I. Climate Science

Open access notables

Projected amplification of global warming by warming-induced greenhouse gas emissions, Abernethy et al., Environmental Research Letters

Warming-induced emissions (WIE) of greenhouse gases from natural sources are a large amplifying feedback that most climate models do not yet represent. This absence risks systematic underestimation of projected future warming and overestimation of remaining carbon budgets. To assess the potential magnitude of these feedbacks, we derived relationships between global temperature and WIE rates from process-based model estimates across three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, and SSP4-6.0. The warming-induced methane emission rate from permafrost, wetlands, freshwaters, and wildfire combined increases with temperature at an estimated 97 ± 6 Tg CH4 yr−1 °C−1 across all three scenarios, while the warming-induced carbon dioxide emission rate from permafrost and wildfire combined increases at 7 ± 1 Pg CO2 yr−1 °C−1 in SSP2-4.5 and SSP4-6.0. Using the MAGICC climate model, we projected that WIE could add 0.2 °C–0.4 °C of warming by 2100 across scenarios, split roughly equally between carbon dioxide and methane, amplifying post-2020 anthropogenic warming by 20%–30%. Combined emission sensitivity and climate response 1σ uncertainties are ±0.2 °C on the added warming and ±10%–30% on the warming amplification.

Interpreting Ensembles of Climate Projections for Impact Studies, Chandler & Brierley, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change

To study the potential impacts of future changes in the earth's climate, projections of these changes are required. These are usually produced using complex computer models, and are subject to many uncertainties which are often sampled using collections (“ensembles”) of model simulations. However, the sampling in any individual ensemble is incomplete and often unrepresentative. This creates challenges for users of the projections, especially when it is important to understand the range of potential impacts that can reasonably be expected. Other challenges include the presence of systematic discrepancies between the model outputs and observations of the real climate system; and the fact that it is often infeasible to work with all members of an ensemble so that an appropriate subset must be chosen. Various approaches have been suggested for addressing each of these issues: a critical review is provided here, to allow an informed choice depending on the requirements of a given application.

The emergence of climate migration research as an academic field, Kohutova et al., Frontiers in Climat

This study examines how research on climate migration has developed from a dispersed topic of academic interest into a distinct academic field. Although the links between environment and human mobility have been studied for over a century, less attention has been paid to how knowledge has been structured and institutionalized around this topic. To address this gap, the article examines how climate migration scholarship has grown, organized its scholarly community, and gained recognition from external actors. Drawing on theories of field formation, we analyse four dimensions of academic fields: differentiation from other research areas, epistemic and social coherence among scholars, their social infrastructure and legitimacy-building. The study uses a mixed-methods approach combining bibliometric analysis, document and policy review, and expert interviews. The findings show that the formation of climate migration as a research field was a cumulative process. Policy attention brought resources for more research, while a shared understanding that climate migration is driven by multiple interacting factors, not climate alone, gave scholars common ground to organize around. Expanding citations and co-authorships networks then gave the field its structure over time. However, the field formation remains uneven. The networks are geographically uneven, research is being published across hundreds of journals, and theoretical frameworks are underdeveloped. Overall, the article shows how new research topics consolidate as academic fields and argues that the label of ‘research field' is not merely descriptive because it impacts visibility, resources, and epistemic authority.

Future warming enhances rates of population increase of arthropod crop pests globally, Molina et al., Ecography

We compiled a dataset on the thermal biology of arthropod crop pests and fitted TPCs to examine the projected shifts in performance under historic and future climates relative to their thermal niches, which were examined through modelling the latitudinal variation of their population-level thermal limits. Our findings highlight that most arthropod crop pests are projected to increase their thermal potential for population growth under warming by 2050, with temperate populations retaining room to grow but tropical populations increasingly exposed to heat stress. These findings can be explained by the asymmetric variation of thermal niche limits for these intrinsic rates of population increase, since we found that lower thermal limits declined with latitude, while upper thermal limits remained constant.

From this week's government/NGO section:

Communicating about Climate and Clean Energy in an Age of Affordability, Andrea Everett, Heatmap and Embold Research

Each phase of research built on the previous one, starting with a large national survey to uncover the core values, priorities, and beliefs of three broad segments of the electorate with different views of climate change. These groups were labelled as Skeptics, Persuadables, and Persuadeds. For climate and clean energy communicators, the electorate is best understood as three distinct audiences. Persuadeds already believe in the 11 urgency of climate action and clean energy. What they lack is the conviction that their own actions matter, so the core tasks are to give them concrete, achievable things to do and to help them see that their efforts matter. Persuadables are open but unconvinced, and on the central issue of clean energy affordability they demand proof they can see close to home, rather than broad statistics or slogans. Skeptics, meanwhile, may be reachable through appeals to their values of personal freedom and energy independence, supplemented by evidence on cost and reliability, but with so few trusted messengers to make the case, clean energy remains a tough sell.

What are the top social media platforms used by each of Global Warming’s Six Americas?, Ettinger et al., Yale University and George Mason University

In Fall 2025, as part of a biannual Climate Change in the American Mind survey, the authors asked a nationally representative sample of Americans (n = 1,146) how often they visit 14 different social media platforms. They were also asked how often they hear about global warming on social media. Across Global Warming’s Six Americas, the most commonly visited social media platforms are YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The Alarmed hear about global warming on social media more often than other segments of the Six Americas. 94 articles in 53 journals by 625 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Contrasting SST modes explain decadal intensification of Pacific Walker Circulation, Li et al., Atmospheric Research 10.1016/j.atmosres.2026.109338

Projected amplification of global warming by warming-induced greenhouse gas emissions, Abernethy et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/ae9e24

Substantial contribution of land-atmosphere interactions to the intensification of compound drought and heatwave events under rising CO2, Xing et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105722

Warming of the subpolar North Pacific accelerated by sea ice retreat and wind changes, Ge et al., npj Climate and Atmospheric Science Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41612-026-01541-2

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Transient overturning changes cause an upper-ocean nutrient decline in a warming climate, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52200-0 13 cites.

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Observations of climate change, effects

Extreme Dry and Humid Heat Seasons Are Changing Asymmetrically, Ivanovich et al., AGU Advances Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026av002516

Global drought shows no detectable recent acceleration under climate warming, Xu et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03954-6

In situ observations reveal continental-scale warming, oxygen decline, and eutrophication in U.S. estuaries, Reinl et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03934-w

Rapid increase of climate extremes reveals new areas of concern in Amazonia, Barlow et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03975-1

State of Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2025: A Review, Marengo et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70581

Warming accelerates drought–flood oscillations and stratifies socioeconomic exposure, Qi et al., PNAS Nexus Open Access pdf 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag283

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Cyclone Gabrielle as a Design Storm for Northeastern Aotearoa New Zealand Under Anthropogenic Warming, Earth s Future, 10.1029/2024ef004772 22 cites.

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Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

A global hourly ISIMIP3 climate forcing dataset for impact modeling, Bechtold et al., Earth system science data Open Access pdf 10.5194/essd-18-6637-2026

Interpreting Ensembles of Climate Projections for Impact Studies, Chandler & Brierley, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Open Access pdf 10.1002/wcc.70088

Introduction to the Concept of Regional Frameworks for Climate Services (RFCS), Golding et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Open Access pdf 10.1175/bams-d-25-0207.1

Regularized Fingerprinting with Linearly Optimal Weight Matrix in Detection and Attribution of Climate Change, Li & Li, Journal of Climate pdf 10.1175/jcli-d-25-0740.1

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
What is a heat wave: A survey and literature synthesis of heat wave definitions across the United States, PLOS Climate, 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000468 18 cites.

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Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

Central Asian Future Dynamics of Coldwave and Cold Spell Under Changing Climate, Ledari et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70585

Evaluating Changes in Convective Environments Over Subtropical South America Under Forced and Natural Climate Variability, Chakraborty et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl125330

Global shifts in mountain wave turbulence within high resolution climate models, Smith et al., Weather and Climate Dynamics Open Access 10.5194/wcd-7-1733-2026

High-resolution projections of summer compound humid-heat extremes and GDP exposure in Eastern China, Yang et al., Atmospheric Research 10.1016/j.atmosres.2026.109341

Impacts of Different Anthropogenic Forcings on Tropical Cyclone Frequency in Large Ensemble Climate Model Simulations, Henry et al., Journal of Climate 10.1175/jcli-d-25-0442.1

Projected Changes in Wind Hazards From Extreme Extratropical Cyclones in the Northeastern U.S., Valle et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd046823

Projecting Compound Wind-Rainfall Hazards From Tropical Cyclones in China Under Climate Change, Xu et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026ef008431

Projecting Spatial Synchrony and Socioeconomic Risk of Heatwaves and Extreme Precipitation in the future, Li et al., Weather and Climate Extremes Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2026.100958

The Future of Atmospheric Heatwaves in Chile Projected by a Regional Climate Model, Petit-Laurent et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70567

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Strong regional trends in extreme weather over the next two decades under high- and low-emissions pathways, Nature Geoscience, 10.1038/s41561-024-01511-4 53 cites.

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Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

A global hourly ISIMIP3 climate forcing dataset for impact modeling, Bechtold et al., Earth system science data Open Access pdf 10.5194/essd-18-6637-2026

Current model capabilities and future predictive pathways of wildfires under a changing climate, Whaley et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-04013-w

Deciphering the Link Between Modeling Errors and the North Atlantic Surface Warming Pattern Projected by CMIP5 and CMIP6 Models, Douville et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl122158

Improving soil temperature simulation accuracy in Arctic permafrost regions by incorporation surface organic layer in CLM5.0, Liu et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111476

Interpreting Ensembles of Climate Projections for Impact Studies, Chandler & Brierley, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Open Access pdf 10.1002/wcc.70088

Km-scale regional coupled system in the Northwest European shelf for weather and climate applications: RCS-UKC4, Berthou et al., Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-8535-2026

The added value of Med-CORDEX coupled high-resolution regional climate models in representing sea surface temperature and marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean Sea, Rovere et al., Ocean science Open Access pdf 10.5194/os-22-2725-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Artificial intelligence for climate prediction of extremes: State of the art, challenges, and future perspectives, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change, 10.1002/wcc.914 115 cites.

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Cryosphere & climate change

Illusory early-warning signals of Greenland Ice Sheet destabilization, Robel et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2623190123

On thin glacial ice: New Austrian Glacier Inventory shows accelerating glacier shrinkage and 31 % area loss within two decades, Hartl et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-5157-2026

Projecting the evolution of the Northern Patagonian Icefield until the year 2200, Schaefer et al., cryosphere Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-20-5115-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Over the Next Three Centuries From an ISMIP6 Model Ensemble, Earth s Future, 10.1029/2024ef004561 73 cites.

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Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry

Recognition of two potential warming events in the Paleocene terrestrial record of North America and associated mammalian responses, Secord et al., PNAS Nexus Open Access pdf 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag289

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Opposing Changes in Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall Variability Produced by Orbital and Anthropogenic Forcing, Geophysical Research Letters, 10.1029/2024gl109897 8 cites.

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Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Biome classification across global vegetation models reveals consistent biome shifts under future climate change, Scheiter et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-6409-2026

Broad-scale shift in dominance of arbuscular mycorrhizal trees along the Japanese archipelago associated with tree diseases and climate warming, Schaefer et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77711-w

Distribution and Habitat Suitability of Artemisia annua in China Under Climate Change Scenarios, Zhang et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access 10.1002/ece3.74236

Evolution of flowering phenology over 44 years of climate change, Deurs et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2613665123

Experimental evidence of a biological soil crust degradation climate warming amplification feedback, Smith et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03874-5

Long-Term Warming Reduces Bacterial Diversity and Functional Potential in Temperate Forest Soil, Liu et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.71104

Seasonally asymmetric warming reshapes grassland stability across timescales, Lu et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2608466123

The projected risk of plant invasions on the peri-Antarctic islands under climate change, Vorstenbosch et al., Ecography Open Access pdf 10.1002/ecog.08195

When warming stops lengthening the growing season: Insights from two decades of forest phenology in Central Europe, Nasiri et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111457

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Global change and premature hatching of aquatic embryos, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17488 22 cites.

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GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

Assessment of Spatial Downscaling Used in Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Estimates, Sun et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008225

Forest Floor Protection: The Critical Defense Against Post-Harvest Soil Carbon Loss, Wallace et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026jg009694

From abandoned fishponds to mature mangroves: the integrated CO2 balance of two contrasting coastal wetland landscapes, Wang et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111469

High-Resolution Dynamical Downscaling Refines the Time of Emergence of Sea Level Rise in the Northwestern Pacific, Kang et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026ef008543

Imaging deep carbon stocks with complex electrical conductivity, Orozco et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-6287-2026

Inefficient consumption of natural gas drives methane emissions from a megacity, Zhao et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-26-12911-2026

Methane emissions from municipal solid waste landfills in Tehran: Field measurements and modeling of a NASA-identified global super-emitter, Hassanabadi et al., Atmospheric Environment 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122355

Projected amplification of global warming by warming-induced greenhouse gas emissions, Abernethy et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/ae9e24

Spatial-Temporal Distribution Dynamics of Carbon Storage of Dominant Species in a Subtropical Evergreen Broad-Leaved Forest and Its Influencing Factors, Duan et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.1029/2025jg008947

White Carbon: Bringing Managed Salterns Into Coastal Carbon Accounting, He, Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026jg010199

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Global riverine land-to-ocean carbon export constrained by observations and multi-model assessment, Nature Geoscience, 10.1038/s41561-024-01524-z 96 cites.

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CO2 capture, sequestration science & engineering

CCS deployment policy choices under regional heterogeneity: Economy-wide impacts and spillovers in China, Xiao et al., Energy Policy Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115616

Deterministic Cost Estimation Approaches for Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage: A Review, Mohajeri & Azadbakht, Greenhouse Gases Science and Technology Open Access pdf 10.1002/ghg.70043

Marine carbon removal at a crossroads, Macreadie et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02740-8

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Enhancing electrochemical carbon dioxide capture with supercapacitors, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52219-3 61 cites.

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Decarbonization

A 250-kilowatt system for co-production of hydrogen and fresh water from seawater, Jiang et al., Nature Energy 10.1038/s41560-026-02130-6

Accelerating renewable energy transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from Latin America, Moyo & Oree, Energy Sustainable Development/Energy for sustainable development Open Access 10.1016/j.esd.2026.102137

Critical gaps remain in carbon accounting at mine sites, Mervine et al., Carbon Management Open Access pdf 10.1080/17583004.2026.2730003

Photovoltaic deployment strategies for net-zero commercial buildings in India: A climate-zoned benchmarking approach, Azeem & Thomas, Energy Sustainable Development/Energy for sustainable development Open Access 10.1016/j.esd.2026.102135

Physical and Biogeochemical Ocean Response to Potential Offshore Wind Development Along the U.S. West Coast, Jacox et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl123676

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Permeability partitioning through the brittle-to-ductile transition and its implications for supercritical geothermal reservoirs, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52092-0 29 cites.

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Geoengineering climate

Impact of stratospheric aerosol injection on rangeland productivity and animal production in Africa, Ho et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1869700

Land Radiative Management Increases Heat Stress in Some Humid Regions, Cheng & McColl, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl125630

Pathway-dependent responses of temperature extremes under solar radiation modification over Northern Africa, Sian et al., Frontiers in Earth Science Open Access 10.3389/feart.2026.1884589

Aerosols

Impacts of Anthropogenic Aerosol-Forced North Atlantic SST Variability on the Simulated Historical Global Warming, Rashid, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl124086

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Surface albedo regulates aerosol direct climate effect, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52255-z 28 cites.

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Climate change communications & cognition

Patient knowledge and views on the health impacts of climate change in primary care: a cross-sectional survey study, Stewart et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1930073

Shifting configurations of nationalism, populism, and conservatism: far-right environmental discourse on agriculture, climate, and energy, Lambrechts & Cleen, Environmental Politics 10.1080/09644016.2026.2728447

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Tackling the academic air travel dependency. An analysis of the (in)consistency between academics’ travel behaviour and their attitudes, Global Environmental Change, 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102908 27 cites.

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Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

Evaluating climate-driven agricultural suitability models for adaptation planning: stakeholder insights from British Columbia, Vakhshoori et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1928659

Exploring Behavioral and Social Dynamics in Crop Insurance Adoption amid Climate Change: Evidence from Paddy Farmers in Tamil Nadu, India, Thiyaharajan et al., Weather Climate and Society 10.1175/wcas-d-25-0063.1

Future warming enhances rates of population increase of arthropod crop pests globally, Molina et al., Ecography Open Access pdf 10.1002/ecog.08568

Impact of stratospheric aerosol injection on rangeland productivity and animal production in Africa, Ho et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1869700

Local climate variability indicators show differentiated socioecological impacts and opportunities for agroforestry-based adaptation in the Colombian Andean-Amazon, Ángel-Sánchez et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1881072

Minimizing climate change adaptation trade-offs in African rangelands, Clark et al., Nature Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41893-026-01938-0

New labour and agricultural damages improve climate cost estimates, Moore et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02749-z

Participatory assessment of agricultural value chain dynamics and market opportunities for smallholder farmers in climate-vulnerable coastal Bangladesh, Kabir et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-71038-8

Rethinking climate vulnerability in livestock systems: evidence from exposure, adaptation, and within-system heterogeneity in West Africa, Adéchian et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1868024

Sustainable grazing management supports climate change mitigation in a mediterranean pasture, Ishaq et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1917508

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change exacerbates the environmental impacts of agriculture, Science, 10.1126/science.adn3747 524 cites.

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Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Extreme Dry and Humid Heat Seasons Are Changing Asymmetrically, Ivanovich et al., AGU Advances Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026av002516

Intensified Warm-Season Nighttime Precipitation over Large Tibetan Plateau Lakes: Evidence from Satellite Observations, Yang et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.09.006

Water governance under pressure: neoliberal structures and collaborative freshwater management in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom, Tariq et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1840817

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Evaluation of precipitation extremes in ERA5 reanalysis driven regional climate simulations over the CORDEX-Australasia domain, Weather and Climate Extremes, 10.1016/j.wace.2024.100676 17 cites.

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Climate change economics

Green energy and the shadow economy: implications for environmental sustainability in G7 countries, Uddin et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1871821

Guaranteed income as an anticipatory action for climate change and disaster preparedness in the US, Prandoni et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1838033

Rethinking overseas expansion: climate risk and Chinese corporations’ cross-border mergers and acquisitions, Guo & Wu, Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1896051

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The role of green financial sector initiatives in the low-carbon transition: A theory of change, Global Environmental Change, 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102915 30 cites.

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Climate change mitigation public policy research

Carbon mitigation governance strategies in Morocco, China, and Norway, Nefzi & Bouzidi, Discover Sustainability Open Access 10.1007/s43621-026-04602-x

Framing the transition: How consultants shape public energy governance in Sweden, Reindl et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104959

Strategic pathways for decarbonization: a data-driven typology to strengthen climate policy, Bento et al., Figshare Open Access 10.6084/m9.figshare.33600992.v1

Tripartite evolutionary game analysis of emission reduction in EU road freight transport under ETD and ETS2 policies, Cai et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1921416

Varieties of decarbonization: Comparing state narratives of Germany, India, and Mexico, Zambianchi et al., Energy Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115598

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The impact of electricity market reform on renewable energy production, Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2024.114306 35 cites.

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Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

Assessing landslide probability changes under climate change scenarios as a basis for adaptation strategies, Chu et al., Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment 10.1007/s10064-026-05309-z

Compound and heterogeneous relationships between climate extremes and global net migration, Petrova et al., Nature Climate Change Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41558-026-02752-4

Knowledge co-production and co-dissemination for climate change adaptation: insights based on Chokwe district, Mozambique, Jonas et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1935074

On race, racism and racialization: reflections on climate mobility, Baldwin, Climate and Development 10.1080/17565529.2026.2729553

The emergence of climate migration research as an academic field, Kohutova et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1825882

Weather extremes in migration dynamics: evidence from the Philippines, Innocenti & Randelli, Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-67411-2

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
What is limiting how we imagine climate change adaptation?, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101476 45 cites.

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Climate change impacts on human health

Balancing urban green space benefits and vector-borne disease risk under climate change: Critical decision-making for 21st century public health, Ferguson et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001016

Impact of Climate Warming on All-Causes Mortality in China: The Role of Non-Optimal Temperature Exposure and Multi-Scenario Projections to 2050, He et al., GeoHealth Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gh001897

Intimate partner violence in sub-Saharan Africa under climate change and socioeconomic scenarios, Peisker et al., Global Environmental Change Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2026.103224

Patient knowledge and views on the health impacts of climate change in primary care: a cross-sectional survey study, Stewart et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1930073

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Spatio-temporal characteristics of Heat stress over Nigeria using evaluated ERA5-HEAT reanalysis data, Weather and Climate Extremes, 10.1016/j.wace.2024.100704 24 cites.

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Climate change impacts on human culture

Climate Change and Outdoor Sport in Chile: A Review of Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation, Carrasco, Weather Climate and Society 10.1175/wcas-d-25-0217.1

Other

A strengthening yet less extreme Atlantic–European jet during winter, Brönnimann et al., Nature Geoscience Open Access 10.1038/s41561-026-02069-z

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season: An Above-Normal Season despite Strong El Niño Conditions, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 10.1175/bams-d-23-0305.1 15 cites.

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Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Disaster effects of climate change in High Mountain Asia: State of art and scientific challenges, Advances in Climate Change Research, 10.1016/j.accre.2024.06.003 75 cites.

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

Indiana Renewables and the Residential Real Estate Market, Faulk et al., Purdue Extension Community Development and The Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University

This brief summarizes the findings of two larger reports examining how proximity to commercial wind turbines or large solar projects affect house values in Indiana. Using data from 2004 to 2024, the authors provide state-specific estimates to inform state and local officials and residents. They found no statistically significant negative effects on residential property values associated with proximity to large wind or utility-scale solar projects in Indiana.

Sustainability in Action 2026. The new rules of business resilience, Sweep and Cap Gemini

Climate disruption is costing companies now and the data cannot keep up. 94% of businesses report climate-related financial losses over the past two years, but 79% say their data is not sufficient to inform strategy. Fragmented data is the biggest thing standing between leaders and climate action Top barriers to sustainability data infrastructure, as reported by senior leaders: 34% limited system integration; 34% scaling across geographies; 31% incomplete Scope 3 or supplier data. These data may be behind, but the returns are already here. Share of leaders reporting measurable ROI today, by area: 43% from better procurement and supply chain efficiency; 52% from reduced regulatory and compliance costs; 41% from improved risk management.

Consumer Attitudes on Corporate Climate Action: Insights for Today’s Business Environment, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Maslansky + Partners, and Potential Energy

The business landscape around climate action has shifted dramatically. But not in the ways heated policy debates might suggest. An in-depth analysis of consumer attitudes via a survey of 2,000 voters across the U.S. reflecting a representative range of political affiliations, ages, and incomes supports a different conclusion. It reveals something surprising for some: despite increased political polarization and a challenging regulatory environment, the business case for climate action has continued holding strong. What’s more, the authors suggest that corporate retreat from environmental commitments carries more reputational and financial risk than maintaining a clear, consistent stance. And perhaps most surprisingly, even those skeptical of climate policy remain open to the business case. Across party lines, strong majorities believe that climate action is smart business and would support companies that invest in clean energy and limit climate pollution.

What are the top social media platforms used by each of Global Warming’s Six Americas?, Ettinger et al., Yale University and George Mason University

In Fall 2025, as part of a biannual Climate Change in the American Mind survey, the authors asked a nationally representative sample of Americans (n = 1,146) how often they visit 14 different social media platforms. They were also asked how often they hear about global warming on social media. Across Global Warming’s Six Americas, the most commonly visited social media platforms are YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The Alarmed hear about global warming on social media more often than other segments of the Six Americas.

California IOU Grid Capacity to Fully Serve Local Load with Distributed Solar+Storage Systems during Summer Peak/Net Peak Hours https://www.kevala.com/resources/grid-capacity-to-serve-local-load, Kevala, The Coalition for Community Solar Access

The authors estimate the amount and geographic concentration of large investor-owned utility (IOU) distribution-connected load in California that could be served by fully exporting front-of-the-meter distributed solar+storage resources, such as community solar+storage, or storage-only resources during summer peak and net peak demand hours without back-feeding onto the sub-transmission or transmission system. Specifically, the authors estimate the total load and corresponding number of 5-MW systems, each discharging at full capacity for 4 hours, that could be interconnected to the distribution grid and operated from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. from June through September, with the discharged electricity being fully absorbed by local load behind each substation.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative: An Initiative of Eastern States of the United States, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Inc., Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Inc

The participating states of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) released a report tracking the investment of proceeds generated from RGGI’s regional CO2 allowance auctions. The report tracks investments of RGGI proceeds in 2024 and summarizes how these investments promote ratepayer affordability, drive pollution reduction, and deliver additional benefits across the region. The RGGI states have individual discretion over how to invest proceeds according to state specific goals. Accordingly, states direct funds to a wide variety of programs, touching all aspects of the energy sector. In 2024, $856 million in RGGI proceeds were invested in programs including energy efficiency, clean and renewable energy, beneficial electrification, greenhouse gas abatement, and direct bill assistance. Over their lifetime, these 2024 investments are projected to provide participating households and businesses with $2.6 billion in energy bill savings and avoid the emission of 4.4 million short tons of CO2. The largest share of the investments was directed to energy efficiency, with 46% of the 2024 total. Other categories receiving significant investments include direct bill assistance, clean and renewable energy programs, beneficial electrification, and greenhouse gas abatement and climate adaptation programs.

Communicating about Climate and Clean Energy in an Age of Affordability, Andrea Everett, Heatmap and Embold Research

Each phase of research built on the previous one, starting with a large national survey to uncover the core values, priorities, and beliefs of three broad segments of the electorate with different views of climate change. These groups were labelled as Skeptics, Persuadables, and Persuadeds. For climate and clean energy communicators, the electorate is best understood as three distinct audiences. Persuadeds already believe in the 11 urgency of climate action and clean energy. What they lack is the conviction that their own actions matter, so the core tasks are to give them concrete, achievable things to do and to help them see that their efforts matter. Persuadables are open but unconvinced, and on the central issue of clean energy affordability they demand proof they can see close to home, rather than broad statistics or slogans. Skeptics, meanwhile, may be reachable through appeals to their values of personal freedom and energy independence, supplemented by evidence on cost and reliability, but with so few trusted messengers to make the case, clean energy remains a tough sell.

Ahead of the Deal: How the United States Can Build an Energy Project Pipeline in Emerging Markets, Katie Auth, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The author argues that global U.S. electricity investment initiatives keep falling short for the same reason. Regardless of the divergent objectives and political rationales that drove each administration’s efforts, they all tried to mobilize private capital into energy projects using the same strategy: supporting individual deals at the very latest stages of project development. This works relatively well in mature economies, but not in the many emerging markets where few projects ever reach that point. The approach simply does not fit the reality of what is needed in the energy sectors of most emerging markets today. And it has left the primary implementer of U.S. development finance, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), with too few good projects in which to put its capital. To build a diversified pipeline of high-quality energy projects that feeds the DFC’s portfolio for years to come, achieves U.S. strategic goals, and expands commercial opportunities for American firms and technologies, U.S. development finance must pivot in three key ways including incentivize strategic, early-stage risk, delegate origination to external partners, and focus assistance on grid systems and procurement.

West-wide Transmission Study: 10-Year Horizon Report, Western Transmission Expansion Coalition

The 10-year Horizon Study offers a holistic, integrated evaluation of Western interregional transmission needs, with a focus on identifying transmission gaps and filling them with actionable projects. In performing the assessment, drivers of the growing need for transmission over the approaching 10 years became clear. Western Transmission Expansion Coalition's (WestTEC) forecasts show Western peak electric demand increasing by 30% in the next decade. This increase is more than three times greater than what the West experienced over the last decade. Nameplate generation capacity is anticipated to increase by 76% in the next decade, more than twice the historical rate. Plans to procure intermittent resources by several Western entities will increase reliance on transmission to manage supply variability. By 2035 the Western grid will increasingly depend on the geographic diversity of load and generation to maintain reliability, which drives high-volume power flows across and between regions. Extreme events requiring transfers between entities occur during summer and winter peaks, cold snaps, and periods of high generation output. This highlights how diversity strengthens the system but requires transmission capacity to do so.

The Cost of Heat: Managing Pennsylvania’s Thermal Transition, Kristin George Bagdanov and Kevin Carbonnier, Building Decarbonization Coalition

The authors call for a managed gas transition: a coordinated, regulator-led strategy to limit unnecessary gas investment, retire portions of the gas system where cost-effective alternatives exist, and protect customers and workers during the shift to cleaner heating and cooling. This managed gas transition is one part of a broader thermal transition: the long-term shift toward cleaner, more affordable, and better-coordinated systems for delivering heat. The analysis that follows traces how Act 11 accelerated gas system spending, how those costs affect customer bills, and why neighborhood.

The Impact of Climate and Environmental Change on Brain Health, Ikiz et al., International Neuro Climate Working Group

The authors synthesize the current scientific evidence on how climate related environmental exposures affect neurological health, mental health, cognition, neurodevelopment, and healthy brain aging. In addition to presenting the Neuro Climate Framework, the authors identify priority directions for future research through the Neuro Climate Research Agenda and outlines stakeholder-specific recommendations through the Neuro Climate Action Roadmap, providing practical guidance for researchers, policymakers, healthcare professionals, educators, communities, individuals, and international organizations.

2026 NYC Heat-Related Mortality Report, Bureau of Environmental Surveillance and Policy, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Heat contributes to the deaths of approximately 500 New Yorkers, on average, each year during the warm season of May through September. Inequities by race and income persist in the people and neighborhoods most impacted. Deaths across all races, however, were more common at home, underscoring the importance of access to and affordability of home cooling to prevent death. The authors report estimated trends in heat-exacerbated deaths for the current and past several decades (1974-2023) in 10-year rolling time windows to provide more stable estimates than previous 5-year aggregation and align with the 10-year period used to describe the temperature-risk relationship in the report. For heat-stress deaths, counts and the annual average for the past ten years (2016-2025) are reported.

Disaster Risk: Improvements Needed to Enhance FEMA’s National Risk Index, Currie et al., United States Government Accountability Office

The authors found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) partially followed leading practices for risk assessment and information quality during the development, operation, and maintenance of the National Risk Index (NRI). The authors made three recommendations, including that FEMA provide information to users on how to apply NRI results effectively and systematically solicit, collect, and incorporate user feedback to inform NRI improvements.

Winter 2026 Arctic Events: A System Performance Review, Clark et al., Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and North American Electric Reliability Corporation

This system performance review focuses on understanding what occurred during the Winter 2026 Arctic Cold Period. The authors also highlight cold weather preparation improvements made prior to the Winter 2026 Arctic Cold Period that supported reliable operation of the Bulk-Power System during the period. The authors engaged with numerous electric and natural gas entities across the eastern half of the United States3 and Texas to gather the information necessary to provide an overview of the performance of the Bulk-Power System and natural gas system during the Winter 2026 Arctic Cold Period. The authors' analysis shows that the Winter 2026 Arctic Cold Period was fundamentally an endurance challenge (sustained reliable operation during extended periods of system stress) that stretched electric and natural gas systems for several days, revealing how extended cold snaps amplify risks across generator performance, fuel supply chains, load forecasting, interregional energy transfers, and system operators. Electric entities reported multi-day reliability challenges driven by equipment cold weather limitations, deferred maintenance, and constrained fuel availability, while natural gas systems faced infrastructure constraints, production obstacles, and logistical barriers that affected upstream deliveries and non-fuel consumables.

Wetlands for Climate Partnership Report (California), Pietri et al., The Nature Conservancy et al

California has lost more than 90% of its historic wetlands, prompting major state investments through initiatives such as AB 1757, CARB’s Scoping Plan, Pathways to 30x30, and Proposition 4. Drawing on workshops, agency discussions, and practitioner engagement conducted from 2024 to 2026, the authors present current progress, persistent barriers, and key opportunities to accelerate wetland restoration and management needed to achieve California’s climate, resilience, and biodiversity goals.

Spending and Safety Outcomes in U.S. Gas Distribution Systems: An Assessment of DIMP & PHMSA’s Call to Action, Seavey et al., The Future of Heat Initiative

Over the past 15 years, two federal initiatives — the Gas Distribution Integrity Management Program rule and Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration's Call to Action — have fundamentally reshaped how U.S. gas utilities invest in safety, one by promoting integrity management and the other by encouraging accelerated replacement of certain pipelines. The authors presents the first comprehensive evaluation of these initiatives. They found that utility safety spending has been significantly misallocated: since 2011, capital spending is up 200% and customer delivery charges have nearly doubled, yet measured safety outcomes have not improved commensurately. The analysis traces this divergence to regulatory frameworks that often fail to ensure that capital investments are guided by rigorous risk assessment and systematic evaluation of alternative risk-mitigation strategies. The authors urge state and federal regulators, utilities, and other interested parties to take action to improve outcomes for the public.

A fossil-free Australia: An ambitious Paris-aligned phase-out of coal, gas and oil from the national energy system, Houlie et al., Climate Analytics

The authors show that Australia can meet its climate goals and reach net zero emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. The authors modelled a new Fossil Fuel Phase-out (FFPO) scenario, a Paris-aligned pathway for Australia informed by the latest global evidence. This scenarios' results are then compared to the Australian government's current policies - the Current Policy Projections (CPP) scenario. A fossil fuel phase-out for Australia to meet its climate commitments and to play its role in global efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C is urgent. The authors show this is possible in all sectors, present policies the government needs to adopt, and highlight what the government is not doing - or needs to be doing more of. The government needs to start this phase-out now.

Global Snapshot of Climate-related School Disruptions in 2025, Ji et al., United Nations Children's Fund

Globally, at least 171 million students – from pre-primary to upper secondary education – experienced school disruptions due to climate events in 2025. Climate-related school disruptions in 2025 could cost affected students at least US$200 billion in lifetime earnings through lost learning and widening education inequities. At least 1 in 10 students had their schooling disrupted due to climate-related hazards in 2025. 75 per cent of the 171 million affected students are in low- and lower middle-income countries. Schools in 106 countries or territories were affected by climate hazards, with 40 countries experiencing multiple instances of school disruptions.

Methane Made in America, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law

The authors provide a user-friendly ranking of the Top 10 oil and gas sites in three basins, Appalachia, Permian, and Haynesville, as seen by one of the most sophisticated methane-detection satellites in the world. The authors define the Top 10 sites as those with the highest average methane emission rate observed from January 1,?2025, to June 1,?2026, by the Tanager-1 satellite, excluding sources with two or fewer detected plumes. Where possible, the authors also identify the “potentially responsible operator” of each site and give information on the site’s public health effects.

Ratepayer Impacts of Arizona Public Service’s Gas Resources, McGarvey et al., Sierra Club and Synapse Energy Economics

Natural gas purchases to fuel Arizona Public Service (APS) power plants currently account for 5% of residential bills. Gas prices can be affected by external factors including global geopolitical events and domestic extreme weather events. Therefore, APS’s reliance on gas resources exposes ratepayers to fuel price volatility risk. Gas price spikes could increase average residential customer bills by over $9 per month. Data centers are driving up electricity demand in Arizona. Since its 2023 Integrated Resource Plan, APS has increased its' planned additions for 2030 by 4.6 GW to meet increased demand. APS is responding by increasing its' reliance on gas. APS plans to increase nameplate capacity of natural gas from 5.1 GW in 2023 to 7.8 GW in 2030, a 48% increase. Gas could make up 32% of the company's generation mix, compared to 19% in 2023. This will lock customers into increased bills for many years and increase ratepayer exposure to gas price risks. About New Research

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Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu

• Flatlining fossils
• Clean-energy growth matches power demand
• Which states led the clean-power shift?
• Fall in oil and gas consumption continues
• Rapid emission growth from heavy industry continues
• New investments in coal 
• Outlook for India’s emissions
• About the data

A surge in clean energy has kept carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in check across India’s power sector, with no growth from the first half of 2024 to the same period in 2026.

This guest post is by:

Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) 

Anubha Aggarwal, India analyst at CREA

This is the first time in more than 50 years that there has been no growth in India’s coal power over a two-year period, even as electricity demand grew overall.

At the same time, both oil and gas consumption have fallen across the nation for two years in a row, helping alleviate the shock of the Hormuz crisis.

Nevertheless, the new six-monthly analysis for Carbon Brief shows that India’s emissions grew by 3.7% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, due to increases from steel, cement and other sectors.

Other key findings for the first half of 2026 include:

• India’s power-sector emissions flatlined at 2024 levels, after a 2.2% decline in the first half of 2025 and a 2.3% rise in the same period this year.
• Clean energy met all of the 7% rise in India’s electricity demand over the two years, adding 63 terawatt hours (TWh), equivalent to the total demand of Switzerland.
• India has added 77 gigawatts (GW) of solar in this two-year period, helping meet 60% of the rise in electricity demand overall.
• While fossil-fuel generation stagnated, generators added 8.5GW of new coal capacity, leading to fewer running hours and increased costs to electricity consumers.
• CO2 emissions from oil and gas fell by 7% year-on-year, extending a reduction that began in 2025, despite higher demand for road transport fuels.
• Steel and cement emissions grew by 8% year-on-year, reaching a 23% share of India’s total CO2 in the first half of 2026. 

If the pace of India’s clean-energy expansion is to continue, it will need to upgrade its electricity grid, rapidly build out energy storage and boost the flexibility of coal power.

While clean-energy expansion is covering most or all of India’s power-demand growth, the fossil-fuel industry continues to pursue major capital investments.

This includes large amounts of new coal-power capacity, ambitious plans for the conversion of coal-to-chemicals and efforts to boost domestic coking coal production for the steel sector.

While CO2 output from the power sector is flat, with oil and gas in decline, India’s emissions still went up due to the contribution from industry.

India lags behind its competitors – including most large emerging economies – when it comes to electrifying its industrial sector.

Faster progress would enable clean electricity to substitute for fossil fuels in industry, as well as for power, offering the potential for India to cut its emissions overall.

Flatlining fossils

Last year, India’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement grew at their slowest pace in two decades, according to previous analysis for Carbon Brief.

This sharp slowdown was due to rapid clean-energy growth and flat oil demand, combined with rising emissions from steel and cement.

The first half of 2026 marks a continuation of these trends.

Most strikingly, the ongoing surge in clean-energy generation means that emissions have flatlined in India’s power sector for two years, as shown in the figure below.

Power-sector CO2 was the same in the first half of 2026 as two years earlier, with a small decline in 2025 having been reversed over the same period this year.

For further details, see: About the data.

Beyond electricity generation, India’s key emitting sectors continued to see divergent trends in the first half of 2026, as some saw ongoing decline while others reached new heights.

This is shown in the figure below, which compares year-on-year changes in emissions during the first half of 2026 with the same periods in 2025, 2024 and the average for 2021-23.

Specifically, emissions grew by 2.3% in the power sector, reversing last year’s decline, while demand for gas and oil products fell for another year.

The biggest increases were for steel and cement, where emissions growth accelerated to 8% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, well above the recent trend.

For further details, see: About the data. Clean-energy growth matches power demand

The period from the first half of 2024 to the first half of 2026 saw the largest increase in non-fossil power generation on record in India.

This enabled fossil-fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from the sector to stay flat, even as electricity consumption increased.

Indeed, this is the first time in more than 50 years that there has been no growth in coal power over a two-year period, even as electricity demand grew overall, as shown below.

For further details, see: About the data.

Over this two-year period, India’s total power generation increased by 7%, some 63TWh, equal to the total consumption of Singapore or Switzerland.

The additional power requirement of 63TWh was met entirely by clean energy. Solar grew by 44TWh, alongside growth from wind (13TWh), nuclear (7TWh) and hydro (8TWh).

Together, clean-energy sources added 70TWh over two years, more than the net increase in demand.

(For comparison, China’s nuclear, wind and solar output increased by 485TWh in 2025.)

The figure below shows that new investments are more than sufficient to maintain this trend, as added power generation from new clean power capacity has stayed above average demand growth for the past 18 months.

For further details, see: About the data.

Over the past two years, India added 77GW of new solar capacity, 11GW of wind, 5GW of hydro and 0.6GW of nuclear capacity.

Solar power continues to dominate clean-energy growth, but, collectively, the other non-fossil sources still contributed 40% of the overall increase in generation. 

One factor in electricity demand growth in 2026 is the El Niño, which delayed the monsoon and intensified heatwaves, driving up cooling demand.  

India is accelerating investment in energy storage, which will support further growth in clean power. The National Electricity Plan projected a requirement of 82 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy storage capacity by 2026-27 and 411GWh by 2031-32.

As of May 2026, the government has issued tenders for around 272GWh of energy storage capacity, including 142GWh of pumped hydro and 133GWh of battery storage systems. Current capacity is 7.5GWh of battery storage and around 60GWh of pumped hydro.

Which states led the clean-power shift?

The fall in power generation from fossil fuels from the first half of 2024 to the same period in 2026 was concentrated in a few states.

Gujarat saw both the largest reduction in fossil-fuel generation and the largest expansion in clean power, as shown in the figure below.

For further details, see: About the data.

After Gujarat, the largest increases in clean-power generation were seen in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, which also saw reductions in power generation from fossil fuels.

Several other states saw declines in fossil-fuel generation due to higher net imports, rather than local clean power. These included Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Punjab. 

Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh also succeeded in increasing clean-power generation faster than power demand, thereby contributing to keeping fossil fuel-based power generation stable nationwide across the two-year period. However, they exported much of the increase and consequently saw local increases in power generation from fossil fuels.

The two states with the largest increases in power demand, Maharashtra and Telangana, managed to almost match the rise with growth in clean-power generation.

Fall in oil and gas consumption continues

India’s oil consumption continued to fall during the first half of 2026, dropping 1.3% year-on-year, a slight acceleration from the 0.7% reduction in the same period last year.

While diesel and petrol consumption continued to grow, oil consumption was pulled down overall by declines in liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), petcoke (a solid derivative of oil used in the cement industry) and industrial feedstocks. Growth of aviation fuel use eased.

Diesel consumption growth accelerated from 1.8% to 4.1% in the first half of the year, supported by higher freight movement and increased agricultural demand, as the delayed monsoon led to greater use of diesel-powered irrigation.

Petrol consumption returned to growth, increasing 6.9% year-on-year after zero growth in the same period in 2025, reflecting sustained growth in passenger and two-wheeler mobility.

A significant increase in ethanol blending shaved a full percentage point off the growth of petrol consumption. India achieved its 20% ethanol blending target five years ahead of schedule in 2025-26. (Ethanol blending has faced public opposition.)

Electric vehicle (EV) adoption in India is also gaining momentum, with EVs adopted in a widening range of categories.

In Delhi, an EV policy was launched to accelerate electrification of the vehicle fleet, with a particular focus on two-wheelers, three-wheelers (auto rickshaws), commercial vehicles and high-mileage segments, alongside expanded charging infrastructure. Higher EV adoption rates will moderate the growth in emissions from petrol consumption in India. 

In contrast, aviation fuel demand growth slowed down from 5% to 2%. The slowdown coincided with the strait of Hormuz and wider crisis, which disrupted international aviation through temporary airspace closures and flight cancellations to several Middle Eastern destinations. Elevated aviation fuel prices also increased airline operating costs, contributing to lower fuel demand. 

LPG consumption contracted by 7%, after 5.7% growth in the same period last year, amid disruptions in global LPG markets following the Hormuz crisis.

Petcoke consumption fell 9.9%, more than reversing a 9.3% increase in the same period last year. Rising petcoke prices encouraged cement manufacturers to switch to coal.

Consumption of other petroleum products continued to drop, although the pace of decline moderated from 14% in 2025 to 9% in 2026. 

Industrial feedstock use was affected by shortages and price increases.

Naphtha demand contracted as import prices nearly doubled and domestic prices increased by around 60%, prompting petrochemical manufacturers to reduce operating rates and suppress demand for imported naphtha.

Bitumen consumption remained subdued due to slower road construction, driven by persistent land acquisition challenges and higher bitumen costs.

Meanwhile, higher light diesel oil (LDO) prices and shortage of LPG led some industrial consumers to switch back to furnace oil in boilers and heaters, despite the higher air pollutant emissions. Supply of fuel oil to industry increased for the same reason.

Rapid emission growth from heavy industry continues

Steel and cement output in India grew by 8% and 9%, respectively, year-on-year in the first half of 2026, despite rising input prices and weakening profitability.

The growth in steel and cement was supported in part by increased investment in India’s real estate sector, especially in the second quarter. Steel consumption growth outpaced production, implying that inventories built up last year were tapped.

Despite domestic demand growth, profit margins of Indian steel and cement manufacturers remained under pressure for much of the period due to elevated raw material costs – particularly imported coking coal – and higher freight costs stemming from the Hormuz crisis.  

The pressure on prices could dampen growth. Cement prices are expected to rise to levels last seen in the 2021-22 financial year, when Russia’s decision to cut back gas exports to Europe drove a sharp increase in fossil-fuel prices.

Outside the steel, cement and power sectors, coal-consumption growth accelerated to 14% in the first half of 2026, up from 3% last year, as the LPG shortage prompted a shift to coal.

Gas shortages resulted in some additional burning of coal for cooking in March and April. The government officially authorised the hospitality industry to use coal, refuse-derived fuel pellets, biomass and kerosene for one month.

The ceramic and tile industry also requested that the government allow the use of coal gasifiers amid the gas shortage. State governments including Delhi NCR, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Maharashtra also allowed industries to temporarily use alternative fuels, including coal. 

India’s industrial energy use is dominated by fossil fuels, particularly coal. Indian industry has the second-lowest electrification rate in the G20, as shown in the figure below. The share of electricity in total energy consumption in the sector also lags the world average, in terms of both current levels and the rate of increase.

For further details, see: About the data.

The current low rates of electricity use in Indian industry imply that there is major potential for electrification, using technologies and processes already in place in other countries.

New investments in coal 

While the clean-power expansion is starting to meet most or all of India’s electricity demand growth, there are still large investment plans across the coal supply chain.

Some 43GW of coal-power capacity was under construction at the end of June. Additional coal-power capacity is seen as necessary to meet increasing peak loads, even as solar power and energy storage are already playing a role in covering daytime and evening peak demand, respectively. The expansion of energy storage will increase this contribution.

Outside the power sector, India has major ambitions to produce chemical-industry products, such as fertiliser and plastic feedstock, from coal through coal gasification, in pursuit of energy security.

The government is targeting a capacity to process 100m tonnes of coal per year in the next four years, despite the technology for coal gasification still being nascent in India. At present, the only operational use of coal gasification is at Jindal Steel Limited, which is reportedly using syngas in its steel-making process. 

Meanwhile, India plans to reduce its average CO2 emissions per tonne of steel by 25% by 2025-26, mainly by reducing the share of coal-based steelmaking.

At the same time, the government is aiming to increase the use of domestic coking coal, which it notified in January this year as a “critical and strategic mineral”. Coal miners and steel companies are reportedly planning to establish additional washeries for coking coal to make it suitable for blending with imported coal for use in steel production. 

India is also looking to invest in new coal mines in the near future. 

These continued investments in coal gasification, domestic coking coal and new coal mining capacity could lock in coal use across industry for several decades.  

Outlook for India’s emissions

Over the two-year period from the first half of 2024 to the same period in 2026, India has achieved its largest clean-energy expansion on record.

As a result, power-demand growth has been met entirely by clean electricity and CO2 emissions in the sector have flatlined.

This expansion of clean energy also allowed a reduction in fossil-fuel imports for power generation, with the use of imported coal falling 38% and the use of gas by 35%, supporting the energy security aims of the government and reducing exposure to the Hormuz shock.

In order to keep the clean-energy growth going, India would need to overcome multiple obstacles, including expansion of the electricity transmission network, improvements in grid flexibility to accommodate variable renewables and the timely completion of new projects. 

For example, renewable power projects totalling 5.3GW missed completion deadlines and are having to pay penalties to the grid operator in order to retain network access.

Curtailment has emerged as an issue, particularly for projects relying on interstate power transmission, pointing to the need to upgrade the network. (Curtailment refers to electricity generation that is “wasted” because it cannot be accommodated by the power network.)

Another obstacle to be overcome if clean energy is to keep growing will be making coal-power plants more flexible, so they can ramp down during high renewable output.

A flexibility plan for coal-power plants has been delayed by more than a year due to persistent regulatory bottlenecks, contributing to the curtailment of renewable energy. 

Expanding energy storage has the potential to ease grid and flexibility constraints, while reducing or eliminating the need for adding thermal-power capacity to meet peak loads.

The Central Electricity Authority has proposed that, after June 2027, all new government-owned solar and wind projects would have “mandatory” two-hour battery storage. (This mirrors a policy that was in place in China until early 2025 and was subsequently scrapped, in favour of more market-based approaches.)

For oil and gas, India’s consumption has been flatlining for the past two years, after half a century of continuous growth that was only briefly interrupted by Covid-19.

This has reduced the impacts of the Hormuz crisis on the country’s trade balance, helping close the gap between supply and consumption. But it has entailed disruptive shifts in many oil-dependent sectors.

For example, high prices and fuel shortages due to the Hormuz crisis led state governments to reverse their orders banning the use of dirtier fuels such as fuel oil, kerosene and coal in industries and commercial establishments.

Meanwhile, EV adoption has also begun to influence oil consumption. 

Despite the progress in the power sector and reductions in oil consumption, India’s total emissions went up over the past two years due to a major increase in industrial emissions.

Low levels of electricity use in industry mean that growing industrial output results in increasing direct fossil-fuel use and emissions.

Unless the rate of industrial electrification picks up, increases in heavy industry output will continue to translate into increases in fossil-fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

About the data

This analysis is based on official monthly data for fuel consumption, industrial production and power generation from different ministries and government institutes. 

Coal-power emissions are estimated by combining plant-level coal consumption from the Central Electricity Authority’s (CEA) monthly coal reports with data on the calorific value and emission factors of coal used at different power plants from the CEA’s CO2 baseline database.

For each station and month, total coal consumption is split into domestic and imported coal using the imported share of coal receipts over a trailing two-month window, found to best reproduce the actual split in data available for 2023.

Consumption is converted to CO2 using each plant’s station-specific gross calorific value from the CEA database and IPCC emission factors for domestic coal, imported coal and lignite. The national-average calorific value is used for recently added plants, for which data is not available in the baseline database. 

Coal use at steel and cement plants, as well as process emissions from cement production, are estimated using production indices from the index of eight core industries released monthly by the Office of Economic Adviser, assuming that changes in total fossil-fuel use follow production volumes. These production indices were used to scale fuel use by the sectors in 2022.

To form a basis for using the indices, monthly coal-consumption data for 2022 was constructed for the sectors by combining the annual total coal and petcoke consumption reported in IEA World Energy Balances with monthly production data. This work was set out in a paper by Robbie Andrew, a researcher at Norwegian research institute CICERO, on monthly CO2 emission accounting for India. Monthly petcoke consumption was available from the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell, while coal consumption by the cement industry was calculated by subtracting petcoke use from total fossil-fuel use.

Annual cement-process emissions up to 2025 were also taken from Andrew’s work and scaled using the production indices. This approach better approximated changes in energy use and emissions reported in the IEA World Energy Balances, than did the amounts of coal reported to have been dispatched to the sectors, showing that production volumes are the dominant driver of short-term changes in emissions.

For other sectors – including aluminium, auto, chemical and petrochemical, paper and plywood, pharmaceutical, graphite electrode, sugar, textile, mining, traders and others – coal consumption is estimated based on data on despatch of domestic and imported coal to end users from statistical reports and monthly reports by the Ministry of Coal, as consumption data is not available.

Coal consumption by “captive” coal-power plants – those supplying power to industrial sites, not to the public electricity network – was calculated based on capacity changes from Global Energy Monitor, assuming constant utilisation, as utilisation has been very stable year-to-year, as calculated from Central Electricity Authority data.

The difference between coal consumption and dispatch is stock changes, which are estimated by assuming that the changes in the amount of coal stored at end-user facilities mirror those at coal mines, with end-user inventories excluding power, steel and cement assumed to be 70% of those at coal mines, based on comparisons between our data and the IEA World Energy Balances.

Stock changes at mines are estimated as the difference between production at and dispatch from coal mines, as reported by the Ministry of Coal.

Coal consumption is estimated in two ways for sectors beyond power, steel and cement. Consumption of domestic coal in these other sectors is taken from the monthly reports by the Ministry of Coal. Their consumption of imported coal is estimated from the total imports of thermal coal reported by consultancy Kpler, by subtracting demand for imports at coal-power plants. The basis for this assumption is that steel and cement industries use little imported thermal coal, according to Ministry of Coal data.

Product-by-product consumption data for petroleum products, as well as gas use by sector, is from the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.

As the fuel dispatch and consumption data is reported as physical volumes – such as tonnes or litres – calorific values are taken from IEA’s World Energy Balance and CO2 emission factors from 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

The emissions factor for motor oil or petrol was updated, based on the blending percentage of ethanol each year. The ethanol-blending percentage is as reported by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. 

Calorific values are assigned separately to different fuel types, including domestic and imported coal, anthracite and coke, as well as to petrol, diesel and several other oil products.

related Explainer: The CMIP7 emissions scenarios – and how they explore future climate change 01.09.2026 Climate modelling UNEP: New country climate plans ‘barely move needle’ on expected warming 04.11.2025 Climate pollutants Analysis: India’s power-sector CO2 falls for only second time in half a century 18.09.2025 Emissions World’s electricity supply close to ‘peak emissions’ due to growth of wind and solar 05.10.2023 Electricity

The post Analysis: India’s power-sector emissions flat for two years due to clean-energy surge appeared first on Carbon Brief.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sanket Jain

Extreme heat and widespread drought related to climate change have been in the headlines this summer everywhere from Europe to the Colorado River Basin to Puerto Rico and Bangladesh. But drought is only the beginning of the problem for drinking water. Scientists say the depleted groundwater supplies that remain will warm by 2.1 degrees C globally by the end of this century – changing their chemistry and leading to contamination. 

And heat is just one concern. Droughts and fluctuating rainfall patterns are also altering groundwater quality. The good news is that around the world, local and regional authorities are experimenting with ways to replenish groundwater, including methods for collecting excess rainfall or surface runoff and channeling it to replenish aquifers. The work is in early stages, but some methods already are showing promise.

Warming water, changing chemistry 

As groundwater warms, dissolved gases become less soluble, while organisms underground can consume oxygen more rapidly. Because many aquifers already contain little oxygen, modest warming could make them even more oxygen-poor. 

In some aquifers, this shift can mobilize naturally occurring contaminants such as arsenic, manganese, and phosphorus from surrounding rocks into groundwater, making it less safe to drink. The extra phosphorus can fuel harmful algal blooms when groundwater eventually flows into rivers and lakes. Warmer groundwater may also favor pathogens linked to waterborne diseases.

Under a stable climate, Earth gets warmer deeper underground because heat from the Earth’s core moves toward the cooler land surface, explained Barret Kurylyk, a professor of civil and resource engineering at Dalhousie University and Canada Research Chair in Coastal Water Resources. 

“In the past few decades, the land surface has warmed due to climate change,” he said. 

As the surface becomes warmer than shallow aquifers, the usual temperature difference reverses, causing heat to move downward toward groundwater. Movement of rain or snow downward can also transfer heat into groundwater, exacerbating the change in groundwater chemistry. 

This heat transfer matters because groundwater accounts for 99% of the Earth’s liquid freshwater, provides about half the world’s drinking water, and supplies nearly 40% of the water used for irrigation. By 2100, an estimated 77-188 million people are expected to live in areas where groundwater exceeds the highest drinking-water temperature acceptable threshold adopted by any country.

What happens after a drought

In the remote Kasanal village in Southern India’s Karnataka state, Santosh Naik says the annual monsoon is no longer enough to fill his two wells. The 38-year-old farmer said that by August 2026, his 60-foot wells were 90% empty, even though they would normally fill within a month of the rains. 

Naik has spent over a decade drilling deeper in search of water. Since 2011, he has dug 14 borewells – narrow, machine-drilled shafts – across his five-acre farm, each about 300 feet underground. Now only three are functioning. But he is not just worried about declining levels. The water quality is changing too, he says.

“Earlier, we used to drink water from borewells and wells, but if you drink that water now, you will definitely fall ill,” he said. 

He added that the entire village has stopped drinking water from its wells. 

Naik grows sugarcane, soybean, peanuts and sorghum, but his harvests have been falling as his water supply has gotten saltier. Since 2020, his annual sugarcane production has been about 80,000 kilograms lower, costing him about 280,000 Indian rupees ($2,935). 

His experience illustrates a broader problem across India. An analysis of 20,994 groundwater observations estimated that about 29% of the study area, including 25% of cropland, had elevated groundwater salinity. 

Changing contaminants 

Scientists confirm that climate extremes can change how water moves through the soil and what it carries. One team monitored 13 groundwater wells across three aquifer systems in Germany for up to eight years. As groundwater levels declined, its molecular composition increasingly resembled that of water draining through the soil. 

Senior study author Gerd Gleixner, a biogeochemist and professor at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, said that during drought, larger pores open up in soils. When heavy rain follows, these pores can carry water rapidly toward groundwater instead of allowing it to move slowly through the upper soil. 

“The problem is that this water that comes down is not supposed to go down directly. It is supposed to go more slowly, so that there is more time for progressive processing in the upper part,” Gleixner said. 

The upper soil normally acts as a kind of “main bioreactor,” processing substances before they reach the groundwater. But rapid flow through these pores can bypass some of this processing, allowing substances from the surface to reach groundwater more directly.

Gleixner said this rapid downward movement can carry unwanted substances from the surface into groundwater, including antibiotics and, potentially, microplastics. 

Scientists are also investigating what happens to groundwater when it is pumped more heavily during droughts. Researchers in California’s San Joaquin Valley analyzed water-quality records from over 3,000 public drinking-water wells over the 2012-2016 drought and the recovery that followed. During the drought, nitrate and total dissolved solids increased in many wells. As pumping intensified, wells drew a larger share of modern-aged groundwater, which was more likely to contain contaminants linked to human activities, such as nitrate. As wetter conditions returned and groundwater levels recovered, many of these changes reversed.

The water people once trusted

Farmer Shivaji Tasgave, 83, no longer trusts the water from a 200-year-old well that served his family for generations after it turned blackish and foul-smelling. 

But when the rains failed to arrive as expected, he was forced to rely on this water to irrigate his crops. Half his peanut and sugarcane failed to grow. 

In his remote Jambhali village in Western India, Tasgave said that almost 150 wells in his neighborhood have become unusable because of deteriorating groundwater quality.

Along coastlines, groundwater quality can change when the balance between freshwater flowing toward the sea and seawater moving inland is disturbed. Under natural conditions, groundwater flows from land toward the sea, creating a pressure that helps keep seawater from moving inland. When that freshwater pressure weakens, seawater can move farther inland into freshwater aquifers.

A team of scientists in Germany found many coastal groundwater systems are vulnerable to this shift. Between 1990 and 2024, they analyzed about 480,000 coastal groundwater monitoring locations worldwide. They found statistically significant groundwater-level changes in 28% of observations over nine-year windows, and 21% over 19-year windows. Declines became more frequent in the last nine years. 

“These declines may reflect a combination of causes, including lower rainfall, drought and reduced groundwater recharge, but also potentially unsustainable groundwater abstraction that exceeds groundwater recharge,” said Annika Nolte, an environmental and data scientist at the University of Bremen, Germany, who led the study.

“Seawater intrusion can make groundwater less suitable or unsuitable for human consumption and may ultimately threaten reliable drinking-water supplies from wells,” she added. 

When saline groundwater is used for irrigation, it can also reduce soil fertility and crop yields. A global meta-analysis found that irrigation with salty water reduced crop yields by 17.3% compared with freshwater irrigation.

Giving groundwater a chance to recover

In many parts of the world, researchers are experimenting with different ways to help aquifers recover. Monitoring groundwater levels and salinity, and improving estimates of present and future groundwater recharge, are essential to determine how much water can be withdrawn without weakening freshwater heads, Nolte said.

In the Netherlands, a solution named "Water Battery" has been operating near the village of Epe since 2015. Water from natural springs is collected in a human-made reservoir and then pumped to infiltration ponds, where it seeps into the groundwater. The water is stored underground, while natural biogeochemical processes improve its quality before the groundwater is extracted.

California has been adopting a similar strategy. Excess surface water can be diverted onto selected farm fields to replenish depleted aquifers, increasing groundwater storage and improving water availability during dry periods. Separate field studies in California almond orchards have also shown that flooding fields during the trees’ dormant winter period, in moderately drained to well-drained soils, has little effect on root production or crop yields. 

Cities are also finding ways to use stormwater effectively. In the Argentine coastal city of Pinamar, researchers evaluated rain gardens, which are shallow, planted areas designed to collect stormwater and let it soak into the ground. Gardens improved groundwater recharge, particularly during low-intensity rains, where recharge efficiency increased more than sixfold. 

Although the approaches differ, the idea remains the same: Instead of moving excess water away, let the ground hold on to it. 

This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 

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Global fossil-fuel emissions are set to fall by around 0.5% in 2026 amid the fallout from the Hormuz crisis, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

The US-Iran war has severely disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, causing a spike in oil and gas prices that continues to ripple around the global economy.

Each month of disruption – and each new flashpoint, such as in Yemen – is increasing the incentive to switch to alternatives.

Those alternatives include coal, with the latest forecasts pointing to a 1.2% rise in coal demand this year – apparently supporting media claims of a “return to coal” in the wake of the crisis.

Yet Carbon Brief’s analysis shows the rise in emissions associated with this increased coal use, much of which is unrelated to Hormuz, is set to be more than offset by declines for oil and gas.

The estimated overall impact on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels in 2026 is shown in the figure below and amounts to a reduction of around 0.5% from 2025 levels.

(Fossil fuels account for two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions.)

The emissions estimates for each fossil fuel are based on the latest forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA) for coal, oil and gas, in light of the ongoing global energy crisis.

For example, the agency initially estimated that global coal demand would decline this year. In its 2025 coal report, published in mid-December, it said that declining coal demand in China would outweigh the impact of pro-coal policies under US president Donald Trump.

In contrast, the latest update, published in September 2026, said that global coal demand would rise by 1.2% in 2026, instead of the small decline that had been expected.

The report highlighted the boost to coal demand from higher gas prices in the wake of Hormuz. However, there are limits to this, because few countries can switch from gas to coal at large scale.

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The IEA’s latest report also noted the role of a strong El Niño, which is pushing up the need for cooling and depressing hydropower output in key markets. Other short-term factors are also affecting coal demand this year, including a rising amount of “wasted” wind and solar in China.

For gas, the IEA did not initially update its previous forecast that global gas demand would rise by 2.0% in 2026, which had been published in January of this year.

Its most recent forecast – published in July – already pointed to a 0.6% drop in demand in 2026. Since then, pressure on gas demand from high prices has only grown stronger.

For oil, there has been an even more dramatic shift in forecasts since the start of the year.

In its January 2026 oil market report, the IEA forecast a rise in demand in 2026 of 930,000 barrels per day (bpd). As shown in the figure below, this has been steadily revised downwards over the course of the year, as the Hormuz crisis was first ignited – and then extended.

By September, the IEA was forecasting a 2,500,000bpd drop in oil demand in 2026, equivalent to a reduction of 2.4% from 2025 levels.

(A 15 September research note from Morgan Stanley, not available online, found a “consensus” forecast of a 2,415,000bpd drop in demand in 2026.)

While there are many short-term factors at play in the shifting forecasts for 2026, it is clear that the latest energy crisis will also affect fossil-fuel demand in the next year and beyond.

For example, whereas the IEA initially forecast that oil demand would rebound in 2027 to well above 2025 levels, it is now expecting use of the fuel to be effectively flat for two years.

This puts a question mark over its previous expectation – published in October last year – that global oil demand would not peak until as late as 2030.

“For every month the conflict lasts, the probability of permanent [oil] demand destruction increases,” wrote Sverre Alvik, vice president at consultancy DNV in a late August analysis.

As fuel prices have surged, electric vehicles (EVs) have captured record shares of major car markets, from Australia and China through to Europe, Indonesia and Thailand.

In July, EV sales nearly doubled year-on-year in “new markets”, noted Alvik, pointing to countries outside China, Europe and North America.

The IEA says the 2027 outlooks for coal and gas are interdependent, with coal demand potentially increasing again if gas prices remain elevated – or dropping back if gas prices ease.

At the same time, governments in countries that had planned to rely on imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) have been signalling shifts towards favouring domestic clean energy instead – or continuing to use coal for longer.

The current crisis, therefore, has the potential to not only lower fossil-fuel use and emissions in the short term, but also on a more lasting basis.

Related Analysis: India’s power-sector emissions flat for two years due to clean-energy surge 17.09.2026 Emissions CCC: Heathrow expansion could push flights to ‘80% of UK emissions by 2050’ 16.09.2026 Emissions Analysis: China’s CO2 emissions fall in Q2 2026 due to plummeting oil use 03.09.2026 Emissions Explainer: The CMIP7 emissions scenarios – and how they explore future climate change 01.09.2026 Climate modelling

The post Analysis: Global fossil-fuel emissions set to fall in 2026 amid Hormuz crisis appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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Aviation is on track to be responsible for 80% of the UK’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC).

Emissions from flying have more than doubled since 1990 – driven by rising passenger numbers – even as the climate impact of every other sector in the UK economy has fallen.

The UK does not have “credible” policies in place to reverse this trend of rising emissions, says the CCC in new advice to the government on future aviation policy.

The government has signalled its support for expanding Heathrow, the nation’s largest airport, while relying on “techno-fixes” such as “sustainable aviation fuels” (SAFs) to cut emissions. 

Yet, even without Heathrow expansion, the CCC says aviation emissions are on track to be higher in 2050 than they are today – reaching 38m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2).

As the chart below shows, this would account for most of the remaining CO2 from the UK economy, all of which would need to be removed from the atmosphere in order to meet the legal target of net-zero emissions.

Expanding Heathrow would add another 2.4MtCO2 in 2050, amounting to around 5% of all the UK’s emissions. (This would increase to 4.5MtCO2 when expansion is complete in 2054.)

With a final decision on Heathrow expansion expected by 2029, the government asked the CCC  for its advice on whether the plan is compatible with the UK’s climate targets. 

The CCC has concluded that the UK simply lacks sufficient policies to reduce aviation emissions and “expanding Heathrow would compound the problem”. In a press briefing, CCC chair Nigel Topping told journalists:

“The UK does not currently have a credible plan to reduce [aviation emissions] in line with net-zero, so that creates a serious challenge for meeting our climate commitments.”

The “jet-zero strategy”, launched by the previous Conservative government in 2022, set out plans to cut aviation emissions. However, the Labour government has since accepted that the strategy’s expectations for SAFs, electric planes and fuel-efficiency improvements were unrealistic.

The CCC says a “credible and robust net-zero policy framework for aviation” should be set out in a revised strategy, which is planned for 2027. Only then could Heathrow expansion be aligned with the net-zero goal, adds the committee.

As part of this new strategy, the CCC says the “aviation sector needs to take responsibility for its emissions”. It says policies should be designed based on the “polluter pays” principle, requiring the aviation industry to fund its own SAFs and CO2 removal.

Specifically, the committee says funding will be needed for “engineered removal” technologies, such as direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS). 

These technologies are currently “not yet available at the scale required”, but are vital for the kind of permanent CO2 removal needed to mop up aviation emissions, says the CCC.

(“Natural solutions” such as tree planting are the other main way CO2 is expected to be removed from the atmosphere. However, the CCC envisages these removals offsetting the remaining methane emissions from livestock agriculture in the UK, whereas it says “engineered removals” would be required to remove and store CO2 from flights.)

The CCC acknowledges that placing decarbonisation costs on airlines would likely lead to higher ticket prices. It estimates that this could mean an increase, in 2024 prices, of around £150 for a return trip to Alicante, Spain, and £400 for a return trip to New York by 2050. 

However, it says this is preferable to a public spending approach, which would result in the roughly 50% of the population who do not fly paying for flight-related CO2 removals.

In addition, the committee notes that higher costs would help to manage demand for flights, which would otherwise be expected to increase considerably over the coming decades.

related Analysis: Global fossil-fuel emissions set to fall in 2026 amid Hormuz crisis 16.09.2026 Emissions El Niño: Indonesia fire emissions in 2026 ‘on track’ to match record for this century 11.09.2026 El Niño and La Niña UK aviation emissions to be 50% higher than thought by 2050, government admits 10.09.2026 Aviation and shipping Analysis: UK solar power hits record high over summer 2026 04.09.2026 Renewables

The post CCC: Heathrow expansion could push flights to ‘80% of UK emissions by 2050’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler

A few days ago, on an atmospheric sciences mailing list, Prof. Gary Lackmann pointed out that August 2026 set a record for the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. I thought this was right in TCB’s wheelhouse, so I’ve dug further into the numbers in this post.

What does “precipitable water” mean?

Precipitable water (abbreviated PWAT) is the water in the atmosphere that’s available to condense and fall as rain or snow. We quantify it by calculating how deep a puddle it would make if you condensed all of the water vapor in the atmosphere and rained it to the surface. The value is typically reported in millimeters.

Here is the average PWAT over the 1991–2020 period. The global average is about 24 mm, enough to make a puddle about an inch deep.

The distribution of PWAT follows the distribution of temperature. The reason is thermodynamics: the amount of water vapor that air can hold increases by roughly 7% for every degree Celsius of warming, following the Clausius–Clapeyron relation. The result is high PWAT in warm tropics and low PWAT in cold polar regions.

It is increasing

The planet has been warming, so you might expect that the PWAT should also be rising. Indeed, this is what we see. Here is global-mean PWAT for every August since 1979.

Also plotted is the August global average temperature; it’s also going up. In fact, we see the expected correlation (r = 0.86) between PWAT and temperature.

August 2026’s PWAT was 1.5 mm above the average PWAT in August of the 1980s, a difference of 5.8%. This is in the ballpark of what we would expect given the ~1°C of global average warming over this period.

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We’re #1

A few days ago, news came out that August 2026 was the hottest month in the last 170 years. Yup, climate change strikes again (with an assist from El Niño).

link

Therefore, it might not be too surprising that August 2026 also set a record for PWAT, 27.35 mm, beating the previous record (July 2024) by 0.04 mm1.

The data I analyzed only goes back to 1979, but given the very strong connection between PWAT and temperature, it is unimaginable that any month in the last few thousand years, maybe 100,000 years, has more PWAT in the atmosphere than August 2026. We are, as the proverb says, living in interesting times.

Why this matters: extreme rain

PWAT is one of the most important factors that controls the intensity of rainfall. In particular, we expect increases in PWAT to increase the frequency or intensity of extreme precipitation events. This has been confirmed in data. For example, Kunkel et al. (2020) concluded:

An analysis of 3,104 stations in the United States shows virtually every station exhibits a positive correlation between precipitable water (PW) and extreme daily precipitation (EP) with over one-third statistically significant.

In Trenberth et al. (2003), the authors state:

We have argued that because heavy rainfall rates greatly exceed evaporation rates and thus depend on low-level moisture convergence, then the rainfall intensity should also increase at about the same rate as the moisture increase, namely 7% per K with warming.

The IPCC AR6 report says:

In summary, precipitation extremes are controlled by both thermodynamic and dynamic processes. Warming-induced thermodynamic change results in an increase in extreme precipitation, at a rate that closely follows the C-C [Clausius–Clapeyron] relationship at the global scale (high confidence).

So the increase in PWAT is not just a weirdo statistic. It is a statement about the ceiling on the worst rain events we can face.

July 4 flooding

As an example of a real-life case, let’s consider the flooding in Texas on July 3-4, 2025. This tragic rain event caused flooding that claimed the lives of more than 130 people, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic.

The PWAT over Texas for that event was incredibly high. Here is a plot of the percentile rank of PWAT at 2 am CDT on July 4, 2025.

Percentile rank of precipitable water at 2 AM CDT on 4 July 2025, relative to all hours within ±10 days of July 4 in 1979–2025.

Most of the state has PWAT above the 95th percentile, with a large plume of moisture in the middle of the state exceeding the 99.9th percentile. Here is a histogram of PWAT for the grid point closest to Kerrville:

Distribution of precipitable water over Kerrville for all hours within ±10 days of July 4, 1979–2025. The red line marks 2 AM on 4 July 2025

PWAT over Kerrville was 55.6 mm, about 60% higher than a typical early-July value of 35 mm. Out of 23,688 late-June/early-July hours over 47 years of data, only 23 hours were moister.

It is inarguable that the high PWAT contributed to the extreme rain of this event. Given that we can connect increases in PWAT to global warming, we can confidently conclude that climate change made this rain event more intense than it otherwise would have been.

The bottom line

The atmosphere holds more water vapor than it used to because it is warmer than it used to be. August 2026 saw the highest water vapor levels in the modern record due to the extreme warmth from climate change and the El Niño. This trend is not going to stop as long as we’re dumping carbon into the atmosphere and it’s going to contribute to more and more intense rain events.

Code for the plots in this post can be found here.

1 That doesn’t sound like much, but it corresponds to about 5 trillion gallons of water.

24 September | New York

A strategy discussion at New York Climate Week 2026, bringing together frontline actors fighting data centers in communities and the policy advocates fighting for guardrails to prevent their economic, social, and climate harms. In this time of relentless attacks on people and planet, our strength is our aligned action. Just as the carbon bubble analysis equipped a generation of climate activists, bringing together community, economic, and political AI expertise can strengthen the fight on the ground.

If interested in attending, please contact events@carbontracker.org

SPEAKERS & TOPICS

• The AI bubble could burst — and take the economy with it
  • Matthew Scherer, Open Markets Institute
• Federal principles for data centers and AI governance
  • Clara Vondrich and J.B. Branch, Public Citizen
• The Investor Dilemma
  • Danielle Fugere, As You Sow
• How communities are stopping data centers
  • Abre’ Conner, NAACP
• Private equity financing of data centers
  • Ashlee Thomas, Private Equity Stakeholder Project
• Big Tech: now Big Oil’s #1 Accomplice
  • Holly Alpine, Embedded Emissions
• Data Centers and Democracy
  • Saul Levin, Hum podcast

The post NYCW 2026: AI Data Center Roundtable appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

24 September | New York

A breakfast strategy session at New York Climate Week 2026, aligning Amazon, Congo Basin and Coral Triangle strategies ahead of COP31. The aim: moving Fossil Free Zones from community-led demands into formalised, low-cost policy tools that governments can integrate into national energy transition and deforestation roadmaps.

PROGRAMME & SPEAKERS

If interested in attending, please contact events@carbontracker.org

The post NYCW 2026: Fossil Free Zones Breakfast appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

24 September | New York

What can we celebrate? What can we challenge?

A Laudato Si’ and Carbon Tracker panel at Climate Week NYC 2026. With overshoot of 1.5°C now called unavoidable and a stable climate recognised as a legal obligation, we ask what the Season of Creation gives us to celebrate, what it demands we challenge, and whether honest realism or optimism better serves the fight ahead.

If interested in attending, please contact events@carbontracker.org

THEMES FOR DISCUSSION

1. Limiting overshoot
   • UNEP’s September 2026 report: at least 1.8°C even in the most optimistic future. “There are no good
     outcomes above 1.5°C.”
2. A stable climate as a human right
   • The ICJ advisory opinion of July 2025, endorsed by the UN General Assembly 141–8 in May 2026,
     with the COP31 host among the abstentions.
3. A decade of COPs without “fossil fuels”
   • From Paris to COP30, outcomes that consistently omitted the phrase, and the Santa Marta coalition of
     the willing formed in response.
4. The growing cost of delay
   • Over 35,000 excess deaths across Europe in the summer 2026 heatwaves; seven of nine planetary
     boundaries already exceeded.
5. Optimism or realism?
   • “What if we stop pretending?” against communities that rise to the occasion, and Laudato Si’s reminder
     that the cry of the Earth is the cry of the poor.

SPEAKERS

 

The post NYCW 2026: Season of Creation appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Josh Gabbatiss, Daisy Dunne, Molly Lempriere, Dr Simon Evans

Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, has emerged as a major force in UK politics in recent years – pushing anti-net-zero policies, alongside vehement opposition to immigration.

The hard-right populist party is currently mired in a funding controversy and only has a handful of MPs, yet, until recently, it had been leading in national polls for more than a year.

As seen with many similar parties across Europe and beyond, a rejection of climate science is central to Reform’s ideological outlook.

Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, is a vocal critic of what he calls “net stupid zero” and has incorrectly blamed “the sun or volcanoes” for human-caused global warming.

As Reform’s energy spokesperson, Tice has also been clear that, if the party were ever to form a national government, it would scrap the UK’s net-zero target, support fossil-fuel expansion and tear up existing contracts for renewable energy.

While less vocal on the subject, Farage has, nevertheless, expressed climate-sceptic views and falsely blamed net-zero policies for the “deindustrialisation of Britain”.

These views draw on long-standing, inaccurate climate-sceptic narratives and are reflected in Reform’s election manifestos, its actions in local government and the opinions of many of its supporters.

Here, Carbon Brief gathers together by topic and factchecks 45 false or misleading claims made by the party’s leadership relating to climate change, renewables and net-zero.

• Climate science

• Net-zero target

• Energy costs

• Oil and gas

• Impacts and adaptation

• Clean energy

Climate science

FALSE

Tice: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change climate change…The Norwegian government’s own equivalent of our ONS [Office of National Statistics] has recently produced a report along the lines of what I’m saying.”

Sky News, February 2025

The world’s authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the planet, primarily through releasing greenhouse gases.

The IPCC says that, due to human activities, concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) “have increased at rates that have no precedent on centennial timescales in at least the past 800,000 years”.

It adds that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now higher than they have been for at least the past two million years.

The report that Tice is referring to is by two independent authors, with Statistics Norway clarifying in 2024 that their views are “not the official stance” of the statistics bureau. (It has also not been formally peer reviewed.)

A factcheck of the Norwegian report by a climate scientist for RealClimate describes it as “misguided” and a “distraction due to errors”.

Another factcheck published by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found it “contains standard talking-points of climate denial”.

MISLEADING

Tice: “Look, the climate’s always changed for millions of years. And it goes through cycles, long, medium and short.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Global temperatures are currently around 1.4C hotter than when the industrial era first began in 1850-1900, as shown in the figure below.

The IPCC says that this amount of warming is likely to have made Earth hotter than at any time in about 125,000 years.

Data from NASA GISTEMP, NOAA GlobalTemp, Hadley/UEA HadCRUT5, Berkeley Earth, Copernicus ERA5, JRA-3Q, DCENT, and China-MST. Temperature records are aligned over the 1981-2010 period and use the WMO approach to calculate warming relative to pre-industrial levels (1850-1900).

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that approximately 100% of this warming has been caused by humans. 

There are also natural influences that can affect Earth’s climate on shorter timescales, such as El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and small variations in the output of the sun. However, scientists have found that these have only a limited effect on the underlying trend of long-term global warming.

When looking at longer timescales of millions of years or more, Earth has experienced multiple ice ages interspersed with warmer periods.

These changes in climate were triggered by variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun, in combination with subtle fluctuations in the tilt and rotation of the planet, over tens of thousands of years. However, the resulting changes to CO2 levels in the atmosphere also played a role.

This should serve as a “cautionary example”, according to Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and Carbon Brief contributor, “because human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases push the Earth further out of the range of climate conditions that have characterised the past few million years”.

FALSE

Tice: “The idea that you can stop the power of the sun or volcanoes is simply ludicrous.”

BBC Breakfast, June 2024

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that humans have caused 100% of recent climate change.

Tice’s suggestion that the sun or volcanic eruptions are behind current warming is false.

As the video below explains, the sun and volcanic eruptions have little bearing on the long-term trend of global temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution.

Click here to read the rest

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All the ambulance services in England experienced some of their busiest-ever days during this summer’s record-breaking June heatwave, according to data obtained by Carbon Brief.

In June, temperatures climbed past 37C in parts of the country as authorities declared only the second ever “red” extreme heat warning.

Four out of 10 NHS ambulance services, including London’s, responded to unprecedented numbers of life-threatening emergencies on at least one day from 23-27 June.

Another two services – in the south-west and east of the country – received their highest volume of 999 calls on record.

Ambulance services provided data on their busiest days since records began, in response to freedom-of-information (FOI) requests from Carbon Brief.

The results show how demand during the June heatwave exceeded levels seen during the traditionally busy winter season in other years – and even the height of the Covid-19 pandemic – for many services.

Heat demand

Extreme heat ramps up the risk of numerous life-threatening conditions, including heart disease and respiratory problems. 

England experienced record-breaking temperatures at the end of June, with the whole country covered by amber or red “heat health alerts” from the government.

A red alert, which was issued for the entire Midlands and south of England, indicates “significant risk to life for even the healthy population”. This was only the second time such an alert has been triggered.

Researchers calculated that there were nearly 3,000 heat-related deaths in the UK this summer. There has also been unprecedented demand for A&E departments and some ambulance services.

To investigate the strain facing ambulances, Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to the 10 NHS ambulance trusts in England, asking for lists of their busiest days. 

This covered both the total volume of 999 calls and “category 1” responses – referring to incidents involving “life-threatening injuries and illnesses”, such as heart attacks.

The chart below shows the busiest days on record for England’s ambulances, including both total calls and category 1 responses. Most services were able to provide records back to the 2010s. (See: Methodology.)

The five-day period from 23-27 June is overrepresented in these results, with at least two heatwave days ranking in the top 20 for every service in the country.

The top 20 rankings for services across England cover different periods of time. See Methodology for more details.

This trend is especially pronounced in the south and east of England, where June temperatures exceeded 36C and even approached 38C in some regions.

London, South East Coast, South Central and North East ambulance services all reported daily records for responding to life-threatening emergencies during the heatwave.

For the South East Coast and South Central services – which cover a region stretching from Oxfordshire to Kent – 25, 26 and 27 June all saw unprecedented numbers of category 1 callouts. 

South Western and East of England services both saw record numbers of 999 calls on 26 June, the same day the highest-ever June UK temperature was reported in Norfolk.

It is worth noting that demand for ambulance services – including category 1 calls – has been growing for many years, driven by factors such as an ageing population, more complex health conditions and growing mental-health pressures.

This helps to explain why dates from before the 2020s are rare in the top rankings provided to Carbon Brief.

Beyond the heatwave, 2026 as a whole is on track to be a record year for ambulance demand.

‘Stifling heat’

On 26 June, the busiest day of the heatwave, ambulances across England responded to 4,084 life-threatening emergencies.

The average daily volume of such incidents is normally around 2,500 during the summer months.

Stu Holliday, head of emergency preparedness, resilience and response at North East Ambulance Service, tells Carbon Brief: 

“During periods of hot weather, we typically see an increase in calls from people affected by dehydration, heat exhaustion and heatstroke, as well as those whose existing health conditions, particularly heart and respiratory illnesses, can be made worse by prolonged high temperatures.

“Older people, young children and pregnant people can be especially vulnerable.”

Ambulance teams are generally busier in the winter because cold weather and seasonal illnesses drive up the number of severe medical emergencies.

However, the data from June shows that extremely hot days are starting to match or even edge out cold ones as the busiest days. This is a trend seen across the healthcare system.

While not every service provided records back to 2019, the data broadly shows that ambulances were busier during the heatwave than at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As well as patients, heatwaves put pressure on ambulance workers. The UNISON union has warned of crews facing “stifling heat with faulty or no air conditioning” and “back-to-back callouts” due to increased demand.

Methodology

Carbon Brief requested data on the top 50 busiest days for England’s 10 main ambulance services.

These are: London; South East Coast; South Central; South Western; West Midlands; East Midlands; East of England; North East; Yorkshire; and North West.

Data was requested for as far back as service records go. Most were able to provide records going back to some point in the 2010s, with the exception of North East and South Central, which only had records from 2021 and 2022 onwards, respectively. 

Rising annual demand for ambulance services means that most of the busiest days for ambulances have been in the 2020s. For example, all but four of the busiest days for category 1 emergencies reported to Carbon Brief were in the 2020s. 

Carbon Brief requested data on ambulance demand for all the UK nations. In Scotland and Northern Ireland – where temperatures are cooler – services did not see call volumes reach the top 50 rankings during the June heatwave. The Welsh Ambulance Service did not respond to Carbon Brief’s request.

related Revealed: More than 1,000 NHS operations cancelled due to record UK heatwaves 11.09.2026 Health and society Climate change is driving a ‘shift’ in childhood malaria risk across Africa 29.07.2026 Health and society Q&A: How heat-related deaths are counted by scientists and public health authorities 17.07.2026 Extreme weather Guest post: France’s June heatwave caused more than 2,700 heat-related deaths 07.07.2026 Health and society

The post Revealed: England’s June 2026 heatwave sparked record demand for ambulances appeared first on Carbon Brief.

 by David Spratt 

There can be no excuse for not knowing that 1.5°C of warming would create a disastrous outcome, but few have chosen to say so. Indeed, up to the 2025 COP in Belém, the large Australian advocacy and umbrella organizations were actively advocating for 1.5°C, for example that “the 1.5°C threshold represents an ethical and moral boundary”. 

What is the morality in saying 1.5°C is an appropriate threshold when the World Health Organization concludes that more than 200,000 lives have been lost to the "silent killer" of extreme heat in Europe since 2022?

Right now, there is very strong evidence for the coming collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which transports tropical ocean heat to the north-east of North America and western Europe. AMOC is slowing down and now rapidly approaching a tipping point for its collapse over a hundred years.  This would be a going-out-of-business scenario for north-west European agriculture, monsoons that typically deliver rain to West Africa and South Asia would become unreliable, and huge swaths of Europe and Russia would be devastated by drought. As much as half of the world’s viable area for growing corn and wheat could dry out. 

And evidence has been accumulating over the last decade that tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice,  the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems. The Earth climate system is undergoing abrupt change.

System-level change is happening faster than forecast only two decades ago, and changes are cascading. “If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization,” leading scientists warned in 2017.

A 2025 assessment of non-linear change in climate systems —  the North Atlantic subpolar gyre, Tibetan Plateau, land permafrost, Amazon rainforest, Antarctic sea ice, monsoon systems, Arctic summer sea ice, Arctic winter sea ice, and Barents sea ice — found abrupt shifts in all of these across multiple models, except for monsoons. At global warming of 1.5°C, six out of 10 studied climate subsystems already showed large-scale abrupt shifts across multiple models.

Setting goals

There are too few words and too little focus from climate advocates, from governments and from policy-makers on these issues. Is 1.5°C a desirable end-goal, or a political trade-off? What are their goals and what are they aiming to protect? For more than a decade advocates talked a lot about 1.5°C, but now they seem to be dropping the topic from their agendas. So what’s the new goal? Two degrees?

For a quarter of a century, policymakers have speculated about the maximum climate damage that civilisation and the Earth system can tolerate and adapt to. How close to the edge of the climate cliff can we stand, without falling to our death? 

Clearly, the goal pursued in mainstream climate advocacy is not the provision of “maximum protection” to the most climate vulnerable, or “concern to protect the welfare of all people, all species, and all generations”, but rather some poorly-informed notion of maximum acceptable damage.

To protect small-island states, the Great Barrier Reef, Antarctica, the Amazon — indeed to provide protection for the many places and people we care about — requires returning to a climate similar to the relatively stable Holocene conditions of the last 9000 years and fixed human settlement, during which time CO2 levels did not exceed 280 ppm CO2. it also requires preventing a cascade of tipping points in the meanwhile.

If this were the goal, activists and policymakers would be advocating a “three levers” approach to reversing global warming: a strategy to rapidly “reduce, remove and repair”. That means reducing emissions to zero at emergency speed; removing carbon by drawdown to return atmospheric conditions to the Holocene zone; and the urgent research on active cooling to identify safe interventions that protect and repair vital systems and, in the shorter term, aim to prevent warming reaching a level that triggers a cascade of calamitous tipping points that are irreversible on human timescales. 

Note:  This is an extract from Searching for climate action’s missing goal, available at: https://safeclimate.org.au/paper/searching-for-climate-actions-missing-goal

 

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, September 6, 2026 thru Sat, September 12, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (10 articles)

• Satellite images of penguin droppings reveal impact of antarctic warming Penguin colonies are so large that their masses of excrement can be seen from space, offering scientists a useful means of studying the Antarctic birds. An analysis of 30 years of satellite images of penguin guano shows how the birds’ diets are shifting in response to warming. Yale Environment 360, Staff, Sep 06, 2026.
• Learning from the summers of 1976 and 2026 We have changed the climate in which our weather happens Climat Lab Book, Ed Hawkins, Sep 7, 2026.
• How climate change may amplify the impact of earthquakes in the Arctic Phys.org, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Sep 07, 2026.
• America is losing its war against wildfire The opportunities to let wildfire do its job are being increasingly extinguished by hotter, drier conditions that last longer throughout the year. Grist, Mark Betancourt, Sep 08, 2026.
• Many People Aren`t Connecting the Dots Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather Scientific evidence has never been stronger. Why aren’t more people making the link? Inside Climate News, Kiley Price, Sep 08, 2026.
• Can an entire Arctic ecosystem evolve to adapt to the climate crisis? In the first project of its kind, scientists are trying to answer if the future of Alaska’s streams and tundra may depend not on survival of the fittest but on how species adapt together The Guardian, Gloria Dickie, Sep 09, 2026.
• We just had the hottest August, hottest summer, and hottest year to date in U.S. history NOAA data show unprecedented heat, as deepening drought, shrinking reservoirs, and a severe wildfire season underscore the growing impacts of a warming climate. Could El Niño bring some relief? Yale Climate Connections, Bob Henson, Sep 09, 2026.
• Major study to assess impacts of climate change on Scotland`s canals Scottish Canals is working with two globally renowned climate and heritage experts to assess the growing challenges posed by climate change to Scotland’s network of canals. The Herald News, Craig Williams, Sep 10, 2026.
• Climate `feedback loops` could worsen global warming by 30%, study finds Emissions of planet-heating methane and CO2 from natural sources are worsening the climate crisis, paper says The Guardian, Oliver Milman, Sep 10, 2026.
• Earth just had its hottest August on record The intensifying super El Niño, combined with global warming, is favored to make 2026 the hottest year on record, with 2027 expected to be even hotter. Yale Climate Connections, Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, Sep 10, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (4 articles)

• The Worst Case Is Still on the Table Why removing RCP8.5 from the National Climate Assessment would be a serious mistake The Climate Brink, Andrew Dessler, Sep 04, 2026.
• Climate experts respond to the government’s plan to amend the Fifth National Climate Assessment Climate.Us, Rebecca Lindsey, Sep 8, 2026.
• As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond A rift over how IPCC messages are produced and turned into policy is creating tensions in the world’s most influential coalition of climate NGOs Climate Home News, Matteo Civillini, Sep 09, 2026.
• With multilateralism in crisis, what`s next for climate philanthropy? Climate philanthropy must do more than fill the gaps left by retreating governments and find new ways to support climate action in a fragmented global landscape. Climate Home News, Megan Rowling, Sep 11, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (3 articles)

• This is the work of our lifetime: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson urges action after new UN climate report A United Nations report has found that the world will warm to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Climate solutions advocate Ayana Elizabeth Johnson urges a quicker implementation of known strategies - and determination rather than despair. NPR, Joel Rose, Sep 05, 2026.
• Rewetting peatlands may curb warming-driven CO? emissions Press release from the University of Münster about a new paper published in Nature Communications. Phys.org, Kathrin Kottke, Sep 10, 2026.
• How California is kicking its natural gas habit Solar and batteries matter, but they’re not the only reasons for the steep decline in gas-fired electricity. Inside Climate News, Dan Gearino, Sep 11, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (3 articles)

• Reform continues to cast doubt on climate science. Do its supporters agree? Climate scepticism is common at the Reform party conference, but many also criticise Labour for failing to protect Britons from hot weather The Guardian, Fiona Harvey, Sep 05, 2026.
• Fixing one of climate`s worst plots This is the third and last in our series discussing the use of unadjusted data and how it overstates the warmth of the 1930s over the U.S. Skeptical Science, Andrew Dessler, Sep 07, 2026.
• Factcheck: Reform UK`s 45 false or misleading claims about climate and energy Carbon Brief gathers together by topic and factchecks 45 false or misleading claims made by the ReformUK's leadership relating to climate change, renewables and net-zero. Carbon Brief, Carbon Brief Staff, Sep 11, 2026.

Health Aspects of Climate Change (2 article)

• Can Studying Heat Waves in Real Time Save Lives? Heat drove medical emergencies across the country last summer. Tracking those changes more quickly could help doctors prepare. Inside Climate News, Keerti Gopal, Sep 04, 2026.
• The Guardian view on extreme heat: its scale should be a wake-up call to us all | Editorial With thousands dead across Europe this summer, it’s time to recognise heatwaves as the major natural disasters they are The Guardian, Editorial, Sep 06, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (2 articles)

• Climate Trunk - Political Economy Summary post of John Lang's Climate Trunk visuals in the "Political Economy" ring Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler, Sep 09, 2026.
• Beyond the heatwave: what it really takes for climate warnings to cut through in the UK As trust in institutions wavers, experts say local, collective action is more effective in driving change The Guardian, Natalie Wint, Sep 12, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (1 article)

• Does hosting wind turbines provide farmers with additional income? Yes - Wind projects provide farmers with substantial economic benefits while allowing most land to remain in agricultural use. Skeptical Science, Sue Bin Park, Sep 8, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (1 article)

• Global warming is ruining their way of life. These Colorado ranchers demand accountability A group of Colorado ranchers who are struggling with severe drought and heat have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a climate case that soon will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ranchers say that big oil companies should be held accountable for their role in causing climate change. LA Times, Ian James, Sep 05, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (1 article)

• The Arctic Report Card Matters More Than Ever; AGU Joins Partners to Publish in 2026 The critical and highly anticipated yearly assessment will be carried forward through a partnership with CIRES/CU Boulder and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Eos, Chris Avery and Kristen Averyt Hinton, Sep 09, 2026.

Miscellaneous (1 article)

• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #36 2026 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 30, 2026 thru Sat, September 5, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Sep 6, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

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Wildfires currently burning large swathes of land in Indonesia are on track to produce emissions on a par with the country’s most-intense fire season this century, according to experts. 

Data from the Global Fire Emissions Database reveals that, as of 7 September, fires in Indonesia produced 76m tonnes of carbon (MtC) in 2026.

This puts 2026 on the same trajectory as 2015, when fires burned 2.6m hectares of land across the country and generated a total of 333MtC. 

Dr Guido van der Werf, a researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, tells Carbon Brief that the fires in Indonesia are “more or less on track” to reach levels seen 11 years ago.

Parts of the country – including the eastern province of Papua – are “burning more than they’ve ever burned”, he says.

Indonesia is no stranger to emissions-intensive fires. Research has estimated that the record 1997 fire season generated carbon emissions equivalent to 13-40% of all global fossil-fuel emissions that year. 

Meanwhile, a separate study that looked at carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the 2015 fires in south-east Asia – which primarily burned Indonesia – found they were greater than the total of the EU’s fossil-fuel emissions that year. The “severe haze” from the fires has been linked to more than 100,000 premature deaths across the region.

El Niño influence

As in 2015 and in 1997, this year’s Indonesian fires come during an El Niño year.

The naturally-occurring climate phenomenon, linked to ocean temperatures in the Pacific, periodically drives up temperatures and dries out land in Indonesia – creating the conditions for fires so immense that they imprint on global emissions. 

Scientists are projecting that this year’s El Niño – which started in June and is expected to last into 2027 – will be one of the most intense on record.

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Dr Mark Parrington, a senior scientist from the Copernicus Climate Change Service explains: 

“From August until the end of October [to] November is the dry season in Indonesia. We do normally see fire around this time of year, but nowhere near the scale that we’ve seen this year, or indeed any of the previous El Niño years”.

Dr Nisa Novita, strategic lead for peatland at Indonesian environmental NGO Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara, tells Carbon Brief that El Niño “does not directly cause most fires”, but acts as a “major amplifier by creating hotter and drier conditions, making fires easier to ignite, spread faster and much harder to control”. 

Studies have shown that fires in Indonesia often occur where there has been significant land clearance and peatland drainage for agriculture and palm oil plantations. These practices create a dry landscape that is highly flammable during times of drought.

Pink bars show years in which an El Niño event was called by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. GFED fire emissions data for 1980-96 is from Field et al. (2009) and Van Marle et al. (2017); data for 1997-2022 is from Van der Werf et al. (2025); and data for 2022 onwards is from Chen et al. (2026).

Van der Werf says the scale of this year’s fires – and whether they will end up being more intense than 2015 – will depend on the length of this year’s El Niño event, as well as the effectiveness of recent peatland conservation efforts.

Novita explains that Indonesia’s fires are heavily emissions-intensive due to its large tropical peatland ecosystem: 

“When peatlands are degraded and drained due to canal development for agriculture, the water table drops, making the peat dry and highly flammable especially during dry seasons or El Niño events, like now.

“Unlike fires in dry ecosystems, peat fires can smolder underground, so the soil itself becomes readily available fuel.”

Extensive peatland restoration efforts in Indonesia in recent years have been credited with reducing the number of fires during the 2019 El Niño.

After the catastrophic fires in 1997-98, the Indonesian government introduced a range of measures designed to strengthen peatland protection and restoration through dedicated institutions and regulations. This included the introduction of a moratorium on licenses to convert forests and peatlands into plantations and logging areas. 

In the aftermath of the 2015 fires, it established an official peatland restoration agency, which was given an additional mandate for mangrove restoration in 2021. This agency was dissolved last year. Novita says:

“We have learned and improved…But the question is: is it enough? Or are we still underestimating the risk that degraded peatlands pose, especially when we face another El Niño?”

Van der Werf says it remains unclear from the 2026 fire data how great an impact recent efforts to restore peatland in Indonesia have had on reducing the impact and spread of the fires: 

“I had hoped that this year Indonesia would be relatively quiet, even though we have a big El Niño…You could argue if those regulations worked, then this wouldn’t be a big fire [season], even though it [has been] very dry. 

“This is maybe the case in Sumatra [which has seen a quiet fire season], but definitely not in other regions. Papua [a region of Indonesia] and [neighbouring country of] Papua New Guinea – those are the new frontiers. They are basically going through the same thing that Sumatra went through 20 years ago.”

Related Revealed: England’s June 2026 heatwave sparked record demand for ambulances 14.09.2026 Health and society Revealed: More than 1,000 NHS operations cancelled due to record UK heatwaves 11.09.2026 Health and society Guest post: How extreme heat is ‘creeping’ from summer into autumn and spring 10.09.2026 Heatwaves Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods 08.09.2026 Rainfall and flooding

The post El Niño: Indonesia fire emissions in 2026 ‘on track’ to match record for this century appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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• Climate science
• Net-zero target
• Energy costs
• Oil and gas
• Impacts and adaptation
• Clean energy

Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, has emerged as a major force in UK politics in recent years – pushing anti-net-zero policies, alongside vehement opposition to immigration.

The hard-right populist party is currently mired in a funding controversy and only has a handful of MPs, yet, until recently, it had been leading in national polls for more than a year.

As seen with many similar parties across Europe and beyond, a rejection of climate science is central to Reform’s ideological outlook.

Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, is a vocal critic of what he calls “net stupid zero” and has incorrectly blamed “the sun or volcanoes” for human-caused global warming.

As Reform’s energy spokesperson, Tice has also been clear that, if the party were ever to form a national government, it would scrap the UK’s net-zero target, support fossil-fuel expansion and tear up existing contracts for renewable energy.

While less vocal on the subject, Farage has, nevertheless, expressed climate-sceptic views and falsely blamed net-zero policies for the “deindustrialisation of Britain”.

These views draw on long-standing, inaccurate climate-sceptic narratives and are reflected in Reform’s election manifestos, its actions in local government and the opinions of many of its supporters.

Here, Carbon Brief gathers together by topic and factchecks 45 false or misleading claims made by the party’s leadership relating to climate change, renewables and net-zero.

• Climate science
• Net-zero target
• Energy costs
• Oil and gas
• Impacts and adaptation
• Clean energy

Climate science

FALSE

Tice: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change climate change…The Norwegian government’s own equivalent of our ONS [Office of National Statistics] has recently produced a report along the lines of what I’m saying.”

Sky News, February 2025

The world’s authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the planet, primarily through releasing greenhouse gases.

The IPCC says that, due to human activities, concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) “have increased at rates that have no precedent on centennial timescales in at least the past 800,000 years”.

It adds that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now higher than they have been for at least the past two million years.

The report that Tice is referring to is by two independent authors, with Statistics Norway clarifying in 2024 that their views are “not the official stance” of the statistics bureau. (It has also not been formally peer reviewed.)

A factcheck of the Norwegian report by a climate scientist for RealClimate describes it as “misguided” and a “distraction due to errors”.

Another factcheck published by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found it “contains standard talking-points of climate denial”.

MISLEADING

Tice: “Look, the climate’s always changed for millions of years. And it goes through cycles, long, medium and short.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Global temperatures are currently around 1.4C hotter than when the industrial era first began in 1850-1900, as shown in the figure below.

The IPCC says that this amount of warming is likely to have made Earth hotter than at any time in about 125,000 years.

Data from NASA GISTEMP, NOAA GlobalTemp, Hadley/UEA HadCRUT5, Berkeley Earth, Copernicus ERA5, JRA-3Q, DCENT, and China-MST. Temperature records are aligned over the 1981-2010 period and use the WMO approach to calculate warming relative to pre-industrial levels (1850-1900).

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that approximately 100% of this warming has been caused by humans. 

There are also natural influences that can affect Earth’s climate on shorter timescales, such as El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and small variations in the output of the sun. However, scientists have found that these have only a limited effect on the underlying trend of long-term global warming.

When looking at longer timescales of millions of years or more, Earth has experienced multiple ice ages interspersed with warmer periods.

These changes in climate were triggered by variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun, in combination with subtle fluctuations in the tilt and rotation of the planet, over tens of thousands of years. However, the resulting changes to CO2 levels in the atmosphere also played a role.

This should serve as a “cautionary example”, according to Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and Carbon Brief contributor, “because human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases push the Earth further out of the range of climate conditions that have characterised the past few million years”.

FALSE

Tice: “The idea that you can stop the power of the sun or volcanoes is simply ludicrous.”

BBC Breakfast, June 2024

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that humans have caused 100% of recent climate change.

Tice’s suggestion that the sun or volcanic eruptions are behind current warming is false.

As the video below explains, the sun and volcanic eruptions have little bearing on the long-term trend of global temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution.

MISLEADING

Farage: “All I do know is that man produces about 3% of the CO2 produced in the world every year and that it is nuts to call CO2 a poison.”

BBC Radio 5 Live, June 2024

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is now higher than it has been for at least two million years, having spiked dramatically since the Industrial Revolution.

This surge in CO2 levels is entirely due to human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. While Farage is correct that, on an annual basis, humans only account for a few percent of all the CO2 that is released into the atmosphere, this is irrelevant.

The world’s land and ocean naturally release hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 each year. However, the land and ocean also absorb hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 each year, meaning that – before the start of the fossil-fuel era – these flows were broadly in balance.

The recycling of CO2 through Earth’s natural systems is known as the “global carbon cycle”.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans have disrupted Earth’s natural balance by releasing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The IPCC says that, because of humans, concentrations of CO2 “have increased at rates that have no precedent…in at least the past 800,000 years”.

It adds that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are now higher than they have been for at least the past two million years.

FALSE

Tice: “Many thousands of scientists fundamentally disagree about the need to [reach net-zero], or the pace to [achieve net-zero]…But they have been smeared and labelled. They can’t get any research grant funding.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Contrary to Tice’s claim, there are not “thousands” of scientists that disagree on the need for net-zero.

Tice is likely referring to a “world climate declaration” that was circulated on social media by climate sceptics in 2022, supposedly signed by “1,200 climate experts”. A closer look at the list of signatories revealed that less than 1% described themselves as climate scientists – and six of the people on the list were dead.

Reaching net-zero emissions globally is the “only way” to stop climate change, according to the IPCC. The IPCC’s most recent set of reports involved 721 scientists in 90 countries.

All modelled pathways for limiting global warming to 1.5C by 2100, the ambition of the Paris Agreement, involve reaching net-zero emissions around the middle of the century.

This is reflected in the text of the Paris Agreement, which aims to “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century”.

FALSE 

Tice: “The proof of my argument is one of the IPCC reports a few years ago that said even if you get to net-zero effectively tomorrow, it’ll make no difference to one of the key things people are most worried about, which is sea level rise, for somewhere between 200 years on the one hand and 1,000 years on the other hand.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Although it is true that sea level rise is set to worsen, even if countries reach net-zero, it is certainly not the case that making efforts to cut emissions will make “no difference”.

Tice is likely referring to the IPCC’s special report on 1.5C released in 2018.

It said with “high confidence” that human-caused global warming to date will “persist for centuries to millennia and will continue to cause further long-term changes in the climate system, such as sea level rise”.

A more recent study, published in Nature Climate Change in 2025, found that following current climate policies would cause an extra 79cm of sea level rise by the year 2300.

However, reducing emissions in line with 1.5C would cut this additional sea level rise to 15cm. 

Moreover, the best-available evidence shows that warming will more or less stop when the world reaches net-zero emissions. Even if some sea level rise continues, net-zero would still prevent a long list of other increasingly severe climate impacts from taking place.

FALSE

Tice: “The IPCC has just resiled from one of its core assumptions, which was the [RCP]8.5 scenario…One of the foundations of the IPCC’s very ethos in the last 20-30 years, they’ve just abandoned.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

The “foundations” of the evidence on climate change, as well as the risk of “catastrophic” warming without stronger action, are unchanged by the recent shift on “RCP8.5”.

“RCP8.5” is one of a range of emissions scenarios that climate scientists have used  when making projections about future climate change. It is a scenario of very high global emissions, imagining a future with large increases in coal use and no climate policies.

In May 2026, a new set of emissions scenarios were published, no longer including a scenario with emissions as high as those in RCP8.5 (or its successor, SSP5-8.5). 

This moment was seized upon by a range of climate-sceptic and rightwing figures – including US president Donald Trump – who falsely claimed it as evidence that the IPCC had to “admit” that it was “wrong” about future climate change.

This is incorrect because it both misrepresents the meaning of the shift on RCP8.5 and because the set of emissions scenarios in question were not developed by the IPCC in the first place. Instead, they were put together by a group of climate modelling experts. (See Carbon Brief’s factcheck for more information.)

While the new scenarios no longer include such high emissions as in RCP8.5 – partly as a result of limited climate policy success – they also show it is now “not possible” to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels without significant “overshoot”.

Moreover, projections suggest that the world is still on course for between 2.5C and 3C of warming. This level of warming was previously described as “catastrophic” by the UN.

MISLEADING

Tice: “Cleaner air equals higher temperatures, not CO2.”

Twitter/X, July 2026

According to the IPCC, 100% of warming since the Industrial Revolution is due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, particularly CO2.

Tice cites a Daily Telegraph article with the incorrect headline: “Heatwaves caused by fall in pollution.” He erroneously claims this as evidence that “we have been gaslit and lied to” about the causes of climate change.

In fact, as a Carbon Brief factcheck of that article notes, scientists say that the framing of heatwaves being “caused” by declining air pollution is simply “wrong”.

The claim is based on a paper in Geophysical Research Letters, which looks at how air pollution affects circulation patterns in the atmosphere and influences summer temperatures in Europe. 

Scientists have long known that human-caused emissions of aerosols “mask” global warming, partly because they reflect or absorb sunlight. Curbing air pollution, therefore, removes some of this cooling effect.

Nevertheless, the lead author of the study in question is clear that greenhouse gas emissions remain the “most important factor” driving Europe’s extreme heat events, due to their role in global warming. 

A recent attribution study by the World Weather Attribution service concluded that the June heatwave in Europe would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.

Net-zero target

FALSE

Tice: “Net-zero will make zero difference to climate change.”

BBC Breakfast, June 2024

In fact, reaching net-zero emissions globally is the “only way” to stop climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

At that point, when carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been cut substantially and any remaining emissions are balanced out by CO2-removal technology or tree-planting, then warming is expected to essentially stop.

FALSE

Tice: “It’s incredibly stupid for the UK to almost unilaterally say, we’re going to lead the way in the world.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

It is completely false to argue that the UK is acting “unilaterally” to tackle climate change.

The UK has indeed been a leader in climate legislation. When the then-Conservative government set the UK a legally binding “net-zero by 2050” target in 2019, it was the first major economy to do so. 

However, 140 of the world’s 198 countries now have net-zero targets, covering 74% of the world’s emissions. Some have set more ambitious goals, such as Germany’s target of reaching net-zero by 2045, while others are even aiming for “net-negative” emissions.

The UK is, therefore, not pursuing net-zero “unilaterally”. Indeed, if the UK abandoned its net-zero target, it would join the US and Iran as the only major emitters without one.

MISLEADING

Tice: “We’re responsible for 0.7, 0.8% of CO2 emissions.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

The UK’s annual emissions, including emissions from fossil fuels and land-use changes, were roughly 0.7% of the global total in 2024, the most recent year for which data is available. When only considering fossil-fuel combustion, the figure is 0.8%.

Yet, while the numbers Tice quotes are accurate, it is misleading to use them as a justification for abandoning climate policies.

Only six nations each produce more than 2% of the world’s annual emissions. In 1990, the UK was one of those rare countries, but it has roughly halved its share since then, largely due to renewable-energy expansion. Even today, it remains the world’s 22nd largest emitter.

As the chart below shows, more than a third of all greenhouse gases come from the roughly 180 nations that produce 1% or less of the world’s emissions. If none of them acted, the world would never stop climate change.

Finally, some analysts point out the UK’s “moral responsibility” to act on climate change, given its large historical contribution to current levels of global warming. 

The UK, through its historical CO2 emissions, is responsible for around 3% of current warming. When emissions in other countries under the UK’s colonial rule are counted as well, its share grows to more than 5% of the global total.

FALSE

Tice: “[Net-zero is] killing our economy.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Efforts to cut the UK’s emissions are not “killing the economy”. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that they are boosting the economy.

UK emissions in 2025 were 54% below 1990 levels, the baseline year for the nation’s climate goals. The UK economy has nearly doubled in size over the same period, as the chart below shows. 

GDP has also continued to grow since the net-zero target was introduced in 2019.

A 2026 report from the CBI Economics – the consultancy arm of the Confederation for British Industry (CBI) – concluded:

“Net-zero is already one of the UK’s most productive and geographically distributed industrial sectors, generating high-value employment, driving supply chain activity, and anchoring the UK within one of the defining economic transformations of our era.”

The report concludes that the net-zero economy generated around £105bn in gross value added in 2025. It also supported 1.1m jobs across the country, with considerably higher wages than the UK average.

FALSE

Tice: “The cost of net-zero, which the Climate Change Committee admits is in the trillions of pounds, we don’t know how many trillions, who’s paying that? The British people.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimates that it would cost the UK a total of £108bn to reach net-zero by 2050, equivalent to 0.2% of GDP, while the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) says this would be far cheaper than failing to act.

The idea that net-zero will cost the UK trillions of pounds is false. Such claims invariably rely on analysis that exaggerates the capital cost of net-zero, while excluding both the benefits of cutting emissions and the costs of a system without net-zero policies.

One prominent recent example, promoted by Reform UK, relied on the assumption that gas boilers and petrol cars, for example, would cost nothing to buy and would have free fuel.

The idea that the CCC has “admitted” that net-zero will cost “trillions” may stem from a misinterpretation of CCC analysis from 2019, which estimated a net cost of £321bn.

Alternatively, Tice may be conflating this with another misinterpretation in the 2024 Reform UK manifesto, which falsely claimed that the cost of net-zero would be “£2tn or more”, according to the National Energy System Operator (Neso).

In fact, Neso had estimated that the cost of a net-zero energy system would be “broadly the same” as a high-carbon alternative.

Since then, the CCC has calculated that the net cost of investments needed to reach economy-wide net-zero will be around £108bn out to 2050, or less than 0.2% of GDP. Not only are the up-front investment costs lower than originally thought, but, by the 2040s, there will likely be large operational savings, due to clean technologies being cheaper to run.

There are also benefits from reaching net-zero, such as avoiding climate damages from cutting emissions and shielding the UK from fossil fuel-driven energy price spikes. 

The government, therefore, expects net-zero to deliver substantial economic value to the UK, when weighing both the costs and benefits of meeting the target. The government says meeting its climate target for 2040 would yield net benefits worth £865bn.

Similarly, other bodies, such as Neso and the OBR, find that net-zero is the “cheapest” option for the UK, when compared with failing to cut emissions.

Finally, contrary to Tice’s comments, the vast majority of the capital costs of reaching net-zero will not be borne by public funding from the “British people”. The CCC estimates that 65-90% of the capital required will come from the private sector.

FALSE

Tice: “Labour’s reckless net-zero fantasies are destroying hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs.”

Press Association, July 2025

The transition to a net-zero economy is expected to boost the UK economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

In a “landmark moment”, as of 2024, there were more people employed in the UK clean-energy sector than the oil and gas industry for the first time, according to the Renewable Energy Association.

While jobs in some sectors are expected to decline in the coming years, there is currently no evidence that “hundreds of thousands” of jobs have been “destroyed” by the net-zero target.

The CCC says that there is a lack of “robust data” on whether UK climate policies have already driven job losses, but notes that “this is unlikely to be the case, as most decarbonisation has occurred in sectors where employment declined for other reasons”.

This can be seen in the employment figures for coal mining, steelmaking and oil and gas production, three industries that were mainstays of the UK economy.

As the chart below shows, all of these sectors employ fewer people today than they did in the past. But their major declines happened long before the net-zero target was set, resulting from a wide range of factors including coal being replaced by cheaper fuels, cyclical downturns in oil prices and competition with steel production overseas.

The grey shaded area indicates the period in which the UK has a net-zero target in place. Definitions from ONS Nomis have changed over the years, but the broad categories covered in this chart are “mining of coal and lignite”, “manufacture of basic iron and steel and of ferro-alloys”, “manufacture of other products of first processing of steel”, “extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas” and “support activities for petroleum and natural gas extraction”.

(The chart above only includes jobs in oil and gas extraction, but figures for UK fossil-fuel jobs vary considerably between sources, depending on the sectors classed as relevant. Industry body Offshore Energies UK cites a much broader figure of 180,000 jobs in 2024, which includes “supply chains and regional economies”.)

This does not mean that there will be no impact on the UK workforce in the future. 

A literature review by the CCC concluded that the “phase-down of high-emitting sectors and redirection of sectors” could threaten 8,000-75,000 jobs. This could include roughly 15,000 oil-and-gas workers and around 1,000 people working in coal mines.

One of the sectors that could see big changes is livestock farming, as UK diets shift away from emissions-intensive animal products. Notably, this shift is already taking place without any intervention from the government, let alone net-zero policies.

The CCC also expects there to be “extensive job creation” as the country transitions to a net-zero economy. Job gains in low-carbon sectors, such as renewable energy and clean heating, are set to far surpass losses in other sectors, as the chart below shows.

Overall, the committee says 135,000 to 725,000 “net” new jobs are set to be “created by net-zero”. 

Rather than opposing net-zero targets, some trade unions have stressed the need to support a “just transition” for workers in fossil fuel-intensive sectors. 

Industry groups have also pointed to the significant employment opportunities that a “net-zero economy” will bring. 

FALSE

Farage: “We view the net-zero targets as being the prime reason for the deindustrialisation of Britain.”

Reform UK press conference, February 2025

Net-zero is at the heart of the UK’s industrial strategy and it has frequently been described as the “economic opportunity of the century”. 

CBI chief economist Louise Hellem has described the net-zero economy as “a major part of the national industrial base”, while the Aldersgate Group says net-zero has the potential to be “the UK’s growth engine”.

Moreover, net-zero targets – set in 2019 – are clearly not the “prime reason” for the UK’s “deindustrialisation”, which has been underway for decades.

Since around the 1960s, major industries such as steel and mining have declined in the UK. There are various reasons for this, including globalisation, but the timeline does not match up with the creation of climate legislation.

Around 30% of the nation’s workers were employed in manufacturing after the second world war. By 2000-2016, the period in which the UK introduced its first major climate policies, this had already dropped to 10%, according to the ONS.

In recent years, businesses have warned that the UK’s relatively high industrial electricity prices are driving further “deindustrialisation”. This has been a talking point for those seeking to blame the nation’s net-zero strategy for driving high prices.

However, these arguments tend to omit the UK’s high exposure to expensive gas, which sets the nation’s wholesale electricity prices most of the time. 

The UK steel industry itself says that this exposure to gas is the key reason why it faces much higher electricity prices than counterparts in countries such as France and Germany. 

Energy costs

FALSE

Farage: “If we had carbon-free electricity it would cost over a trillion – and maybe nearer two – to upgrade the entirety of our grid.”

Press conference, August 2025

Cutting the UK’s emissions by using clean power to run an electrified economy is expected to significantly reduce consumer bills.

This is because electrified technologies, such as EVs and heat pumps, are significantly more efficient than fossil-fuel alternatives.

Moreover, the UK would be consolidating three separate energy systems – electricity, gas and transport fuel – into a unified, more efficient and electrified whole.

It would cost £108bn to reach the UK’s net-zero target – including a “carbon-free” electricity grid – according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC).

This includes the investment needed to build a low-carbon energy system, instead of maintaining one built on fossil fuels.

Crucially, it also takes into account the running costs of the two systems, such as the much higher cost of fuel needed for petrol cars, as shown below.

Investing in a net-zero economy would bring benefits worth around £865bn, according to the government. Unlike the CCC figures, this includes avoided climate damages.

It is not clear where Farage’s false claim comes from.

The 2024 Reform UK manifesto included a similar false claim that the “cost of net-zero has been estimated by the National Grid and others at some £2tn or more”.

In reality, the then-National Grid Electricity System Operator – now Neso – had said in 2020 that the cost of building and operating the UK energy system would be “broadly the same”, with or without net-zero.

It is true that the UK will need to invest heavily in upgrading its electricity grid. This will cost some £64bn out to 2030 and another £89bn in the following decade, according to Neso.

This is around 10 times lower than Farage’s claim. But, crucially, it does not include the savings this investment will unlock, such as cheaper travel with electric vehicles.

FALSE

Tice: “There was a direct link between the growth in renewable generating capacity and the growth in electricity prices in the UK.”

Bloomberg interview, May 2026

It is expensive gas that has largely driven up electricity prices in the UK.

High gas prices caused two-thirds of the rise in electricity bills over recent years, according to the UK Energy Research Centre – and this was before the Iran crisis.

The UK has high electricity prices principally because its electricity system remains heavily reliant on gas-fired power plants. This means gas usually sets the price of UK power.

Moreover, the growth in renewable capacity has helped to protect UK billpayers during the latest fossil-fuel price shock, after the US and Israel attacked Iran.

This is an “early sign” that the government’s clean-power plan “may be working”, according to thinktank NESTA. It says “electricity [prices are] beginning to decouple from gas“.

Electricity systems that have high shares of renewable energy tend to have lower wholesale power prices, according to evidence from US states and from European countries.

As the University of Oxford’s Prof Jan Rosenow explains in a recent post on his Bright Spots substack, the “‘renewables make electricity expensive’ claim doesn’t survive contact with the wholesale data”. He adds:

“The countries with the most expensive wholesale electricity are the ones still dependent on gas to set their prices.”

Rosenow notes that the relationship between renewables and consumer bills is less clear, because these also include network charges, policy costs and taxes. He argues for reforms to ensure that “lower wholesale prices [from clean power] feed through into lower bills”.

The CCC also argues for reforms to make electricity cheaper. Still, it concludes that clean power coupled to faster electrification is the clearest route to lower energy bills for the UK.

FALSE

Farage: “Perhaps the real unfairness of net-zero policies…has been the impact on domestic bills, something about which there has been an absolute wall of silence.”

Press conference, February 2025

By far the biggest driver of increases in domestic energy bills in recent years has been the rising cost of gas, not “net-zero policies”.

Gas prices have been trending upwards since the mid-2000s, long before the UK even had a net-zero target. Initially, this was due to dwindling supplies in Europe – including the North Sea – as well as more global competition for gas.

Gas prices then surged in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off supplies to Europe. This year, war in the Middle East has once again sent gas prices soaring.

Most of the energy bill increases in recent years have been the result of wholesale gas costs rising due to these successive global crises.

There are some parts of domestic energy bills that could be described as “net-zero policies” – notably, the subsidies or “green levies” to support both old and new renewable energy. 

However, these are not the drivers of recent price rises and are a much smaller component of a domestic energy bill than wholesale gas costs. (In addition, a chunk of policy costs have recently been moved off bills into general taxation.)

Moreover, the renewables they support have helped to curb the UK’s reliance on imported gas, saving the nation money.

Finally, the idea that this issue has faced a “wall of silence” is simply not true.

Energy bills and net-zero have been endlessly debated by politicians, commentators and the media. A pledge to cut energy bills was one of the central pillars of the Labour government’s election manifesto in 2024.

FALSE

Tice: “The cost of renewables plus backup, literally by definition, must cost more than backup because there is a cost of capital and a cost of retention of all of the backup…Don’t build it in the first place. We don’t need batteries.”

Bloomberg interview, May 2026

The UK is building a clean-energy system that will cost more to build – and much less to operate – than the current fossil-fuel economy.

Tice is ignoring half of this equation and – by definition – this means he is not giving a full picture.

For example, wind and solar do not need fuel to operate, whereas “backup” plants cannot generate power without gas or fuel oil.

It is highly misleading to look only at the capital investments needed to build wind, solar or gas plants, while ignoring the cost of operating them.

Electricity generation from wind and solar helped the UK avoid gas imports worth £1.7bn in the first two months of the Hormuz crisis alone, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

The CCC says that households could cut their bills by an average of £1,200 per year – even after higher upfront costs – by adopting solar, heat pumps and electric vehicles, as shown below.

.cb-tweet img{ border: solid 1.25px #333333; border-radius: 5px; } @media (max-width:650px){ .cb-tweet{ width:100%; } } Household energy costs for heat, power and transport, £ per year. The upfront costs of purchasing cars, heating systems, chargers and solar panels are annualised. Source: CCC progress report 2026.

Ultimately, an electrified economy built on renewables and other sources of clean power will reduce energy waste and cut bills, according to the CCC and others.

FALSE

Tice: “It is as cost-effective or indeed cheaper to put the cables underground.”

Press conference, February 2025

Contrary to repeated claims by Tice, there is clear evidence that it is significantly cheaper to build overhead electricity pylons than it is to “put cables underground”.

It is 3.5-5 times more expensive to bury cables than to run overhead wires, according to research published in May 2026 and shown in the figure below, with other similar studies.

The latest study, by consultancy Ramboll, shows that underground cables remain far more expensive, even where techniques such as “cable ploughing” are used to bury them.

The findings are in line with previous research published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in April 2025.

This found that “underground cables are, on average, 4.5 times more expensive than overhead lines”. It said that undersea cables “can be up to 11 times more costly”.

Another consultancy, DNV, reached very similar conclusions in 2024. The IET said the same back in 2012, when it estimated underground cables to be five times more costly.

All of these reports directly contradict claims made by Tice in a 2025 press conference:

“We are serving notice on National Grid…put the cables underground…It is as cost-effective, or indeed cheaper, to put the cables underground.”

Tice’s claim is based on a highly misleading interpretation of the East Anglia network study, published by Neso in 2024.

This study put a price on various options to reinforce the electricity network in the east of England, including a planned overhead route from Norwich to Tilbury.

Contrary to Tice’s claims, figures from project developer National Grid suggest that using underground cables for this route would be 6.5 times more expensive than overhead wires.

If all of the country’s planned new electricity cables were put underground, it could cost up to an extra £22bn, according to Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at thinktank Britain Remade.

FALSE

Tice: “[A ‘windfall tax’ on renewables] is the best way that we can help get the bills down and lower the cost of living.”

Press conference, February 2025

Expensive gas has been the main driver of UK energy bill increases in recent years, particularly as successive global crises have sent global gas prices spiralling.

As such, reducing the UK’s exposure to international gas prices – as well as cutting its reliance on imported fuels for cars and boilers – is key to reducing bills.

Yet, Tice has claimed that the “best way” to cut bills would be through a so-called “windfall tax” on wind and solar power generators.

It is unclear how it would be possible to cut bills – by even a small amount – through an additional tax on renewables, which generate around half of the nation’s electricity.

With “windfall”, Tice borrowed a term that is often used for new taxes on the fossil-fuel companies making billions in additional profits due to war in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Renewables have helped to shield the UK from the impact of these conflicts, by curbing its reliance on gas and saving billions that would otherwise have been spent on costly imports.

Tice suggested that a new tax on renewable energy firms could help “recover” the money previously paid to them in subsidies. However, he has not offered any detail on how the proposed tax would work, how much money it would raise or what impact it might have.

A retrospective change to the tax treatment of existing energy infrastructure would hamper future investment in the system, whether that is for clean power or Tice’s own preferred energy sources.

Blocking renewables through a windfall tax and other changes could stop investments worth tens of billions of pounds, according to the New Economics Foundation thinktank.

MISLEADING
Farage: “Our electricity prices for industry are between five and six times higher than those in America.”

Press conference, February 2025

The UK primarily has high industrial electricity prices due to its exposure to high gas prices.

In turn, the UK and other European countries face much higher gas prices than the US.

This is particularly true since Russia cut off pipeline gas supplies to the continent amid its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – a shift that has been reinforced by EU sanctions.

This means Europe is reliant on internationally traded liquified natural gas (LNG), for which it competes with Japan and other countries.

In contrast, gas prices are low in the US because supplies are often a by-product of more valuable oil extraction, which comes out of the ground with “associated” gas. The demand for US gas is also limited by the amount that can be exported overseas as LNG.

As such, while it is true that UK industrial electricity prices are high compared to other countries, the reasons are different to what Farage implies.

In addition, his claim that costs are “five to six times higher” than the US is overstated. 

The most widely cited figures, based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, suggest industrial prices are four times higher in the UK than those in the US.

Despite claims made by right-leaning commentators, it would not be possible for the UK to recreate the US gas market dynamics by fracking for shale gas, or by ramping up North Sea gas extraction.

Oil and gas

MISLEADING

Tice: “Let me remind you, in the 80s and 90s…we were growing at between 2.5% and 4% a year. We had deep, plentiful energy driven by oil and gas from the North Sea, right? No one was worried about the price of electricity. No one was worried about the quantity of supply. No one was worried about the reliability of supply.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

The UK extracted a significant proportion of its oil and gas resources from the 1980s onwards, after privatising the industry and using the revenue to cut income taxes.

Now, as anticipated at the time, there is very little fuel left to drill.

The UK went through a “dash for gas” in the 1990s, with North Sea gas production levels steadily increasing from the 1980s until the 2000s. 

However, gas production in the North Sea fell by 74% between 2000 and 2025, while oil output fell by 75%.

This is not because policies favouring new oil and gas production ended, but rather because of competition from cheaper sources of the fuels and because the amount of fossil fuels left in the North Sea basin started to run out.

According to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank, around 90% of the oil and gas that is likely to be produced from the North Sea has already been burned.

It is also true that electricity prices were much lower in the 1990s than they are today. This is largely explained by rising gas prices – and increasing exposure to imports. 

The UK dash for gas power was driven by cheap gas prices, which favoured a shift away from coal and nuclear. This included cancelling a planned fleet of new nuclear reactors.

When gas subsequently became expensive, electricity prices went up, because the UK was heavily exposed to the fuel. This dynamic continues today, although the rise of renewables is starting to break the link between gas and power prices..

FALSE

Tice: “We [would] allow licences to drill…If you increase the supply of anything, it’s basic economics, the price of that good will come down, as it does in America, where their gas price, their wholesale gas price, is give or take 30% of ours.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Gas is cheap in the US because it is widely extracted as a byproduct of more valuable oil and because demand is limited by export capacity.

These dynamics – and the abundant, easily accessible shale resources in the US – are a function of geography and cannot be replicated in the UK.

North Sea production is in long-term decline and this cannot be reversed by new licenses, because most of the oil and gas that was under the ground has already been burned.

In addition, the production of oil and gas in the North Sea has very limited effects on global energy prices, which determine the cost of UK energy bills.

This is because the country is a relatively small producer, accounting for around 1% of global output. By contrast, the US is the world’s largest oil-and-gas producer.

FALSE

Tice: “If we’d had this common sense not to abandon our North Sea, we wouldn’t have been in that pickle [referring to importing LNG from the US].”

Bloomberg, May 2026

The UK is increasingly reliant on imported fossil fuels, because it has already used up most of the oil and gas that was once under the North Sea.

The country was a net energy exporter in 2000, but, by 2010, was dependent on imports for 30% of its energy supplies. On the same metric, the UK’s net import dependency reached 44% in 2024.

This is not because policies favouring new oil and gas production ended, but rather because the amount of fossil fuels left in the North Sea basin started to run out.

Gas production in the North Sea fell by 74% between 2000 and 2025, while oil output fell by 75%.

This decline has occurred despite the previous Conservative government, which was in power from 2010-24, holding six new licensing rounds and issuing hundreds of new oil and gas licences.

FALSE

Tice: “Why are the Norwegians drilling 49 new wells last year? Because they think there’s plenty more to go that’s worth going for. So, why are we so stupid that, on our side of the line, we think it’s a good idea to drill zero new wells?”

Bloomberg, May 2026

The UK has already used up most of the oil and gas that was under its part of the North Sea, whereas the state-run Norwegian system has taken a different approach.

Nevertheless, even the most optimistic of Norway’s official forecasts sees a steady decline in production over the coming decades, as their oil and gas also starts to run out.

UK fossil-fuel production is lower than Norway’s because of geology and the decisions that were taken in the past, neither of which can be changed by the current or any future UK government.

Specifically, the UK has already used up the large majority of its North Sea resources, having extracted around 90% of the oil and gas that is available.

In contrast, Norway has only used up 57% of the “expected recoverable resource” from its part of the North Sea, according to official estimates published by Norwegian Petroleum.

FALSE

Tice: “We’ve got lots of [oil and gas] reserves, but if you just say it’s not viable because you make the regulations and everything too expensive, then don’t be surprised if people say, well, there’s not much to go for.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Projections of the amount of oil and gas that will be recovered from the North Sea have barely changed since the Labour government took office in 2024.

Tice’s suggestion that official estimates of North Sea reserves have been revised down as a result of the Labour government’s policies is, therefore, provably untrue.

For gas, there is little difference between official projections published before and after the government’s 2024 election win and its decision to ban new licensing, as shown below.

North Sea oil (right) and gas production (right), million tonnes of oil equivalent, under the baseline NSTA projection or with further drilling. Source: NSTA.

While the NSTA projections for oil have shifted more noticeably between 2023 and 2026, this largely relates to output from existing fields, rather than the potential from new drilling.

FALSE

Tice: “I go to Aberdeen and they’re literally losing a thousand jobs a month in and around Aberdeen and the oil and gas industry because of this mad policy.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Jobs in North Sea oil and gas have been declining rapidly for decades, having fallen by a third between 2014 and 2023 – well before the current government took office.

However, the major driver of job losses has been the irreversible decline of the North Sea basin. Gas production in the North Sea fell by 74% between 2000 and 2025, while oil output fell by 75%.

This decline has occurred despite the previous Conservative government, which was in power from 2010-24, holding six new licensing rounds and issuing hundreds of new licences.

MISLEADING

Tice: “All of the nations who’ve got energy treasure, who are extracting it, they are growing, whether it’s America, whether it’s the Middle East, whether it’s in Asia.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Fossil-fuel producers have received windfall profits as a result of price spikes in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the effective closure of the strait of Hormuz.

On the flip side of this, countries that rely on fossil-fuel imports – particularly in Europe and China – have been hit with an extra $330bn in costs since the Iran crisis began.

For the UK, the most effective way to cut the need for costly fossil-fuel imports is to continue expanding clean-energy supplies and the electrified technologies that use them.

It is true that the US economy is growing at a faster rate than Europe’s. This is down to a range of reasons, experts say, including the nation’s rapid uptake of AI.

Another factor is that import dependency has left the UK and others particularly exposed to the economic impacts of the recent fossil-fuel price spikes.

Meanwhile, there is also plenty of evidence to show that investing in clean energy is driving economic growth in countries around the world.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), the world’s energy watchdog, estimated that clean energy accounted for 10% of global GDP growth in 2023. The figure was 30% for the EU, according to the IEA.

Analysis published by Carbon Brief shows that clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025. And the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that climate action will provide a long-term boost to China’s economy and energy security.

In the UK, emissions have “decoupled” from economic growth, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

The analysis found that UK emissions fell to 54% below 1990 levels in 2024, while GDP was up 84%.

FALSE

Farage: “Countries that frack get rich. Countries that don’t frack get poor.”

Edinburgh press conference, August 2025

The availability and accessibility of shale resources – and, therefore, the potential economic return from extracting oil and gas via fracking – is a function of geography and geology.

The UK’s shale gas resources are hard to extract and roughly 10-times smaller than initially thought. As a result, their potential to boost the UK economy is extremely limited.

While fracking has boosted economic growth in the US, there is little evidence to suggest this could be replicated by countries in Europe. 

Only four countries frack for oil and gas at a large-scale commercial level: the US, Canada, China and Argentina.

Across much of Europe, fracking faces legal bans over concerns that the practice can contaminate water supplies and impact public health.

There are also practical and economic hurdles to fracking in Europe.

US oil majors abandoned efforts to establish a shale gas industry in Poland more than a decade ago. As the Economist noted in 2014: “There is no getting around geology.”

In the UK, fracking is unpopular with the public, with just 17% of people supporting it and 45% opposing it.

Any attempt to produce oil and gas via fracking would likely face protests and lengthy legal battles. Even if projects were able to go ahead, it would likely take years to produce a meaningful amount of gas .(See Carbon Brief’s fracking factcheck.)

Impacts and adaptation

MISLEADING

Tice: “Actually, what we need to do with climate change…we need to adapt to it.”

BBC Breakfast, June 2024

Climate change will keep getting worse until the world cuts emissions to net-zero.

Moreover, there are hard limits to adaptation, which can be overwhelmed by higher warming.

The longer emissions continue, the higher global temperatures will rise and the more nations such as the UK will have to adapt. It is, therefore, misleading to present adaptation as an alternative to cutting emissions. 

The IPCC says that risks “will become increasingly complex and more difficult to manage” as climate change worsens. It also stresses that there are limits to adaptation, some of which have already been reached.

In response to the latest IPCC assessment report, Dr Aditi Mukherji told Carbon Brief:

“Effectiveness of most adaptation responses decreases drastically at global warming levels of 1.5C to 2C, showing that mitigation and adaptation efforts have to go hand in hand.”

In its latest advice to the UK government, the CCC set out the need to prepare for extreme heat, drought and flooding and states: “Without global emissions reductions, these risks may go past the point where the UK can protect itself with adaptation measures.”

FALSE

Tice: “It’s much cheaper to adapt to climate change than to think you can stop it.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Cutting emissions to net-zero will be much cheaper for the UK than dealing with the economic damages of unmitigated climate change, according to the OBR.

In addition, adapting to unavoidable warming will be far cheaper than “facing the damages”, according to the CCC.

While Tice frequently presents a false dichotomy between cutting emissions and adapting to climate impacts, they are not either/or alternatives. In fact, both are required to reduce the dangers of climate change – and both will require substantial investment.

Climate-related damages are already costing the UK, with one recent estimate concluding that the June 2026 heatwave alone led to a £1.15bn hit to the economy.

These costs will spiral if global emissions are not reduced. It is well established that the cost of inaction on climate change is considerably higher than the cost of cutting emissions.

The CCC estimates that climate change is already costing the UK economy £60bn a year in damages and this could rise to around £260bn by 2050, under around 2C of global warming. 

The committee says a comprehensive climate-adaptation programme in the coming decades will reduce these costs. 

As the chart below shows, CCC analysis has concluded that an adaptation package covering heat and health, urban heat and water scarcity could avoid up to £12bn a year in climate-damage costs across the UK by the 2050s.

In total, climate-adaptation actions are expected to cost at least £11bn per year out to the 2050s – a considerable sum, but one that the CCC says is “manageable” and will largely come from private-sector investment.

At the same time, the CCC says there is a risk of “catastrophic damages”, especially if warming continues to rise above 2C. Given this, it stresses that “reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions remain essential” to minimise such risks.

FALSE

Tice: “The issue [with drought] is not the quantity of water in the UK. The issue is how the water companies do or don’t capture it.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Climate change is making drought more frequent and severe in the UK, even as it makes winters wetter than they were in the past.

This is increasing the need for new reservoirs and other measures to manage the quantity of water available in the UK throughout the year. 

The summer of 2026 saw record-low levels of rainfall across much of the south of England and Wales, as shown in the map below.  

July 2026 was the driest month on record in England and Wales, according to the Met Office. This coincided with the two nations recording their sunniest July on record as well. 

These “remarkable conditions” in 2026 come as part of a summer “marked by multiple heat records, which have contributed to drought conditions”, the Met Office notes.

The Environment Agency says that, due to climate change, “we are experiencing longer, hotter summers…leading to an increased likelihood of drought”.

FALSE
Tice: “I’m old enough to remember 1976. This feels a bit the same. That was 50 years ago.”

Press conference, August 2026

Since 1976, global warming has made heatwaves “more frequent, long-lasting and intense”.

As a result, summer 2026 was the UK’s hottest on record, with the Met Office finding that this was made around 130-times more likely by human-induced climate change.

Moreover, this year’s record means that summer 1976 is now only the seventh-warmest for the UK, with the top five all having occurred since 2003.

In the summer of 1976, there were 15 consecutive days when somewhere in the UK was above 32C. This led to water shortages and frequent wildfires, followed by flash floods.

There has been a lot of comparison to this “historic event” amid the record-breaking temperatures seen in 2026.

However, climate change means that a 1976-style weather pattern would be 3-4C hotter today than it was at the time.

There were just three days in which UK temperatures breached 36C in the entire 20th century, including 1976. Yet there were three days above 36C in 2026 alone.

Summer 2026 also saw 10 separate days with temperatures above 35C, breaking the previous record of five days, which had been set in 1976.

Additionally, the humidity was much higher in 2026 than in 1976. According to the Met Office, this meant that “even where peak air temperatures were comparable, the perceived heat and associated health risks were often greater in 2026”.

Clean energy

MISLEADING

Tice: “80% of the offshore renewables is overseas owned. So the British consumer is being shafted to help overseas investors.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Around the world, more than 90% of new renewable power projects are cheaper than new fossil-fueled generation.

An energy system built around renewable power and electrified technologies such as EVs   is also the lowest-cost option in the UK.

While it is true that more than 80% of UK offshore windfarms are owned by foreign companies, this is just ​​a feature of the country’s privatised energy sector.  

For example, 40% of North Sea oil and gas licences are also owned by foreign investors. 

Additionally, regardless of the windfarms’ owners, their presence on the electricity grid is helping to protect consumers from high fossil-fuel prices. 

In 2025, windfarms cut wholesale power prices by a third, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank. 

MISLEADING

Tice: “Why are we so stupid that we spent £700m on Hinkley Point C, £700m of taxpayers’ cash, to protect a bunch of salmon? About 70 salmon, for God’s sake.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant will include a system designed to protect millions of fish. 

However, the cost of this system amounts to just 1.5% of the overall £46bn cost of building the new reactors in Somerset. 

The £700m system is expected to stop more than 2.6m fish a year from being sucked into the cooling pipes at the site on the Severn estuary. 

Additionally, the use of the system is replacing plans to flood 900 acres (364 hectares) of farmland in neighbouring Gloucestershire, originally proposed by the site’s main developer, EDF. 

The construction of Hinkley Point C is being financed by EDF and the China General Nuclear Power Group, not the taxpayer. When it begins generation, it will benefit from a “contracts for difference”, which is funded via electricity bills.  

MISLEADING

Tice: “A hell of a lot more people have died building wind turbines than have died in the nuclear power industry. Little stated fact by the renewable industry.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Both wind and nuclear power are considered to be among the safest forms of energy generation in the world.

There are occasional fatalities among workers at windfarm construction sites, but these are very rare, particularly when compared with accidents in the fossil-fuel industry. 

This is before taking into account that fossil-fuel pollution is responsible for one in five deaths globally, according to research by University College London. 

Death rate from accidents and air pollution. Nuclear energy deaths include those from the Fukushima and Chornobyl disasters. Deaths from hydropower include those from the Banqian Dam failure in China.

Analysis from 2020 suggests that solar power was the safest source of energy, followed by nuclear and then wind. All three clean-energy sources are orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels, as shown in the figure below.

For example, each unit of electricity generation from coal is associated with more than 600 times as many deaths as the same amount of power from wind.

Our World in Data, a non-profit collaboration between the University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab, which did the analysis, explains:

“People often focus on the marginal differences at the bottom of the chart – between nuclear, solar and wind. This comparison is misguided: the uncertainties around these values mean they are likely to overlap.

“The key insight is that they are all much, much safer than fossil fuels.”

MISLEADING

Tice: “[Solar is a] good use of rooftops, there’s no subsidy on those.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Solar power is the cheapest electricity in history and keeps getting cheaper.

It is expected to play a key role in the energy transition, including in the UK.

While the government’s subsidy scheme for domestic solar – the “feed-in tariff” (FiT) – closed to new applicants in 2019, several other incentives have subsequently been introduced.

It was directly replaced by the “smart export guarantee”, wherein utilities pay households for any excess power they generate from their solar installations. This – together with the savings from using self-generated power – helps to offset the cost of the installation of solar panels. 

Additionally, the government’s warm homes plan offers grants and loans designed to triple the number of homes with rooftop solar by 2030. 

Ultimately, Tice’s focus on rooftop solar (which his firm uses) positions it in opposition to ground-mounted solar farms – creating a false dichotomy between a “good use” and a “bad use”. 

Ground-mount solar is set to play a significant role in decarbonising the UK. It is much cheaper than rooftop solar and is not limited by the availability of rooftops. 

FALSE

Tice: “All the renewables, all the wind turbines and the solar farms, they want a fat subsidy for very long-term contracts.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Renewables are the cheapest source of new electricity in the UK, where recent surges in energy bills have been predominantly due to the role of gas in setting electricity prices.

The first subsidy-free solar farm in the UK was opened in 2017 near Flitwick in Bedfordshire. 

Across the UK, there are now a number of subsidy-free solar and windfarms, which either rely on selling power into the market or private power purchase agreements. 

The majority of solar and windfarms hold government contracts, but these are fixed-price deals rather than subsidies. 

The new wind and solar projects secured at the latest government auction of “contracts for difference” will be significantly cheaper than new gas, according to the government.

No new gas plants have been built in the UK without long-term subsidy contracts through the government’s capacity market. In addition, the price of fuel for gas-fired generation continues to spike in response to the latest global energy crisis in the Middle East.

The most recent large new gas plant was Keadby 2, which opened in 2023 and would now cost 3.5-times as much to build, according to its owner.

FALSE

Tice: “There is nothing environmentally friendly about covering 100 square miles of Lincolnshire, agricultural, productive farmland, with solar panels, surrounding whole villages, decimating property prices in those villages or making them unsaleable, and thinking that’s going to end well.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

Even if solar farms expand in line with net-zero targets, they would cover just 0.7% of land in the UK – less than golf courses do currently. 

Solar farms are very rarely built on productive agricultural land in the UK – with the majority built on low-grade land – and pose “no threat to national food security”, according to the National Farmers Union. 

There is limited evidence that property prices are impacted by solar farms, with some studies suggesting that well-screened solar farms have no impact.

A London School of Economics study from 2021 did “not find any statistically significant effects [of solar on house prices], even at relatively small distances of 1km”. 

Other studies have found very small negative impacts – on the order of 1-3% – while one study of 70 solar farms in the US identified a small boost to house prices.

As such, there is nothing to suggest that solar farms either “decimate” property prices or make homes “unsaleable”. 

FALSE

Tice: “I drive a Tesla. Do I think it’s going to change the climate? No.”

Bloomberg, May 2026

As an electric vehicle (EV), driving a Tesla is far better for the environment than a petrol or diesel car, as it produces fewer greenhouse gases, air pollutants and noise. 

Typically, an EV driven in Europe emits around two-thirds fewer greenhouse gas emissions than an equivalent petrol car, even accounting for battery production and disposal. 

Carbon Brief analysis found that a Tesla Model Y, for example, will emit about 68% less CO2 over its lifetime than the average petrol car. 

In addition to cutting costs for drivers, EVs are a key part of decarbonising road transport.

In the UK, transitioning away from petrol and diesel vehicles to EVs is expected to account for 23% of the total reduction in emissions being targeted by 2050. Net-zero is the “only way” to halt global warming. 

MISLEADING

Tice: “The government says that the cost of renewable subsidies in the last 15 years is £100bn.”

Press conference, February 2025

Upfront renewable subsidies – in the UK and elsewhere – have helped deliver dramatic reductions in the cost of wind and solar power.

Since 2010, the cost of solar power has fallen by 89%, onshore wind by 71% and offshore wind by 63% – and these declines are set to continue.

As a result, 90% of new wind and solar installed in 2025 was cheaper than new fossil-fuel power, according to the International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA).

In the UK, wind power saved consumers more than £100bn between 2010-2023, after accounting for renewable subsidies, according to researchers at University College London.

In contrast, high fossil-fuel prices since the global energy crisis in 2022 had already cost the UK more than £180bn by the end of 2025, according to ECIU, with the first six months of the Iran crisis adding another £10bn in extra costs. 

FALSE

Tice: “Those farmers who want to sell out to the renewable industry for solar farms – you can’t have it both ways, folks. Either you’re part of food production, part of food security for our nation, or you’re part of the renewables industry.”

Press conference, February 2025

Contrary to Tice’s claims, farmers can – and indeed often already do – “have it both ways”. Government statistics for 2023/24 suggest that 32% of farm businesses make use of renewable energy, mostly solar power. 

Furthermore, some 37% of farmers, landowners and tenant farmers say the revenue from solar power helps secure their farms for future generations, according to interviews carried out by trade association Solar Energy UK. 

Finally, solar can also be combined directly with food production through the use of “agrivoltaic” systems. This concept combines farming – including livestock grazing and shade-tolerant crops – with solar panels and has been gaining momentum as a solution to land-use conflicts.

FALSE

Tice: “The British people are not being told that these battery energy systems are dangerous – and until they can be proven to be absolutely safe, they should be banned.”

Press conference, February 2025

Battery energy storage systems are safe and getting safer all the time. 

In the UK, there are over 1,659 large-scale battery storage projects and there have been only two reported fires in the past five years – neither of which had any injuries or fatalities.

Home battery storage systems are also safe. A recent study that looked at installations in Germany found the probability of a fire is 0.005% – this is around the same level as a tumble-dryer fire, 50 times lower than a general house fire and 18 times lower than a petrol or diesel engine fire.

(In contrast, there has been a spate of fires at UK waste facilities caused by the inappropriate disposal of lithium batteries in consumer devices, usually vapes.) 

FALSE

Farage: “The argument that wind power makes us less reliant on other sources of energy from around the world just is not true. The national grid is not fit to deal with intermittent renewable energy.”

Press conference, August 2025

Wind power is already making the UK less reliant on imported fuels.

Moreover, expanding clean-energy supplies will be a much more effective route to reducing the UK’s reliance on energy imports than efforts to increase North Sea drilling.

ECIU found that the growth of offshore wind had reduced the nation’s spending on imported fuels by at least £30bn by the end of 2025. 

Separately, Carbon Brief analysis found that wind and solar saved the UK from gas imports worth £1.7bn in March and April 2026 alone, amid the pressures of the Iran war. 

The UK’s electricity grid does require upgrades as part of the transition to an energy system dominated by renewables, EVs and heat pumps. This transition will enable the UK to cut its imports of not only gas for heat and power, but also oil for transport.

Regardless of net-zero targets, higher spending on the electricity network is partly making up for decades of “under-investment”.The grid needs upgrades to connect new nuclear plants and data centres, as well as to meet growing electricity demand from homes and businesses.

Despite the need for investment, there is nothing to suggest that the grid is “not fit to deal” with renewables.

Power cuts for the average UK household are now happening 43% less often than they did in 2011. During that time, renewables have grown from 9.5% to 47% of electricity supplies.

Related Revealed: England’s June 2026 heatwave sparked record demand for ambulances 14.09.2026 Health and society Revealed: More than 1,000 NHS operations cancelled due to record UK heatwaves 11.09.2026 Health and society UK aviation emissions to be 50% higher than thought by 2050, government admits 10.09.2026 Aviation and shipping Analysis: UK solar power hits record high over summer 2026 04.09.2026 Renewables

The post Factcheck: Reform UK’s 45 false or misleading claims about climate and energy appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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More than 1,000 operations at NHS hospitals were cancelled due to heat during the UK’s record May and June heatwaves, Carbon Brief can reveal.

This includes 167 orthopaedic surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements, as well as heart, eye and skin cancer operations.

At least 10 emergency surgeries – those for “life-threatening” conditions – had to be cancelled because of the record-breaking heat, according to the investigation.

Carbon Brief sent freedom-of-information (FOI) requests to 140 NHS trusts to investigate the impact of heatwaves on operations being cancelled in England and Wales.

Areas with the most operations cancelled due to heat include Surrey and Sussex, south Essex and parts of London – all regions experiencing among the highest temperatures.

High temperatures can threaten patient safety by stopping the ventilation systems used in theatres from working, increasing the risk of infection, experts tell Carbon Brief.

Less than half of the NHS trusts provided details of heat-related surgery cancellations – and Carbon Brief understands that many hospitals do not routinely record this information.

Carbon Brief’s figure is therefore likely to be a significant underestimate, but still provides an unprecedented insight into a surgical system “poorly prepared” for heatwaves and the impact on patients.

Overheating operations

The record-breaking heatwaves that have repeatedly struck the UK in 2026 – amplified by climate change – have already been linked to thousands of deaths. 

High temperatures can lead to all sorts of health complications and worsen respiratory, cardiovascular and kidney diseases. 

Extreme heat also threatens healthcare systems. News outlets have reported on the NHS “struggling”, as it faces record A&E demand, hospital wards reaching “unsafe” temperatures and equipment failing due to heat.

Among these reports was coverage of hospitals being forced to cancel operations, or even abandon them midway through, as surgical theatres became intolerably hot.

To investigate this problem, Carbon Brief sent FOI requests to the 140 NHS trusts and health boards in England and Wales responsible for hospitals with surgical theatres.

They were asked about all the operations that were cancelled due to extreme heat during the May and June heatwaves, when “amber” and “red” heat warnings were in place.

In total, 59 trusts and health boards responded with details of 1,110 heat-related cancellations across the 17-day period covering 22-28 May and 18-27 June.

(Of the 63 trusts that responded but did not provide details of heat-related disruption, many said that they simply did not record this data, rather than stating that heat was not a problem. See Methodology for more details.)

The map below shows the location of these cancelled surgeries, which cover everything from routine hernia operations to heart surgeries.

Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust reported the most cancellations – 140 in total – all in the surgery unit at Crawley Hospital. This hospital was in one of the hottest parts of the country in June, with temperatures approaching 36C.

Other hotspots for cancellations include south Essex, Dudley in the West Midlands, south Wales and parts of London. Many of the hardest-hit hospitals were in southern England, where temperatures were highest. 

Of the trusts that provided full datasets of all surgery cancellations in the period, around 7% were heat-related. This data illustrates how heat is placing more strain on an already stretched NHS, adding to existing issues such as staff shortages and lack of beds.

Nearly all of the cancelled surgeries were “elective”, meaning they were scheduled in advance and not immediately life-saving. Nevertheless, the list of cancellations includes at least eight heart operations and seven skin-cancer removals.

There were also 10 “emergency” operations cancelled due to heat in surgical theatres. Another 18 surgeries had to be abandoned mid-way through.

Dr Dmitri Nepogodiev, a public health researcher focusing on surgery at the University of Birmingham, says hospitals will always prioritise “time-sensitive, life-threatening” surgeries. 

Nevertheless, he tells Carbon Brief that every cancellation can cause significant “distress” and harm to patients’ quality of life, adding:

“Behind all of these statistics…are real people who have probably already been waiting a long time.”

Each dot in the graphic below indicates a cancelled surgery. Of the 596 for which trusts provided details, 167 are orthopaedic surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements.

Eye surgeries, gynaecological and urological surgeries are also among the most frequently cancelled, broadly reflecting how common such procedures are.

Richard Egan, an endocrine surgeon and a national clinical director within NHS Wales, notes the knock-on effects of cancelling surgeries for several days during heatwaves. He tells Carbon Brief:

“That’s a significant impact on waiting lists…For every week that patients are waiting on a waiting list, their condition could get worse and deteriorate.”

‘Increased risks’

When providing specific reasons for cancellations, most NHS trusts simply indicated that surgical theatres were “too hot and humid”. 

Sometimes, this was accompanied by comments about “risk of infection” or “overheating for both patients and staff”.

There are several reasons why it can get “too hot” for operations to take place, but the main one is that the complex ventilation systems installed in theatres can stop working above a certain temperature, explains Dr Ed Robinson, an NHS anaesthetist. He tells Carbon Brief:

“An operating theatre is a very tightly engineered clinical environment. There are quite complicated ventilation systems, which dilute airborne contaminants, remove fumes from different [medications] and anaesthetic gases.

“We have generalised airflow systems that make the air in theatre flow outwards to adjacent areas, so pathogens and fumes get carried away from the patient into non-clinical areas. When it gets to a certain heat, those systems can fail.”

These systems are also responsible for controlling heat and humidity levels inside theatres, says Robinson.

When the systems fail, it is not possible to guarantee patient safety, he continues, meaning surgeries may need to be cancelled.

Although most hospitals simply stated that it was “too hot” for operations to take place during the heatwaves, there were 48 cases where staff specified that this was due to air conditioning or ventilation units that were either broken or unable to sustain appropriate temperatures. 

Tim Lane, a urological surgeon and president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS England), tells Carbon Brief that heat places “extra physical strain” on patients:

“Extreme heat can increase risks and make it harder to deliver care under the conditions clinicians would consider ideal.”

If air in operating theatres is too humid, excess moisture can condense on surgical implements and transmit infections, he says.

Extreme heat and humidity inside theatres can also pose a risk to staff having to wear heavy protective clothing. Robinson explains:

“Staff are usually wearing PPE [personal protective equipment]. If it’s orthopaedics, they will be wearing ‘leads’ a lot of the time. This is because they will be doing lots of X-rays, and there’s no time to descrub and rescrub every time. 

“So if the ventilation system is not working, you’re going to overheat [and] that’s going to affect your ability to concentrate and perform a safe operation. You just wouldn’t start under those conditions.”

There are also “certain pieces of equipment and medications” that are not “validated to be used outside of certain ranges of temperature”, he says.

This includes specialised “cement” used to secure hip and knee replacements, which can set too quickly at higher temperatures, according to Lane.

‘Poorly prepared’

Following the record-breaking heat of 2022, one study found that surgical services in the UK were “poorly prepared for heatwaves”. 

Based on staff surveys, the study concluded that ambient temperatures “could not be controlled” in two-fifths of NHS operating theatres.

With hospitals once again under significant pressure this summer, health secretary Yvette Cooper told the Guardian that the NHS “has to make sure we are preparing for summer pressures now in the same way we prepare for winter”.

Nepogodiev notes that the problem of extreme heat extends from increased patient numbers to staff shortages, which can be the result of a range of wider factors such as heat-related train cancellations. He tells Carbon Brief.

“There isn’t a single magic solution because it’s a kind of complex, multifactorial challenge – so it also underlines the importance of broader preparedness.”

Egan, who is investigating ways to prepare surgical theatres for extreme heat, says the response so far has been “ad hoc”. He suggests it may be possible to continue with less risky operations, even at higher humidity levels.

As it stands, many NHS hospitals are old and not designed for increasingly extreme temperatures.

Government advisers at the Climate Change Committee (CCC) have recommended that all healthcare buildings should work to “maintain safe and appropriate temperatures” by 2035.

The UK’s national adaptation programme already says NHS England will work to “adapt NHS infrastructure to extreme weather events and overheating risks”, by incorporating adaptation measures into plans for new buildings. 

However, years of underinvestment have left many sites with what the King’s Fund thinktank calls “deteriorating buildings” and “outdated technology”.

Following the extreme heat this summer, the government has announced £32m from a £1.5bn spending programme for projects that strengthen hospitals’ “resilience to extreme heat, including improved “cooling and ventilation systems”.

RCS England president Lane tells Carbon Brief that heat-related surgical cancellations underline the need for investment in hospitals, ventilation systems and modern equipment:

“NHS staff work incredibly hard to adapt, often reorganising services and finding practical solutions to keep care running, but resilience alone cannot compensate indefinitely for outdated infrastructure or sustainability.”

Methodology

Carbon Brief contacted 140 NHS trusts and health boards in England and Wales, only including those that perform surgical procedures. Mental health trusts, community trusts and other specialist trusts were therefore excluded.

These requests covered the periods 22-28 May 2026 and 18-27 June 2026, when heatwaves affected much of England and Wales. 

At the time of filing the FOIs, these were the two periods when the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) had issued “amber” or “red” heat-health alerts across much or all of England. There were also comparable weather warnings in place across Wales for some of this time.

(Scotland and Northern Ireland were excluded from the analysis, on the basis that they did not experience such extreme heat.)

The FOI requests asked for details of all surgical procedures – both elective and emergency – that were cancelled during this period. Specifically, the requests also asked trusts to state which cancellations were related to extreme heat. Of these, 59 provided details of surgeries that were cancelled due to heat. 

Of the remaining 63 that responded to the FOI requests, only a few stated explicitly that there were no surgeries cancelled due to heat. Most either said that they did not record this information, or provided lists with standard cancellation reasons that may – or may not – indicate heat as a factor, such as “failure of equipment”. The remaining 19 did not respond to the request by the time of publication.

NHS trusts and health boards responded to Carbon Brief’s FOI requests in a large variety of ways, reflecting the inconsistent way in which heat-related cancellations are recorded.

Among those that disclosed data, some provided all the information requested while others only provided parts. Some would not provide exact numbers when the number of cancellations was five or less. In those cases, Carbon Brief assumed that two surgeries had been cancelled. (This assumption accounts for fewer than 50 of the 1,110 cancellations.)

The full dataset is available here, with details of all the surgeries cancelled and the reasons given for their cancellations.

related Factcheck: Reform UK’s 45 false or misleading claims about climate and energy 11.09.2026 UK policy UK aviation emissions to be 50% higher than thought by 2050, government admits 10.09.2026 Aviation and shipping Analysis: UK solar power hits record high over summer 2026 04.09.2026 Renewables How this summer’s heat and drought impacted crops in Europe – in six charts 04.09.2026 Food and farming

The post Revealed: More than 1,000 NHS operations cancelled due to record UK heatwaves appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Open access notables

Early warning signals for tipping points in complex climate systems, LIU et al., Advances in Climate Change Research

The growing risk of climate tipping events underscores the urgent need for reliable early warning signals (EWS). Here we synthesize recent advances in EWS research for climate systems, systematically categorizing available methods into three groups, namely statistical indicators, nonlinear dynamical diagnostics, and data-driven approaches, and evaluating their theoretical applicability to practical limitations. In conclusion, statistical indicators offer theoretical clarity but are sensitive to non-stationary noise, nonlinear dynamical methods provide enhanced robustness in high-dimensional settings, and network- and deep learning-based approaches show the potential for detecting diverse tipping types, particularly when integrated with physical constraints and multi-modal observations. Given these trade-offs, we advocate for three practical strategies to enhance EWS utility, including adopting ensemble frameworks that combine multiple indicators to reduce false alarms, advancing cascade EWS to capture cross-system tipping interactions, and shifting from qualitative trend warnings toward quantitative, threshold-defined predictions with quantifiable uncertainties. We also discuss supporting techniques for these strategies, including adaptive noise filtering, dimensionality reduction, satellite data integration, and physics-informed machine learning. This review provides a structured reference for method selection across climate subsystems and data regimes, and underscores that operational EWS will require sustained integration of nonlinear dynamics, Earth observation, and data science.

Countering climate misinformation with large language models: Evidence from ChatGPT, Tsang & Wang, PLOS Climate

Public support for climate action hinges on the integrity of information environments. In an online experiment, U.S. adults used ChatGPT to evaluate climate-related claims. We first conducted computational text analysis of GPT conversation logs, assessing valence, formality, bias, recency, authority cues, and semantic richness of ChatGPT’s responses using language-model based classifiers and link-level metadata. Concurrently, we measured credibility judgments for both the claims and ChatGPT’s responses through participant self-reports. Credibility perceptions were driven primarily by individual differences; greater acceptance of the scientific consensus, attention to climate change, prior familiarity with ChatGPT, and younger age predicted higher perceived credibility. Once these factors were accounted for, authority cues were associated with slightly less extreme climate attitudes, while positive valence and semantic richness correlated positively with perceived credibility. These results support transparent, unbiased, audience-tailored engagement as a pathway to strengthen responsible climate communication and help bridge the gap between scientific consensus and public understanding.

Lost in Projection: Uncertainty is Misrepresented in Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessments, Curran et al., Risk Analysis

In practice, many climate change risk assessments fail to capture the true depth of uncertainty. Despite widespread scientific recognition of deep uncertainty (large ranges of possibility) in climate conditions, this nuance is often lost in translation to policy and planning contexts; instead, conditions are presented as single projections. This means that communities are making large-scale infrastructure investments and long-term policy commitments based on false precision, leaving them unprepared for climate surprises or potentially wasting resources and disrupting communities unnecessarily by overadapting. To examine how climate uncertainties are represented and accounted for in adaptation planning, we conducted a structured review of 39 climate risk and vulnerability assessments from across the world, using sea level rise as a case study. These documents inform policy that guides billions of dollars in infrastructure investments and shape community preparedness strategies. Our analysis reveals that only 54% of these documents correctly represent sea level rise as deeply uncertain. This issue is compounded when making decisions; 71% of decisions were made by misapplying scenarios as individual projections to plan for, rather than as a tool for exploring potential future conditions, directly contradicting their intended use. This demonstrates a gap between scientific understanding of climate uncertainty and planning practice. Addressing this gap requires improved uncertainty communication, moving beyond just quantifying uncertainty to also characterizing uncertainty. This must be done in conjunction with the support of decision makers to incorporate a stronger understanding of uncertainty into planning by using tools designed specifically for decision making in deeply uncertain environments.

From this week's government/NGO section:

How Climate Resilient Are the World’s Largest Cities?, AlphaGeo

Geography is not destiny. Cities with near-identical physical risk scores diverge by as much as 33 resilience-adjusted risk (RAJ) points depending on the adaptation measures in place — demonstrating that risk is not fixed, and that resilience is a function of policy and investment, not geography alone. South Asian megacities face a compounding crisis. Ahmedabad (RAJ 41), Hyderabad Pakistan (41), Multan (38), Dhaka (36), Kolkata (35), and Lahore (35) combine extreme physical exposure with only moderate adaptation performance. European, African, and Latin American capitals outperform. Chicago, Addis Ababa, Melbourne, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Nairobi all score below 14 on the RAJ scale, making them among the most resilient major cities globally. Chinese megacities are closing the gap. Beijing (50%), Tianjin (49%), Shenzhen (49%), and Shanghai (46%) lead globally on adaptation efficiency — consistently converting high physical exposure into substantially lower residual risk. Mispriced risk is concentrated in South Asia. South Asia accounts for the majority of cities where residual RAJ scores remain high and adaptation rates remain comparatively low relative to the scale of physical exposure.

Heathrow Airport expansion risks for the Climate Change Act, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester

The authors examine whether a third runway at Heathrow Airport is compatible with the UK’s domestic and international legal climate change obligations, and shows how growing airport capacity before climate technologies succeed will break the UK’s carbon budget. Through an analysis of future UK aviation scenarios and reviewing the status and outlook for key technology options, the authors findings show that Heathrow expansion cannot reasonably be considered consistent with UK Government climate targets. The authors examine three questions including the level of demand implied by an expanded Heathrow Airport; whether sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) can mitigate emissions arising from any net additional demand; and if greenhouse gas removal (GGR) expansion can address remaining additional residual emissions. This assessment is within the context of the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget, which is a legally binding limit on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the period when the third runway is proposed to start operating. 92 articles in 50 journals by 638 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Anthropogenic forcing dominates relentless westward extension of the western North Pacific subtropical high, An et al., Atmospheric Research Open Access 10.1016/j.atmosres.2026.109301

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Transient overturning changes cause an upper-ocean nutrient decline in a warming climate, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52200-0 13 cites.

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Observations of climate change, effects

Changes in Compound Heat-Humidity over China: Insights from Homogenized Data, DENG et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.accre.2026.08.017

Long-term temperature, oxygen and water clarity trends in Swiss lakes, Bärenbold et al., Earth system science data Open Access pdf 10.5194/essd-18-6527-2026

Recent intensification of extreme precipitation over East Antarctica driven by increases in greenhouse gases and stratospheric ozone, Chittella et al., cryosphere Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-20-5005-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Indian Ocean Acidification and Its Driving Mechanisms Over the Last Four Decades (1980–2019), Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 10.1029/2024gb008139 21 cites.

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Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

Advanced Visualization Techniques for Insight in Clouds and Climate Research, Sullivan et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Open Access pdf 10.1175/bams-d-25-0055.1

An AI-driven reconstruction of global surface temperature with emphasis on refining the Antarctic record, Ouyang et al., Earth system science data Open Access 10.5194/essd-18-6503-2026

Early warning signals for tipping points in complex climate systems, LIU et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.09.002

Shallow Antarctic blue ice shows photochemical influence on trapped greenhouse gases, Lee et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-026-03923-z

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
What is a heat wave: A survey and literature synthesis of heat wave definitions across the United States, PLOS Climate, 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000468 18 cites.

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Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

Downscaling and Trend Projection of Lightning Associated with Forest Lightning-Ignited Fires under Climate Change, Song et al., Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 10.1016/j.jastp.2026.106967

Global cities under multiple climate hazards, Nogherotto et al., Urban Climate Open Access 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103132

Revealing Enhanced Signals of Future Marine Heatwave Changes in the East/Japan Sea Through a High-Resolution Dynamical Downscaling Ensemble, Oh et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2025ef007760

The Source of Arctic Precipitation in HadGEM3-GC5, Ridley et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026jd046751

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Strong regional trends in extreme weather over the next two decades under high- and low-emissions pathways, Nature Geoscience, 10.1038/s41561-024-01511-4 52 cites.

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Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

Diagnosing CESM2 Biases in Northwest Indian Ocean Warming and Its Implications for India Summer Monsoon Precipitation, Chen et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl123060

Evaluating Deep Learning Models for Streamflow Prediction Under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 Climate Scenarios, Piri et al., Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 10.1016/j.jastp.2026.106972

Global Kilometer-Scale Simulations with ARP-GEM2: Effect of Parameterized Convection and Calibration, Geoffroy & Saint-Martin, Journal of Climate pdf 10.1175/jcli-d-25-0650.1

Spurious Drifts in the ITCZ Location and Associated Atmospheric Circulation in Decadal Climate Predictions, Mahmood et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl124719

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Artificial intelligence for climate prediction of extremes: State of the art, challenges, and future perspectives, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change, 10.1002/wcc.914 113 cites.

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Cryosphere & climate change

Attribution of the Spread in Antarctic Sea Ice-Driven Water Mass Transformation in Coupled Climate Models, Chen et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026jc024388

Glaciers of Ecuador: a review of current scientific knowledge, Avila & Campos, Earth-Science Reviews Open Access 10.1016/j.earscirev.2026.105680

Permafrost Degradation Drives Shifts in Chemostasis and Stream Geochemistry in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, Wright et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl125327

Refreezing variability in the Greenland Ice Sheet firn zone and its response to extreme melt events, CHEN et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.accre.2026.08.015

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:

Evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Over the Next Three Centuries From an ISMIP6 Model Ensemble, Earth s Future, 10.1029/2024ef004561 73 cites.

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Sea level & climate change

An improvement to short term variability in Global Mean Sea Level reconstruction, Shaw et al., Ocean science Open Access pdf 10.5194/os-22-2673-2026

Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry

Global and regional climate change impacted Paleogene mammal faunas in Central Asia, Benevento et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-77374-7

Paleogeographic controls on Phanerozoic weathering rates and implications for climate regulation, Graham et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77289-3

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Opposing Changes in Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall Variability Produced by Orbital and Anthropogenic Forcing, Geophysical Research Letters, 10.1029/2024gl109897 8 cites.

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Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Aggravated forest fragmentation undermines productivity spatial stability and amplifies climate impact, Huang et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111455

An Integrated Oceanographic and Physiological Framework for Identifying Climate Refugia for Marine Invertebrates, Provost et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71091

Climate and Ecosystem Impacts of a Weakened Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in Brazil, Komarov et al., Earth Interactions Open Access 10.1175/ei-d-25-0050.1

Ecosystem response of an anthropogenically impacted lagoon to induced climate-driven water stagnation: an enclosure experiment, Burini et al., Marine Environmental Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108393

Habitat Selection and Intrapopulation Spatial Segregation in an Arctic Top Predator at the Southern Limit of Its Range, Ross et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.71024

Invertebrates at the Land-Sea Interface in a Climate Change World: Heatwaves, Floods, Fire and Ice, Byrne & Ross, Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.71096

Mapping the Global Habitat Redistribution of Critically Endangered Commercial Fish Species Under Climate Change, Gong et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71077

Modeling climate adaptive habitat connectivity for conservation planning in Colombia, Song et al., Ecography Open Access 10.1002/ecog.08789

Modelling Climate-Resilient Habitats for Conservation and Restoration of Isoberlinia doka Craib and Stapf and Isoberlinia tomentosa (Harms) Craib and Stapf in Benin, Adjahossou et al., Climate Resilience and Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1002/cli2.70062

Nonuniform resizing of marine life under climate change, Trindade-Santos et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2606099123

Parrotfish demonstrate little behavioural shift during marine heatwaves, Golanski et al., Biology Letters Open Access 10.1098/rsbl.2026.0337

Phenological fluctuations induce seasonal asymmetric warming in boreal forests, Yan et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77464-6

Plant dominated ecosystem respiration of alpine meadow in permafrost region under experimental warming, Qin et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.09.003

Predicted Global Redistribution of Pyrophilous Beetle Melanophila acuminata (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) Under Climate Change, Wang et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access 10.1002/ece3.74317

Projected AMOC Weakening Controls Future Diatom Decline in the Subpolar North Atlantic Ocean, Doléac et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2025ef007992

Virulent Parasites Emerge in Hosts With Rising Temperatures, Hector et al., Global Change Biology Open Access 10.1111/gcb.71082

With Knowledge Comes Responsibility: Increasing Conservation Scientists’ Impact in a Time of Global Crises, Martin et al., Conservation Letters Open Access pdf 10.1111/con4.70076

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Global change and premature hatching of aquatic embryos, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17488 22 cites.

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GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

Atmospheric CH4 plateau sustained by NOx emission rise and southward shift, Zhu et al., Nature 10.1038/s41586-026-10983-w

C-PEAT’s Global Peatland Carbon Database (v.2025), Loisel et al., Earth system science data Open Access pdf 10.5194/essd-18-6485-2026

Coordinated satellite, aircraft, and ground-based observations of a large transient methane release, He et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access pdf 10.1073/pnas.2603595123

Drivers of northern peatland CO2 fluxes revisited: interacting water level-temperature dependency, Behrens et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77456-6

Engineering carbon emissions induced by permafrost degradation and mitigation strategy: Insights from the Qinghai–Tibet Highway, LAN et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.09.005

Enhanced carbon loss in the Southern Ocean under mitigation scenarios, Lee et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aee9228

Global ecosystem carbon losses from earthquakes, He et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-04012-x

Greenhouse Gas and Climate Effects of Global Wetland Restoration Under Future Warming, Wagner et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026ef008632

Significant Decline in Carbon Storage at the Edges of Mangrove Forest, Zhao et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026ef008723

Significant Reduction in Ethane Emissions in the Denver-Julesburg Basin From 2015 to 2021 From Oil and Natural Gas Operations, Ngulat et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres Open Access pdf 10.1029/2025jd044690

Temporal Amplification of Microbial Necromass Contribution to Soil Organic Carbon Under Nutrient Addition, Zhang et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles 10.1029/2026gb009455

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Global riverine land-to-ocean carbon export constrained by observations and multi-model assessment, Nature Geoscience, 10.1038/s41561-024-01524-z 93 cites.

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CO2 capture, sequestration science & engineering

Asymmetric Response of Land Precipitation Variability Under Carbon Dioxide Removal, Gan et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd047086

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Enhancing electrochemical carbon dioxide capture with supercapacitors, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52219-3 61 cites.

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Decarbonization

Building a scalable climate coalition for heavy industry, Wolfram et al., Science 10.1126/science.aef7190

Copper supply chain decarbonization for the energy transition must maximize copper recovery, Cox et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03977-z

Toward efficient green methanol from biomass and renewable power, Zhao et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77364-9

Towards a zero-waste city: carbon emissions and reduction potential from solid waste management in Wuhan, Tian et al., Figshare Open Access 10.6084/m9.figshare.33465965

Utilising urban energy structure as a carbon management strategy for carbon emissions mitigation and climate neutrality, Sun & Tang, Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-68670-9

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Permeability partitioning through the brittle-to-ductile transition and its implications for supercritical geothermal reservoirs, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52092-0 28 cites.

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Black carbon

Atmospheric deposition, aquatic transformation and marine carbon sequestration potential of black carbon: A critical review, Wu et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108384

Increase in global warming potential of atmospheric black carbon since 1750, Shen et al., Nature Geoscience 10.1038/s41561-026-02085-z

Aerosols

Direct Radiative Impacts of Stratospheric Aerosols on the Tropical Troposphere: Clouds, Precipitation, and Circulation in Convection-Resolving and Global Simulations, McGraw & Polvani, Journal of Climate 10.1175/jcli-d-25-0688.1

Potential aerosol tradeoffs of vessel speed reduction for fresh ship plume composition and tracer coverage, Shi et al., npj Climate and Atmospheric Science Open Access 10.1038/s41612-026-01532-3

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Surface albedo regulates aerosol direct climate effect, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-52255-z 27 cites.

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Climate change communications & cognition

Countering climate misinformation with large language models: Evidence from ChatGPT, Tsang & Wang, PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000930

Moralizing reproduction in a warming world: rethinking climate-reproductive concern beyond WEIRD contexts, Tu et al., Environmental Sociology 10.1080/23251042.2026.2729092

Unsupervised NLP for quantifying sentiment deviation and framing in global climate discourse, K et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1827024

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Tackling the academic air travel dependency. An analysis of the (in)consistency between academics’ travel behaviour and their attitudes, Global Environmental Change, 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102908 27 cites.

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Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

A biological carbon pump code of practice for high seas fisheries, Cavan et al., Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 10.1038/s43017-026-00825-8

Collaborative learning networks on climate change adaptation practices among smallholder farmers: A case study from Central Uganda, Kekirunga et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100879

Genetically engineered crop adoption support yields and cultivation under climate change, Dong et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02737-3

Hail Risk and Cropland Exposure Changes in the United States, Bundy et al., Weather Climate and Society 10.1175/wcas-d-25-0160.1

Mapping the Global Habitat Redistribution of Critically Endangered Commercial Fish Species Under Climate Change, Gong et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71077

No significant long-term enhancement of sedimentary carbon burial by intensive Porphyra farming: Evidence from Haizhou Bay, China, Chen et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108396

Spatiotemporal evolution and influencing factors of the agricultural carbon footprint in the yellow river basin, Zhou & Pan, Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1793645

The OsUVR8-OsNAC3-OsERF117 signaling module mediates metabolic acclimation and climate adaptation in rice, Liu et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aef5945

Transitioning From Rice-Wheat to Diversified Rice-Based Rotations Enhances Rice Production and Mitigates Greenhouse Gas Emissions Across Asia, Wang et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026ef008580

‘We always make it work’: How Swedish dairy farmers manage and prepare for an unknown future of extreme weather, Simonsson et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100881

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change exacerbates the environmental impacts of agriculture, Science, 10.1126/science.adn3747 515 cites.

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Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Contrasting roles of climate change and land-use change on runoff dynamics in a semi-humid monsoon watershed of China, Afzal et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-67812-3

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Evaluation of precipitation extremes in ERA5 reanalysis driven regional climate simulations over the CORDEX-Australasia domain, Weather and Climate Extremes, 10.1016/j.wace.2024.100676 17 cites.

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Climate change economics
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The role of green financial sector initiatives in the low-carbon transition: A theory of change, Global Environmental Change, 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102915 29 cites.

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Climate change mitigation public policy research

Benchmarking climate futures: the public authorization of climate pathways and its political afterlives, Park, Environmental Sociology 10.1080/23251042.2026.2729097

Crediting temporarily bound carbon reduces emissions and costs in integrated production of EU refineries, Bussmann et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03891-4

Stringent climate policies and energy poverty: Evidence of spatial spillovers and challenges for a just transition, Bai & Huaccha, Energy Policy Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115590

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The impact of electricity market reform on renewable energy production, Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2024.114306 35 cites.

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Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

Applying design thinking for innovative climate adaptation solutions: Building capacity for locally led adaptation, Ziervogel et al., Environmental Science & Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104481

Assessing Wildfire Hazard for Powerline Expansion Under the Changing Climates in Alberta, Canada, Zong et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl124354

Climate vulnerability and the subnational distribution of adaptation funding, Alberola, Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104488

Geospatial assessment of tropical islands vulnerability and impact under extreme cyclonic conditions, mitigation and management for climate-resilient planning, Raja et al., Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103134

Limits and barriers to climate adaptation among Indigenous women: Insights from Vedda communities in Sri Lanka, Garbutt et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104478

Lost in Projection: Uncertainty is Misrepresented in Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessments, Curran et al., Risk Analysis Open Access pdf 10.1111/risa.70331

Ten critical questions for scaling up floating developments, MacAfee et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-77492-2

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
What is limiting how we imagine climate change adaptation?, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101476 43 cites.

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Climate change impacts on human health

Health impacts of climate change on children and adolescents: an umbrella review, Yahaya et al., BMC Public Health Open Access 10.1186/s12889-026-29270-4

Metabolic response and microbial assembly in the invader Ageratina adenophora with contrasting growth under local plant leaf and soil inoculants, Zhao et al., Plant and Soil 10.1007/s11104-026-09027-z

Mortality risks of seasonal temperature anomalies and the unrecognized risk of winter warmth: a nationwide case-time series, Ham et al., Scientific Reports Open Access 10.1038/s41598-026-71032-0

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Spatio-temporal characteristics of Heat stress over Nigeria using evaluated ERA5-HEAT reanalysis data, Weather and Climate Extremes, 10.1016/j.wace.2024.100704 24 cites.

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Climate change & geopolitics

Climate and digital transitions in a changing global order: resource dependencies, connectivity and uneven development, Meraj et al., Climate and Development 10.1080/17565529.2026.2726446

Climate change impacts on human culture

Climate extremes are associated with crime dynamics in China, Lin et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03948-4

Community-based archaeology reinforces Indigenous cultural resilience to climate change in Alaska, Hillerdal, Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03970-6

Other

Investigation of the failure mechanism and reinforcement control effect of cut slopes under climate change, Meng, Frontiers in Earth Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/feart.2026.1896698

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The 2023 Atlantic Hurricane Season: An Above-Normal Season despite Strong El Niño Conditions, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 10.1175/bams-d-23-0305.1 15 cites.

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Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

The Anthropocene debate, Chernilo, European Journal of Social Theory 10.1177/1368431016651874

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Disaster effects of climate change in High Mountain Asia: State of art and scientific challenges, Advances in Climate Change Research, 10.1016/j.accre.2024.06.003 75 cites.

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Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

2025 Electricity ATB Technologies and Data Overview, National Renewable Energy Lab

The 2025 Electricity Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) provides consistent, freely available, technology-specific cost and performance parameters across a range of research and development (R&D) advancement scenarios, resource characteristics, and sites for electricity-generating technologies, both at present and with projections through 2060. Two sets of financial assumptions are available: The With Tax Credits Case includes some effects of tax credits enacted as of July 2025, and the Without Tax Credits Case (shown by default in the figures) does not. The performance parameters in the Electricity ATB include Capital expenditures (CAPEX), Operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures, and Capacity factors.

Heat Pump Rates in Rhode Island, Zuo et al., Conservation Law Foundation, Green Energy Consumers Alliance, Acadia Center, and Environmental Defense Fund

The authors analyze the electric bills of heat pump customers served by Rhode Island Energy (RIE). Under today’s rates, most gas-heated homes would pay more after switching to heat pumps. Only 21% of natural gas-heated households would save on their annual energy bills after installing a heat pump — not because heat pumps are inherently expensive to run, but because electricity bills are inflated by RIE's outdated delivery rates. The grid can handle the additional winter load. RIE should create a dedicated delivery rate class for heat pump customers that reflects what these customers actually cost the system — rather than letting default volumetric rates collect far more than the cost of serving them.

A Livable Future: Protecting Jobs and Growth from Extreme Heat in South Asia's Cities, Jain et al., International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, The World Bank Group

South Asia must absorb roughly 280 million new working-age people by 2050, most of them in cities, at a time when its labor markets already struggle to keep pace. Extreme heat is widening that shortfall. It already subtracts the equivalent of 31 million full-time jobs a year across the region and erodes the earnings of those who keep working. The losses concentrate in the cities where the new workforce must find employment, and they fall hardest on the households least able to absorb them. Heat reduces productivity in existing work, discourages the investment that will create new jobs, and shifts labor demand towards cooling and heat-resilient industries. Managing it has become integral to the region’s growth and jobs agenda, and governments can begin now, through institutions and budgets already in place. The authors set out how: heat and South Asia’s jobs challenge; the costs of inaction are large and growing; what needs to happen: three pillars, 15 interventions; what each decision-maker can do now; and the decade ahead.

Heathrow Airport expansion risks for the Climate Change Act, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester

The authors examine whether a third runway at Heathrow Airport is compatible with the UK’s domestic and international legal climate change obligations, and shows how growing airport capacity before climate technologies succeed will break the UK’s carbon budget. Through an analysis of future UK aviation scenarios and reviewing the status and outlook for key technology options, the authors findings show that Heathrow expansion cannot reasonably be considered consistent with UK Government climate targets. The authors examine three questions including the level of demand implied by an expanded Heathrow Airport; whether sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) can mitigate emissions arising from any net additional demand; and if greenhouse gas removal (GGR) expansion can address remaining additional residual emissions. This assessment is within the context of the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget, which is a legally binding limit on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the period when the third runway is proposed to start operating.

The Colorado River Water Supply Crisis in a Few Graphs: Part 2, Agricultural Water Use in the Lower Basin, Schmidt et al., Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School

Reductions in Lower Basin water use during the last four years, including forecast use in 2026, are similar to the initial targets for Lower Basin shortages described in the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead (FEIS) and the accompanying Record of Decision (ROD). Lower Basin consumptive use in 2023, 2024, and 2025, and forecast for 2026 has been the smallest for the entire 2010-2026 period. These four years of smallest use are between 1.4 and 1.7 million acre feet/year (maf/yr) less than the 7.50 maf/yr amount generally recognized as the Lower Basin’s mainstem allocation. Reductions in Lower Basin use have been achieved by large reductions implemented by Central Arizona Project (CAP) contractors and subcontractors, the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), and non-CAP water users in Arizona. The reductions in use in the IID have been in summer water use and have not affected consumptive use in winter when garden crops, such as lettuce, onions, carrots, and broccoli, are grown.

Employing Domain-Informed AI for Energy Planning and Decarbonization under Uncertainty, Obringer et al., Institute for Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University

Renewable energy is a critical part of climate change mitigation but is also more susceptible to adverse climate conditions than fossil fuel-based energy generation. The electricity grid is further stressed by growing demand and the expansion of power-intensive end-uses, e.g., data centers and EVs, whose growth trajectory already exceeds the anticipated capacity expansion needs. Current long-term planning of electric grid upgrades and expansion generally relies on historical weather and climate trends that are unlikely to remain stable in the coming decades. In the past, the complexity of large-scale climate downscaling has inhibited deeper integration of climate projections and energy planning models. Failing to integrate climate projections exposes public infrastructure to severe physical and fiscal risk. Domain-informed AI can be used as a complement to existing tools to provide forward-looking information on the effects of climate change on renewable energy integration, informing decarbonization policies. Unregulated AI data centers consume massive amounts of electricity, directly straining the grid. Policymakers should mandate that this computational infrastructure of AI operates primarily on verifiable renewable energy.

Opposition to Renewable Energy Facilities in the United States: September 2026 Edition, Romany Webb and Ivonne Norman, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University

The authors document legal obstacles and challenges to renewable energy siting at the state- and local-levels in the United States. In particular, the the authors focus on: (a) state laws and local ordinances that impede the siting of utility-scale solar, wind, battery storage, and related transmission projects, referred to as “state and local restrictions”; and (b) instances of organized opposition to individual projects, referred to as “contested projects”.

Peat-Emit. Supporting developing economies to estimate and report greenhouse gas emissions from organic soils, Freeman et al., Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Accurate estimates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from organic soils are essential for effective climate reporting and mitigation, yet developing countries often lack region-specific data to support reliable estimates. The authors address that gap by reviewing and synthesizing the latest available evidence on emissions from organic soils to develop updated greenhouse gas emission factors (EFs) tailored to developing economies. The authors focus on terrestrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO?), methane (CH?), and nitrous oxide (N?O), and also evaluate emissions from tropical peatland fires, including fuel consumption and combustion completeness. Developing regions included are East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa, where existing emission factors have been limited or insufficiently representative. Although aquatic emission pathways were reviewed, they were not updated because new robust data is still lacking. These updated factors will improve the accuracy of national greenhouse gas inventories and support countries in meeting their reporting obligations and advancing climate mitigation efforts under international frameworks.

How Climate Resilient Are the World’s Largest Cities?, AlphaGeo

Geography is not destiny. Cities with near-identical physical risk scores diverge by as much as 33 resilience-adjusted risk (RAJ) points depending on the adaptation measures in place — demonstrating that risk is not fixed, and that resilience is a function of policy and investment, not geography alone. South Asian megacities face a compounding crisis. Ahmedabad (RAJ 41), Hyderabad Pakistan (41), Multan (38), Dhaka (36), Kolkata (35), and Lahore (35) combine extreme physical exposure with only moderate adaptation performance. European, African, and Latin American capitals outperform. Chicago, Addis Ababa, Melbourne, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Nairobi all score below 14 on the RAJ scale, making them among the most resilient major cities globally. Chinese megacities are closing the gap. Beijing (50%), Tianjin (49%), Shenzhen (49%), and Shanghai (46%) lead globally on adaptation efficiency — consistently converting high physical exposure into substantially lower residual risk. Mispriced risk is concentrated in South Asia. South Asia accounts for the majority of cities where residual RAJ scores remain high and adaptation rates remain comparatively low relative to the scale of physical exposure.

WMO Air Quality and Climate Bulleting, World Meteorological Organization

The authors highlight the need for improved atmospheric observations of air pollutants such as fine particulate matter, and ground-level ozone, as well as aerosol like black carbon and microplastics, which are not sufficiently monitored even though they are widespread and are potentially harmful to ecosystems. They stress the importance of complementary and coordinated policies on air quality and climate because they cannot be dealt with in isolation.

Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster, Jennie King, Council on Strategic Risks

Extreme weather events are fueling dangerous mis- and disinformation in communities across the United States. These crises can happen anywhere, as hyper-local events are weaponized by domestic or transnational actors. The resulting chaos endangers lives and hinders local responses during a crisis, and has corrosive effects on policymaking and community resilience in the long term. It also threatens to undermine national security by disrupting critical infrastructure, empowering extremists and foreign adversaries, and paralyzing decision-making. The toolkit positions information resilience as a key element of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. It provides a model that combines upstream efforts to build readiness and trust architecture, with frameworks to triage and counter information threats when a crisis strikes. It is designed primarily for emergency managers, resilience officers, and public information officers. In tandem, it details how a more expansive set of actors is needed to realize and embed outcomes, working across government at the state, local, and tribal levels.

Assessing overcapacity risk in India’s solar PV manufacturing market, Sharma et al., The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis

India’s solar PV module manufacturing capacity reached approximately 233 gigawatts (GW) by June 2026, placing it among the world’s largest module manufacturing bases. However, this capacity is heavily concentrated in modules, at nearly 7x cell capacity and 116x ingot-wafer capacity, signaling a structural gap in upstream manufacturing. India’s module manufacturing base is operating at 35–40% utilization, well below the 50–65% level required for sustainable operations. With manufacturing capacity already exceeding domestic demand, further capacity additions risk widening the supply-demand gap in modules. Data centers, green hydrogen, and export markets could be the largest sources of incremental module demand by 2030, offering 17–22GW of annual additional opportunity beyond conventional solar deployment. Their ability to scale up will depend on supportive policy, project execution, and evolving procurement dynamics. Vertically integrated manufacturers with scale and technology depth are positioned to define the industry’s next growth phase. Small-scale assemblers, legacy Passive Emitter and Rear Cell (PERC)-based lines, and manufacturers without an upstream integration roadmap will be at risk of consolidation, acquisitions, or exit.

Built for backup, contracted to run: China’s coal support system risks crowding out clean power, Qi Qin and Christine Shearer, Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air

New coal power plants entering operation in China reached the highest first-half year level since 2016, with 10 GW entering operation for every 1 GW retired, despite a policy shift towards tighter control of new project approvals. China commissioned 30 GW of new coal power, up 43% from last year, while retiring only 2.7 GW. Another 25.4 GW started construction. Coal power generation rebounded 3.4% year-on-year in H1 2026, reversing the 2025 decline. The rapid expansion of coal power capacity led to worsening oversupply, reflected both in the increase of wasted wind and solar generation and in falling use of coal power plants. The rebound was not evidence of a broad return to coal following LNG shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. China’s combined domestic coal production and imports in fact fell by 1.4% year-on-year in H1 2026, rather than expanding in response to the external energy shock. Growth in clean energy supply and electrification helped offset the fall in oil supply and limit increases in fossil fuel consumption.

Challenges related to sea level rise and ways and approaches to address it : report of the Secretary-General, General Assembly of the United Nations

The authors provide an assessment of the current context of sea level rise, key challenges and ongoing efforts by Member States and the United Nations system to address such challenges. The author provide forward-looking recommendations recognizing the global multidimensional effects of sea level rise and their implications for human rights and sustainable development. The authors call for strengthened international cooperation to ensure equitable, just and sustainable solutions that uphold the rights of affected States and their populations, through international governance frameworks and action that safeguard dignity, stability and opportunities for those affected and future generations.

Hidden assets: The economic and health case for climate and clean air action, Climate and Clean Air Coalition, United Nations Environment Programme

The authors provide the most complete assessment to date of the benefits and costs of integrated climate and clean air action, complemented by an empirically grounded analysis of how these benefits can be delivered quickly enough to avoid premature deaths and disease and improve the lives of many of the world’s most vulnerable people.

EV Transition Check 2026: Measuring progress toward zero emissions for road transport in Europe, Marie Rajon Bernard and Alexander Plummer, International Council on Clean Transportation

The authors assess the progress of Europe’s road transport toward zero emissions. This second edition widens the scope to include trucks and buses in addition to passenger cars. The authors provide a broad range of data and analysis for a comprehensive snapshot of the current status of the transition to battery electric vehicles (BEV). In terms of the affordability and accessibility of BEVs, the number of passenger car BEV models on offer in Europe’s largest automotive market, Germany, has quadrupled between 2020 and 2025 to about 160, and affordable options, defined as BEVs priced below €30,000, have grown to about 35. BEVs in the three largest car segments (medium, upper-medium, and luxury) have already reached upfront cost parity with comparable internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). Although the median BEV sales price has increased in recent years, so has the electric range by approximately 30% on average in the past 5 years. Factoring in improvements in performance as well as inflation, BEV prices have decreased by about 18% over the past 5 years, spurred primarily by a decrease in global battery prices, which, adjusted for inflation, have fallen by about 35% in the past 5 years. The delta between battery cost reductions and BEV sale prices indicates further potential for BEV price reductions in the upcoming years. About New Research

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Extreme heat is one of the deadliest climate hazards, but no two heatwaves are the same.

Heat extremes that happen outside of the peak summer months are often more dangerous because they can catch people off guard.

Heatwaves that hit during the spring or the first heatwave of the summer are riskier because  people’s bodies are not yet accustomed to the heat and cooling strategies, such as air conditioning or public cooling centres, might not be available.

On the other hand, heatwaves that happen in the autumn, after a long summer season of heat exposure, can place further strain on bodies and local infrastructure that are already under stress.

As the climate changes and global temperatures rise, research has shown that heatwaves are becoming more frequent, intense and lengthy. 

Our study, published in AGU Advances, is the first to measure whether the timing of extreme heat during the calendar year is changing around the world.

We find that, in more than half of the world, extreme heat events are spreading into the “shoulder seasons”, but doing so unevenly – in other words, they tend to creep more into autumn or spring, depending on the location. 

Defining heat seasons 

Meteorological summer is often assumed to be the warmest three-month period of the year. It is simplistically defined as June to August in the northern hemisphere and December to February in the southern hemisphere.

However, extreme heat seasons vary from place to place and do not always neatly map on to these defined periods. 

Our study, therefore, goes beyond traditional definitions of seasons and instead focuses on “local heat seasons”. We define these as the three consecutive months when extreme heat events happened most often in the 1980s. 

From this starting point, our research looks at how extreme heat is creeping into the two-month periods before and after a local heat season. We call these periods “shoulder seasons”.

This flexible definition of heat and shoulder seasons allows us to measure how the timing of extreme heat has changed over time. 

Specifically, we look at the percent of annual heat days that occurred in the heat season and shoulder seasons at each location on Earth and measure how those relative shares have shifted over the last 45 years.

For our analysis, we use climate data from 1980-2024 from the MERRA2 reanalysis dataset. To ensure our results were robust, we repeated the process using ERA5 reanalysis data. 

We picked the 1980s as our baseline decade as it was the start of the common time period between the two reanalysis datasets. We compared this to climate data in the decade between 2015-24. 

Comparing these two time periods – the opposite ends of our datasets – allowed us to register a larger magnitude change and account for cumulative effects of climate change.

We consider measures of both dry and humid heat, as each has distinct impacts. Dry heat tends to be more dangerous to plant and ecosystem health, while humid heat is more strenuous for humans.

We use the dry-bulb temperature and wet-bulb globe temperature as our measures of dry and humid heat, respectively. 

Created in the 1950s by the US military, wet-bulb globe temperature has a long history as an international standard used for outdoor sports and occupational hazard monitoring. It combines measurements of temperature, humidity, wind speed and solar radiation.

Changing heat seasons

Our research finds that, in the 1980s, extreme heat around the world was closely confined to a single heat season. For example, some 93% of the world’s land area experienced more than 80% of extreme dry-heat days during its traditional dry-heat season. 

Surprisingly, this was even true in the tropics, where there is much less of a seasonal swing in temperatures.

We also show that extreme dry- and humid-heat seasons are often different from one another, typically offset by one month. This is especially true in places influenced by monsoon systems, such as north-western Mexico and central India, where the extreme dry-heat season precedes the extreme humid-heat season. 

But, the edges of these extreme heat seasons are starting to blur. 

Extreme heat events are spreading out significantly in the calendar year in more than half of global land areas.

This extension of the extreme dry- and humid-heat seasons means that dangerous heat has started to creep into the shoulder seasons – but not equally so.

The maps below show how, in western Europe, southern Africa and north-western India, a larger fraction of each year’s extreme heat events are happening in the months before the historical dry- and humid-heat seasons. These regions are shaded in green.

On the other hand, in much of the US, eastern China, northern Africa and eastern Europe, extreme heat events are increasing in frequency in the months after the traditional heat seasons. These regions are shaded in purple.

Shift of the extreme dry- (top) and humid-heat (bottom) seasons, where green indicates a greater percentage of heat events in the two months before the traditional heat season (analogous to spring in the mid-latitudes) and purple a greater percentage of extreme heat events in the two months after (autumn in the mid-latitudes). Black shading indicates locations without a consecutive three-month heat season. Credit: Ivanovich et al. (2026) Boosting existing seasons

It is possible that these observed changes have a straightforward – and somewhat simple  – explanation.

In many regions, one shoulder season – spring or autumn – is warmer than the other. One hypothesis we explored was whether a simple step up in daily heat across the calendar year makes it more likely for extreme heat days to occur in one shoulder season over the other.

Our research shows that things are not so simple.

To investigate, we created a new, “synthetic” timeseries in order to identify the impact of annual average warming. To do this, we took the baseline 1980s timeseries and “shifted up” the data by the average change in local dry or humid heat between the first and last 10 years of our dataset (1980-89 compared to 2015-24).

We find that, in most locations, intensifying the baseline seasonality in a given location by warming evenly over the course of the year explains the changes in extreme heat timing within the traditional heat season.

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However, annual average warming alone cannot explain the uneven changes in how extreme heat is occurring in the shoulder seasons. 

As such, we conclude there must be other factors at play. 

Long-term changes in seasonal precipitation and soil moisture – whether drying or moistening – could be contributing. 

There could also be potential links to land-use changes, such as agricultural intensification or increased irrigation. Natural fluctuations in regional climates, caused by phenomena such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, could also be playing an important role.

To tease out the contributions of each of these drivers, scientists will need to conduct more regionally-focused studies.

Managing hazards

The expansion of extreme heat events into the shoulder seasons indicates that key protections, such as heat early warning systems and the establishment of cooling centres, may be needed outside the traditional summer months.

Further research is also required to look into whether the overlap of extreme heat with other seasonal hazards is increasing.

For example, we find that, throughout much of the US, there is a larger expansion of the heat season into the autumn than the spring. In the western US, extreme heat which stretches later into the year could increase the overlap between the extreme heat and wildfire seasons. 

Meanwhile, a similar extension of the heat season into the autumn in the eastern US could increase the overlap between the extreme heat and Atlantic hurricane seasons.

Understanding how the intersection of these seasonal hazards is changing is essential for developing targeted climate adaptation strategies, given that multiple hazards happening at once or in quick succession are much more dangerous than when they happen in isolation.

Ivanovich, C. et al. (2026) Extreme dry- and humid-heat seasons are changing asymmetrically, AGU Advances, doi:10.1029/2026AV002516

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The UK government has slashed its hopes for electric planes and “sustainable aviation fuels” (SAFs), ahead of giving the green light to a third runway at Heathrow.

An “ambitious” rollout of new technologies and efficiency upgrades will only cut flight emissions by a quarter over the next two decades, according to forecasts quietly released in June.

This would leave aviation emissions in 2050 nearly 50% higher than expected under the “jet-zero” strategy, launched by the previous Conservative government in 2022.

The Labour government has signalled its support for a contentious third runway at Heathrow airport, with a final planning decision expected by 2029.  

Ministers have justified this expansion by citing the rollout of clean-aviation technologies.

Yet, the updated forecasts suggest that rising flight numbers and a reduced role for “techno-fixes” will leave aviation emissions stubbornly high in 2050 – the UK’s legal target for net-zero.

If this is to be compatible with UK climate goals, then these higher emissions from flights in 2050 would need to be taken out of the atmosphere using costly and largely unproven “carbon dioxide removal” technologies – or by planting gigantic new forests.

Emissions up 

The previous government’s “jet-zero” strategy committed the UK to a “high ambition” pathway that would have seen aviation emissions peak at 38.2m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2019 and drop to 19.3MtCO2e in 2050.

At the time, the Conservative government said this “clear goal” was achievable, alongside airport expansion and rising flight numbers.

Its strategy relied heavily on the extensive use of early-stage technologies, such as SAFs and battery-powered planes, as well as wider fuel-efficiency improvements.

In public statements, Labour has broadly continued this approach, backing new airport runways while supporting SAFs as a way to curb aviation emissions.

However, the government’s latest forecast, quietly published ahead of the formal approval of a new runway at Heathrow, sets far lower expectations for these technologies.

Its “technology development” pathway, with “ambitious carbon abatement measures”, only sees emissions drop to 28.1MtCO2e in 2050. As the chart below shows, this is around 9MtCO2e higher than the jet-zero strategy’s stated goal – a roughly 50% increase.

The shift is down to much lower expectations for SAF uptake, fuel-efficiency improvements and the roll-out of battery-powered planes, as well as lower international carbon prices.

The government now expects SAFs to make up 30% of aviation fuel by 2050, rather than 50%. It also concedes that SAFs will save less carbon over their lifecycle than previously thought.

SAFs have faced considerable criticism, due to limited supplies and uncertainty around the extent to which they cut emissions. Even meeting the UK’s relatively modest goal of 22% SAF uptake by 2040 would require enormous – potentially unattainable – volumes of waste products, which are currently the main source of the fuel.

For its new forecasts, the government commissioned a separate analysis of likely aircraft fuel-efficiency improvements over the next few decades. This analysis, from the Aviation Impact Accelerator, yielded “less optimistic” projections than earlier work.

Fuel-efficiency improvements have therefore been revised downward from 2% per year in the “jet-zero” strategy to 1.3% in the new “technology development” scenario.

There is also a reduced role for battery-powered planes, with only some of the smallest zero-emissions aircraft expected to be in use by 2035.

Crucially, even making the more limited emissions cuts in the new “technology development” pathway would require greater efforts to decarbonise the aviation sector.

If the UK fails to implement new policies or innovations, while flight numbers continue to rise, then aviation emissions would be even higher in 2050 than they are today. 

This is illustrated by the pink “current trends” pathway in the chart above, in which emissions increase to 41.1MtCO2e by 2050.

This is roughly double the amount targeted by the jet-zero strategy and recommended by government climate advisors, the Climate Change Committee (CCC).

Budget ‘busting’

The new forecasts all account for the growth of several UK airports, including “planned Heathrow expansion”. Overall, passenger numbers would be at least 50% higher by 2050. 

In contrast, the CCC and other experts have advised that the rise in passenger numbers may need to be limited, in order to keep emissions down.

In order to meet the UK’s net-zero target, any aviation emissions that remain in 2050 would need to be offset by planting many thousands of hectares of new forest, or by relying on costly and largely unproven CO2 removal technologies.

Tim Johnson, director at the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF), says the new forecasts present “a more honest and realistic vision of what’s possible in the next 24 years”. However, he tells Carbon Brief:

“Less reliance on cleaner technology and fuels reopens the debate about the role and scale of greenhouse gas removals and ways to tackle the projected 50% growth in demand for air travel.”

AEF calculations, based on government data and shared with Carbon Brief, suggest that emissions from the third runway at Heathrow would initially be relatively modest, reaching 3.5MtCO2e per year in 2050. Its emissions would then be expected to rise significantly beyond the legal 2050 net-zero deadline.

Previously, the Labour government has explicitly cited SAFs and other new technologies as part of its justification for expanding Heathrow airport.

Dr Lois Pennington, a research associate at the University of Manchester who has analysed Heathrow’s emissions impact, says the government’s new forecast shows “we are projected to be well over aviation’s share of the carbon budget even before a third runway is considered”. 

She tells Carbon Brief:

“For Heathrow, it means expansion can no longer be waved through on the promise of technology, and any approvals will be in the full knowledge that it will bust our legally binding carbon budgets.”

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29 September | Online

Join Carbon Tracker and Transport & Environment, with guest panellists from the investor and sector community, for a 60-minute briefing on Carbon Tracker’s recently published report Trucking’s Tipping Point and an Investor Statement on zero emission freight. Drawing on the University of Exeter’s FTT model and Carbon Tracker’s market and asset data, the session sets out why heavy-truck electrification is becoming an economic rather than a regulatory decision, what that means for transition risk in the sector, and how exposed European incumbents are to faster-scaling Chinese competitors.

It will also introduce the Investor Statement on zero emission freight, coordinated by Transport & Environment, in the context of the current EU CO₂ standards review. For investors, this raises a pointed question: are automotive and industrials portfolios carrying transition risk that isn’t yet being priced in?

The post Trucking’s Tipping Point: Are Markets Underpricing the Electric-Truck Transition? appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.