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.
An exceptional El Niño is building. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says it has intensified to very strong levels and is likely to last at least through February 2027. If its current trajectory holds, it could become stronger than anything seen since WMO monitoring began four decades ago.
That is bad news for agriculture. El Niño – a naturally occurring weather phenomenon – can scramble rainfall patterns across the world, bringing drought to some regions and floods to others. And this time it is unfolding against the backdrop of a significantly hotter climate, with farmers already contending with unreliable growing seasons, extreme heat and less predictable rainfall because of global warming.
El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027
We are seeing the consequences already. In Sri Lanka, drought linked to El Niño has dried wells and reservoirs and cut into crops and farmer incomes. Indonesia is experiencing its worst wildfire season in 11 years, with prolonged drought and extreme heat exacerbated by El Niño. And in Peru, authorities are preparing for the opposite extreme: intense rains, flooding and landslides which the national civil-defence agency says could affect around 1.2 million people.
These impacts will multiply as El Niño intensifies.
And yet, just as the risks to food production are rising, the money available to help farmers withstand them is shrinking.
10% funding decline in 2024
A forthcoming analysis from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that climate-related development finance for agrifood systems is moving in the wrong direction. In 2024, the latest year for which data is available, it fell by 10 percent compared with a 2 percent overall decline. The sectors that put food on our tables — crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries — received just 5 percent.
Yet this is precisely the moment when climate investment in agriculture needs to grow, not shrink. It can help communities adapt, build resilience and protect food security, while unlocking larger flows of public and private finance. Agriculture feeds us, supports the livelihoods of well over a billion people, and is often the first sector hit by drought, floods and extreme heat. Cutting that investment now is a false economy.
One failed harvest can plant the seed for the next crisis, forcing farmers to eat the seed they have saved for planting, sell livestock or tools, or take on debt. It can also deepen food insecurity, disrupt supply chains and drive up prices, showing up months later in supermarket aisles far away.
The Central American Dry Corridor, stretching through much of the region, shows both how exposed farmers are, and what investment can do. Based on an analysis of 41 years of satellite observations, FAO finds that some crop and pasture areas there face more than a 50 percent chance of agricultural drought over the coming months.
About half of Central America’s 1.9 million producers of maize, beans and other basic grains live in the Dry Corridor. Many grow food both for sale and for their own families. When a harvest fails, they lose both income and dinner.
El Salvador project conserves water and soil
In El Salvador, which lies within the Dry Corridor, more than 50,000 farmers have adopted practices to better withstand drought and increasingly unreliable rainfall through RECLIMA, a project financed by the Green Climate Fund and implemented by FAO in partnership with the government of El Salvador. It has substantial national co-financing, including from the country’s Environmental Investment Fund.
El Niño can intensify El Salvador’s annual mid-season dry spell, known as the canícula, turning it into a longer, harsher drought just as maize needs water most.
For María Cristina Corvera de López, a second-generation farmer in rural Nahualapa, adapting means changing how every drop of rain is captured and used. She plants trees alongside her crops to provide shade and minimise evaporation and uses simple irrigation channels and a homemade drip system to conserve water. Instead of burning stalks, leaves and husks after harvest, as generations before her did, she turns them into mulch to hold moisture in the soil.
“The effects of climate change are a constant challenge,” she says. But the new techniques have made her farm more resilient to El Niño as well. Where she once harvested about 50 bags of maize per acre, she now gets around 80, even during droughts. It’s enough to feed her family and sell the surplus.
Managing risk now cuts future costs
Together, these adaptations can mean the difference between losing a crop and getting through a dry season with enough food, seed and income to plant again. They are also the result of climate finance invested before disaster strikes.
RECLIMA shows what that kind of adaptation investment can buy. Adaptation accounted for 45 percent of climate-related development finance to agrifood systems in 2024, and multilateral development banks are directing more agricultural finance towards resilience. That shift reflects a growing recognition that adaptation is a form of risk management, not just a development cost.
We need much more of it. The same investments that help farmers withstand El Niño also enable them to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future. Cutting investment in the people who produce our food just as climate risks intensify does not save money. It simply pushes a much larger bill into the next harvest, the next food crisis, and the next El Niño.
The post As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers appeared first on Climate Home News.
As El Niño intensifies, we should be investing more in the world’s farmers
An area of Amazon forest roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey has remained standing due to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leadership of Brazil, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Lula beat Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election to become president of the nation that is home to nearly 60% of the Amazon rainforest.
Forest loss surged during Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency and dropped sharply under the left-wing Lula, with Amazon deforestation likely to hit its lowest level on record this year.
Now, as another presidential election approaches, Lula is facing off against Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, whose “anti-environmental” policies are similar to his father’s.
Carbon Brief’s analysis suggests that at least 20,000 square kilometres (km2) of deforestation has been avoided since Lula took office and prioritised Amazon protection.
The analysis is based on modelling by an international research team of an alternative scenario in which Brazil’s flagship forest code legislation was not enforced – a proxy for Jair Bolsonaro’s leadership.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that this estimate is likely “conservative” and that actual deforestation under Bolsonaro could have been “much higher”.
With Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro tied in the polls, the upcoming election is expected to significantly shape the level of environmental action in the world’s fourth-largest emitter, whose emissions are largely driven by deforestation.
‘Brazil is back’
When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil between 2019 and 2022, he championed the nation’s powerful agribusiness sector and oversaw an unprecedented increase in Amazon deforestation.
Bolsonaro weakened regulations, slashed federal agency budgets and empowered illegal activities in the Amazon, while attacking Indigenous and environmental groups.
This meant that the forest code – Brazil’s flagship legislation that requires landowners to preserve and restore forest on their property – was not properly enforced.
After Lula’s presidential victory in 2022, he promised to target “zero deforestation” by 2030, telling the COP27 UN climate summit that “Brazil is back”.
Lula rolled back Bolsonaro’s wave of deregulation and reinstated a deforestation “action plan”. Led by celebrated environmentalist Marina Silva, the environment ministry scaled up enforcement and policing activities in the Amazon.
As a result, annual deforestation in the Amazon has more than halved from 11,594km2 per year in 2022 to 5,731km2 in 2025.
Data from August 2025 to July 2026 – the timespan used in government records – is yet to be released, but preliminary satellite alerts put the deforestation figure at 2,874km2.
While the final figure is likely to be higher, experts still think Amazon deforestation in 2026 could hit its lowest level since records began in 1988.
New Jersey-sized forest
Compared to a scenario in which Bolsonaro won in 2022, Carbon Brief analysis suggests that at least 20,000km2 of Amazon forest remains standing today due to Lula’s leadership.
This area – roughly the size of Wales, Belize, Slovenia or the US state of New Jersey – is indicated by the grey area in the chart below.
This analysis is based on a 2023 study on the role of nature-based solutions in Brazil’s pathway to net-zero emissions. This was a refined update of a 2018 study that used the same GLOBIOM-Brazil model, from researchers at the University of Oxford, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
It is based on a comparison of forest code implementation with a “baseline” scenario in which the code is not enforced, reflecting the kind of weak governance seen under the Bolsonaro administration. (See Carbon Brief’s 2022 article for more details of this modelling.)
Dr Aline Soterroni, a University of Oxford researcher who led the 2023 analysis, tells Carbon Brief that the reversal seen under Lula “shows how quickly deforestation can respond to political will”.
However, she stresses that the modelling of the “no forest code” scenario is “relatively conservative”, with deforestation remaining high but not rising.
Deforestation in this scenario – used here as a proxy for a Bolsonaro election win – is tempered by slower demand growth for Brazilian beef and soy, says Soterroni. She notes that the scenario also does not capture the potential for illegal forest clearing in response to weak governance.
Indeed, some experts anticipated in 2022 that a Bolsonaro victory would send deforestation rates rising to near-record levels.
Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, tells Carbon Brief that if Bolsonaro had won in 2022, “we have reason to believe [this would have resulted] in much higher rates than during his first term”.
Angelo says the “political signal” would likely have driven an “explosion of wildcat mining” and illegal deforestation in the Amazon. He also points to efforts – including by Flávio Bolsonaro – to formally dismantle the forest code in the Brazilian congress, during Jair Bolsonaro’s first term.
Soterroni notes that deforestation rates did not immediately drop following Lula’s election, as suggested by modelling of a full “forest code compliance” scenario. She says this reflects the “gradual and imperfect process” of restoring and enforcing the law.
Nevertheless, she tells Carbon Brief:
“The key message from our modelling is the contrast between these trajectories: weak environmental governance keeps deforestation substantially higher than full implementation of the forest code. That message remains relevant today.”
Election significance
With Jair Bolsonaro in prison for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election, his son Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator for Rio de Janeiro, is standing against Lula in the upcoming contest for president.
There are 13 candidates, but Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula are by far the frontrunners and are currently neck-and-neck in opinion polls.
If Lula wins, experts say he is likely to continue with the “zero deforestation by 2030” agenda that has already had a pronounced impact on forest loss.
As the chart below shows, periods when Amazon deforestation fell in recent history all occurred during Lula’s three terms as president.
In contrast, experts say Flávio Bolsonaro, a climate sceptic who has indicated he will continue his father’s political agenda and favour agribusiness and mining, will likely drive a surge in deforestation. Angelo tells Carbon Brief:
“At the risk of sounding alarmist, I’ve been saying that Lula’s re-election is the only thing standing between us and a wide destruction of the Amazon.”
A Bolsonaro win would be a “tremendous disaster”, says Dr Patricia Pinho, deputy science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, adding:
“I don’t think we can afford four years of increasing deforestation [and] violence against Indigenous peoples.”
Dr David Lapola, an ecologist focused on Amazon research at the University of Campinas in Brazil, says he believes deforestation “would certainly rise” and Brazil’s climate and deforestation goals “would be thrown in the trash bin”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The Bolsonaro administration in the 2019-2022 period showed that the deconstruction of environmental policies and institutes can be done very, very quickly.
“In a matter of a few months, they can destroy what has been constructed over decades of environmental policy and activism in Brazil.”
‘Greenest’ policies
Lula has the “greenest” policy proposals of Brazil’s six top-polling presidential candidates, according to analysis by the Climate Observatory.
The analysis identifies 16 “positive and detailed” environmental commitments in Lula’s proposals, including reaffirming his “zero deforestation by 2030” goal.
Flávio Bolsonaro, on the other hand, has one positive environmental commitment and seven “clearly anti-environmental” proposals.
The right-wing politician has committed to zero “illegal” deforestation by 2029. However, he has also previously led an attempt to change the forest code, opening up large tracts of previously out-of-bounds forest for legal clearance by extractive industries.
Given this, Angelo tells Carbon Brief that he is sceptical about the 2029 pledge.
“The only way you can trust him on this is to think that he is going to revoke the forest code and make all illegal deforestation legal.”
Lula is also the only major candidate to list a clear target for cutting national emissions, sticking with Brazil’s existing goal to cut emissions by 59-67% by 2035, compared to 2005 levels.
Overall, the Climate Observatory notes that climate change and environmental issues “are off the radar for most candidates”, who are instead focusing on the economy and security issues.
Pinho adds that deforestation and the Amazon have not been at the “forefront” of this election, compared to 2022.
If Bolsonaro wins, up to 95% of the Amazon would fall under the leadership of right-wing national governments – including those in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – reported Mongabay. It noted that presidents in all these nations “explicitly favour agribusiness and mining over environmental conservation”.
If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round of Brazil’s election on 4 October, a runoff will take place on 25 October, as has happened at every presidential election since 1998.
Soy moratorium and Brazilian congress
Other factors will also play a role in future deforestation in Brazil, regardless of the next president.
One is the effective end of the Amazon soy moratorium. This is a voluntary agreement signed by companies committing to not buy soya beans grown on land in the Brazilian Amazon that was deforested after 2008.
Conservation organisation WWF’s international director general, Kirsten Schuijt, previously described it as the “most impactful voluntary supply chain policy ever implemented”.
However, major grain traders withdrew from the agreement earlier this year, effectively bringing it to an end. Pinho describes this move as a “huge destruction” of Brazil’s environmental protections.
Research shows the moratorium prevented around 18,000km2 of deforestation in its first decade of operation from 2005-16.
In contrast, a 2026 study estimated that the end of the moratorium could result in 14,000km2 of additional deforestation in the Amazon by 2036.
Alongside choosing a new president on 4 October, Brazilian voters will elect state governors and members of congress, which will also factor into future environmental impacts.
Right-leaning parties, including the far-right Liberal Party linked to the Bolsonaros, currently hold half the seats of the two chambers of congress.
This has led to conflict between lawmakers and Lula. For example, in 2025, congress bypassed Lula’s veto of several aspects of a controversial piece of legislation dubbed the “devastation bill”.
Pinho says that the potential for a right-wing congress and president would be “devastating for the environmental and climate agenda”.
Lapola notes that a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency “would consolidate the view in Brazil that environmental protection is solely a matter of political preference, and not a crucial need of all people”. He adds:
“Land pillage, destruction of precious biodiversity and scorning of Indigenous peoples simply cannot be a nation’s project in the 21st century. We have got to be smarter than that, for sure.”
related
Q&A: What change of power in Colombia could mean for world’s fossil-fuel transition
Brazil’s biodiversity pledge: Six key takeaways for nature and climate change
COP30: Could Brazil’s ‘Tropical Forest Forever’ fund help tackle climate change?
Guest post: How Caribbean states are shaping climate legislation
The post Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022
This letter is a bit more direct and longer than most of those which I write, but I hope you will be okay with that, because the times seem to call for being plain.
A few weeks ago I got a text message from an old and dear friend —let’s call her Hannah.
I have enough shared life with Hannah that, whenever we talk, the conversation always feels current and effortless, despite gaps of months or even years.
Hannah has been talking with her son — we’ll call him Neil — who is a teenager and doing well in school, but wildly worried about the state of the world, including the imminent trajectory of global warming. Hannah and I don’t text each other other very often, but on this occasion she’s reached out with something visceral:
Neil has challenged me to point him to something hopeful, if I can find it. He says so far no one is showing any will to uphold the Paris Agreement. I am checking in to see how you still manage to have real hope.*
Then, just a few days later, the United Nations Environment Programme Limiting Overshoot report landed, containing the principal finding that it is likely the global temperature will soon exceed 1.5°C.
After that news, and the real time devastation in Nepal, and in the context of the broader state of the world, I found myself having multiple conversations with friends and colleagues about the structure of hope. I want to openly share that after a few of these exchanges, I metaphorically closed the blinds, and wondered how to feel, and what to do, because there is no avoiding the dreadfulness of the news, and what it means for the suffering of people and life on Earth.
But if you are fortunate enough to have time, space and security to do so, then after the darkness, you open the shutters and once again there is light. This is the structure of my innermost resolve.
* * *
Our lives — those of us living on our magnificent earth now — have the greatest possible purpose.
There is virtually no problem that we endlessly clever and creative, human beings cannot solve, when we work together.
And we are not just intelligent and ingenious; we are inherently social, nurturing and brave; capable of the deepest enduring love.
Each of the roughly 12,000 generations of humanity so far has made life possible for those who have followed, through acts of devotion.
Babies have been held and fed. Water and food have been found and shared. Shelter has been built. For 12,000 generations we have held the hands of our children.
Every single one of us was once carried in the arms of another, unable to walk ourselves. It is our thoughtfulness, kindness and care that have seen us through as a species. Sometimes this has been in the most exigent of circumstances, when enough of our ancestors did not give in, faced incredibly difficult things, to somehow make it through.
And so it comes to this. To what we now must do. We must do as 12,000 generations of people did for us.
The struggle to keep global warming to under 1.5 degrees may be over. The battle of return—to get our planet back to safe temperatures at emergency speed and scale — is just beginning. Upon this struggle depends the future of all we care about, and that of all life on Earth. The prospects of the next 12,000 generations are conditioned by our efforts now.
Our work now is to keep the overshoot as low as we can, make it as brief as possible, and do everything within our power to alleviate other pressures on nature. It is to take care of humanity — of one another — in the face of mounting climate and ecological damage. And by these efforts, create the conditions for future flourishing. Every fraction of every degree matters.
What must now be done is hard, much tougher than should have been necessary, because of the vested interests in coal, oil and gas and deforestation, and the failures of decision makers. And while renewable energy has surged, making the case for change much simpler, on the other side of the ledger there’s the reactionary and gangsterist turn of politics and the multiplier effects of wars and mass violence, with the existential destabilisation of big tech looming over all.
There is no sugarcoating the scale of difficulty. But what is necessary remains within our collective power. We must never, for one second, say that returning our planet to flourishing is impossible — many of the obvious solutions already exist; but even where transformation relies on reforms, technologies or capabilities that might sound fanciful, or historical changes that are unprecedented, this can be no barrier to our conviction. After all, much of what we take for granted today as ordinary features of social life, would have been considered impossible by every single generation before us.
The world has not been destroyed by nuclear war; we solved the growing hole in the ozone layer; Antarctica was kept sacrosanct from exploitation. Humanity has collectively triumphed before, and can do so again.
We can find the necessary social and political will to do what is needed because these are endlessly renewable resources. The necessary financial capital exists. Apart from the fossil fuel industry, the greatest barrier we face is to mistakenly concede that what lies before us is insurmountable. It is not.
We must avoid the siren song of fatalism. Because. It. Is. Never. Too. Late.
None of which is to be insensitive to the horrors already unleashed — the deadly and grotesque harm to people, places and species that cannot be undone; or to be blind to the impacts that are coming. But where we have the power to act, we also have the responsibility — and the extraordinary privilege — to do what must be done.
Although she is wounded, our planet is still alive and beautiful beyond all of our comprehension. Hundreds of billions of creatures live and thrive still upon this earth. Nothing has happened until it has happened, and life fights for life. Every beetle, every tree, all the fish in the ocean, the smallest of the geothermal shrimps, the greatest of the whales and the mightiest of the birds — all demand life every second of their existence, so that their species too may have future generations.
No individual has to know how to solve this alone. Indeed, finding some detachment and humility is essential to concentrate on the role that each of us can play.
Hope is not merely a mindset or a story we tell ourselves. Collective power is not abstract; it is what we do, together, applying ourselves to the practical mechanics of change and contestation within society, by being part of the organisations and networks of people that are dedicated to effective strategies. It is why I am so committed to Greenpeace.
Working from without and within, there are opportunities to make rapid change within institutions, governments, businesses and communities to create the social, economic and political momentum for emissions reduction at speed and scale, reminding ourselves always of what remains possible, even if it hasn’t happened yet.
We can return the planet to safer temperatures. We can put technologies back in the service of people and life. We can return to the assumptions that seemed so obvious just one generation ago — that it is both possible, and our obligation, to build a better future for all people, and for life on Earth.
I did write back to Hannah and Neil, to say honestly to a treasured friend and her son, that yes, as a matter of faith, conviction, evidence and strategy, absolutely there is real hope. And this is a pledge not just to Neil and his generation, but to the next 12,000.
Together, we have the power. Together, we cross this bridge through the dark. To secure an Earth capable of nurturing life in all of its magnificent diversity.
We did not choose to carry this historic responsibility, but here we are. And it is so lucky that we are here.
I wouldn’t choose any other time to be here, alive on Earth, with you.
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