 amid “exceptional rainfall” and flash floods. People seeking radiology, maternity and urgent-care services were told not to visit over the weekend and various clinical services were delayed or cancelled.
The NHS declared a “major incident” in 2021 when flood waters “caused power outages impacting multiple areas” at Whipps Cross Hospital in north-east London – including its maternity service – for four days. Neighbouring hospitals also flooded.
Some closures lasted far longer. In Stroud General Hospital, a surgical theatre was closed for two weeks and an X-ray facility for around two months after storm water overflowed into the building in 2023.
Several NHS trusts stressed that the flooding incidents they reported were localised – often resulting from roof leaks exacerbated by heavy rain – and resulted in minimal disruption. Sometimes, as with a cardiology suite in Cannock Chase Hospital, the service was moved and the trust says patient care was not disrupted.
However, the responses also showed the breadth of damage such events can cause, including rainwater “pouring onto expensive equipment” and floods triggering the long-term relocation of services.
For example, Orchard Cottage, a site that provided care for adults with learning disabilities in Derbyshire, experienced major flooding during Storm Babet in 2023 and was permanently shut down as a result.
Adaptation needs
The UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, a group of UK health organisations, concluded in a report in 2025 that, with flood risks projected to grow, there is an “urgent need for adaptation measures” across the nation’s healthcare facilities.
Government advisors at the Climate Change Committee have highlighted the need for flood resilience in UK hospitals, including flood barriers, waterproofed electricals and built-in redundancy for critical areas, such as theatres, labs and IT equipment.
There have been various measures at both government and NHS level intended to improve the resilience of medical facilities to climate-related hazards.
The UK’s national adaptation programme sets out expectations for NHS England to “adapt NHS infrastructure to extreme weather events”. All trusts must have “green plans” in place, which require climate change to be factored into infrastructure decisions, for example, through the creation of drainage systems or green spaces.
Yet, as it stands, three-quarters of UK doctors say their workplaces are not prepared for the impact of extreme weather and nearly half of healthcare workers report that extreme weather has disrupted NHS services in the past five years.
Many hospitals have outdated infrastructure – often predating the founding of the NHS – which was not designed to cope with climate change. Prof Hugh Montgomery, chair of intensive-care medicine at University College London, tells Carbon Brief:
“The hospitals themselves weren’t built for this weather any more than anything else is really – and of course it’s going to get worse, in an exponential function.”
Many of the FOI responses provided to Carbon Brief identified specific building defects, such as roof leaks, which led to the flooding incidents during periods of heavy rainfall. There is a huge – and growing – backlog of maintenance work at NHS hospitals that was estimated in 2024-25 to need repairs costing £15.9bn.
Chris Naylor, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, a thinktank focusing on health policy, tells Carbon Brief:
“Dealing with some of the backlog maintenance would probably help with climate adaptation as well, because of leaky roofs and all the rest of it. But we do also need to be thinking specifically about climate adaptation within the NHS and making sure there is funding for that.”
Montgomery points out that with trusts “mostly bankrupt” and most hospitals running a deficit, the question remains how to fund such interventions. “They’re struggling to keep their heads above water and they’re losing money,” he says.
Dr Mark Harber, a consultant nephrologist and special adviser on climate change at the Royal College of Physicians, tells Carbon Brief that hospitals at least need to make plans for extreme weather. This is particularly important for patients in need of time-dependent and life-saving treatments, such as kidney dialysis and chemotherapy.
Harber notes that hospitals, supply chains and transport could all be disrupted by floods:
“You have to have plans in place to deal with that, even if the NHS can’t deal with the flooding risk per se.”
Carbon Brief asked NHS England – which is responsible for the majority of the trusts that reported flooding disruption – for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Methodology
The list of incidents reported by trusts can be viewed here.
Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to 120 English NHS trusts that have reported any incidents of flooding since 2021 in NHS England’s Estates Returns Information Collection (ERIC) dataset. This covers around 60% of all English NHS trusts.
Carbon Brief also filed FOI requests with all 42 of the health boards and trusts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which are equivalent to English NHS trusts.
All trusts and health boards were asked for details of wards, departments or services that have been temporarily or permanently closed due to weather-related flooding, such as river flooding or heavy rainfall.
This matches the wording used to describe a flooding event in the ERIC system, which requires the reporting of all flood events “caused by external weather events” that trigger a risk assessment by staff. Such external events are distinct from floods caused by other issues that are not related to the weather, such as burst pipes.
In total, 14 trusts did not respond and many more said they did not hold the data requested. Some trusts provided data, but on further questioning stated that the data they provided covered all flooding events and it was not possible to say which were related to weather conditions. These cases have not been included in the final dataset.
The post Revealed: Floods have forced at least 67 closures at NHS hospitals since 2021 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: Floods have forced at least 67 closures at NHS hospitals since 2021
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