UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has unveiled the first spending review under the current Labour government, announcing funding for nuclear power, energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
A spending review establishes each ministry’s spending limits and priorities for the rest of the parliamentary term.
The Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) received one of the largest jumps in capital spending, despite energy secretary Ed Miliband reportedly being one of the last to agree to a spending settlement.
Before the final details had been announced, the Times was describing Miliband as one of the “biggest winners” from the process.
High-profile funding announcements in the Treasury’s spending review include £14.2bn for the Sizewell C new nuclear power plant in Suffolk, the first state-backed nuclear power station for decades.
Elsewhere, two new CCS clusters – Acorn and Viking – were allocated funding and railways across the nation were given a boost.
Below, Carbon Brief runs through the key announcements.
- Departmental spending
- Energy efficiency
- Energy infrastructure investment
- Transport
- Other announcements
Departmental spending
Spending reviews are an opportunity for governments to stake out their priorities by setting the budgets for departments over the rest of this parliament.
Reeves’ spending review has been viewed by experts and media commentators as an opportunity to boost Labour’s flagging popularity and pursue some of its key manifesto commitments, including net-zero.
It covers plans for departmental “resource” spending – including day-to-day running costs – out to 2028-29 and “capital” spending out to 2029-30.
The latter includes injections of funding for infrastructure and public services, such as major clean-energy and transport projects.
In her speech launching the review, Reeves did not specifically mention the terms net-zero or climate change, but stressed the importance of achieving energy security via domestic, low-carbon power. “Clean energy” also featured prominently in the review document itself.
Overall, total departmental budgets are set to grow by 2.3% in real terms across the spending review period.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) is expected to see a 16% increase in overall departmental spending, reaching £12.6bn in 2028-29.
(This does not include the boost in funding for Sizewell C nuclear plant, which will see a 15.6% increase thanks to a £14.2bn investment over the next five years. See: New nuclear.)
The chart below – taken from the spending review document – shows that while the absolute increase in spending on areas such as health, defence and education is higher, DESNZ is among the most highly prioritised in relative terms.
The review document emphasises that this increase in public money is necessary to mobilise private investment and “secure the UK’s electricity system with homegrown, clean power by 2030”.
Other departments that are also relevant for climate action have not seen the same overall increases in budget.
The Department for Transport (DfT) is set to see its overall departmental spending drop by 0.4%. However, the review notes that capital spending will increase, including more money for local low-carbon transport options and major rail projects.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) budget is also expected to fall overall, but support for “nature-friendly farming” is set to more than double over the review period.
Energy efficiency
Leading up to the spending review, there had been speculation that the government might cut plans to invest £13.2bn on upgrading the nation’s homes under its “warm homes plan”, which had been a manifesto commitment ahead of last year’s election.
Such a move could have cost households more than £1.4bn a year in avoidable energy bills, according to analysis from thinktank the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
However, the spending review confirmed the pledged £13.2bn in funding for the scheme, covering spending between 2025-26 and 2029-30.
The government says this will help to cut bills by up to £600 per household through energy efficiency measures, heat pumps, solar panels and batteries. It will also help support tens of thousands of jobs across the country, the spending review adds.
According to innovation agency Nesta, the warm homes funding is roughly double the previous government’s commitment, amounting to a £6.6bn increase in government spending on home upgrades over the current parliament, compared with the previous one.
It will see around one-fifth of the nation’s housing stock upgraded by 2029, although to a varying degree.
Responding to the announcement, trade association Energy UK’s chief executive Dhara Vyas said in a statement:
“It’s also very important that millions of customers will see a direct benefit from today’s announcements. By reaffirming the funding to improve the energy efficiency of millions of homes and supporting the switch to cleaner heating alternatives, customers can expect warmer and more comfortable homes, cleaner air and cheaper bills – showing how the energy transition can improve their daily lives.”
Funding for the warm homes plan in the spending review follows £3.4bn in investment announced for the scheme at the autumn budget in 2024. At the time, Labour had said that this was just the “first step” in investment for decarbonisation and household energy efficiency within the scheme.
Further details for the warm homes plan will be confirmed in October, the spending review says.
Beyond energy efficiency, Reeves announced what she called the “biggest boost to investment in social and affordable housing in a generation”, confirming £39bn in funding for a 10-year affordable homes programme.
This will nearly double government spending on affordable housing, according to reporting earlier this week.
Miliband recently announced changes to the “future homes standard” that will mean almost all new homes will have to be built with rooftop solar as a default, high levels of energy efficiency and low-carbon heating, such as heat pumps.
As such, new properties built under the affordable homes programme will largely have to include energy efficiency measures and low-carbon energy technologies.
Energy infrastructure investment
GB Energy
The spending review also confirms that it will allocate £8.3bn in funding for Great British Energy (GB Energy) and the linked GB Energy – Nuclear, another manifesto commitment.
It says this has been achieved by allocating £9.6bn in “additional financial transactions, such as loans and equity investments, to support growth”.
(It explains that “financial transactions” are designed to “allow government to invest alongside the private sector, through equity investments, loans and guarantees”. The document also says that GB Energy will be designated as a “public financial institution”.)
In addition to this top-line confirmation for GB Energy, the spending review also gives it an extra £300m in support for offshore wind supply chains.
This forms part of the “government’s investment in resilient and clean energy security, boosting domestic jobs, mobilising additional private investment and securing manufacturing facilities for critical clean energy supply chains such as floating offshore platforms”, it notes.
The spending review confirms up to £80m for port investment to support floating offshore wind deployment in Port Talbot in Wales, subject to final due diligence.
GB Energy funding follows on from Labour’s manifesto, promising investment into technologies such as floating offshore wind, as well as partnering with local authorities and the private sector to support the deployment of mature technologies.
New nuclear
Ahead of the spending review, the chancellor announced a £14.2bn investment in the planned Sizewell C new nuclear power plant in Suffolk.
The plant is being jointly developed by the UK government with French state-owned utility firm EDF Energy, which is already building the Hinkley C plant in Somerset.
Each new plant will have a capacity of 3.2 gigawatts (GW), enough to power six million homes. During its construction, Sizewell C will provide 10,000 jobs, including 1,500 apprenticeships, according to the government.
In a statement earlier this week, energy secretary Ed Miliband said new nuclear was needed for energy security, lower bills and to help cut emissions. He said:
“We need new nuclear to deliver a golden age of clean-energy abundance, because that is the only way to protect family finances, take back control of our energy, and tackle the climate crisis.
“This is the government’s clean energy mission in action- investing in lower bills and good jobs for energy security.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme following the investment announcement, Miliband stated that China would not be able to invest in the new nuclear plant in Suffolk. He further clarified that, while the majority of the investment would come from the UK government, there will also be private investment announced at a later date.
Sizewell C will be one of the first new nuclear power stations in the UK in decades, with no new nuclear power plants having opened since 1995 and all but one of the existing fleet expected to retire by the early 2030s.
The under-construction plant at Hinkley Point C is also being developed by EDF and is expected to serve as a “blueprint” for Sizewell C.
The Hinkley C plant is being funded via a “contract for difference” (CfD), under which EDF is responsible for the upfront investment costs, but will receive £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh, 2012 prices) for each unit of electricity generated. (This will drop to £89.50/MWh in 2012 prices as a result of the Sizewell C project going ahead.)
EDF has reportedly accepted that Hinkley C will cost more than £40bn to complete, but has “rejected claims” that the Sizewell C scheme would cost a similar amount.
Sizewell C is due to be funded under the “regulated asset base” (RAB) model and so will not receive a CfD, but the details of this deal are not yet available. The final investment decision on the project is due later this summer, according to reports.
Additionally, the government announced Rolls-Royce has been selected to build small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) following a “rigorous” two-year competition.
Rolls-Royce will partner with Great British Energy – Nuclear as part of the government’s industrial strategy, which will see £2.5bn invested over the spending review period.
The firm is expected to build three SMRs, with the first connecting to the grid “in the mid-2030s”, according to Rolls-Royce.
The spending review also included over £2.5bn for nuclear fusion. This will include support for the design and build of a prototype energy plant in Nottinghamshire.
The document notes that the government is providing a “pathway for privately led advanced nuclear technologies”, although details are not elaborated.
Great British Energy – Nuclear will shortly publish a new framework with the National Wealth Fund for exploring further investment opportunities for viable nuclear projects.
The spending review includes £13.9bn for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, to keep “former nuclear sites and facilities safe and secure as it decommissions sites and manages nuclear waste”.
Carbon capture and storage
The UK has already pledged “up to” £21.7bn of funding over 25 years to support five carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, involving “clusters” of connected facilities.
Most of this funding will come from levies on consumers, but the government has also been gradually announcing chunks of public investment to get these initiatives off the ground.
The spending review allocates another £9.4bn of capital spending by 2029. This will partly go towards “maximis[ing] deployment to fill the [CO2] storage capacity” of the first two funded clusters.
At the same time, the government also confirmed its support for the next two clusters – Acorn in north-east Scotland and Viking in the Humber in the spending review. These projects are set to be up and running in the 2030s.
The review states that the government is providing the “development funding to advance [the] delivery” of these clusters, with a final investment decision expected “later this parliament, subject to project readiness and affordability”.
Pathways set out by government advisors at the Climate Change Committee (CCC) suggest CCS is required to meet the UK’s net-zero targets.
However, the government has faced intense scrutiny over its investments in CCS. A report by the influential Public Accounts Committee earlier this year said investing public funds in this relatively undeveloped technology was a “high risk” approach.
Transport
The spending review includes a number of commitments for regional transport projects that could help cut UK emissions, including rail upgrades, bus lanes and cycleways.
Overall, the Department for Transport (DfT) settlement will reach total funding of £31.5bn in 2028-29, a slight increase from current levels. This includes support for the HS2 high-speed rail project.
HS2, which had its second phase out to Manchester cancelled under the Conservatives in 2023, will see its funding drop over the spending period.
Meanwhile, capital spending on transport projects around the country is set to experience a 4% real-terms growth rate each year out to 2029-30.
Regional transport projects receiving funding include the TransPennine Route Upgrade between York and Manchester, with £3.5bn, as well as £2.5bn for East-West Rail between Oxford and Cambridge and £300m for rail investment in Wales.
(For comparison, despite the declining funds, HS2 will receive £25.3bn over the period.)
Other relevant investments in the spending review include a commitment to “more than double” city region transport spending per year by 2029-30, by providing a total of £15.6bn for elected mayors across England. The review says this could go towards local transport priorities, including “zero-emission buses, trams and local rail”.
Additionally, there is another £2.3bn allocated for investment in local transport grants to support “bus lanes, cycleways and congestion improvement measures” for areas outside the larger regions with mayors.
The review includes a relatively small sum – £2.6bn – of capital investment that is set aside to “decarbonise transport” as “part of the government’s clean energy mission”.
This is made up of £1.4bn to “support continued uptake” of electric vehicles, in particular vans and heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), as well as £400m for charging infrastructure and £616m for walking and cycling infrastructure.
Some of these funds will also support the production of “sustainable” aviation fuel (SAF) in the UK by extending the government’s advanced fuels fund.
The spending review also includes funding for transport projects that may not help to decarbonise the nation’s transport. Notably, there is £24bn of funding by 2030 to “maintain and improve motorways and local roads across the country”.
Also, while the project is not mentioned in the spending review document itself, Reeves’s speech mentioned “backing Doncaster airport” alongside “investment to connect our cities and our towns”. (The airport is currently closed, but there has been a local political effort to reopen it.)
Other announcements
R&D funding
The government is increasing research and development (R&D) funding to £22.6bn per year by 2029-2030.
This will include funding for the UK’s science base, the spending review says, such as the non-departmental public body UK Research and Innovation and research initiative Horizon Europe.
Part of this funding will go to the government’s new R&D missions accelerator programme. Some £500m of public funds are intended to leverage a further £1.5bn of private investment in innovation that supports the government’s “missions”.
(One of the five key “missions” announced by the Labour government in its manifesto is to “make Britain a clean-energy superpower”.)
Additionally, R&D funding will include up to £750m for a new supercomputer at Edinburgh University, the largest in the UK. This will be used to support a broad range of fields, including climate and weather predictions and research into fusion power.
In a statement, secretary of state for Scotland Ian Murray welcomed the funding for the supercomputer, adding:
“This will see Scotland playing a leading role in creating breakthroughs that have a global benefit – such as new medicines, health advances and climate change solutions.”
Ahead of the publication of the delayed UK industrial strategy, the spending review lists relevant R&D commitments.
It says over £3bn in R&D and capital funding over the next four years will go to advanced manufacturing across the UK, “anchoring the supply chain of zero emission vehicles, batteries and ultra-low and zero-carbon emissions aircraft[s]”.
Clean-energy industries will also receive “significant additional funding”, it adds.
Flood defences and farming funds
As part of the spending review, the government announced investment in climate adaptation and the natural environment to “increase the UK’s resilience to the effects of climate change and protect the ecosystems that underpin the economy and food security”.
This includes £2.7bn in sustainable farming and nature recovery funding until 2028-29, as well as £4.2bn to build and maintain flood defences from 2026-27 to 2028-29.
According to the spending review, farmers will benefit from £2.3bn through the farming and countryside programme and up to £400m from additional nature schemes
There will be increasing support for “nature-friendly farming” through environmental land management schemes, which will grow from £800m in 2023-24 to £2bn by 2028-29. This will be sustained by “rapidly winding down” other subsidy payments.
The spending review states that this will make a “significant contribution” to the Environment Act targets, including improvements to water and air quality and creating spaces for wildlife to support biodiversity.
Funding for both flood defences and farm schemes follows the government stating that it was facing “significant funding pressures” of almost £600m in 2024-25 in the autumn budget.
Foreign aid and climate finance
The government announced in February that it would further cut aid spending to 0.3% of gross national income (GNI) by 2027 in order to fund higher defence spending.
This came just three months after the UK, alongside other developed countries, had committed to raising at least $300bn a year for climate action in developing countries at the COP29 climate summit.
Developed countries have traditionally used their aid budgets to meet such “climate finance” goals.
But observers have noted that scaling up climate finance to meet this new target will be difficult, as nations cut back their overseas spending and the world faces overlapping humanitarian crises.
When announcing the cut earlier this year, prime minister Keir Starmer said that the UK would retain its focus on “tackling climate change” in its aid spending. The government also acknowledged that the decision to cut aid would require “many hard choices”.
The government has a pledge to spend £11.6bn over five years on climate finance in developing countries, which ends in 2025-26. Beyond that, it is expected to announce a new pledge to feed into the $300bn goal.
The spending review does not provide details of precisely what this goal will be, or whether it will be more ambitious as other aid programmes undergo swingeing cuts.
It states that the funding plan “prioritises UK multilateral investment across issues where the international system needs to deliver at scale and to reform”, including the “climate and nature crisis”.
It also says the three departments that provide nearly all UK climate finance – the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, DESNZ and Defra – will “maintain progress” on the nation’s international climate goals.
However, the amounts of aid channelled via all three of these departments will be lower in the coming years than they are now, according to the government’s figures.
Response to climate-risks report
In a separate document published alongside the spending review, the government also set out its response to the latest “fiscal risks and sustainability” (FRS) report, published by the Office for Budget in September 2024.
Within this, the government reiterates its intention to “accelerate to net-zero”, including via its target for clean power by 2030.
The response adds that, alongside this, the government recognises that it “must also take action to build resilience and ensure the UK is well-prepared for the changing climate”.
It says that FRS identified flooding and extreme heat as areas that need particular attention, before setting out its spending commitments in these areas.
The response also confirms two important dates for UK climate-policy watchers.
First, the response says the government will, in October 2025, publish its “carbon budget delivery plan”. This will set out the plans and policies the government will put in place in order to meet the first six carbon budgets, covering the years out to 2037.
Second, it says that the government will legislate for the seventh UK “carbon budget” by June 2026. This is a legally binding limit on emissions covering five years from 2038 to 2042. The CCC has recommended an 87% reduction below 1990 levels.
The post UK spending review 2025: Key climate and energy announcements appeared first on Carbon Brief.
UK spending review 2025: Key climate and energy announcements
This week our powerful Pacific team is in Palau for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting. This is a major moment in our campaigns for Pacific climate justice and to stop deep sea mining. So what’s it all about, what can we expect over the coming days, and why is this year’s meeting in particular so important? Read on to find out!
*Pawa is Melanesian word meaning collective power.
Meet Moemoana Schwenke, our Pacific Climate Campaigner
“When you love something deeply, you do everything you can to protect it.”
What is the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF)?
The Pacific Islands Forum, or ‘PIF’, is our region’s most important political organisation. It is where countries of the Pacific — including Australia and New Zealand — come together to collaborate on shared challenges and to set collective goals.
The PIF Leaders Meeting is an annual weeklong event that includes a dedicated meeting of the Pacific’s small island developing states (PSIDS), many special side events organised by Pacific civil society, the leaders’ meeting itself, and more. At the end of the week, leaders issue a Forum Communiqué, capturing what they have agreed on, their shared priorities and the actions they will take together.
This year’s meeting is being held in the beautiful northern Pacific nation of Palau, the same place our Pacific team gathered back in January to plan for the year.
What’s at stake this year?
Climate change has dominated the PIF for decades. Pacific leaders have been crystal clear it is their number one priority, and the annual gathering is the moment they can exert maximum pressure on Australia over its fossil fuel record.
The voyage to COP31
This year’s meeting comes less than three months before COP31, where Australia will take on the role of President of Negotiations — a role it has committed to undertaking in partnership with the Pacific — and less than a month before the ‘Pacific Pre-COP’, to be held in Fiji and Tuvalu.
Following a fraught round of mid-year negotiations in Bonn, PIF leaders will need to set out a clear vision and priorities for COP31. These include accelerating a just global transition away from fossil fuels, defending science as the foundation of international climate cooperation, and increasing the availability and accessibility of finance for renewable energy and climate adaptation.
Accountability for Australian fossil fuel exports
Since the last PIF Leaders Meeting, Australia has signed the Belém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. The declaration reaffirmed the legally binding commitment to help limit global warming to 1.5°C and recognised that this is incompatible with new fossil fuel production. Yet, Australia has continued to approve new coal and gas projects, including at least five since the last PIF Leaders Meeting.
What is Greenpeace doing?
We’re going big this year, taking six members of our team to Palau to support Pacific leaders to hold the line, hold Australia accountable, and show the world what’s at stake. We’ll lobby leaders, hold press conferences, share our messages with the world, and support our incredible local partners in Palau.
How can you get involved?
PIF is the first in a drumbeat of major moments where we’ll be carrying the voices of the Pacific to the world. Come October we’ll be voyaging to Fiji on our ship Oceania for the Pacific Pre-COP, and in November we’ll be off to Antalya for the world’s climate negotiations (COP31).
Learn more about the Pacific way to a fossil fuel free future by checking out our report and exhibition.
Follow our journey, and check back here for more ways to join the movement for climate justice. Together we have the pawa!
Gill Einhorn is head of the Forest Future Alliance and Natalie Çilem is community lead of the Global Wildfire Leadership Network.
Wildfires have devastated communities across the world this summer, claiming lives, displacing thousands of people and leaving billions in economic damage in their wake. In Europe alone, wildfires have already caused an estimated €19 billion in losses this year.
They are an economic, financial and public health challenge that is growing faster than many governments and markets are prepared for – and exposing the real costs of poor land management.
A system built for recovery, not resilience
Far more money is currently spent responding to the disastrous effects of wildfires than preventing them in the first place. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that more than half of wildfire-related spending goes towards response, while planning receives only around 0.2 percent. This problem is not limited to wildfires; over 95 percent of disaster aid between 2005 and 2017 was allocated to response, and less than 4 percent was directed towards prevention or preparedness.
Forests are critical, but without investment in how land is managed and protected, their value is neither stable nor guaranteed. Protecting forests requires investing not only in conservation, but in the conditions that keep forests standing.
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As fires burn and temperatures soar, it’s time to imagine a world beyond GDP
Environmental destruction, like clear-cutting a forest, can boost gross domestic product but it reduces a country’s real wealth -
Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks
The US and Saudi Arabia want to scrap shipping’s Net-Zero Framework and have swung behind a far less ambitious alternative -
Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31
Pacific leaders will launch the first call for proposals next week for a new regional fund designed to swiftly channel climate finance to local communities
Each dollar invested in wildfire-resistant construction could save around $210 in avoided future economic losses, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and Forest Future Alliance. Despite this evidence that prevention can significantly reduce future costs, wildfire resilience remains chronically underfunded.
This spending discrepancy is creating significant challenges for insurers, asset owners and financial institutions. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes reached $107 billion in 2025, with wildfires, floods and storms accounting for 92 percent of claims.
In this context, insurers are reassessing where and how they are willing to underwrite risk. Around 56 percent of global wildfire losses between 2000 and 2023 were uninsured. In some high-risk areas, insurers are scaling back coverage altogether, leaving homeowners, businesses and governments to shoulder a growing share of the costs – making it increasingly difficult to break even.
Proven solutions are already paying off
In many regions, wildfires are driven not by natural causes but by the deliberate clearing of land for agriculture. Degraded landscapes are becoming drier, more flammable and increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic loss, creating a vicious cycle of deforestation, economic damage and rising emissions.
The answer is not simply stronger firefighting capacity. Governments, investors and businesses must work together to shift capital upstream into prevention, resilience and long-term landscape stewardship of healthy forests. That means planting appropriately, investing in heat-resistant species, exploring approaches that minimise fire footprints through active management, and exploring the AI and technology solutions that are burgeoning.
Solutions to this already exist and are proven to have an impact. Following devastating wildfires year-on-year, Portugal shifted its approach to wildfire management, increasing prevention spending within its national rural fire management system from around 20 percent in 2017 to approximately 60 percent in 2022. While many countries remain locked in a reactive cycle of disaster response, public policy can shift investment upstream and make resilience a priority before fires occur.
Indigenous communities have long used proactive land stewardship to reduce wildfire risk while supporting healthy and productive landscapes. For example, the Cheslatta Carrier Nation in British Columbia traditionally managed fuels through cultural fire practices but now implements mechanised fuel removal methods under commercial agreements. By combining Indigenous stewardship with sustainable forest management, Cheslatta is generating community benefits while also boosting wildfire prevention.
Resilience can also be strengthened through finance and technology. FireSat, a partnership led by Earth Fire Alliance with Google.org, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Muon, is a satellite constellation designed for rapid wildfire detection. Scanning every 20 minutes, it can detect fires 400 times smaller than current systems and track them through smoke and darkness in almost real time. In California alone, FireSat could prevent up to 350,000 acres from burning each year. It has recently received significant new investments allowing it to expand towards a constellation of more than 50 satellites that will monitor every point on Earth every 20 minutes or less.
In Brazil’s Pantanal, the Embrace the Forest initiative uses AI-powered detection towers across 2.5 million hectares to support earlier intervention and faster response. During the severe 2024 fire season, the initiative contributed to a 40 percent reduction in burned area compared to 2020.
These examples illustrate what is possible when resilience is treated as an investment priority rather than a recovery cost. But we must ensure funding for these measures is scaled before disaster strikes. Initiatives like the Global Wildfire Leadership Network (GWLN) are key, bringing together corporate decision-makers, investors, insurers, governments and Indigenous leaders to direct investment towards prevention and align finance, technology and stewardship to protect nature, safeguard communities and strengthen future economic stability. With a goal of doing more together than the sum of our parts, the network focuses on Forest Future Alliance GWLN Solutions Labs – where partners sign up with the intent to collaborate.
Rewarding prevention
Financial incentives must be created that reward prevention. This can be done by scaling public-private partnerships, supporting long-term landscape stewardship, investing in community capacity including Indigenous wisdom and technology. Ultimately, our terrestrial natural reserves are critical infrastructure that support resilient economies and thriving communities.
One in three people are dependent on forest services, goods and economic opportunities for survival, so it’s in all our interests to protect what we have. Forests support cooling, water and food security – and are a very cost-effective way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where done appropriately.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
No sector can solve this challenge alone. The benefits of wildfire resilience are shared across communities, governments, insurers, investors, utilities and businesses. A single intervention can protect homes and livelihoods, reduce insurance claims, secure water supplies and lower future public costs. Because the benefits are shared, the solutions must be too. Coalitions of actors can take proven approaches further than any one individual or organisation could alone.
As wildfires continue to burn at an unprecedented scale, the opportunity now is to roll out solutions, shift investment upstream and build a future where resilience, rather than recovery, becomes the foundation of thriving economies.
The post From firefighting to future-proofing: Preventing wildfires must be the priority appeared first on Climate Home News.
From firefighting to future-proofing: Preventing wildfires must be the priority
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the second-largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide (CO2).
Methane traps heat in the atmosphere more efficiently than CO2, but has a significantly shorter lifespan, fading after just a few decades.
Therefore, reducing emissions of methane – a gas primarily produced by agriculture, fossil fuels and waste management – is a powerful option for limiting global warming in the near-term.
Yet climate strategies and models often only focus on CO2, or combine all greenhouse gases into one metric known as “CO2 equivalent”.
The latter approach makes reducing methane emissions dependent on modelling choices and assumptions about the “equivalence” of methane and CO2.
It hides the opportunities and challenges linked to methane’s high warming and short lifetime.
In a new study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, we offer a different perspective that “decouples” CO2 and methane reduction and takes global warming limits as a starting point for determining the required level of methane cuts.
We show that, even under the most ambitious existing national net-zero targets, an absence of methane reduction leads to peak warming that exceeds 1.85C above pre-industrial levels.
The study highlights that, to limit peak warming to well-below 2C, net-zero CO2 targets must be complemented by stringent methane emissions cuts.
CO2 equivalent
How much methane corresponds to one tonne of CO2?
The question is as difficult to answer as: ‘how much spaghetti equals a chicken?’ You could compare the two meals according to their calories, protein content or cost. Each metric can be convenient, but is only valid for that specific comparison – no amount of spaghetti is the same as a chicken.
The same is true for the conversion of emissions of methane and other gases to CO2-equivalent emissions. It can be convenient, as it allows different gases to be compared or combined into a single number. This is why the metric is used in climate targets or evaluating the effectiveness of different mitigation options.
But, because methane and CO2 have different atmospheric lifetimes and warming properties, any conversion is only valid for a chosen time horizon and a chosen baseline.
Depending on the assumptions baked into calculations, methane mitigation can either appear as an immediate priority or framed as almost unnecessary.
There are a number of metrics that scientists use to convert greenhouse gases – whether methane, hydrofluorocarbons or nitrous oxide – into CO2-equivalent emissions:
- “GWP20” measures how much heat a greenhouse gas traps in the atmosphere over a 20-year period, relative to CO2. It emphasises urgent methane mitigation but has been criticised for its implicit discounting of future damages.
- “GWP100” looks at a 100-year timeline. It gives more weight to long-term warming and is used in “integrated assessment models” (IAMs) used by scientists, national emission reporting to the UN and by the GHG Protocol used by companies.
- “GWP*” considers the rate of emissions, rather than warming over a fixed time horizon. Under GWP*, very limited methane reductions bring CO2-equivalent emissions to zero, meaning remaining methane emissions can be designated as causing “no additional warming”. (This interpretation remains controversial as it assumes the continuation of historical levels of warming.)
IAMs are the tools used to generate future emissions scenarios. Because they combine CO2 and methane emissions, the impact of methane emission cuts alone is difficult to isolate in existing emission scenarios.
IAM-generated scenarios also assume mitigation decisions driven by costs. Combinations of CO2 and methane emission pathways that are not purely cost-effective are, therefore, not represented, even though climate policy is messy and emission pathways are rarely cost-effective in the real world.
Only a few countries – including Japan, Mexico and South Korea – specify methane mitigation targets.
A different approach
In our study, we separate CO2 and methane emissions and treat them as independent.
Instead of choosing a conversion method, we suggest that states and organisations set a limit on peak global warming first, then, based on their existing net-zero targets, determine the minimum compatible methane reduction target.
Companies and countries around the world have set net-zero targets focused on CO2, as well as those that include all greenhouse gases. As a result, our research looks at the necessary methane reductions for both types of goal. We consider scenarios where companies or countries deliver linear – in other words, steady – emissions reductions to reach net-zero.
Using a simple climate model, we systematically combined methane and CO2 (or greenhouse gas) mitigation pathways starting in 2025 and calculated peak warming.
The figure below shows how peak warming depends on both the year of reaching net-zero CO2 and the level of methane cuts.
The blue arrows in the figure show that to limit warming to 1.7C under a 2050 net-zero CO2 scenario, methane emissions would need to fall by at least 69% by 2050, relative to 2020.
Our research also finds that, if an organisation or country’s 2050 net zero-target covers all greenhouse gases, its methane emissions would need to fall by 63% instead.
However, under current policies, methane emissions are expected to increase by around 20% by 2050, relative to 2020. We find that this pathway would result in peak warming above 2C by 2050 – even if global CO2 emissions were to reach net-zero by that date (see purple bar on the right-hand side of the figure above).
The figure also shows how, if methane emissions remained at 2020 levels and net-zero CO2 was delivered by 2040 or later, warming would exceed 1.85C. This level of warming is above what has been argued as consistent with the Paris Agreement’s “well-below” 2C limit.
Conversely, cutting methane emissions by around one-third – in line with the Global Methane Pledge target for 2030 – could reduce peak warming by 0.15C, of which 0.05C could be delivered by interventions that come at no net cost. These are shown by the orange and red bars, respectively, on the figure above.
The table below highlights the minimum compatible methane cuts for three different peak warming levels and net-zero CO2 or greenhouse-gas emission targets.
| Peak warming | Year of net-zero CO2 emissions | Year of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions | ||||
| 2050 | 2060 | 2100 | 2050 | 2060 | 2100 | |
| 1.7C | -69% | – | – | -63% | – | – |
| 1.8C | -32% | -56% | – | -11% | -47% | – |
| 2C | +8% | -8% | -83% | >50% | +33% | -78% |
Minimum methane emission reductions between 2020 and the year of net-zero emissions, consistent with peak warming of 1.7C, 1.8C, and 2.0C at 50% likelihood, assuming linear emission trajectories. For some net-zero targets and peak warming levels, there are no compatible methane mitigation targets (indicated by “–”).
Remaining carbon budget
The global carbon budget refers to the amount of cumulative CO2 emissions allowable while still meeting a particular global warming threshold.
The 2021 climate science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a 2023 Nature study estimated that, by 2025, the remaining carbon budget for holding warming to 2C would be around 1,000-1,150bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2).
We find that these estimates are founded on the assumption of methane reductions of 27-35% by 2050, relative to a 2020 baseline. (A 2024 Communications Earth & Environment study reached similar conclusions.)
Under the GWP* metric, where methane emissions are only cut to maintain “no additional warming”, the remaining carbon budget would be constrained. The best estimate of a 2C budget shrinks by around 30% to approximately 750GtCO2.
Finally, if methane emissions are not cut at all in the future, our findings suggest that the remaining carbon budget for 1.7C of global warming has, in effect, already been exhausted.
Our analysis shows how peak warming depends on both CO2 and methane reduction – and how methane-specific targets can help refine existing net-zero targets.
Crucially, we show that complementing net-zero CO2 targets with stringent methane cuts is necessary to limit peak warming to well-below 2C.
Weber, K. et al. (2026) Limiting warming by CO2 and methane mitigation in an expanded scenario space, Communications Earth & Environment, doi:10.1038/s43247-026-03832-1
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The post Guest post: Why tough methane cuts are crucial for keeping warming ‘well-below’ 2C appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Why tough methane cuts are crucial for keeping warming ‘well-below’ 2C
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