The spotless white-sand beach of Le Lamantin luxury resort in Saly, about 90 kilometres south of Senegal’s capital Dakar, is lined with neat rows of sun loungers and parasols. Here, holidaymakers enjoy jet-skiing, catamaran-sailing and spa therapy, unaware that their hotel is benefiting from international climate finance channelled through the World Bank Group.
Just a few kilometres further south, however, local fishermen in Mbour, the country’s second-largest fishing port, are struggling. The beaches where they keep their boats are being progressively eaten away by rising seas that also threaten their homes.
The stark contrast between the neighbouring coastal areas highlights how global funding for climate projects – largely taxpayers’ money from rich countries – often fails to help those shouldering the burden of warming impacts, especially when it is being used to mobilise more private investment for green aims.
“They prioritise Saly because the hotels are wealthy,” said Saliou Diouf, a retired fisherman who lost his house in Mbour to encroaching waves. “The World Bank should help the most vulnerable.”
Le Lamantin is one of a dozen upscale hotels in sub-Saharan Africa acquired by Mauritius-based Kasada Hospitality Fund LP – run by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and multinational hotel giant Accor – which it is revamping in accordance with EDGE, a green building certification created by the World Bank.
Kasada was granted over $190 million in guarantees by the World Bank Group’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and loans of up to $160 million by its private-sector lender, the International Finance Corporation, to help it snap up hotels across Kenya, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Namibia and Senegal, and spruce them up as Accor brands like Mövenpick.
The Mövenpick Resort Lamantin Saly, where a standard hotel room costs about £220 a night. (Photo: Jack Thompson)
MIGA, the little-known insurance arm of the World Bank Group, has counted its backing for the hotels as part of its climate efforts for the past three years, according to annual sustainability reports.
The five-star resort in Senegal, where rooms cost at least £220 a night ($270), is being refurbished to consume at least 20% less energy and water than other comparable buildings by its owner Kasada, which expects it to obtain EDGE certification this year.
Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for ActionAid International, told Climate Home it is “shocking that what little funds there are for climate action are benefiting luxury hotels”.
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“Climate finance must be used to help those most vulnerable – not to help the world’s wealthiest add a climate hashtag to their Instagram posts by the pool,” she said.
MIGA told Climate Home its support for Kasada is primarily aimed at developing Senegal’s tourism sector and creating jobs, adding that refurbishing hotels can also have beneficial climate impacts and play an important role in decarbonising the hospitality industry.
Mbour, just a few miles from the pristine beaches of Saly, is the second-largest fishing hub in Senegal with 11,000 fishers. (Photo: Jack Thompson)
‘The money is missing’
In nearby Mbour, however, the fishing community feels left behind.
“I was born here, I grew up here – when I was a child, the sea only came up to the last pole,” Diouf told Climate Home, pointing to the remnants of a Portuguese-built pontoon used to moor colonial ships in the 1800s.
In just one generation, he said, the sea has gobbled up more than 100 metres of beach in Mbour, forcing 30 families to abandon their houses and threatening hundreds more. A quarter of the Senegalese coastline – home to 60% of the population – is at high risk of erosion.
Mbour’s fast-disappearing shore is a crisis for its 11,000 fishers as big swells destroy their boats, crammed into the remaining patch of sand.
But in Saly, it’s a different story. Here, between 2017 and 2022, under a separate project, the World Bank invested $74 million in beach protection, building 19 stone walls, groynes and breakwaters to reclaim 8-9 kilometres of hotel-lined beachfront, popular with tourists.
The World Bank Group said the project helped preserve around 15,000 direct and indirect jobs by saving tourism infrastructure, while also protecting two fishing villages in Saly.
Satellite data shows the changing coastline in Saly (north), where protective infrastructure was developed, and Mbour (south), which has none. (Photo: Modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2024]/Sentinel Hub)
Kasada told Climate Home, meanwhile, that Le Lamantin hotel has so far created about 50 direct jobs of different types for people living near Saly, with MIGA also pointing to indirect employment stimulated by the resort such as agriculture, handicrafts and transport.
The World Bank Group (WBG) said its units work together to avoid trade-offs. “It’s not to either support hotels and the tourism sector as a driver of development, or to enhance the resilience of local communities – the WBG does both,” it said in a written response to Climate Home.
But fishermen in Mbour – which was outside the scope of the Saly coastal protection infrastructure project – are not benefiting from that approach, and even say the works in Saly have exacerbated erosion in their area. The Mbour artisanal fisheries council has devised a climate adaptation strategy to address the problem.
One of its coordinators, Moustapha Senghor, said seawalls and breakwaters are needed, but there are no funds for what would amount to “a colossal investment”. “We know exactly what we need to do, but the money is missing,” he said.
Sea level rise is threatening beach-side homes and swallowing coconut trees that protect the coastline in Mbour, Senegal. (Photo: Jack Thompson)
Private-sector trillions
Governments and climate justice activists are putting pressure on the World Bank to significantly step up its role in funding climate projects, especially to help the most vulnerable countries and communities.
For the past three years, a group of countries led by Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley has called for reforms so that the bank can better address climate change.
At the same time, wealthy nations have been reluctant to inject more capital into its coffers, while attempts at tinkering with the balance sheet to squeeze out more climate cash only go so far.
For World Bank Group President Ajay Banga, the real solution lies in greater private-sector involvement, using scarce public money as a lever to help mobilise huge dollar sums for climate and development goals this decade.
“We know that governments and multilateral institutions and philanthropies all working together will still fall short of providing the trillions that we will require annually for climate, for fragility, for inequality in the world. We therefore need the private sector,” Banga told media ahead of this week’s annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
MIGA’s guarantees can be a key driver of climate investments in developing countries. (Graphic: Fanis Kollias)
Following suggestions from a group of CEOs convened by Banga, the World Bank Group announced in February a major overhaul of its guarantee business to enable “improved access and faster execution”. The goal is to triple issuances, including those from MIGA, to $20 billion by 2030, with a significant proportion of that expected to support green projects.
MIGA – as a provider of guarantees aimed at encouraging private capital into developing countries – may not be the obvious choice to help low-income communities like Mbour’s fishers.
But, in its 2023 sustainability report, the agency wrote: “because the poorest are the most vulnerable to climate change, MIGA is working to mobilize more private finance to scale up climate adaptation, resilience and preparedness”.
Last year, less than one percent of MIGA’s total guarantees directly supported climate adaptation measures, according to its annual report.
The guarantees generally act as a form of political risk insurance, making an investment less risky and giving companies access to cheaper loans as a result.
MIGA’s 2023 sustainability report showcases the Kasada-owned hotels as an example of its efforts to “rapidly ramp up” private capital for climate action, with the agency providing its highest volume of climate finance last year.
Struggle to fund adaptation
But some experts argue the World Bank Group should be targeting its efforts more closely on communities who are struggling to survive as global warming exacerbates extreme weather and rising seas.
Vijaya Ramachandran, a director at the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental research centre, said projects like the Kasada-backed hotels are “not where the dollars are best spent from a climate perspective”.
Ramachandran, a former World Bank economist, co-authored a study last year analysing the climate portfolio of the bank’s public-sector lending arms, which exclude MIGA. It found a lack of clarity over what constitutes a climate project and showed that hundreds of projects had been tagged as climate finance despite having little to do with emissions-reduction efforts or adaptation.
Ramachandran told Climate Home that, in the case of MIGA’s backing for the African hotels, Kasada “should just be doing the energy saving itself as part of its own efforts to address climate change”.
Holidaymakers enjoy a spacious, ocean-side pool at the five-star Le Lamantin resort in Saly, Senegal. (Photo: Jack Thompson).
Olivier Granet and David Damiba, managing partners of Kasada Capital Management, told Climate Home the hotel investment fund had always planned to be “a leader in energy and water efficiency in its properties”.
But, they added, the financial and technical support of MIGA and the IFC had helped them implement their strategy “further and more easily”, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight Kasada-owned hotels have already been certified under EDGE and the rest are expected to achieve the standard this year, they noted.
Ramachandran said making hotels energy-efficient is a good thing – “but from a public finance perspective, for poorer African countries the focus should be on adaptation and making them more resilient”.
Developing countries need an estimated $387 billion a year to carry out their current adaptation plans, but in 2021 they received only $24.6 billion in international adaptation finance, according to the latest figures published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
MIGA to miss climate target?
Once regarded by campaigners as the “World Bank’s dirtiest wing” for its support of fossil fuels, MIGA has come under mounting pressure to shift its subsidies in a greener direction, in line with broader institutional goals.
In response, the agency has committed to throw more of its financial weight behind projects that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions or alleviate the impacts of climate change.
In 2020, it revealed a plan to dedicate at least 35% of its guarantees to climate projects on average from fiscal year 2021 through 2025, embracing a target set by the wider World Bank Group.
MIGA conceded at the time this would be “a challenge” – and it now looks likely to fall short of the goal. In 2023, climate finance represented 28% of its guaranteed investments.
According to the agency’s 2023 sustainability report, 31 out of 40 projects it supported with guarantees last year had a climate mitigation or adaptation component, but it did not disclose what percentage of each was counted as climate finance.
Meanwhile, over the last three years, MIGA has backed three gas-fired power plants in Mozambique and Bangladesh, while it is also planning to support an additional one in Togo.
In monetary terms, MIGA’s annual provision of climate guarantees has risen from just over $1 billion in 2019 to $1.5 billion in 2023, pushing up the total size of its climate portfolio to $8.4 billion. But the headline numbers only paint a partial picture, clouded by a lack of transparency in the data.
MIGA’s portfolio of climate investments has grown in the past six years. (Photo: MIGA Climate Change)
In response to Climate Home’s request for a full list of MIGA’s climate projects, the agency said it could not disclose the information for confidentiality reasons.
“Our clients are private-sector investors or financiers, and we do not have agreement to release disaggregated information about their investments and financing,” a MIGA spokesperson said.
The only clues about the make-up of MIGA’s climate portfolio come in its glossy annual sustainability reports, which highlight a handful of initiatives.
Climate Home News reviewed these reports from the last three available years – 2021, 2022 and 2023 – and tracked highlighted projects, which are framed as positive examples of climate finance.
Motorways and elite universities
They show that support for renewable energy made up a quarter of MIGA’s climate guarantees in 2023.
But its track record of climate investments raises questions about the agency’s criteria for designating projects as climate finance and how it allocates those resources to help people most in need, experts said.
Karen Mathiasen, a former director of the multilateral development bank office in the US Treasury, said MIGA should not be using its resources to expand investment in things like luxury hotels and then counting them as climate finance.
“There is a real problem in the World Bank Group with greenwashing,” added Mathiasen, who is now a project director with the Center for Global Development.
MIGA said it calculates the climate co-benefits from its projects using the same methodologies as other multilateral development banks, and applies them consistently according to a “rigorous internal consultation and review process”.
Large infrastructure projects feature heavily in MIGA’s climate portfolio.
For example, a group of international banks, including JP Morgan, Banco Santander and Credit Agricole, have received a total of €1.4 billion in guarantees to bankroll the construction of a new motorway in Serbia, in an area prone to severe flooding.
The 112-km dual-carriageway, in the West Morava river valley, is implementing measures to reduce flood risk, including river regulation – and so was counted as climate finance.
In 2022, MIGA’s largest climate guarantee – worth €570 million ($615 million) – helped finance the construction of a new campus in Morocco’s capital Rabat for the Mohammed VI Polytechnic, a private university owned by mining and fertiliser company OCP Group and frequented by the country’s elite.
According to MIGA, the project would seek to obtain LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green-building certification “for key facilities”, and include hydraulic structures to enhance the climate resilience of the campus.
Similarly, support for a new hospital in Gaziantep, Turkey, was tagged as 100% climate finance because it features energy efficiency measures and flood drainage works.
In 2023, just under half of MIGA’s climate guarantees went towards “greening” the financial sector in mainly middle-income countries like Argentina, Colombia, Hungary, Algeria and Botswana.
These guarantees are intended to help local banks free up more capital and boost loans to climate projects, although in some cases they are only expected to do so on a “best effort basis” involving no strict obligation, according to MIGA’s annual reports.
MIGA said this clause is included for regulatory reasons and requires banks to “take all necessary actions to provide climate loan commitments” as far as is “commercially reasonable”.
UN climate chief calls for “quantum leap in climate finance”
Call for clarity
Ramachandran of the Breakthrough Institute said MIGA should demonstrate the outcomes of its climate finance projects “in terms of reduced emissions or of improved resilience, (and) what the overarching strategy is to make sure the money is best spent”.
“Instead the focus is simply on dollar amounts,” she added – a criticism rejected by the World Bank Group.
MIGA said it supports projects in all sectors that contribute to development and enables the inclusion of emissions-cutting and climate adaptation measures in their design and operation.
Former U.S. official Mathiasen believes MIGA could be a powerful engine to mobilise more private money for climate action, but said it needs a cultural change to focus more on results rather than numerical targets which give staff an incentive to “pump up the numbers”.
“A little bit of an add-on – that is not a climate project. There needs to be clear, transparent criteria of what constitutes a climate project,” she said.
(Reporting by Jack Thompson in Senegal and Matteo Civillini in London; additional reporting by Sebastian Rodriguez; editing by Megan Rowling, Sebastian Rodriguez and Joe Lo; graphics by Fanis Kollias)
The post World Bank climate funding greens African hotels while fishermen sink appeared first on Climate Home News.
World Bank climate funding greens African hotels while fishermen sink
Dozens of countries have called out growing “coordinated attacks” by fossil fuel interests aimed at undermining the role of climate science in the UN negotiations at the mid-year talks in Bonn.
Under the banner of ‘Friends of Science’, in an overflowing press conference room lined with negotiators and civil society supporters, diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”. That includes reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate science body, they said.
While steering clear of singling out any specific country, they said efforts to cast doubt on established scientific concepts, such as the 1.5 global warming limit, are led by “the usual suspects” and those who think “science threatens their economic prospects”.
Saudi Arabia and India have opposed calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios that would minimise the magnitude and duration of any overshoot of 1.5C, according to one negotiator in the room and summaries of closed-door discussions published by a reporting service.
UN chief António Guterres conceded last year that a temporary breach of the key warming limit is inevitable, while urging countries to redouble efforts to bring temperatures back down.
‘Polluted narrative’
Scientists have long established that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of man-made climate change and a rapid shift away from oil, coal and gas is essential to curb global warming.
Saudi Arabia is dependent on oil and gas exports, while India largely relies on coal to power its economic development.
One negotiator said that research on how climate action can be equitable for developing countries, produced by Indian universities, had been published too late to be incorporated into the last IPCC assessment report in 2023. This incident led the Indian government to try and discredit the IPCC, they said. Some Indian scientists have argued that the IPCC’s scenarios are unfair on developing countries.
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Saudi Arabia and India have played down the importance of making sure that the latest IPCC assessments – regarded as the gold standard of climate science – are available for the next global stocktake, the UN scorecard of climate action around the world.
“Anyone that is blocking references to science – they are not our friends,” Sivendra Michael, lead negotiator for Fiji, told a press conference, highlighting the rise of a “polluted narrative” both inside and outside the negotiating rooms.
1.5C is a ‘hard limit’
Speaking for the AILAC coalition of Latin American countries, Panama’s Ana Aguilar said they went to Bonn to negotiate positions, not to negotiate the facts laid out by science.
“We see coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the best available science driven by a narrow set of interests, not by the needs of our people,” she added. “We have seen this playbook before… manufacture doubt, delay the response and let the vulnerable people pay this bill.”
The ‘Friends of Science’ coalition stressed that the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement cannot be negotiated, as the survival of the most climate vulnerable communities is at stake if it is permanently breached.
“Science tells us that 1.5C is a hard limit for many countries, including the small island developing states and least developed countries,” said Manjeet Dhakal, a negotiator for Nepal. “We still have a chance to keep 1.5 degrees in reach and minimise the overshoot if we act fast and drastically.”
Long-running IPCC standoff
While diplomats claimed attacks on science are broadening, one long-standing issue of contention is whether the latest assessment reports of the IPCC will be ready in time for the next UN global stocktake due to start this November and end in 2028.
This matters because, as some experts have pointed out, previous IPCC findings played a key role in the first such exercise, which culminated at COP28 in Dubai in the landmark agreement on transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
Since the start of the latest IPCC assessment cycle, known as AR7, a battle over the timing has dragged on for over two years at successive IPCC meetings, with governments repeatedly failing to find a breakthrough.
A large majority of nations have been pushing for an accelerated timeline that would ensure the AR7 reports can be fed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings they want a longer process, arguing a fast-tracked assessment would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources.
Science and the stocktake
That fight has now bled into the Bonn talks where governments began discussing the arrangements for the next stocktake. At a session earlier this week, most developed countries, Latin American and small island states, and the world’s poorest nations emphasised the assessment of collective climate action must be guided by the “best available science” – code for the findings of the IPCC reports.
The Maldives, speaking for small island states, said IPCC science remains “essential to the integrity, credibility and usefulness” of the stocktake. AILAC said that starting the process “on the right footing” requires a political decision on the timeline to deliver the AR7 reports in time. Switzerland said IPCC reports “ask more than is politically comfortable, but that is precisely why they must guide every decision we make”.
Saudi Arabia, however, said no particular scientific input – and in particular what comes out of the IPCC – should be prioritised. Similarly, India warned against creating “some kind of preferred hierarchy” in the role that any specific source of information should play in the process.
Ghana’s Antwi-Boasiako Amoah, who chairs the African Group, told a press conference on Tuesday that some countries think rushing to get IPCC inputs into the global stocktake could “undermine or compromise the IPCC process”. “Africa is for science,” he said, without saying where the continent stands on the IPCC timeline.
Crunch talks in October
At the “Friends of Science” press conference, Dhakal pushed back on the idea that science would have to be rushed to be incorporated. He said the IPCC leadership has “perfectly made it clear” that they can deliver the report before the global stocktake. “It is the scientists who are saying they can deliver it on time,” he said.
The discussion will be picked up again at the next IPCC session in October, where its boss Jim Skea is hoping to reach an agreement. “As a scientist myself, I cannot overstate the importance of this decision,” he told governments in Bonn last week.
Andreas Sieber, head of political strategy at campaigning group 350.org, told Climate Home News that the debate may sound procedural, “but it is anything but”. “Science is the backbone of the Paris Agreement ambition cycle, and the evidence assessed through AR7 will help determine not only the emissions pathways countries pursue, but also how the world responds to mounting climate losses and who receives support,” he said in Bonn.
The post Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
Climate Change
Cropped 17 June 2026: Coral reef ‘hope’ | Ocean talks | Plant flowering times ‘shift’
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Ocean talks
MAKING WAVES: African and Commonwealth countries issued a “call to action” to implement the High Seas Treaty at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya this week, reported the Associated Press. The summit, which ends on 18 June, is focused on ocean issues including “climate change, biodiversity and pollution”, said the newswire. The UK government announced £13.9m in marine-related funding at the summit.
OCEAN ‘STRAIN’: Climate change, pollution, overfishing and biodiversity loss are putting oceans under “severe strain”, according to a UN report. The third “world ocean assessment” noted that conservation efforts have also “grown”, including through “nature-based solutions, ecosystem restoration and sustainable management techniques”. Meanwhile, another UN report said that fisheries and aquaculture production reached an all-time high of 235m tonnes in 2024.
OBSERVATION ISSUES: Scientists told the Guardian that the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle a key ocean-observation system run by the US would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather forecasts around the world. Several Democratic and one Republican lawmaker pushed back against the plan to get rid of the system, reported the Associated Press. [For more, see the first edition of Cited, Carbon Brief’s newsletter on climate science.]
Plant and fungi update
OFF-KILTER: Plant flowering times have “shifted significantly” over the last century, according to an AI-assisted analysis of 8m “digitised herbarium specimens” in the latest “state of the world plants and fungi” report from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. The report stated there have been “both advances and delays” in flowering date, with a median shift of 2.5 days per decade in either direction. The greatest variation was observed in the tropics, it added.
‘NEW ERA’: The report highlighted that Kew recently completed a digitisation of 7.4m herbarium and fungarium specimens in its collection. The ongoing digitisation of specimens around the world, alongside AI technology, could “transform understanding of biodiversity loss and climate change and pave the way to resolving these seemingly intractable crises”, it said.
EXTINCTION RISK: In its coverage of the report, the Guardian said that AI and digitalisation could help scientists document “vital” plant species “before they vanish”. About 40% of the world’s “assessed” 70,000 plant species are at risk of extinction, while a further 330,000 are yet to be analysed, according to the newspaper. The situation for fungi is “even more stark”, it reported, with 90% of an estimated 2m species still “unknown to science” and less than 1% of known species assessed for extinction risk.
News and views
- BEEF TRACKS: A “landmark” law in Colombia requiring the beef industry to prove supply chains are deforestation-free has taken effect, reported the Associated Press. The measure is part of efforts to “reverse decades of forest loss, much of it driven by the expansion of cattle ranching into previously forested areas”, noted the newswire.
- CONTINGENCY PLAN: With El Niño conditions officially confirmed as underway, the Indian government called for an “overhaul” of agricultural districts’ plans for managing the impact of below-normal rainfall on crops, reported Down to Earth. Around 150-200 districts have been identified as “most critical” based on projections, the outlet noted.
- MEATIER: Global meat supply has increased fourfold in the past six decades, according to a UN report covered by the Guardian. Agriculture’s “planet-heating emissions are forecast to rise by 7.6% over the next decade” as food production continues to grow, the newspaper said.
- TREES, NOT TARMAC: Kenya’s former chief justice, David Maraga, was among a number of protesters arrested in Nairobi for demonstrating against plans to turn 75 acres of Nairobi National Park into a car park, reported Kenya’s Daily Nation. Demonstrators were en route to deliver a petition to Kenya’s Wildlife Service when they were interrupted by anti-riot police officers, according to the newspaper.
- MANGROVES BACK, ALRIGHT: A new study covered by BBC News found that mangrove forests are “staging an unexpected comeback” globally. The broadcaster said mangroves had been “declining rapidly as they were cleared for fish farms and housing”, but the world is now “gaining more mangroves than it has been losing”.
- ‘LIMITED’ PROGRESS: Some 59% of the world’s largest financial institutions do not have a deforestation policy in place, according to the latest “forest 500” report from Global Canopy. The report – which assesses the 150 financial institutions that provide the most financing to the 500 companies with the “greatest influence” on deforestation – described finance sector progress on forest loss in 2025 as “limited”.
Spotlight
Coral reef ‘hope’
This week, Carbon Brief reports on research estimating coral reef resilience.
New research offers a sliver of “hope” that 30% of the world’s coral reefs could be “resilient” against the harmful effects of climate change.
The study, which is in the final stages of peer review and due to be published soon, identified swathes of reefs that have the best potential to withstand and recover from marine heatwaves and other stressors.
Climate change is a major threat to the survival of coral reefs. In a 2018 report, the UN’s science body warned that reefs could decline by an additional 70-90% at 1.5C of warming and as much as 99% under 2C.
The areas of potentially resilient reefs identified in the new study span almost 166,000 square kilometres – an area twice the size of Scotland.
These reefs are spread across 71 countries and 100 territories, but 61% are found in the territorial waters of just five nations – Australia, the Bahamas, Cuba, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The lead study author, Dr Kyle Zawada from Macquarie University in Australia, told Carbon Brief that the research shows the areas that could most likely “persist through climate change”. He added:
“[Coal reefs] are obviously in dire straits – but that’s not to say there are not pockets of resistance and pockets of resilience.”
Fewer than 30% of the reefs deemed to be the most climate-resilient are contained in protected or conserved areas, the study noted.
The map below shows a snapshot of the findings, highlighting the Great Barrier Reef off the north-eastern coast of Australia. The light pink areas are regular reefs, while the slightly darker pink are “climate-resilient” reefs.
Reef maps
The team, led by researchers from Macquarie University and the Wildlife Conservation Society, used the findings from more than 45,000 research surveys on corals over 1960-2025 in modelling simulations to create a map of coral cover around the world in 2020 and projections for 2050.
The modelling looked at various scenarios of future emissions and the researchers developed criteria to determine which reefs could be best positioned to survive or recover from extreme events and higher temperatures.
This specified that, for example, larger-sized reefs and those with a wide diversity of coral species tend to be more resilient than smaller areas with a lower variety of coral.
Zawada told Carbon Brief that the study does not replace real-life observations of how reefs respond to extremes. But, he added, it offers a “good guess” of areas to protect:
“It would be nice to say that there are these little reefs of hope, obviously with the massive asterisks that this doesn’t mean that these ones are out of the woods…and to sort of use that as a rallying call for us to take that hope forward and have a look at these reefs.”
Watch, read, listen
WAY DOWN: An interactive article in the New York Times detailed the ongoing “quest” to mine the deep sea.
‘PING-PONG SPONGES’: The Guardian delved into the “secrets of the deep sea”.
DENTAL DAMAGE: A dentist wrote about how “extreme heat is turning Pakistani farmworkers’ mouths into hostile environments for their own teeth” in the Earth Island Journal.
‘PIG ELECTION’: DeSmog explored the impacts of Denmark’s plans to “radically overhaul its drinking water policy as part of a raft of sweeping reforms to the country’s livestock industry”.
New science
- Lower rainfall levels, driven by deforestation, led to a reduction in soya bean production in southern Brazil over 1982–2018 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- A “partial ecosystem collapse scenario” that considers changes to tropical timber, wild pollination and marine fisheries services could increase the annual debt-servicing costs of 23 countries by $162bn | Nature Ecology & Evolution
- Around 7% of the global population of Tapanuli orangutans – the “world’s rarest ape” – was killed after extreme rainfall led to “widespread landslides” in Sumatra, Indonesia, in 2025 | Current Biology
In the diary
- 19 June-27 June: London climate action week
- 21 June: Colombian presidential elections (second round)
- 22-26 June: 26th meeting of the UN open-ended informal consultative process on oceans and the law of the sea | New York City
- 30 June-4 July: 4th meeting of partners of the Global Peatlands Initiative | Lima, Peru
The post Cropped 17 June 2026: Coral reef ‘hope’ | Ocean talks | Plant flowering times ‘shift’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 17 June 2026: Coral reef ‘hope’ | Ocean talks | Plant flowering times ‘shift’
Climate Change
Alabama’s Self-Proclaimed ‘AI Watchman’ Unseats Incumbent Public Service Commissioner
Jim Zeigler first served on the body nearly 50 years ago. Now the Republican is hoping his opposition to data centers will stave off a Democratic victory in November.
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Alabama’s Self-Proclaimed ‘AI Watchman’ Unseats Incumbent Public Service Commissioner
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