Carbon Brief

Print article Share With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations. At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance. The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK. In

Article Contents Expand menu Close Clean-tech exports Solar exports are the biggest enabler

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Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu Close The UK has supported around 500 climate projects since 2021

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Print article Share Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at a rapid pace and is increasingly being used by scientists to better understand climate change. AI is perhaps best-known for its use in “large language models”, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. However, the field is vast.  From weather forecasting to analysing satellite images, climate scientists are using various types of AI to develop faster and more efficient ways to study the warmi

Print article Share A surge in wholesale costs driven by expensive gas is responsible for nearly 90% of the rise in UK household electricity bills since 2020, reveals new analysis. The figures, shared with Carbon Brief by thinktank Nesta, show that wholesale gas costs are also behind the vast majority (77%) of the increase in household gas bills. The analysis firmly contradicts the idea, which has become embedded in UK media and political narratives, that the

Print article Share A temporary breach of the 1.5C global-warming limit is now “inevitable” following “decades of insufficient climate action”, says the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). In its “sobering” annual assessment of the global “emissions gap”, UNEP says that exceeding the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit is “imminent and unavoidable”. This year’s report, titled “The point of return”, says the “task now” is to minimise the size and scale of a temperature “

Print article Share Countries have failed – for the sixth time running – to agree on the timeline for publishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) next set of influential reports. The IPCC’s 65th session (IPCC-65) was seen by many to be the final opportunity for countries to agree on a schedule where its seventh assessment report (AR7) would be published in time for the UN’s second “global stocktake” of climate action. Before last week’s m

Print article Share Some 58% of countries have met a UN call to submit new pledges on addressing nature loss – two years after the original deadline – according to Carbon Brief analysis. Countries were asked to submit new pledges, known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs), by the start of the COP16 biodiversity summit in October 2024. After only 15% of nations met the original deadline, countries agreed at the summit to a new text tha

Print article Share Countries will meet in Armenia this month to carry out the first global review of progress towards meeting key nature targets by 2030. These targets – and the wider ambition to halt and reverse biodiversity loss around the world – were agreed in the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022. But the ambitions will not be achieved in time for the 2030 deadline unless action “accelerates rapidly”, a key UN repo

Print article Share The amount of finance for nature delivered to date “falls far short” of what is needed to meet the UN’s global goals, according to a report released ahead of the COP17 biodiversity summit.  The global stocktaking report, prepared by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD) ahead of this month’s summit in Armenia, finds that developed nations are failing to close the $200bn “biodiversity finance gap”.  Initiatives designe

Print article Share Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).  Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD. This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway poin

A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error. The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”. In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net

Print article Share The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £5.9bn since the start of the Hormuz crisis as a result of record generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis. While gas prices are surging to levels not seen since the 2022 energy crisis, the UK has been generating record amounts of power from wind and solar, up 14% year-on-year. This unprecedented clean-power generation is directly cutting the need for gas-fired electrici

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Print article Share Antarctic sea ice has recorded its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 48 years ago, new data reveals. Provisional data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that Antarctic sea ice hit its annual winter peak on 14 September, with an extent of 17.59m square kilometres (km2). The organisation notes that the data is still preliminary, adding that “large fluctuations in extent are typical of Ant