UN chief António Guterres called on Tuesday for stronger action to cut emissions of planet-heating methane, taking aim at the fossil fuel industry’s practices and profits, and pointing to coal, oil and gas as the root of today’s climate and energy crises.
In a major speech at London Climate Action Week, with the British capital under a heatwave warning, the UN Secretary-General said countries had not done enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with what is needed to keep warming below the globally agreed goal of 1.5C.
“The task before us is to strictly limit the overshoot, shorten its duration, and bring temperatures down below 1.5 degrees Celsius as fast as possible,” Guterres said. One way of doing that, he added, is by cutting methane emissions first.
He noted that methane – a potent greenhouse gas that traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide – is responsible for around one-third of global warming but breaks down in the atmosphere within a decade or two.
“That means that aggressive cuts could produce visible temperature relief within a generation,” the UN chief emphasised, launching a global call to action on methane covering fossil fuel production, agriculture and organic waste disposal.
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Of the three main sources of methane, he singled out the fossil fuel industry, where he said “the most immediate gains can be made”.
He cited the International Energy Agency (IEA) finding that around 70% of oil and gas methane emissions can be eliminated using existing technology, mostly at low or no net cost. This is because the gas leaking from coal mines and oil and gas production facilities can be captured and then used or sold.
Despite this, in 2025 alone, Guterres said some 167 billion cubic metres of gas were flared – as much as Africa consumes in a year.
“I am urging the fossil fuel industry to step up and do what is long overdue,” added the UN chief, whose term ends this year.
Guterres said voluntary action “is no longer enough” and there were similar global precedents for getting rid of harmful substances, including leaded petrol and ozone-depleting chemicals. “Methane pollution must be next,” he emphasised.
Methane emissions stuck at highs
The latest Global Methane Tracker report from the IEA shows that methane emissions from fossil fuels remained at very high levels in 2025, with no sign of a decline globally despite progress in some countries. In 2025, energy generated 41% of global methane emissions, followed by agriculture (40%) and waste (17%).
On Tuesday, a World Bank tracker showed that global gas flaring rose for the third year in a row in 2025, wasting an estimated $54 billion worth of gas by burning it off.
Demetrios Papathanasiou, the World Bank Group’s global director for energy, said that at a time when many countries are struggling to expand their access to affordable and reliable energy, “the economic development costs of continued flaring are simply too high”. “The gas currently flared could be captured to power industries and businesses, create jobs and strengthen energy security,” he said in a statement.
As well as easing climate change, the IEA says capturing waste methane could help improve gas market security after Iran’s near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz removed close to 20% of global liquefied natural gas supply from the market.
The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, last year called on leaders at the UN General Assembly to draw up a “legally binding global agreement” to reduce methane emissions, an idea that is also supported by France.
Mottley’s “legally binding” methane pact faces barriers, but smaller steps possible
However, Guterres stopped short of supporting such a solution on Tuesday, throwing his weight instead behind a proposal for governments to set a new global standard for net near-zero methane emissions across the value chain in the oil and gas sector.
This initiative, outlined in a report on the new call to action, would establish a common, internationally recognised methane intensity benchmark, for use by both producers and consumers. Compliance with the standard would then become a condition for financing, procurement and long‑term market access.
Voluntary action ‘not enough’
In recent years, countries and companies willing to act on the methane problem have teamed up on the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030 from 2020 levels, and the UAE-led Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter, signed by over 50 oil and gas companies. But their success has been limited in real terms.
Speaking at a separate event on Monday, Jonathan Banks, vice president of methane pollution prevention at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF), said the global pledge had been successful in creating “high-level political buy-in”, raising more money to detect methane emissions and helping countries plug their sources.
But it “is not there to be this all-encompassing binding treaty that drives emissions down”, he added.
At last year’s COP30, 11 countries representing around 10% of global oil production and 18% of gas exports signed a pledge to “drastically reduce” methane emissions in the fossil fuel sector, including by eliminating routine gas flaring and venting.
Comment: Curbing methane is the fastest way to slow warming – but we’re off the pace
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) also runs a system that detects methane leaks around the world. It has issued more than 5,000 alerts across 33 countries, but received responses in only 12% of cases.
Meghan Demeter, a programme manager at the UNEP service, said on Monday that countries face several barriers to responding to the alerts, including limited capacity to interpret the data and act on it, as well as funding shortages, particularly among national oil companies.
A senior UN official told journalists that existing initiatives on methane had raised awareness of the issue but had failed to deliver the emissions cuts needed. “’It’s absolutely critical that governments step in and strongly regulate the oil and gas sector,” he added.
Norway leads the way
As an example of how this could work, the call to action report singled out Norway, which banned routine flaring in 1971, imposed a tax on emissions from petroleum production and transport in 1991, and increased its tax on flaring and methane emissions in 2017. It now has one of the lowest methane emissions intensities of upstream oil and gas production in the world.
The report said that if all countries matched Norway’s standards, global methane emissions from oil and gas operations could fall by roughly 90%.
Recent COP hosts Brazil and Azerbaijan linked to “super-emitting” methane plumes
It added that China, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar reduced or maintained their methane emissions from oil and gas production between 2023 and 2024, even as output increased, indicating a decline in the emissions intensity of their operations.
On Monday, the Fossil Fuel Regulatory Programme (FFRP), a UNEP-backed initiative that works with governments to strengthen regulatory frameworks for cutting methane emissions from their energy sectors, added Egypt, Brazil, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to its existing partners, Ghana, Kazakhstan and Iraq.
Windfall tax on fossil fuel profits
Guterres also made a strong push for states to hit the very deep pockets of fossil fuel companies with windfall taxes, as countries like the UK, Italy or Spain have done in recent years.
He said fossil energy giants had reaped ”extraordinary profits”, with the eight biggest making an extra $6.5 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, which included only one month of the Middle East crisis which has pushed up oil prices.
“These are windfall gains born of pain – of instability, hardship and dependence. I urge governments to tax them,” said the UN chief.
He added that the proceeds should be used “where they belong: helping vulnerable families and communities, and accelerating the shift to clean, affordable energy”.
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UN chief says fossil fuel industry must cut methane for warming “relief”
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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