Carbon Brief has analysed editorials – articles considered the newspaper’s formal “voice” – since 2011 and this is the first year opposition to climate action has exceeded support.
Criticism of net-zero policies, including renewable-energy expansion, came entirely from right-leaning newspapers, particularly the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.
In addition, there were 112 editorials – more than two a week – that included attacks on Ed Miliband, continuing a highly personal campaign by some newspapers against the Labour energy secretary.
These editorials, nearly all of which were in right-leaning titles, typically characterised him as a “zealot”, driving through a “costly” net-zero “agenda”.
Taken together, the newspaper editorials mirror a significant shift on the UK political right in 2025, as the opposition Conservative party mimicked the hard-right populist Reform UK party by definitively rejecting the net-zero target that it had legislated for and the policies that it had previously championed.
Nearly 100 UK newspaper editorials voiced opposition to climate action in 2025 – more than double the number of editorials that backed climate action.
As the chart below shows, 2025 marked the fourth record-breaking year in a row for criticism of climate action in newspaper editorials.
This also marks the first time that editorials opposing climate action have overtaken those supporting it, during the 15 years that Carbon Brief has analysed.
This trend demonstrates the rapid shift away from a long-standing political consensus on climate change by those on the UK’s political right.
Over the past year, the Conservative party has rejected both the “net-zero by 2050” target that it legislated for in 2019 and the underpinning Climate Change Act that it had a major role in creating. Meanwhile, the Reform UK party has been rising in the polls, while pledging to “ditch net-zero”.
These views are reinforced and reflected in the pages of the UK’s right-leaning newspapers, which tend to support these parties and influence their politics.
All of the 98 editorials opposing climate action were in right-leaning titles, including the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Times and the Daily Express.
Conversely, nearly all of the 46 editorials pushing for more climate action were in the left-leaning and centrist publications the Guardian and the Financial Times. These newspapers have far lower circulations than some of the right-leaning titles.
In total, 81% of the climate-related editorials published by right-leaning newspapers in 2025 rejected climate action. As the chart below shows, this is a marked difference from just a few years ago, when the same newspapers showed a surge in enthusiasm for climate action.
That trend had coincided with Conservative governments led by Theresa May and Boris Johnson, which introduced the net-zero goal and were broadly supportive of climate policies.
Notably, none of the editorials opposing climate action in 2025 took a climate-sceptic position by questioning the existence of climate change or the science behind it. Instead, they voiced “response scepticism”, meaning they criticised policies that seek to address climate change.
(The current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has described herself as “a net-zero sceptic, not a climate change sceptic”. This is illogical as reaching net-zero is, according to scientists, the only way to stop climate change from getting worse.)
In particular, newspapers took aim at “net-zero” as a catch-all term for policies that they deemed harmful. Most editorials that rejected climate action did not even mention the word “climate”, often using “net-zero” instead.
This supports recent analysis by Dr James Painter, a research associate at the University of Oxford, which concluded that UK newspaper coverage has been “decoupling net-zero from climate change”.
This is significant, given strong and broad UK public support for many of the individual climate policies that underpin net-zero. Notably, there is also majority support for the “net-zero by 2050” target itself.
Much of the negative framing by politicians and media outlets paints “net-zero” as something that is too expensive for people in the UK.
In total, 87% of the editorials that opposed climate action cited economic factors as a reason, making this by far the most common justification. Net-zero goals were described as “ruinous” and “costly”, as well as being blamed – falsely – for “driving up energy costs”.
The Sunday Telegraph summarised the view of many politicians and commentators on the right by stating simply that said “net-zero should be scrapped”.
While some criticism of net-zero policies is made in good faith, the notion that climate change can be stopped without reducing emissions to net-zero is incorrect. Alternative policies for tackling climate change are rarely presented by critical editorials.
Moreover, numerous assessments have concluded that the transition to net-zero can be both “affordable” and far cheaper than previously thought.
This transition can also provide significant economic benefits, even before considering the evidence that the cost of unmitigated warming will significantly outweigh the cost of action.
Meanwhile, UK newspapers published 112 editorials over the course of 2025 taking personal aim at energy security and net-zero secretary Ed Miliband.
Nearly all of these articles were in right-leaning newspapers, with the Sun alone publishing 51. The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Times published most of the remainder.
This trend of relentlessly criticising Miliband personally began last year in the run up to Labour’s election victory. However, it ramped up significantly in 2025, as the chart below shows.
Around 58% of the editorials that opposed climate action used criticism of climate advocates as a justification – and nearly all of these articles mentioned Miliband, specifically.
Editorials denounced Miliband as a “loon” and a “zealot”, suffering from “eco insanity” and “quasi-religious delusions”. Nicknames given to him include “His Greenness”, the “high priest of net-zero” and “air miles Miliband”.
Many of these attacks were highly personal. The Daily Mail, for example, called Miliband “pompous and patronising”, with an “air of moral and intellectual superiority”.
Frequently, newspapers refer to “Ed Miliband’s net-zero agenda”, “Ed Miliband’s swivel-eyed targets” and “Mr Miliband’s green taxes”.
These formulations frame climate policies as harmful measures that are being imposed on people by the energy secretary.
In fact, the Labour government decisively won an election in 2024 with a manifesto that prioritised net-zero policies. Often, the “targets” and “taxes” in question are long-standing policies that were introduced by the previous Conservative government, with cross-party support.
Moreover, the government’s climate policy not only continues to rely on many of the same tools created by previous administrations, it is also very much in line with expert evidence and advice. This is to prioritise the expansion of clean power and to fuel an economy that relies on increasing levels of electrification, including through electric cars and heat pumps.
Despite newspaper editorials regularly calling for Miliband to be “sacked”, prime minister Keir Starmer has voiced his support both for the energy secretary and the government’s prioritisation of net-zero.
In an interview with podcast The Rest is Politics last year, Miliband was asked about the previous Carbon Brief analysis that showed the criticism aimed at him by right-leaning newspapers.
Podcast host Alastair Campbell asked if Miliband thought the attacks were the legacy of his strong stance, while Labour leader, during the Leveson inquiry into the practices of the UK press. Miliband replied:
“Some of these institutions don’t like net-zero and some of them don’t like me – and maybe quite a lot of them don’t like either.”
As well as editorial attitudes to climate action in general, Carbon Brief analysed newspapers’ views on three energy technologies – renewables, nuclear power and fracking.
There were 42 newspaper editorials criticising renewable energy in 2025. This meant that, for the first time since 2014, there were more anti-renewables editorials than pro-renewables editorials, as the chart below shows.
As with climate action more broadly, this was a highly partisan issue. The Times was the only right-leaning newspaper that published any editorials supporting renewables.
By far the most common stated reason for opposing renewable energy was that it is “expensive”, with 86% of critical editorials using economic arguments as a justification.
The Sun referred to “chucking billions at unreliable renewables” while the Daily Telegraph warned of an “expensive and intermittent renewables grid”.
At the same time, editorials in supportive publications also used economic arguments in favour of renewables. The Guardian, for example, stressed the importance of building an “affordable clean-energy system” that is “built on renewables”.
There was continued support in right-leaning publications for nuclear power, despite the high costs associated with the technology. In total, there were 20 editorials supporting nuclear power in 2025 – nearly all in right-leaning newspapers – and none that opposed it.
Fracking was barely mentioned by newspapers in 2023 and 2024, after a failed push by the Conservatives under prime minister Liz Truss to overturn a ban on the practice in 2022. This attempt had been accompanied by a surge in supportive right-leaning newspaper editorials.
There was a small uptick of 15 editorials supporting fracking in 2025, as right-leaning newspapers once again argued that it would be economically beneficial.
The Sun urged current Conservative leader Badenoch to make room for this “cheap, safe solution” in her future energy policy. The government plans to ban fracking “permanently”.
North Sea oil and gas remained the main fossil-fuel policy focus, with 30 editorials – all in right-leaning newspapers – that mentioned the topic. Most of the editorials arguing for more extraction from the North Sea also argued for less climate action or opposed renewable energy.
None of these editorials noted that the UK is expected to be significantly less reliant on fossil-fuel imports if it pursues net-zero, than if it rolls back on climate action and attempts to squeeze more out of the remaining deposits in the North Sea.
This is a 2025 update of previous analysis conducted for the period 2011-2021 by Carbon Brief in association with Dr Sylvia Hayes, a research fellow at the University of Exeter. Previous updates were published in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
The count of editorials criticising Ed Miliband was not conducted in the original analysis.
The full methodology can be found in the original article, including the coding schema used to assess the language and themes used in editorials concerning climate change and energy technologies.
The analysis is based on Carbon Brief’s editorial database, which is regularly updated with leading articles from the UK’s major newspapers.
STATE OF THE CLIMATE: Scientists have announced that 2025 was either the second or third hottest year on record, with close margins between last year and 2023, reported the Associated Press. The newswire noted that “temperature averages for 2025 hovered around – and mostly above – 1.4C of industrial era warming”. Bloomberg said that this happened despite the natural weather phenomenon La Niña, which “suppresses global temperatures”, meaning “heat from greenhouse gases countered that cooling influence”. Carbon Brief’s comprehensive analysis of the data found cumulative global ice loss also “reached a new record high in 2025”.
OVERHEATING OCEANS: Separately, the world’s oceans “absorbed colossal amounts of heat in 2025”, said the Guardian, setting “yet another new record and fuelling more extreme weather”. It added that the “extra heat makes the hurricanes and typhoons…more intense, causes heavier downpours of rain and greater flooding and results in longer marine heatwaves”.
FIRE AND ICE: Wildfires in Australia have destroyed around 500 structures, said the Sydney Morning Herald, with a “dozen major fires” still burning. A wildfire in Argentinian Patagonia has “blazed through nearly 12,000 hectares” of scrubland and forests, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, parts of the Himalayas are “snowless” for the first time in nearly four decades, signalling a “climatic anomaly”, reported the Times of India.
The size of a new climate fund unveiled by the Nigerian government, according to Reuters.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Both China and India saw coal power generation fall in 2025, in the “first simultaneous drop in half a century”, found new analysis for Carbon Brief, which was widely reported around the world. It noted that, for both countries, the decline in coal was driven by new clean-energy capacity additions, which were “more than sufficient to meet rising demand”.
The year 2026 will be pivotal for China’s climate policy. In March, the government will release key climate and energy targets for 2030, the year by which China has pledged to have peaked its emissions.
At the same time, with the US increasingly turning away from climate policy and towards fossil fuel expansionism, China’s role in global climate action is more important than ever.
Carbon Brief asks leading experts what they are watching for from China over the year ahead.
After decades of rapid growth, independent analyses suggest China’s CO2 emissions may have plateaued or even begun to decline in 2025.
The transition from emissions growth to stabilisation and early decline will be the key watch point for 2026 and will be shaped by the forthcoming 15th five-year plan. [This plan will set key economic goals, including energy and climate targets, for 2030.]
However, the precise timing, scale and enforceability of these absolute emissions control measures remain under active debate. Chinese experts broadly agree that if the 2021-2025 period was characterised by continued emissions growth, and 2031-2035 is expected to deliver a clear decline, then 2026-2030 will serve as a critical “bridge” between the two.
First, the 15th five-year plan inaugurates the “dual control of carbon” system. This year marks the first time industries and local governments face binding caps on total emissions, not just intensity.
Second, the national carbon market is aggressively tightening. With the inclusion of steel, cement and aluminum this year, regulators are executing a “market reset” – de-weighting older allowances [meaning they cannot be used to contribute to polluters’ obligations for 2026] and enforcing stricter benchmarks to bolster prices ahead of the full rollout of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism.
China’s solar manufacturing overcapacity is prompting Beijing’s first serious consolidation efforts. At the same time, its offshore wind technology is advancing rapidly [and there are] signals that Chinese wind companies are pursuing entry into European markets through local production, mirroring strategies adopted by battery manufacturers.
Together, these dynamics suggest that the next phase of cleantech competition will be shaped less by trade defense alone and more by the interaction between Chinese supply-side reforms and global market-absorption capacity.
China’s electric vehicle (EV) industry has been the primary force pushing the global passenger vehicle market toward clean energy. That momentum should continue. But a growing headwind has emerged: tariffs. Mexico, Brazil, Europe and the US are just a few of the countries raising barriers, complicating the next phase of global EV expansion.
One new wildcard: the US now effectively controls Venezuelan oil. If that meaningfully impacts global oil prices, it could either slow – or unexpectedly accelerate – the shift toward clean-energy vehicles.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
A full-length version of the article is available on the Carbon Brief website.
SHAPING THE LAND: In addition to land use shaping the climate, climate change is now increasingly “changing the land”, according to satellite monitoring by World Resources Institute, creating a “dangerous feedback loop”.
‘POSITIVE TIPPING POINTS’: A commentary co-authored by climate scientist Prof Corinne Le Quéré in Nature argued that several climate trends have locked in “irreversible progress in climate action”.
FROM THE FLAMES: Nick Grimshaw interviewed musician and data analyst Miriam Quick on how she turned the 2023 Canadian wildfires into music on BBC Radio 6. (Skip to 1:41:45 to listen.)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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Brazil is home to 10-15% of all known species on Earth, 64% of the Amazon rainforest and it supplies 10% of global food demand, according to official estimates.
It was among around 85% of nations to miss the 2024 deadline for submitting a new UN nature plan, known as a national biodiversity strategy and action plan (NBSAP), according to a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.
On 29 December 2025, Brazil finally published its new NBSAP, following a lengthy consultation process involving hundreds of scientists, Indigenous peoples and civil society members.
The NBSAP details how the country will meet the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the landmark deal often described as the “Paris Agreement” for nature, agreed in 2022.
Below, Carbon Brief walks through six key takeaways from Brazil’s belated NBSAP:
The third target of the GBF sets out the aim that “by 2030 at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water and of coastal and marine areas…are effectively conserved and managed”. This is often referred to as “30 by 30”.
Previous analysis by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that more than half of countries’ pledges were not aligned with this aim. (Importantly, all of the GBF’s targets are global ones and do not prescribe the amount of land that each country must protect.)
Brazil’s NBSAP sets a substantially higher goal – it seeks to conserve 80% of the Amazon rainforest within its borders, as well as 30% of the country’s other ecosystems.
Since Brazil is one of the largest countries in the world, in addition to being the most biodiverse, this higher target represents a significant step towards achieving the global target.
For the purposes of its protected areas target, Brazil considers not just nationally designated protected areas, but also the lands of Indigenous peoples, Quilombola territories and other local communities.
As the NBSAP notes, Brazil has already taken several steps towards achieving the “30 by 30” target.
In 2018, the country created or expanded four marine protected areas in its territorial waters, increasing its protected area coverage from around 1.5% to greater than 25%.
According to Brazil’s sixth national report, submitted to the CBD in 2020, 18% of the country’s “continental area” – that is, its land and inland waters – was part of a protected area. More than 28% of the Amazon received such a designation.
A further 12% of the country is demarcated as Indigenous lands, which “provide important protection to a large territorial extension of the country, particularly in the Amazon biome”, the report says.
The action plan that accompanies the new NBSAP sets out 15 actions in support of achieving target three, including recognising and titling Indigenous lands, establishing ecological corridors and biosphere reserves and implementing national strategies for mangrove, coral reef and wetlands protection.
As well as committing to the GBF targets of protecting and restoring ecosystems, Brazil’s NBSAP also sets a separate target to “eliminate” deforestation in Brazilian biomes by 2030.
Target 1B of Brazil’s NBSAP says that the country aims to “achieve zero deforestation and conversion of native vegetation by 2030”.
The country hopes to achieve this “through the elimination of illegal deforestation and conversion, compensation for the legal suppression of native vegetation, prevention and control of wildfires, combating desertification and attaining land degradation neutrality”.
This goes above and beyond what is set out in the GBF, which does not mention “deforestation” at all.
Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was reelected as leader in 2022 on a promise to achieve “zero deforestation”, following a rise in Amazon destruction under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
Data from Global Forest Watch (GFW), an independent satellite research platform, found that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by a “dramatic” 36% in 2023 under Lula.
However, Brazil remains the world’s largest deforester. Separate GFW data shows that the country accounted for 42% of all primary forest loss in 2024 – with two-thirds of this driven by wildfires fuelled by a record drought.
Brazil’s NBSAP comes shortly after it hosted the COP30 climate summit in the Amazon city of Belém in November.
One of the presidency’s priorities at the talks was to bring about greater coordination between global efforts to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.
At the Rio Earth summit in 1992, the world decided to address Earth’s most pressing environmental problems under three separate conventions: one on climate change, one on biodiversity and the final one on land desertification.
But, for the past few years, a growing number of scientists, politicians and diplomats have questioned whether tackling these issues separately is the right approach.
And, at the most recent biodiversity and land desertification COPs, countries agreed to new texts calling for closer cooperation between the three Rio conventions.
At COP30, the Brazilian presidency attempted to negotiate a new text to enhance “synergies” between the conventions. However, several nations, including Saudi Arabia, vocally opposed the progression of a substantive outcome.
Following on from this, Brazil’s NBSAP states that its vision for tackling nature loss is “aligned” with its UN climate plan, known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC).
In addition, the NBSAP states that Brazil is taking a “holistic approach to addressing the existing crises of climate change and biodiversity loss in a synergistic manner”.
It lists several targets that could help to address both environmental problems, including ending deforestation, promoting sustainable agriculture and restoring ecosystems.
Brazil joins a small number of countries, including Panama and the UK, that have taken steps to bring their actions to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss into alignment.
According to target 19 of the NBSAP, the Brazilian government will “develop and initiate” a national strategy to finance the actions laid out in the document by the end of 2026.
This financial plan “should aim to substantially increase…the volume of financial resources” for implementing the NBSAP.
These resources should come in the form of federal, state and municipal funding, international finance, private funding and incentives for preserving biodiversity, the document continues.
The accompanying action plan includes a number of specific mechanisms, which could be used to finance efforts to tackle nature loss. These include biodiversity credits, a regulated carbon market and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility.
Separately, the NBSAP sets out a goal in target 18 of identifying “subsidies and economic and fiscal incentives that are directly harmful to biodiversity” by the end of this year. Those identified subsidies should then be reduced or eliminated by 2030, it adds.
The document notes that the phaseout of harmful subsidies should be accompanied by an increase in incentives for “conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity”.
The NBSAP does “important work” in translating the targets of the GBF into “ambitious targets” in the national context, says Oscar Soria, co-founder and chief executive of civil-society organisation the Common Initiative.
Soria tells Carbon Brief:
“While the document is laudable on many aspects and its implementation would change things for the better, the concrete financial means to make it a reality – funding it and halting the funding of activities going against it – are still lacking. In this regard, this NBSAP is a good example of the GBF’s problem at the global level.
“The hardest part of political negotiations will begin only now: in 2026, the Brazilian government will have to evaluate the cost of implementing the NBSAP and where finance will come from.”
Brazil is one of the world’s leading food producers, meeting 10% of global demand, according to its NBSAP.
It is also the world’s largest grower of soya beans and the second-largest cattle producer.
However, agriculture is also a major driver of biodiversity loss in Brazil, largely due to the clearing of rainforest or other lands for soya growing and cattle ranching. Agriculture itself is also affected by biodiversity loss, particularly the loss of pollinators. The NBSAP says:
“Biodiversity loss directly undermines agricultural production and human well-being, demonstrating that agriculture, other productive activities and biodiversity conservation are interdependent rather than antagonistic.”
Brazil’s NBSAP addresses sustainable agriculture in target 10A, which aims to “ensure that, by 2030, areas under agriculture, livestock, aquaculture and forestry are managed sustainably and integrated into the landscape”.
It lists several approaches to achieving sustainable production, including agroecology, regenerative agriculture and sustainable intensification.
Targets seven and 10B also pertain to food systems. Target seven seeks to reduce the impacts of pollution, including nutrient loss and pesticides, on biodiversity, while target 10B commits to the sustainable fishing and harvesting of other aquatic resources.
In 2021, Brazil launched its national low-carbon agriculture strategy, known as the ABC+ plan. The plan promotes sustainability in the agricultural sector through both adaptation and mitigation actions.
Brazil was among the majority of nations to miss the UN deadline to submit a new NBSAP before the COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia in October 2024.
At the time, a representative from the Brazilian government said that it was unable to meet the deadline because it was embarking on an ambitious consultation process for its NBSAP.
Braulio Dias, director of biodiversity conservation at the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, who is responsible for the NBSAP process, told Carbon Brief and the Guardian in 2024:
“Brazil is a huge country with the largest share of biodiversity [and] a large population with a complex governance. We are a federation with 26 states and 5,570 municipalities. We started the process to update our NBSAP in May last year and have managed to conclude a broad consultation process involving over a thousand people in face-to-face meetings.
“We are in the process of consolidating all proposals received, consulting all the departments of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, all the federal ministries and agencies engaged in the biodiversity agenda and the National Biodiversity Committee, before we can have a high-level political endorsement.
“Then we still have to build a monitoring strategy, a finance strategy and a communication strategy. We will only conclude this process toward the end of the year or early next year.”
In its NBSAP, the Brazilian government says it engaged with around 200 scientific and civil society organisations and 110 Indigenous representatives while preparing its NBSAP.
Around one-third of the Amazon is protected by Indigenous territories.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil have continuously called for more inclusion in UN processes to tackle climate change and nature loss, including by holding multiple demonstrations during the COP30 climate summit in November.
Michel Santos, public policy manager at WWF Brazil, says that many in Brazil’s civil society were pleased with the NBSAP’s extensive consultation process, telling Carbon Brief:
“Brazilian civil society is very happy with everything. It was a long process with broad participation. It took a while to be completed, but we consider the result quite satisfactory.”
Analysis for Carbon Brief shows the country’s emissions have been “flat or falling” for more than 18 months, but the timing of a peak remains uncertain.
In March 2026, the government is expected to publish a series of energy and climate targets for 2030 as part of its 15th five-year plan.
These targets could boost – or moderate – the pace of its energy transition.
A number of policy mechanisms that are already due to fully come into effect this year – such as non-binding total emissions targets and the expansion of carbon market coverage to more sectors – could also help decarbonise the country’s economy.
Meanwhile, the rise in extreme weather events intensified by human-caused climate change makes adaptation as important as ever, while also adding to the challenge of advancing clean energy.
Finally, as the US turns even further away from climate action and towards fossil-fuel expansion in 2026 – notably with Venezuelan oil – China’s climate diplomacy could send a strong signal for sustained global climate action.
Carbon Brief asked 11 leading experts on China what energy and climate developments they are watching for in 2026. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Image - Shuo Li (note)Shuo LiAfter decades of the rapid growth that made China the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, independent analyses suggest China’s CO2 emissions may have plateaued or even begun to decline in 2025.
Strong growth in renewable power has, for the first time outside economic contraction, outpaced rising electricity demand, pushing power-sector emissions down and contributing to an overall modest drop in total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This latest trend was picked up by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), as something that should continue over the next five years, marking an official nod to a peak in energy-related CO2 emissions years ahead of the 2030 timeline Beijing previously set.
The transition from emissions growth to stabilisation and early decline will be the key watch point for 2026 and will be shaped by the forthcoming 15th five-year plan. [This plan will set key economic goals, including energy and climate targets, for 2030.] Early policy signals suggest that the plan will introduce more explicit controls on total emissions alongside China’s traditional reliance on intensity-based targets.
However, the precise timing, scale and enforceability of these absolute emissions control measures remain under active debate. Chinese experts broadly agree that if the 2021-2025 period was characterised by continued emissions growth, and 2031-2035 is expected to deliver a clear decline, then 2026-2030 will serve as a critical “bridge” between the two.
The central questions are what this transitional period will look like in practice, how it will lay the groundwork for a sustained and timely emissions decline and whether meaningful reductions can be achieved before the end of the decade.
Image - Xinyi Shen (note)Xinyi ShenIn 2026, I’ll be closely watching whether China moves beyond high-level industrial decarbonisation targets and begins to address the domestic, structural constraints that have slowed progress so far.
In heavy industry, particularly steel, the main barriers are not technological readiness, but persistent blast furnace overcapacity and the lack of clear economic incentives for low-carbon production pathways, which continue to lock in emissions-intensive assets.
Against this backdrop, carbon-related trade measures, such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), will make 2026 an important test of how China balances export competitiveness with climate commitments. In addition, we will see whether growing international scrutiny accelerates more substantive demand-side and policy reform in industry, rather than prolonging a reliance on incremental efficiency gains.
Image - Min Hu (note)Min HuOf course, I’ll be tracking all the critical energy and climate targets under the 15th five-year plan.
More importantly, I’m watching whether a coherent package of measures can truly take hold to unlock green electricity on the demand side – not just expand renewable capacity – and translate policy intent into a genuine market pull for renewable electricity, especially from the manufacturing sector.
Given the challenge of balancing rapidly growing electricity demand with the pace of grid decarbonisation, progress on this front will be decisive for the long-term trajectory of emissions.
I’m also watching how provincial and municipal governments translate the dual-carbon goals into concrete targets and sectoral implementation. Subnational action – through overarching dual-carbon plans and sector-specific measures – will be fundamental to achieving national objectives. It will be critical to ensure that the subnational momentum around zero-emission industrial parks and clean-tech manufacturing competition results in measurable, additional emissions reductions.
Image - Biqing Yang (note)Biqing Yang2026 marks the first year of China’s 15th five-year plan, the planning cycle that ends with China’s target year of 2030 for carbon peaking. China’s fossil-fuel use in power generation is seeing an early sign of peaking and the upcoming years will be crucial in driving the plateau into an absolute decline.
As renewables expand, system flexibility and stability will increasingly become the priorities. By 2027, China aims to retrofit its existing coal-power fleet “as much as possible” and deploy more than 180 gigawatts (GW) of battery energy storage. Development in coal retrofit and further policies to support battery development will both be important to watch in 2026.
On the other hand, maximising flexibility potential will rely on continued reforms in the power market and system operations, following the milestone year of 2025, which saw substantial policy development in China’s ambition to establish a unified national power market.
Image - Yan Qin (note)Yan QinIn 2026, I am monitoring three pivotal developments in China.
First, the 15th five-year plan inaugurates the “dual control of carbon” system. This year marks the first time industries and local governments face binding caps on total emissions, not just intensity. Watching how these national constraints cascade down to the local level will be critical.
Second, the national carbon market is aggressively tightening. With the inclusion of steel, cement and aluminum this year, regulators are executing a “market reset” – de-weighting older [emissions] allowances and enforcing stricter benchmarks to bolster prices ahead of the EU CBAM’s full rollout.
Finally, expect a surge in zero-carbon industrial parks. Following the NDRC’s announcement of 52 pilot sites, new guidelines now mandate 60% on-site renewable consumption. These “green microgrids” are becoming the primary vehicle for reducing grid reliance and certifying low-carbon exports.
Image - Xiaopu Sun (note)Xiaopu Sun2026 marks China’s first year of advancing a comprehensive shift from “dual control” of energy consumption to “dual control” of carbon emissions. At the policy level, it will be essential to track how this transition strengthens the governance architecture for controlling non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), particularly methane.
Key developments to watch for may include efforts to strengthen measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems that enable facility- and company-level accountability.
It will also be essential to monitor progress on the voluntary GHG emission trading scheme, and the extent to which methane and other non-CO2 GHG controls are embedded in broader policy frameworks, including the environmental impact assessment system.
Finally, it will be critical to understand how non-CO2 GHG data collection and management requirements are incorporated into industry policy developments, including those addressing supply chains and product carbon-footprint initiatives.
Image - Tu Le (note)Tu LeChina’s electric vehicle (EV) industry has been the primary force pushing the global passenger vehicle market toward clean energy. Its domestic market has already crossed a more than 50% new-energy vehicle (NEV) retail take rate, while exports surged 86% year-on-year to around 2.4m units [in 2025]. That momentum should continue – especially as US legacy automakers pull back from EV investment in 2026.
As China’s domestic demand cools this year, export pressure will intensify. But a growing headwind has emerged: tariffs. Mexico, Brazil, Europe and the US are just a few of the countries raising barriers, complicating the next phase of global NEV expansion.
At the same time, 2026 looks like a prove-it year for next-generation battery technologies. Longer life, lower volatility and new chemistries could unlock more range, broader use cases and wider adoption – including in tougher markets like the US.
One new wildcard: the US now effectively controls Venezuelan oil. If that meaningfully impacts global oil prices, it could either slow – or unexpectedly accelerate – the shift toward clean-energy vehicles.
Image - Yingjie Chen (note)Yingjie ChenIn 2026, a key focus will be how China translates its 2035 “climate-adaptive society” goal into inclusive action. Finance for adaptation is a critical enabler, requiring both policy guidance and scalable financing models. As climate risks increase, financing resilience in sectors such as energy, transportation, infrastructure and public health is paramount. While China’s green finance taxonomy already includes some climate-adaptive activities, clear labeling and expanded coverage are important next steps.
Additionally, the global goal on adaptation (GGA) indicators can help measure project impact and inform policy. We have observed good practices already in motion, such as integrating meteorological technology with finance to enhance agricultural resilience.
Looking forward, expanding these innovative models to other sectors and regions is a key step, as these pilots can enhance policymaking and be replicated. In this process, identifying and managing risks for vulnerable groups, such as women and children, in public health and education is essential for an inclusive transition.
Image - Prof Scott Moore (note)Prof Scott MooreFirst and foremost, I’ll be looking for details on climate and energy targets in China’s next five-year plan cycle, which we expect to be approved as usual in March. This will essentially operationalise China’s recent nationally determined contribution and its longstanding commitment to peak emissions before 2030.
It will also give us a sign of the tempo we can expect for non-fossil energy capacity growth and whether China will be aiming for the high end of its stated emissions-reduction range. One area I’m especially focused on is the promised expansion of China’s emissions trading system.
Second, given my particular interest in and focus on geopolitics, I’m looking for signs of how the geopolitical disruption we’ve seen in Venezuela, Iran and other regions might affect China’s energy policy – in particular, in terms of long-term contracts for liquified natural gas.
Finally, I’m looking for signs of changes to China’s climate diplomacy following the US withdrawal from both the Paris Agreement and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This leaves a big hole in global climate governance and many countries will be looking increasingly to China for leadership – and funding – in this area.
Image - Cecilia Trasi (note)Cecilia TrasiChina’s solar manufacturing overcapacity is prompting Beijing’s first serious consolidation efforts. The government is introducing stricter licensing requirements and tighter energy-consumption caps for polysilicon facilities, while export-tax rebates for solar products will be abolished.
At the same time, China’s offshore wind technology is advancing rapidly. In early 2026, China installed the world’s first 20 megawatt (MW) offshore wind turbine and plans mass production of 50MW dual-rotor designs, with deployment expected from 2027-2028. MingYang’s £1.5bn announced investment in Scotland signals that Chinese wind companies are pursuing entry into European markets through local production, mirroring strategies adopted by battery manufacturers.
Together, these dynamics suggest that the next phase of cleantech competition will be shaped less by trade defense alone and more by the interaction between Chinese supply-side reforms and global market-absorption capacity.
Meanwhile, following a first wave of rare-earth restrictions in April 2025, Beijing announced controls in October that extended licensing requirements to additional rare earths and introduced unprecedented extraterritorial provisions. While China suspended the October controls for one year, the April controls on seven heavy rare earths remain fully operational.
This creates persistent procurement risk for European cleantech supply chains reliant on Chinese-processed rare earths, although China has begun issuing general export licenses, providing some operational predictability.
Image - Yixian Sun (note)Yixian SunThe biggest question is obviously the emission peak, because it’s essential to confirm if China’s carbon and greenhouse gas emissions are actually flattening or even falling. I really hope China has already reached its peak and the net-zero transition is underway.
Another important area is the evolution of China’s cleantech industries, which have become a new pillar of the country’s economy in recent years. In 2026, it is critical to see if this momentum can be sustained in China.
Given fierce competition and the gradual saturation of the domestic market, I’m also watching how Chinese cleantech companies expand their global footprint through investments in overseas manufacturing, especially as a growing number of countries want Chinese investors to create more “green jobs” and transfer cutting-edge technologies.
]]>Santer – a leading climate scientist and early pioneer in establishing the human “fingerprint” on warming – has played a central role in major climate change reports during his career spanning four decades.
In a wide-ranging interview with Carbon Brief, Santer says the Trump administration is “engaged in a systematic attempt to dismantle climate science”.
The “insane” cuts to major scientific institutions, satellite monitoring and climate research funding amounts to “institutionalised efforts to destroy the US capability to monitor, measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate”, he says.
He adds that “we all lose if we embrace ignorance with open arms and claim that the real world is what the president believes it to be, not what we actually measure and monitor”.
It is “heartbreaking” that “many of the best and the brightest [scientists] will leave the country”, says Santer, and go to work in Europe, China, Japan or Australia.
Now semi-retired, Santer himself is relocating to the UK in order to continue his research in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia as it has become “difficult” to do so in the US.
He has been granted a five-year visa under the UK’s “Global Talent” programme.
He says he worries about the US influence on European politics as there “have been some efforts to export our wilful ignorance” over to the UK.
The interview was conducted shortly before the Trump administration announced that it was withdrawing from more than 60 international bodies and treaties, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Carbon Brief: Ben, thank you very much for joining us. So, after a long career in the US, you’re now relocating to the UK, where you studied for your degrees. What has prompted your return?
BS: It’s really difficult for me to continue doing work in attribution science in the US in 2026. I’m a scientist – working on identification of human fingerprints on climate is in my life blood. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what I’ve done for the last 40 years. The notion of not being able to do that work anymore in the US is unacceptable to me, so that’s one of the reasons why I’m moving to the UK to continue to do work in trying to disentangle human and natural effects on climate. I’m also coming to the UK because my partner lives here and I want to be with her.
CB: In Trump’s first term [as US president], you were at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I wonder, what impacts did you experience of the Trump administration when you were there?
BS: A number of impacts and those impacts started right at the beginning of the first Trump administration. So Trump’s nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, when he was nominated, had to go through Senate confirmation hearings. During those confirmation hearings, he was asked about the reality and seriousness of climate change. He responded that there had been no significant global warming since 1998. 1998 was a big natural El Nino, natural warming event. And Mr Pruitt was cherrypicking. He was saying [in effect], “when I look at satellite temperature records, the temperature of the lower atmosphere – the troposphere – and only go back to 1998 and then march forward in time, I believe there’s been no significant warming”. That was wrong, demonstrably so.
My colleagues and I at Lawrence Livermore National Lab were asked to investigate Mr Pruitt’s claim. We did. We published a paper in 2017 in the Journal of Climate [it was actually in Scientific Reports], showing that that claim was wrong. Even if one did the cherrypicking and forgot about the pre-1998 portion of the satellite temperature record. The LA Times [it was actually the Washington Post] reported on our Journal of Climate paper and I think it’s fair to say that the Trump administration did not like that we had factchecked Mr Pruitt. And did not like that we had shown that his on-the-record statement to the US Senate was wrong.
That incident led to a complaint by the Trump Department of Energy – the funder, primary funder, of Lawrence Livermore National Lab – to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The director asked for a meeting with me and, during that meeting, told me that the Trump administration was in a position to cut my funding for detection and attribution research at Livermore – and, indeed, to cut funding for Lawrence Livermore National Lab. In the end, the Trump administration did cut the funding for my research and my group’s research in climate change detection and attribution. In my opinion, that was a direct result of doing science [by] factchecking Mr Pruitt. The administration didn’t like that and they didn’t like the result of the factchecking.
CB: So, how were you able to continue your research at the time?
BS: I was able to continue my research by cutting down the amount of time that I was actually paid by the Department of Energy. So, essentially, I reduced my time at Livermore in order to allow my younger colleagues to continue to do this critically important work. At the time of these cuts, I had been in my position at Livermore for nearly three decades. I was at the tail end of my career. They were not – my younger colleagues were not – and I wanted them to continue to have sufficient funding to do this work.
CB: Fast forward to the Trump second term and there have been reported cuts to climate science and related programmes at the EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency], NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research], NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and NASA. I wonder which of these concerns you the most?
BS: They are all of deep concern to me. I would say the administration – the second Trump Administration – has engaged in a systematic attempt to dismantle climate science and not only climate science in the US, but I know the climate science piece of things reasonably well. They’ve gone after monitoring. They’ve gone after computer modelling. They’ve gone after people who do the kind of attribution science work that I do; people who look at extreme events and human contribution to the changes in the properties of extreme events – droughts, flooding, all of that – they’ve fired thousands of employees.
And when you break the evidentiary chain, when you no longer monitor, say, changes in Arctic sea ice extent or carbon emissions or atmospheric temperature, you make it difficult for people like me to get at the causes of climate change. That’s a deep, deep concern that we may no longer be able to continuously monitor stuff that we urgently need to monitor, not only for climate, but also for basic weather prediction. For example, if you stop monitoring atmospheric moisture, then you degrade the quality of weather forecasts that give you early warning of severe storms, of atmospheric rivers – it’s unthinkable to actually kill those kinds of critically important measurements, but yet, that’s where we are. It’s heartbreaking.
I have hundreds of colleagues at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at the [NASA] Goddard Institute for Space Studies – women and men who have devoted their entire scientific careers to trying to model the climate system, understand the climatic shape of things to come. Many of them, particularly probationary employees, are gone. And you can’t flip a switch under a more enlightened administration, which we hope we get in three years from now, and bring all of that back. Science doesn’t work that way. Many of the best and the brightest will leave the country and will go to Europe or go to China or go to Japan or Australia. They will leave the US. They will see no future for themselves there. Or they won’t even come to the country to study, to do degrees – and that loss of talented, dedicated researchers is heartbreaking. That’s the only word for it.
CB: You mentioned a lot of programmes that have been cut – for example, monitoring. Do you think other countries can step into the void? And, if so, who and how?
BS: I hope so. I hope the Europeans and the Chinese and the Australians and the Japanese are making serious contingency plans – and recognising that this is a real thing. The Trump administration is going to turn off satellites. They’ve announced their intent to severely cut NASA and go after things like the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and other remote sensing systems that make measurements that they don’t like. So hopefully other space agencies recognise the danger to this evidentiary chain.
But, again, that’s not like flipping a switch that you can suddenly launch a satellite – developing sensors, deploying sensors in space – all of that is the stuff of years, not the stuff of a couple of months. But I hope that these kinds of discussions are going on at the highest level in countries that recognise the value of information – again, not only for climate, but for basic weather forecasting. If the US no longer is willing to lead, is no longer willing to invest in basic monitoring of weather and climate, other countries have to try and fill the gap.
CB: Shortly before Trump won his second term, you wrote that his election risks trapping the US and the planet in an “eddy of ignorance”. I wonder what your reflections are now that Trump is in power?
BS: We are in that “eddy of ignorance” in the US. Clearly, this administration seeks to redefine reality itself; seeks in its public-facing websites – say NASA, EPA – to generate a picture of a world where climate isn’t changing, or if it is, the changes are purely natural – they’re due to the sun, volcanoes, orbital perturbations; humans have no agency, have no discernible influence on climate. So, they’re creating an alternative universe in which human caused fossil fuel burning has no impact on climate. And what do you even call that? “Eddy of ignorance” is too weak a term to describe that wilful misrepresentation of the world we actually live in – of the climate we actually live in – how it’s changed, how it’s likely to change it. It’s – again – heartbreaking when you think of the destruction of information on websites, the destruction of libraries – like, as has recently been reported, the Goddard Space Flight Centre library of volumes about atmospheric science, ocean science – the thought of that stuff going away, of not being there anymore. I don’t know what to do with that, I guess.
The only thing I can do with it – and have tried to do with that kind of wilful ignorance – is shine a light on it and say “this is wrong”. No matter what differences in political positions we have, we all lose if we embrace ignorance with open arms and claim that the real world is what the president believes it to be, not what we actually measure and monitor. That’s where we are in the US – president Trump is defining reality and we risk – as many have written – going back to the Soviet Lysenkoism, where any science that conflicts with the prevailing political views of the leader is dismissed and denied. And that has serious negative consequences – of course, not only for the US, but for the entire world. We’re part of the problem now in the US, not part of the solution to the problem of climate change.
CB: You mentioned the Department of Energy (DoE) earlier and its involvement in the Lawrence Livermore Lab. And I wonder what your reaction was to their “critical review” on climate change that they published last year?
BS: So they published this review in July of 2025. It involved five noted climate change sceptics. I had dealt with all of them over the course of my time at Livermore. It was not a surprise that the administration was going to try and come up with some counter narrative to IPCC and national climate assessments. But what did surprise me was just how brazen and blatantly wrong bits of it were.
So, I’ll give you an example. Chapter 5.5 of this Department of Energy climate working group review dealt with temperature changes in the stratosphere. And it touched on work that my colleagues and I had had done and published most recently in 2023 in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the DoE report cited our 2023 paper and said that we had not found a human fingerprint on climate. We had. We had found the most convincing evidence yet of a human fingerprint on the structure of atmospheric temperature. This predicted fingerprint of warming of the lower atmosphere and cooling of the upper atmosphere – predicted by Suki Manabe back in 1967 – we had found it in satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature change. And we had found that this signal was particularly clear where Manabe had predicted back in ‘67 – that it would be clear right in the upper stratosphere. The Department of Energy, in saying “you didn’t find a fingerprint”, was essentially doing the equivalent of something like this: The walls here in this room were white. They’re essentially telling you, “no, they’re not white, they’re black”. What do you do with something like that? When someone mischaracterises your own work and the work of your colleagues – sober, mature science that you’ve spent decades doing – and fundamentally turns it on his head in an official government report for a specific political purpose.
You know, the report was released on the same day as EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced his intent to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding – the finding that emissions of greenhouse gases, through their effect on temperature and through temperature effects on air pollution, materially harm human health. So, this report fed into that political goal of wanting to repeal the endangerment finding. And our science is being misrepresented to support that political goal. That was pretty shocking to me – that it would be so blatant. There was no pretence, really, of trying to get the science right. And the example that I just mentioned – with our vertical fingerprint work with atmospheric temperature – is only one example of many dozens that the Dessler report takedown – and Carbon Brief’s own takedown of the many errors in the DoE report – showed. This was a pattern of behaviour. My job is about pattern analysis and there was a pattern in the DoE report of trying to misrepresent well-understood science.
CB: Your career has spanned periods where climate science has been attacked quite fiercely – back to the time of Kyoto in the 90s or Climategate at the end of the 2000s. What parallels or differences do you see today?
BS: So, back in the mid-90s, the attacks focused on the IPCC second assessment report. That report came out in early 1996 and its headline finding was the infamous 12-word statement: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” And that was significant because it was the first time that the international scientific community said formally: “We see a signal of human activity.” Other individual scientists had made such claims in the past – notably, Jim Hansen in 1988 in a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research. But this was the international community, the IPCC, saying: “Hey, humans are no longer innocent bystanders in the climate system. We formally identified a climate change signal due to our actions. It’s not the sun, it’s not volcanoes, it’s not natural internal variability, it’s on us.”
And as the play Kyoto, which you just mentioned, clearly notes, that was threatening – that discernible human influence finding – to very powerful, moneyed interests. To, for example, the Global Climate Coalition – a consortium of energy interests – they recognised that this was bad for business, that this finding might have downstream implications for their business models, for their ability to continue burning fossil fuels without considering the negative externalities of their actions. So the Global Climate Coalition and other fossil-fuel funded organisations – Western Fuels [Association], the Petroleum Association [the American Petroleum Institute] – went after the IPCC and went after me. No personal animus, but I was the lead author of the chapter in which this finding was situated. And individual folks in Congress, too, like Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman, wanted to make names for themselves and felt that they could do so by casting doubt on the integrity of the IPCC process – the scientific integrity of people like me. So there was some attempt back then to politicise the science too. It wasn’t just fossil-fuel interests that went after the IPCC. It was also folks like Rohrabacher who wanted to make a name for themselves.
What’s different today is that it’s an entire administration. This is institutionalised, wilful ignorance on the part of the administration – institutionalised efforts to destroy the US capability to monitor, measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate. That’s qualitatively different from anything I encountered in the mid-90s at the time of the IPCC second assessment report.
CB: If you were in the earlier stages of your career now, as you were then, do you think you would be just as involved in communication and public engagement on climate change?
BS: Absolutely. The lesson I learned 30 years ago – back at the time of the discernible human influence finding in 1996 – was, sometimes, you don’t have the luxury of sitting on the fence and just waiting to see how things develop. Back then, I was a representative of an entire scientific community. My job had been to – with my peers – assess the then-available science and come up with our best representation of what the science, back then – 30 years told us – and we did and we were right. The cautious, even wimpy, “balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” [statement] was justified by the then-available science. And, in the next 30 years, the science progressed – better models, longer data records, better fingerprint techniques for disentangling human and natural effects on climate, more scientists involved in this kind of work all over the world – leading to the word “unequivocal”.
It is now unequivocal, as the IPCC judged in its 2021 sixth assessment report [on climate science], that there are human fingerprints all over Earth’s climate system – atmosphere, oceans, land surface. Back then, in 1995-96, we were primarily looking at surface thermometer records, surface temperature records. Now, folks have interrogated literally dozens of variables – Arctic sea ice extent, atmospheric moisture, specific humidity, sea level pressure, ocean heat content, clouds, circulation patterns, extreme event properties – you name it, they’ve looked at it. They’ve kicked the tires. They’ve used pattern recognition methods to assess whether purely natural influences can explain the changes in each of those independently measured variables – natural causes can’t.
And that’s the frustration, I would say – this disconnect between this much more mature understanding of causes now in 2021 and this wilful ignorance that we see in the Trump administration. Where the president of your own country refers to all of the work that you’ve done and your colleagues have done as a “con job”. So not only wrong, but criminal – as if there’s intent, on your part and your colleagues’ part, to mislead the global public about the reality and seriousness of climate change. The only response, in my opinion, is you have to, as a scientist, push back against that. If you don’t, if you remain silent, then really bad stuff happens. And I think that’s true for our democracy as well. If good people remain silent when there are serious challenges facing science and democracy, we all lose.
CB: What would be your advice to climate scientists in the US today, particularly those leading the organisations under attack?
BS: “Hang together or hang separately,” as Benjamin Franklin, I believe, famously said. You have to provide some kind of united front to these systematic efforts to dismantle US science. If you don’t, if you leave that to individuals or let the administration attack individual universities, you’re not going to prevail in preventing really serious harms. And I would say it’s taken the scientific community a long time to recognise that. In the US, certain institutions that should have led right from the beginning and said, “no, this is wrong”. Going after the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and going after vaccine schedules harms public health. People will die. Those kinds of messages needed to be made public very early, very forcefully – and they weren’t.
Same with climate science – starting to fire probationary employees, starting to go after climate modelling and to argue that modellers were scaring America’s children by making projections of the climatic shape of things to come. All of that demanded a firm, clear response, which was late in coming. And unfortunately, again, many of the harms that happened in those first few months – the firings, the withholding of grant money that will affect research at universities, climate research, medical research labs, the continuity of whole departments – those harms can’t be easily reversed. I think, for me, the personal lesson learned from the first administration is only when you push back quickly and forcefully in a united way do you have some hope of avoiding the worst outcomes.
CB: We’ve seen how quickly US federal climate science policy has changed under a new government. I wonder what lessons can European governments and institutions and scientists take from that on protecting climate science, regardless of political change?
BS: That’s a great question and it’s one I worry about a lot, because there have been some efforts to export our wilful ignorance, say, to this country [the UK]. Steve Koonin, one of the five authors of the DoE climate working group report, has tried to persuade British colleagues that the science – the climate science done, say, at the Hadley Centre and other research centres and universities isn’t credible, that they shouldn’t make policy based on IPCC or internal climate assessments. And I think we’ll see more of that. I think the Royal Society needs to be very clear that it has to push back against those efforts to try and export our wilful ignorance to this country and to Europe.
[The following part of Santer’s answer is missing from the video recording because of a technical issue.]
Those efforts are only just starting to ramp up in the US. We hear that the same five folks who worked on the DoE report are going to be in charge of the next [US] national climate assessment. And I would not be surprised to see folks like Koonin and others make more appearances over here and it’s in the [Trump] administration’s interests to undermine climate science internationally. Why? Because then they can say, well, “buy our oil – there are no consequences, no climate consequences. And the people who have told you that there are climate consequences are not real, credible scientists – believe our five hand-picked experts who wrote this DoE report and are now rewriting national climate assessments.”
I think you need here, in the UK, to observe what happened and the institutional failures to push back against this kind of wilful ignorance and to learn from those failures. It really is critically important to support science and leading institutions can’t be silent. They can’t say, oh, we don’t want to offend president Trump, or we don’t want to offend Elon Musk, who is one of our members in the Royal Society. No, you will suffer serious, long-lasting reputational harm if you don’t defend science. That’s my lesson learned.
CB: Where do you see things going next in the US? What’s the next move for the Trump administration on climate change?
BS: Well, what I’ve mentioned already is that the five individuals who wrote the DoE’s climate working group report in July 2025 have apparently been tasked with leading the next national climate assessment, which is a congressionally mandated report to Congress. And it’s likely that that will be the same stuff we saw in the DoE report in July 2025 – a counter narrative, if you will, to mature scientific understanding encoded in 30+ years of IPCC reports. So, on the science side of things, it’s about presenting that counter narrative. It’s also, I think, about continuing to dismantle websites and continuing to present the public on EPA and NASA and NOAA websites with a very, very different understanding of the causes of climate change.
It’s – if Congress doesn’t do anything to stop it – going to involve continued cuts to NASA. The Trump administration has made it very clear that they don’t care about observing changes in Earth’s climate from space and they’re going to go after missions that they don’t like that provide basics – atmospheric temperature and atmospheric moisture and, again, pollutants, CO2 emissions, methane emissions, all of those kind of things I would say are imperilled, which is insane. That’s the only word for it. Removing our ability to measure and monitor how the world around us is changing, makes no sense whatsoever. But, yet, that’s where we are, because the data is inconvenient and doesn’t comport with the narrative of the president, that nothing is happening, nothing is changing, or if it is, it’s all natural.
I think there will be continued efforts to go after modelling capability, which is – again – heartbreaking. Some of the institutions I mentioned – like the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, Goddard Institute for Space Studies [GISS] – they’re already under attack. Their funding is under attack. Their leases, in the case of GISS, have been rescinded or cancelled. There are efforts to break up these groups of very, very talented women and men and scatter them to the wind. I think that’s going to continue. And what will be important will be to see whether Congress pushes back against these things or is fearful of incurring Trump’s wrath and allows this sort of stuff to continue internationally.
I think the US is not going to engage with IPCC or UN Framework Convention [on Climate Change] or COPs. [The Trump administration has now withdrawn the US from the IPCC and UNFCCC.] They don’t care. All they care about is exporting US and now Venezuelan oil, presumably. And they don’t care about advancing climate science or any kind of science, really, which is an unbelievable thing to say, coming from a country where science has, since the end of the second world war, been an integral part of the country, of its development, of its economy, of its of its future. Now we’re turning away from science in the US. It’s like we’re handing the baton of leadership to you and saying, “here, we’re done leading in climate science, medical science – you lead now, rest of the world, we’re going to go back and try and make the horse and buggy great again”.
CB: What do you see happening to the [EPA’s] “endangerment finding”?
BS: I think the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has, right from the beginning, intended to rescind the endangerment finding – following Trump’s lead and following the guidance of Project 2025 [A blueprint to reshape the US federal government under a Republican president, published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organisations.] There are powerful interests in the US that, right from the beginning, have argued, “the endangerment finding is bad for business, so get rid of it. This should be an important thrust of the second Trump administration.” And it has been, right from the beginning of the administration. And part of the job has been to come up with this scientific counter narrative – in the DoE report and, I believe, now in the planned next national climate assessment – to argue that, “the science isn’t credible. We don’t need an endangerment finding because human actions aren’t endangering the climate. It’s all natural, folks. Nothing to see here.” That’s going to continue.
But, as I mentioned, that faces challenges, that counter narrative now, because it was so badly done. The DoE report was so sloppy, so riddled with mistakes – some of which were really transparent, not shades of grey differences between experts, but really badly wrong stuff. That’s the DoE report. The factchecking on that report has been done. It’s out there, [it] got widespread publicity – thank you Carbon Brief; thank you, Andy Dessler. The fast track study of the US National Academy of Sciences – done partly in response to the DoE report – has affirmed and confirmed the science is credible. Humans are influencing global climate through burning fossil fuels, through particulate pollution, and we need to do something about it. This is a serious danger to human health.
So, Mr Zeldin’s challenge is a difficult one. I would say he’s got powerful scientific – well, decades of mature science – that he’s going against, that he’s tilting against. And that’s going to be a tough sell. But, that said, it’ll wind up before the US supreme court and the supreme court has a conservative majority. How they adjudicate, given that they already decided back in 2009 [it was actually 2007] that climate change constitutes a danger to human health, will they reverse their decision? There’s a lot of uncertainty. But one thing that is very certain is that Trump wants the endangerment finding rescinded and everything flows from that.
CB: I want to look back now a little bit more. We’re now 15+ years on since Climategate [when thousands of emails between climate scientists were stolen from a university server and selectively released online in an attempt to undermine COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009]. And I wondered how you feel about that whole experience now?
BS: Pretty bad about the whole experience. I did my PhD at the Climatic Research Unit at UEA [the University of East Anglia]. I got my PhD in 1987 and I then went to Hamburg to do a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute [for Meteorology]. Then, after Max Planck, I went to Livermore in 1992 and I continued to work together with people at the Climatic Research Unit. They weren’t only colleagues. They were friends. We published a boatload of papers together. Watching what happened, what unfolded in 2009 and thereafter was terrible. The human cost hasn’t really been revealed – to good people who spent their lives trying to compile surface temperature data sets.
The case of Phil Jones, in the case of Keith Briffa – to do dendrochronology and advance understanding of century timescale changes in climate from looking at tree rings – all of that good work was dragged through the mud by these forces of unreason, by folks who had no real understanding of the science of the integrity of the work. It was sickening and disgusting to witness bad things happen to such good people. I spent a fair bit of time back then in 2009 and 2010 providing input to various investigations, speaking publicly about the individuals involved, and I remain deeply concerned at that human cost. This isn’t a game. When you go after the integrity of individuals and the[ir] decency and honesty – in the public arena – in such a vicious and nasty way, it has consequences.
Some of those consequences aren’t visible to people on the outside, who don’t know folks like Phil Jones and folks like Keith Briffa and others deeply involved in Climategate – folks like Michael Mann. But those consequences, those personal consequences, are very real and I’m concerned that that’s where we’re going again. The way forward, say, for the Trump administration is to challenge the integrity and decency and honesty and motives of climate scientists – as is occurring with use of incendiary language like “con job”. That’s where we’re going again.
CB: How do you think that public trust in climate science – and scientists – compares now to back then?
BS: Well, language matters. Words matter. That’s been a lesson of mine – a lesson I learned back in 1995 with those 12 words with the “discernible human influence” finding. So when there’s this drum beat of incendiary language – “con job”, “hoax”, “conspiracy” – again and again and again, it erodes public trust in science and scientists: “Well, the President surely wouldn’t be saying these things if there weren’t something behind them.” These folks have huge megaphones that they can exploit on a daily basis.
They are in control of the levers of power now – websites at NASA, NOAA, EPA. The president can address the UN General Assembly and use this kind of “con job” language, “you’re all fools if you believe scientists”. I have to believe that that has impact – cumulative impact. If you keep on doing it again and again and again, you can erode public confidence in science. And that’s why part of my job, as I see it, is to be a public figure – to speak and to write about evidence: “How do we know? How have we reached this time in history when we know that we’re not innocent bystanders in the climate system. What’s the nature of the evidence? Who gained it? How did they gain it? Do scientists look at alternate hypotheses? Could it all be the sun, volcanoes, orbital perturbations, intrinsic variability?” We have to do a better job explaining how we know and why it matters to what’s at stake here.
This [year] is likely – 2025 – to be the second- or third-warmest year ever. [This has now been confirmed.] And, over my lifetime, I’ve seen the signal of human-caused warming emerge from the noise of natural variability. We know it’s real. We know that if we do nothing to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, that signal is going to manifest more clearly every year. So it’s critically, just critically, important to speak science to power and continue to push back against this narrative of “con job” and “hoax” and “conspiracy”. But it’s an uphill struggle. Again, given that I can have an interview with you, I can write stuff in Scientific American, but the president can reach tens of millions of people every day.
CB: Just thinking about the media, how do you think the media’s coverage of climate science has changed over time?
BS: I think it’s gotten better. Certainly back in the 90s, it was much more this binary, “he says, she says” type things: “Here’s Expert A, here’s Expert B, giving you some completely different view of a scientific question.” I would say that the reporting is now much more focused on trying to understand the science and rather than having duelling experts out there. Even in the US, we don’t get [prominent climate-sceptic scientists] Dick Lindzen or John Christy now, as we used to on every story about warming and changes in sea ice. You don’t get the counter narrative out there. And that’s good and that’s really positive.
Much of the reporting is now more in depth about what’s going on with the Thwaites great glacier, or what’s going on with sea level and what are the drivers of sea level rise? And all of that is good and positive. And I do think that there’s more effort to hold the administration accountable – the Trump administration accountable – for making incorrect claims. We were unwilling to use the word “lie” at the beginning of the first Trump administration. People are more willing now to say, “this is untrue, there’s no scientific basis for this statement or that statement”, and that’s good, too.
What I think is necessary, as I said before, is for more voices to enter the fray – for the leadership of powerful professional organisations to say, “this claim by the administration that climate science is a ‘con job’ is wrong. It’s not. And here are three decades of reports that we published that show that it’s a thing and we need to worry about it.” It can’t be just individual voices there of a few climate scientists speaking about the reality and seriousness of climate change.
CB: So, you have, obviously, been heavily involved in all IPCC reports throughout the years. We’re now at the early stages of the seventh assessment and countries are still yet to agree on a timeline for publication of the assessment reports. And I wonder what you thought that says about the state of climate politics today?
BS: Well, I’ve been involved in every IPCC assessment since the first one in 1990. I think they’re unique. They’re an invaluable way of providing the collective understanding of an entire community and showing how that understanding has evolved over time. I hope the IPCC continues. I think there’s a continuing need for an authoritative international organisation to say: “This is our best understanding of the science and this is our best understanding of likely outcomes if we do nothing to address the problem, or we follow this emission scenario, or this overshoot scenario.” We need that and it’s clearly good to be able to put error bars on these projections, to have the entire global scientific community involved – and be able to say: “This is what we know with confidence, this is what we don’t know with confidence. Here are our levels of confidence.”
All of that is extraordinary when you think about it, how a community has come together to make these authoritative assessments of the state of our understanding. Which is why it’s been so threatening, I think, to the Trump administration and why they pulled out of IPCC [in 2025] and why they don’t like it.
[The following part of Santer’s answer is missing from the video recording because of a technical issue.]
Because it doesn’t support the president’s narrative that this is a “con job” and that history is valuable to see how, over time, things have firmed up, how the “balance of evidence” finding was transformed into “unequivocal” human fingerprints on climate. Capturing that arc of history, that arc of scientific understanding.
But the IPCC has challenges. The US is backing out now. There are some efforts on the part of the philanthropic community to allow individual US scientists to participate. I hope that that continues. I hope that the US, in some way or other, continues to make scientific contributions to the IPCC. But I do worry about this fractured landscape, with powerful forces out there seeking to undermine the work of the IPCC. We’re going to see the rise of those forces – not only in the US, but elsewhere – to silence or diminish the effectiveness of voices like IPCC. So we need to be prepared for that and we need to have very clear communications about the richness of the evidence.
I think the scientific community and the IPCC maybe haven’t been that good in terms of explaining just how compelling the evidence is for human effects on climate – just how multivariate it is: atmosphere, ocean, land, temperature, moisture, circulation, ice. It’s everywhere. It’s in our backyards. It’s not just evidence of human effects on climate in the far flung Arctic or a few Pacific islands, we need to communicate that better.
CB: Thank you so much for your time.
]]>Five fixed-foundation projects, amounting to 8.25 gigawatts (GW), secured fixed-price “contracts for difference” (CfDs) to supply electricity for an average of £91 per megawatt hour (MWh).
Additionally, two floating offshore wind projects with a combined capacity of 192.5 megawatts (MW) won contracts, securing a “strike price” of £216/MWh.
This new capacity, totalling 8.4GW, marks a significant increase from last year’s sixth auction, when 5.3GW had been secured as part of a bounce back from the “failed” fifth round.
While the latest auction saw offshore wind prices rising by around 10% since the previous round, analysis suggests that the outcome will, nevertheless, be roughly “cost neutral” for consumers.
Contrary to simplistic and misleading comparisons made by some opposition politicians and media commentators, this is because CfD payments would be balanced by lower wholesale costs.
The government welcomed the “stonking” results, saying that it put the country “on track” to reach its 2030 targets for clean power, create jobs and bring new investment.
Below, Carbon Brief looks at the auction results, what they mean for bills and the implications for the UK’s target of “clean power by 2030”.
The UK government announced the results of the seventh auction round (AR7) for new CfDs on 14 January 2026, hailing the outcome as a “historic win”.
The CfD scheme was introduced in 2014 and offers fixed-price contracts to generators via a “reverse auction” process. The first auction was held in 2015.
Projects bid to secure contracts to sell electricity at a fixed “strike price” in the future.
If wholesale prices are lower than this set amount, the project receives a payment that makes up the difference.
However, if the market prices are higher than this level, then the project pays back the difference to consumers. For example, according to a report from thinktank Onward, between November 2021 and January 2022, CfD projects paid back £114.4m to consumers.
For the seventh auction round, the results have been split into two, as part of reforms to help expedite the process for offshore wind. As such, the publication of results on 14 January covers fixed-foundation offshore wind and floating offshore wind.
A second set of results will be released between 6-9 February 2026, covering technologies including large-scale solar and onshore wind.
A total of 17 fixed-foundation offshore wind projects totalling 24.8GW of capacity were competing for contracts at this auction, meaning many have missed out.
Still, a record 8.4GW of offshore wind secured contracts, making it the biggest ever offshore wind auction in Europe, according to industry group WindEurope.
This includes 8,245 megawatts (MW) of fixed-foundation offshore wind and 192.5MW of floating offshore wind, which, collectively, will generate enough to power more than 12m homes.
As such, there was an increase of more than 3GW in offshore wind capacity compared to the sixth allocation round, as shown in the chart below.
(The 2.4GW Hornsea 4 scheme, which had been awarded a CfD at the previous auction round, went on to be cancelled in May 2025, with developer Ørsted citing cost inflation.)
This follows on from the “fiasco” of the fifth allocation round in 2023, where no offshore-wind projects secured contracts due to the limit on prices set by the government.
Carbon Brief analysis suggests that the capacity secured in the latest auction will generate around 37 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity each year, around 12% of the nation’s total demand.
With onshore wind and solar results still to come, this means that projects with CfDs will generate some 135TWh of power by the time they are all completed, or nearly half of current demand.
When the current Labour government took office in 2024, a number of changes were made to encourage offshore wind capacity bids. This included separating the technology from solar and onshore wind into a separate “pot”, an allowance for “permitted reduction” projects in AR6 and a significant increase to the “budget” for the auction overall.
Since then, there have been continued reforms to help meet the government’s target of decarbonising power supplies by 2030. (See: What does AR7 mean for clean power by 2030.)
This includes extending the contracts from 15 years to 20 years, relaxing eligibility requirements related to planning consent and legislating to allow the secretary of state for energy – currently, Ed Miliband – to see anonymised bid information ahead of setting a final budget for that technology.
Initially, the government set a total budget of £900m for fixed-foundation offshore wind projects and £180m for floating offshore wind.
The budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind projects was then raised to £1,790m.
(Note that the “budget” is a notional limit on the amount of CfD levies that can be added to consumer electricity bills. This does not come from government coffers and – as explained below – it does not translate into an equivalent increase in consumer costs, because CfD projects also reduce wholesale electricity prices, which make up the bulk of bills.)
Ahead of the auction, the maximum “administrative” strike price was set at £113/MWh for offshore wind and £271/MWh for floating offshore wind.
The four winning fixed-foundation offshore wind projects in England and Wales secured a strike price of £91.20/MWh in 2024 prices and the one in Scotland £89.49/MWh, as shown in the table below. This comes out at a blended average of £90.91/MWh.
| Projects (fixed-foundation) | Capacity (MW) | Owners | Strike price (2024 prices) | Delivery year (phase one) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awel y Mor | 775 | RWE, SWM, Siemens Financial Services | £91.20/MWh | 2030/31 |
| Dogger Bank South | 3,000 | RWE, Masdar | £91.20/MWh | 2030/2031 |
| Norfolk Vanguard East | 1,545 | RWE | £91.20/MWh | 2029/2030 |
| Norfolk Vanguard West | 1,545 | RWE | £91.20/MWh | 2028/2029 |
| Berwick Bank | 1,380 | SSE Renewables | £89.49/MWh | 2030/2031 |
The two floating offshore-wind projects will see a strike price of £216.46/MWh, shown below.
| Projects (floating) | Capacity | Owners | Strike price (2024 prices) | Delivery year (phase one) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pentland | 92.5 | CIP, Eurus Energy, Hexicon | £216.46/MWh | 2029/2030 |
| Erebus | 100 | TotalEnergies, Simply Blue Energy | £216.46/MWh | 2029/2030 |
These prices are around 19% below the maximum level set ahead of the auction – a figure that had been cited by opposition politicians as “proof” that the round would be a “bad deal” for consumers.
Successful projects include RWE’s Awel Y Mor (775MW), the first Welsh project to win a CfD contract in more than a decade.
Dogger Bank South in Yorkshire and Norfolk Vanguard in East Anglia – which will be two of the largest offshore windfarms in the world – at 3GW and 3.1GW, respectively – both secured contracts.
Additionally, Berwick Bank in the North Sea became the first new Scottish project to win a CfD since 2022. At 4.1GW, the project being developed by SSE Renewables is the largest planned offshore-wind project in the world.
The projects are located around the UK, which is expected to ease grid connections. Nick Civetta, project leader at Aurora Energy Research, noted in a statement:
“83% of the capacity connects in areas of high power demand and greater network capacity, lowering the cost of managing the system.”
In terms of companies, German developer RWE has dominated the auction outcome, with 6.9GW of the capacity being developed overall.
The auction results arrive at a moment of intense interest in energy bills, which remain significantly higher than before the global energy crisis in 2022.
The government, along with much of the energy industry, said the new offshore wind projects would lower bills, relative to the alternative of relying on more gas.
Meanwhile opposition politicians and right-leaning media used misleading figures to argue that gas power is cheap or that the new offshore wind projects would add large costs to bills.
Broadly speaking, there is some evidence to suggest that electricity bills will rise over the years to 2030 – largely as a result of investment in the grid – before starting to decline.
However, this is the case whether the UK pushes forward with its efforts to expand clean power or not – and is mainly dependent on the timing of electricity network investments and the price of gas.
At the same time, electricity demand is starting to rise as the economy electrifies – as shown in the figure below – and many of the UK’s existing power plants are nearing the end of their lives.
This means that new electricity generation will be needed, whether from offshore wind, gas-fired power stations or from other sources.
Adam Berman, director of policy and advocacy at industry group Energy UK, said ahead of the auction that renewables were the “cheapest” source of new supplies.
Similarly, Pranav Menon, senior associate at consultancy Aurora Energy Research, tells Carbon Brief that the key question is how to meet rising demand most cost-effectively. He says:
“Here, it is quite clear that the answer is renewables (up to a certain price and volume), given that new-build gas is much more expensive…(even after accounting for costs and intermittency for renewables).”
The government said that the price for offshore wind secured through AR7 was “40% lower than the cost of building and operating a new gas power plant”. It added:
“Britain has taken a monumental step towards ending the country’s reliance on volatile fossil fuels and lowering bills for good, by delivering a record-breaking offshore wind result in its latest renewables auction.”
In a similar vein, Dhara Vyas, head of Energy UK said in a statement that the results would “deliver lower bills”. She added:
“Today’s auction results will deliver critical national infrastructure that will strengthen our energy security and deliver lower bills, as well as provide jobs, investment and economic growth right across Great Britain.”
These statements rely on updated government estimates of the cost of different electricity-generating technologies, published alongside the auction results.
They also rely on two studies published by Aurora and another consultancy, Baringa, both commissioned by renewable energy firms involved in the auction.
The government’s new cost estimates reflect the inflationary pressures that have hit turbines for gas-fired generation, as well as offshore wind supply chains.
Carbon Brief analysis of the latest and previous figures suggests that the government thinks the cost of building a gas-fired power station has more than doubled. (Reports from the US point to even steeper three-fold increases in gas turbine costs.)
As such, building and operating new gas-fired power stations would be relatively expensive, at £147/MWh, according to the government. (This assumes the gas plant would only be operating during 30% of hours in each year, in line with the current UK fleet.)
While the offshore wind prices secured in AR7 are around 10% higher than in AR6, at £91/MWh, they would still be considerably lower than the cost of a new gas plant.
However, these figures for new gas and for offshore wind in AR7 do not reflect the wider system costs of keeping the electricity grid running at all times.
In late 2025, Baringa concluded that a strike price of up to £94.50/MWh for up to 8GW of offshore wind would be “cost neutral”. This does not include system balancing costs, which the study argues are relatively modest for each additional gigawatt of capacity.
Carbon Brief understands that, when taking this into account, the “cost neutral” price for further offshore capacity would be reduced by a few pounds. This implies that the AR7 result at £91/MWh is likely to be in or around the “cost-neutral” range, based on Baringa’s assumptions.
Also, in late 2025, Aurora concluded that new offshore wind could be secured at “no net cost to consumers”, provided that contracts were agreed at no more than £94/MWh.
In contrast to Baringa’s work, this study is based on what an Aurora press release describes as a “total system cost analysis”. This means it takes into account the cost of dealing with the variable output of offshore wind, such as system balancing and backup.
In an updated note following the results of the auction, Aurora said that it would “generate net consumer savings of just over £1bn up to 2035”. This is relative to a scenario where no offshore wind had been procured at the latest auction.
(In its pre-auction analysis, Aurora pointed to a reduction in consumer electricity bills of around £20 per household per year by 2035, relative to relying on more gas power instead.)
Writing on LinkedIn, Aurora data analyst Ivan Bogachev said that this was the case, even though it might appear to be “counterintuitive”. He added:
“Moreover, AR7 projects are primarily clustered in areas which see few network constraints, limiting any contribution to higher balancing costs.”
In contrast, Conservative shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho and right-leaning media commentators cited misleading figures to claim that the auction was “locking us in” to high prices.
Coutinho has repeatedly cited a figure for the cost of fuel needed to run a gas-fired power station in summer 2025 – some £55/MWh – as if this is a fair reflection of the cost of electricity from gas.
However, this excludes the cost of carbon, which gas plants must pay under the UK emissions trading system and the “carbon price support”. It also ignores the cost of building new gas-fired capacity, which as noted above has soared in recent years.
Dr Callum McIver, a researcher at the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, tells Carbon Brief that “you can’t credibly strip out the cost of carbon” and that the £55/MWh figure is not an “apples-to-apples” comparison with the AR7 result.
McIver says that a fairer comparison would be with a new-build gas plant, which, according to the latest DESNZ cost of generation report, would come in at £147/MWh – and would remain at £104/MWh, even if the cost of carbon is ignored.
UKERC director Prof Robert Gross, at Imperial College London, tells Carbon Brief that Coutinho’s £55/MWh figure for gas is “unrealistically low” because it is below current wholesale prices, which averaged around £80/MWh in 2025.
Gross adds that, as well as ignoring carbon pricing, the figure is also for “existing and not new gas stations, which we will need and which will need to recover much increased CAPEX [capital cost]”.
Another factor often not taken into account by those criticising the price of renewable energy contracts is that these projects reduce wholesale prices, as noted in Aurora’s modelling.
Separate analysis published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank finds that wholesale power prices would have been 46% higher in 2025 – at £121/MWh rather than £83/MWh – if there had been no windfarms generating electricity.
This is because windfarms push the most expensive gas plants off the system, reducing average wholesale prices. This is a well-known phenomenon known as the “merit order effect”.
Offshore wind is expected to be the backbone of the UK’s electricity mix in 2030, making the stakes for this CfD auction particularly high.
Under the National Energy System Operator’s (NESO) independent advice to the government, half of electricity demand will be met by offshore wind by 2030. It says this requires between 43GW and 51GW of generating capacity from the technology.
This advice informed the government’s action plan for meeting 100% of electricity demand with clean power by the end of the decade, which also sets a target of 43-50GW of offshore wind.
Currently, the UK has around 17GW of installed offshore wind capacity, leaving a gap of 27-34GW to the government’s target range.
A further 10GW of capacity already had a CfD prior to the latest auction, excluding the cancelled Hornsea 4 project. The additional 8.4GW contracted in AR7 means the remaining gap to the minimum 43GW end of the government’s range is just 7GW, as shown below.
Speaking to journalists after the auction results were announced, Chris Stark, who is head of “Mission Control” for clean power 2030, told journalists that securing 8.4GW in AR7 put the UK on track for its targets. He added:
“The result today actually takes us now to within touching distance of the goals that we set for 2030 – more to come on that, as I mentioned, with the onshore technologies and the storage projects up and down this country.
“But this is, I think, a real endorsement for the steps that Ed Miliband has taken to bring about that goal of clean power by 2030, it will bring huge benefits to people here in the UK.”
There remain a number of challenges with the delivery of these offshore-wind projects – including securing a grid connection – that could threaten delivery before 2030.
Writing on LinkedIn, Bertalan Gyenes, consultant at LCP Delta, says that with a third of the new capacity set to deliver before 2030, a “swiftly delivered and ambitious [allocation round eight] would put DESNZ within touching distance of its targets”. However, he adds:
“The job is not over yet, the windfarms need to be connected, the network upgraded, consenting pipelines de-clogged – there can be no more delays and certainly no cancellations like what we had seen with Hornsea 4 after last year’s auction.”
McIver wrote on LinkedIn that the auction result “takes us into the goldilocks zone that just about keeps CP30 targets alive, if AR8 can similarly deliver”. He added:
“OK, looking at delivery years [for the contracted projects], maybe we’re aiming for roughly CP33 [clean power by 2033] now? Maybe that would be no bad thing.”
Within the briefing for journalists, Stark highlighted a number of steps undertaken by the government over the past 18 months to ease the challenges around the expansion of the renewable energy sector.
This includes removing “zombie projects” from the queue for connecting projects to the electricity network and announcing £28bn in investment for gas and electricity grids.
As such, the auction results fit within a “host of policies” designed to make the ambitious clean power by 2030 target possible, said Stark.
The second half of the CfD results, covering technologies such as onshore wind and solar, are expected out next month. DESNZ’s action plan set a range of 27-29GW and 45-47GW of capacity for the two technologies, respectively, if the country is to meet its 2030 clean-power target.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here. This is the last edition of Cropped for 2025. The newsletter will return on 14 January 2026.
AG EXCEPTION: France and Italy are “at least temporarily” seeking a carve-out for fertilisers from the EU’s carbon border tax in order to “protect struggling European farmers”, reported Reuters. The first-of-its-kind levy, which came into effect on 1 January, “imposes CO2 emissions fees on imports…to ensure they do not have an unfair advantage over products made in Europe”, the newswire explained. Following the “fertiliser backlash”, the European Commission said it will assess a temporary suspension if the tax leads to “significant inflationary pressure on food prices”, said S&P Global.
MERCOSUR IMMINENT: The EU is set to sign the Mercosur trade deal – an agreement “more than 25 years in the making” – in Paraguay on 17 January, reported the Buenos Aires Times. The deal will create a free trade zone between the EU and the five Mercosur countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Bloomberg wrote that the deal is “meant to signal independence from the world’s two largest economies [the US and China] – and to show that broad multilateral deals remain possible in a global order upended by Donald Trump”.
FARMERS FUMING: Meanwhile, “dozens” of farmers in France and Greece have been protesting the trade deal, “halting traffic and blocking key roads with tractors”, according to the Associated Press. Farmers in Greece “halt[ed] all traffic except emergency vehicles”, the newswire said, while French farmers “set up roadblocks across the country”. French farmers also drove into Paris yesterday, reported Reuters, warning that the trade deal “threatens local agriculture by creating unfair competition with cheaper South American imports”. Greek farmers have been protesting “delayed EU subsidy payments, rising production costs and other grievances” for more than a month, according to Kathimerini.
DEFORESTATION LAW ‘HOLLOWED OUT’: The EU deforestation regulation has been “hollowed out”, the architect of the original legislation told the Guardian. Hugo Schally told the newspaper that the removal of reporting obligations from traders “will make enforcement and eventual prosecution more difficult”. The Guardian noted that the law had come under “intense pressure” from rightwing groups, as well as “some of the biggest exporters to the EU”. A spokesperson for the commission told the newspaper that the law “has already led to positive developments and action on the ground to fight deforestation, climate change and biodiversity loss”.
‘MAJOR FIRES’ IN OZ: Nearly a dozen “major fires” burned across the Australian state of Victoria over the weekend, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The newspaper reported that more than 130 structures have been destroyed and more than 400,000 hectares of land have been “blackened in the fires”. A separate Sydney Morning Herald article noted that the fires had “prompt[ed] grave fears for vulnerable animals”, such as dingoes, critically endangered frogs and several endangered bird species.
WESTERN CAPE WILDFIRES: Thousands of people were also displaced following wildfires in South Africa’s Western Cape, according to Xinhua News Agency. The Daily Maverick wrote that “homes and farms were consumed within minutes, while neighbours and volunteers scrambled to protect property”. Several factors may have contributed to the blazes, including exceptionally dry weather, strong winds, unmanaged vegetation and invasive tree species, the newspaper said.
CRITICAL SITUATION: In Argentine Patagonia, tourists were evacuated and homes burned as fires “scorched more than 15,000 hectares” of forest, reported Agence France-Presse. Rain on Sunday afternoon provided “relief” to some residents of the Chubut region, but the province’s governor, Ignacio Torres, said that the situation “remains very critical”. Torres said that people should “never again…downplay the implications of climate change”, the newswire reported.
BRAZIL FIRES FALL: The number of wildfires in the Brazilian Amazon dropped by 69% in 2025, compared to the previous year, reaching the lowest level in 28 years, reported EFE Verde. The newswire said the decline was “attributed by specialists to less severe climatic conditions than in 2024 [and] to shorter and less rigorous periods of drought”.
SOYA MORATORIUM ‘ENDED’: A major Brazilian soya industry association has announced it will “withdraw” from the “soya moratorium” – an agreement to refrain from selling soya grown on recently deforested land, reported the Associated Press. The newswire noted that the moratorium “has been widely credited with helping curb rainforest loss”. It added: “Environmentalists and government officials said the withdrawal essentially ended the agreement, even though no participant has formally declared it over.”
US TREATY RETREAT: US president Donald Trump announced that the country will withdraw from 66 international bodies, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, saying these bodies “no longer serve US interests”, reported Politico. Among the other organisations are two major scientific bodies – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), reported Carbon Brief. Several legal experts told the Guardian that the move to withdraw from the treaties “may be illegal”.
ALTERNATIVES FOR ENGLAND: Seven out of England’s 10 wildlife targets under the Environment Act 2021 are unlikely to be met by 2030, reported the Guardian. The outlet added that some of the targets could be hindered by the proposed planning and infrastructure bill. Elsewhere, English livestock farmers could profit more from improving the environment than producing meat, according to analysis by thinktank Green Alliance covered by the Grocer.
DIETARY CHANGE: The Trump administration released new dietary guidelines that “take a dramatic turn toward encouraging the consumption of animal protein, including red meat”, said Inside Climate News. It added that the “meat industry celebrated the new guidelines”, while health and environmental groups “called them a dangerous reversal of science-based health advice that could worsen the climate and ecological impacts of livestock”. Previous iterations of the dietary guidelines have not directly considered environmental sustainability, but have encouraged plant-based proteins from a health perspective.
LARGE SEIZURE: Indonesia is planning to reclaim millions of hectares of land it believes are being used illegally, reported Bloomberg. The country has so far seized 4m hectares of palm oil plantations, mining concessions and processing facilities, and officials say this could soon double. The outlet added that much of the land has been given to a state-owned company responsible for managing palm oil plantations, as part of Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto’s efforts to combat “malfeasance in the commodities sector”. Palm oil traders fear land seizures could hurt Indonesia’s palm oil supply, reduce investment and impact smallholder plantations, the article said.
FOOD SECURITY RISK: The head of Iran’s meteorological organisation warned that climate change is becoming a serious threat to the country’s food security, according to NatureNews Africa. The official said that sea level rise in the Persian Gulf could cause flooding and saltwater seep into coastal provinces of south-western Iran, damaging soil and food production. The official also pointed out that high temperatures are already reducing crop yields, damaging soil and harming marine life, the outlet reported, and called for “urgent” policy changes and climate adaptation strategies.
This week, Carbon Brief compiles a non-exhaustive list of international policies and negotiations in 2026 that concern food systems, biodiversity and climate change, as well as major reports expected this year.
The coming year is another “triple COP” year, as countries will meet to negotiate outcomes under three major environmental treaties – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
The world is coming out of an “intense period on the climate policy side”, Oliver Camp, an environment and food systems advocacy advisor at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), told Carbon Brief. Following 2025, which saw many – but not all – countries update their climate pledges (“nationally determined contributions”, or NDCs), Camp said he expects new focus on accelerating implementation in the coming year.
This means “moving from what and why to how”, he continued. On the policy front, countries need to begin implementing high-level plans, such as their NDCs, national adaptation plans (NAPs), food system pathways and national nutrition plans, he added.
Regarding global agricultural policies, Camp said he expects the focus to shift towards food-based dietary guidelines, national agroecology transition plans, livestock strategies and food loss and waste reduction roadmaps.
On nature, a key moment will be the delivery of countries’ biodiversity plans (NBSAPs) and national reports, the latter of which must be submitted to the CBD by 28 February.
At the EU level, countries are required to submit their national restoration plans to the European Commission by mid-2026, which detail how they will meet their targets for restoring ecosystems. This is part of the Nature Restoration Law, which the bloc approved in 2024. This aims to restore at least 20% of EU land and sea by 2030, and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050.
Several global and regional agreements and policies focus on the ocean.
The High Seas Treaty, also known as the agreement on “biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction”, will enter into force on 17 January. The treaty – already ratified by 81 of 145 signing countries – aims to govern the conservation and sustainable use of the world’s oceans outside of national waters and was agreed upon in March 2023.
The first conference of parties to the treaty is supposed to take place within one year after the treaty enters into force and will address the rules of procedure, permanent bodies and rules of funding and budget, as well as priorities for implementing the treaty.
The European Ocean Act is planned for adoption by the end of this year and will seek to improve the implementation of marine governance at EU level by structuring all the marine conservation and sustainable use targets adopted by the bloc. The act also aims to streamline EU ocean policies and reporting.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) will release its “business and biodiversity assessment” in February. This report will examine the impacts and dependence of companies on nature and the methods they use to measure and report their impacts. The report is expected to be adopted at the IPBES 12th plenary session, held from 3 to 8 February 2026 in Manchester, UK.
Marie Cosquer, food systems and climate advocacy analyst for Action against Hunger, told Carbon Brief that she is looking forward to an upcoming report on Indigenous peoples’ food and knowledge systems. That report will be produced by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the UN Committee on World Food Security and released in October.
The first of the UN conventions to meet will be the UNCCD, which will convene COP17 from 17 to 28 August in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. It is expected to deliver solutions for land restoration, sustainable land use, resilience and mitigation of climate impacts. This occurs during the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, which will gather efforts for the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of rangelands.
COP17 of the CBD will be held from 19 to 30 October in Armenia’s capital Yerevan. It will deliver the first global review of nations’ progress in the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Finally, COP31 of the UNFCCC will be held in Antalya, Turkey from 9 to 20 November, with rival bidder Australia acting as “president of negotiations”. In its coverage of COP30 in Belém last November, Carbon Brief compiled a list of the key meetings and milestones leading up to the summit in Turkey.
LAST BAOBAB STANDING: The Guardian asked whether the city of Kinshasa – the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo – can save its sole remaining baobab tree.
BEAVER HEROES: A National Geographic video explored how beaver dams can be beneficial to ecosystems and other species.
‘MICRO-FOREST’ MOVEMENT: NPR’s Short Wave podcast discussed the rise of “micro-forests” – small forests that can help restore degraded lands, take up CO2 and preserve biodiversity.
THE LIVING RIVER: The story of how Indigenous knowledge of New Zealand’s Māori community helped grant recognition of legal rights to the Whanganui River was told by Inside Climate News.
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Ayesha Tandon also contributed to this issue. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The different temperature records confirm that last year was either the second or third warmest since observations began in the mid-1800s, with razor-thin margins between 2025 and 2023.
Last year also set a new record for ocean heat content, with the oceans absorbing more than 90% of the heat trapped by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
Here, Carbon Brief examines the latest data across the Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere and surface temperature. (Use the links below to navigate between sections.)
Noteworthy findings from this 2025 review include…
The year 2025 was the warmest on record for the heat content of the world’s oceans.
Ocean heat content (OHC) increased by around 500 zettajoules – billion trillion joules – since the 1940s.
The heat increase in 2025 alone compared to 2024 – about 23 zettajoules – is around 39 times as much as the total energy produced by all human activities on Earth in 2023 (the latest year in which global primary energy statistics are available). It was also the largest increase in ocean heat content since 2017 (following the strong El Niño event of 2016).
Human-emitted greenhouse gases trap extra heat in the atmosphere. While some of this warms the Earth’s surface, the vast majority – around of 93% – goes into the oceans. About two-thirds of this accumulates in the top 700 metres, but some also ends up in the deep oceans.
The figure below shows annual OHC estimates from the Chinese Institute for Atmospheric Physics (IAP) between 1950 and present for the upper 700 metres (light blue shading) and 700-2,000 metres (dark blue) of the ocean.
In a new paper published last week, researchers found that the rate of OHC increase over the past 15 years is unprecedented over the observational record in the IAP dataset. More broadly, there has been a distinct acceleration in OHC after 1991 – and recent OHC growth rates are generally consistent with satellite measurements of Earth energy imbalance (EEI).
(Energy imbalance is a measure of how much surplus heat there is in the Earth’s climate system. It is the difference between how much energy enters Earth’s atmosphere from the sun and how excess heat is radiated back into space as the world warms.)
In many ways, OHC represents a much better measure of climate change than global average surface temperatures, because it is where most of the extra heat ends up and is much less variable on a year-to-year basis than surface temperatures.
To assess global surface temperatures in 2025, Carbon Brief uses eight independent datasets: NASA, NOAA, the Met Office Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia’s (UEA) HadCRUT5, Berkeley Earth, Copernicus ERA5, Japan’s JRA-3Q, DCENT and China-MST.
The analysis reveals that global surface temperatures were between the second and third warmest since records began in the mid-1800s. Temperatures effectively tied with 2023 within the margin of uncertainty, below the record set last year in 2024.
The figure below shows global surface temperature records from the eight datasets.
Global surface temperature records can be calculated back to 1850, though some groups such as NASA GISTEMP choose to start their records in 1880 when more data was available.
Prior to 1850, records exist for some specific regions, but are not sufficiently widespread to calculate global temperatures with high accuracy (though newly published research has attempted to extend this back to 1781).
These longer surface temperature records are created by combining ship- and buoy-based measurements of ocean sea surface temperatures with temperature readings of the surface air temperature from weather stations on land. (Copernicus ERA5 and JRA-3Q are an exception, as they use weather model-based reanalysis to combine lots of different data sources over time.)
Some differences between temperature records are apparent early in the record, particularly prior to 1900 when observations are more sparse and results are more sensitive to how different groups fill in the gaps between observations. However, there is strong agreement between the different temperature records for the period since 1970, as shown in the figure below.
Global temperatures over the past three years clearly stand out as much warmer than anything that has come before, well above the prior record set in 2016. More broadly, the 11 warmest years on record all happened in the past 11 years.
Two of the eight datasets analysed by Carbon Brief – NASA and DCENT – had 2025 as the second-warmest year behind 2024, while six of the datasets had 2025 as the third-warmest year behind both 2023 and 2024.
However, in nearly all cases the difference between 2023 and 2025 falls within each dataset’s published uncertainty range, making it effectively a tie between the two years.
The table below shows the reported 2025 global temperature anomalies (relative to each group’s 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline), as well as a 2025 value using a common pre-industrial baseline between the 1850-1900 and 1981-2010 periods across the five groups with data back to 1850 (NOAA, Hadley/UEA, Berkeley Earth, DCENT and China-MST).
| Dataset | 2025 Reported | 2025 With common baseline | Ranking |
|---|---|---|---|
| NASA GISTEMP | 1.39 | 1.45 | Second |
| Hadley/UEA HadCRUT5 | 1.41 | 1.39 | Third |
| NOAA GlobalTemp | 1.33 | 1.41 | Third |
| Berkeley Earth | 1.44 | 1.44 | Third |
| Copernicus ERA5 | 1.47 | 1.47 | Third |
| JRA-3Q | 1.46 | 1.46 | Third |
| DCENT | 1.53 | 1.44 | Second |
| China-MST | 1.39 | 1.42 | Third |
Reported temperature anomalies range from as low as 1.33C (NOAA) to as high as 1.53C (DCENT), primarily reflecting differences in the early part of the record. The 2025 values with a common baseline have a much smaller range, from 1.41C (NOAA) to 1.47C (Copernicus).
Separate land and ocean temperatures are not available yet from all of these groups. However, Berkeley Earth reports that global land temperatures in 2025 were the second warmest on record, at 2.03C above pre-industrial levels, while ocean temperatures were the third warmest at 1.03C.
Global land regions – where the global human population lives – has generally been warming around 70% faster than the oceans and 40% faster than the global average since 1970.
The year started off quite hot, with January 2025 setting a new record as the warmest January. All other months of the year ended up being either the second or third warmest on record after 2024 and 2023.
The figure below shows each month of 2025 in dark red, compared to all prior years since 1850. Each year is coloured based on the decade in which it occurred, with the clear warming over time visible, as well as the margin by which both 2023, 2024 and 2025 exceeded past years.
While the globe as a whole was tied as the second warmest on record, many different regions of the planet set new records in 2025.
The figure below shows how global temperature deviated from the average in 2025 across the world. Areas shaded in red were warmer than the baseline period (1951-80) used by Berkeley Earth, whereas the few blue areas experienced cooler temperatures.
Collectively, approximately 770 million people – 9.3% of Earth’s population – live in places that experienced their warmest year on record in 2025. This was mostly concentrated in Asia, including around 450 million people in China.
The figure below highlights regions of the planet that experienced their top-five warmest (red shading) or coldest (blue) temperatures on record in 2025. Overall, around 9% of the planet set a new record, including 11% of the land and 8% of the ocean. No location on the planet experienced record cold temperatures – or even top-five record cold temperatures – for the year as a whole.
Global temperatures over the past three years have been unusually warm, well above what would be expected given the long-term warming trend of around 0.2C per decade since the 1970s.
Recent research has found that global warming has accelerated in recent years to around 0.27C per decade, though this acceleration is largely in-line with climate model projections under scenarios where greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise while emissions of planet cooling aerosols are reduced.
According to analysis from Berkeley Earth, the odds of global temperatures over 2023-25 occurring as a result of greenhouse gas emissions and natural variations in the Earth’s climate alone “is less than one-in-100” and “likely indicates that recent years have been impacted by additional warming factor(s)”.
The figure below shows how the exceptional warming spike of 2023-25 compares to the longer-term warming trend and historical climate variability.
Carbon Brief recently explored the drivers of recent warmth in more detail, finding that it is likely to have been driven by a combination of:
This is illustrated in the figure below, which provides an estimate of the impact of each of these different factors on 2023 and 2024 temperatures, along with their respective uncertainties.
The sum of all the factors is shown in the “combined” bar, while the actual warming compared to expectations is shown in red. The upper chart shows 2023, while the lower one shows 2024.
The first bar includes both El Niño and natural year-to-year climate variability; the height of the bar reflects the best estimate of El Niño’s effects, while the uncertainty range encompasses year-to-year variability in global temperatures that may be – at least in part – unrelated to El Niño.
While a similar analysis has yet to be undertaken for 2025, the end of El Nino conditions and the development of a modest La Nina would have driven temperatures down, while the warming impact of shipping, Chinese aerosol declines would have slightly increased. The warming effect of the solar cycle would likely have remained flat or slightly declined as solar cycle 25 passed its peak.
Finally, a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) assessment of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano found that “the record-high global surface temperatures in 2023-24 were not due to the Hunga eruption”.
The report suggested that the volcano had a small cooling effect (-0.03C) globally in 2023 and 2024. This might switch to a small warming effect (+0.03C) in 2025 and 2026 as the planet-cooling aerosols from the volcano fall back down to the surface but some of the stratospheric water vapour remains, it noted.
However, it added, these effects are “indistinguishable from background variability in the current climate”.
El Niño and La Niña are generally the largest drivers of year-to-year variability in global temperatures. The figure below shows the El Niño (red shading) and La Niña (blue) conditions over the past 40 years (collectively referred to as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or “ENSO”).
Carbon Brief has used the historical relationship between ENSO conditions and temperature to effectively remove the effects of El Niño and La Niña events from global temperatures, as shown in the figure below.
This analysis indicates that El Niño cooled global temperatures in 2025 around -0.05C, following a boost to global temperatures of around 0.12C in 2024, compared to the estimate of global temperatures with both El Niño and La Niña events removed.
This suggests that the shift from El Nino to La Nina conditions can fully explain the decline in global temperatures between 2024 and 2025 and that 2025 would have likely been the warmest year in the observational record if it had not been for the effects of ENSO.
Scientists provided estimates of where they expected 2025 temperatures to end up at the start of the year.
The figure below shows estimates by four different groups that provided temperature predictions for the year prior to any data being collected – the Met Office, NASA’s Dr Gavin Schmidt, Berkeley Earth and Carbon Brief’s own estimate — compared to what actually transpired.
Unlike in 2023 –and, to a lesser extent, 2024 –when start-of-year predictions were notably low, 2025 fell reasonably in-line with what was expected. The Met Office estimate was nearly exactly on target, with Berkeley Earth’s being close as well. Carbon Brief and Schmidt’s estimates were a little on the low side, but actual temperatures were well within the estimated error bars.
Climate models provide physics-based estimates of future warming given different assumptions about future emissions, greenhouse gas concentrations and other climate-influencing factors.
Here, Carbon Brief examines a collection of climate models – known as CMIP6 – used in the 2021 science report of the IPCC’s sixth assessment.
In CMIP6, model estimates of temperatures prior to 2015 are a “hindcast” using known past climate influences, while temperatures projected from 2015 onward are a “forecast” based on an estimate of how things might change.
The figure below shows how observations compare to the full ensemble of 37 CMIP6 models under the middle-of-the-road SSP2-4.5 emissions scenario for future projections. The red line represents the average of all the models and the red areas showing the 5th to 95th percentile range. The average of the eight observational temperature datasets are plotted as dots on top of the climate model data.
The chart illustrates how observations have generally been a bit below the model average over the past two decades, were slightly above model average in 2024 and are more or less dead on in 2025.
However, the ensemble of CMIP6 models differs from the main projection of future warming in the recent IPCC AR6 report. A subset of CMIP6 models have unrealistically high climate sensitivity and they reproduce historical observations poorly.
To account for this, rather than simply averaging all the models – as had been done in prior assessments – the IPCC employed an approach that effectively weights models by their performance. As a result, the models align better with the range of climate sensitivity derived from multiple different lines of evidence.
The chart below shows the assessed warming projections from the IPCC AR6 report in red, with historical observations since 1850 as black dots.
The chart reveals that observed global surface temperatures (black dots) are further above the modeled central estimate 2023-25, but generally remain within the IPCC assessed range.
Climate models broadly expect an acceleration of warming in the current period in a scenario like SSP2-4.5 where emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to modestly increase, but emissions of planet-cooling aerosols like sulphur dioxide are rapidly reduced.
In addition to surface measurements over the world’s land and oceans, satellite microwave sounding units have been providing estimates of temperatures at various layers of the atmosphere since 1979.
The lowest layer of the atmosphere that satellite microwave units provide temperature estimates for is the lower troposphere. This data reflects temperatures a few kilometres above the Earth’s surface. It reveals a pattern of warming in the lowest troposphere that is similar – though not identical – to surface temperature changes.
The records produced by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) and NOAA show 2025 as the second warmest year on record in the lower troposphere, after 2024. The chart below shows the three records for the lower troposphere, using a more recent baseline period (1981-2010) given the absence of satellite data before 1979.
The lower troposphere tends to be influenced more strongly by El Niño and La Niña events than the surface. Therefore, satellite records show correspondingly larger warming or cooling spikes during these events. This explains why there was both a bigger increase between 2023 and 2024 and a bigger decline between 2024 and 2025 in the satellite record than in surface records.
The lower-tropospheric temperature records show large differences after the early 2000s. RSS shows an overall rate of warming quite similar to surface temperature records, while UAH and NOAA show considerably slower warming in recent years than has been observed on the surface.
Greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new high in 2025, driven by human-caused emissions from fossil fuels, land use and agriculture.
Three greenhouse gases – CO2, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) – are responsible for the bulk of additional heat trapped by human activities. CO2 is by far the largest factor, accounting for roughly 42% of the increase in global surface temperatures since the pre-industrial era (1850-1900).
Methane accounts for 28%, while nitrous oxide accounts for around 5%. The remaining 25% comes from other factors including carbon monoxide, black carbon and halocarbons, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
Human emissions of greenhouse gases have increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide to their highest levels in at least a few million years – if not longer.
The figure below shows concentrations of these greenhouse gases – in parts per million (ppm) for CO2 and parts per billion (ppb) for methane and nitrous oxide – from the early 1980s through to October 2025 for CO2 and September 2025 for CH4 and N2O (the most recent data currently available).
Modern-day sea levels have risen to a new high, due to a combination of melting land ice (such as glaciers and ice sheets), the thermal expansion of water as it warms and changes in land water storage.
In recent years, there have been larger contributions to sea level rise from melting ice sheets and glaciers, as warmer temperatures accelerate ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica.
Since the early 1990s, the increase in global sea level has been estimated using altimeter data from satellites. Earlier global sea levels have been reconstructed from a network of global tide gauge measurements. This allows researchers to estimate how sea level has changed since the late 1800s.
The chart below shows five different modern sea level rise datasets (blue lines), along with satellite altimeter measurements as assessed by AVISO (in black) after 1993. (As sea level rise data has not yet been released for the whole year, the 2025 value is estimated based on data through to November.)
Sea levels have risen by over 0.2 metres (200mm) since 1900. While sea level rise estimates mostly agree in recent decades, larger divergences are evident before 1980. There is also evidence of accelerating sea level rise over the post-1993 period when high-quality satellite altimetry data is available.
(To understand more on how climate change is accelerating sea level rise, read Carbon Brief’s explainer.)
A significant portion of global sea level rise is being driven by melting glaciers on land.
Scientists measure the mass of glaciers around the world using a variety of remote-sensing techniques, as well as through GRACE measurements of the Earth’s gravitational field. The balance between snow falling on a glacier and ice loss through melting and the breaking off – or “calving” – of icebergs determines if glaciers grow or shrink over time.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service is an international consortium that tracks more than 130 different glaciers in 19 different regions around the world. The figure below shows the change in global average glacier mass from 1950 through to the end of 2024. (2025 values are not yet available.) Note that glacier melt is reported in metres of water equivalent, which is a measure of how much mass has been lost on average.
Greenland ice sheets have become a larger contributor to sea level rise in recent years due to accelerating loss of mass. The year 2025 was the 29th in a row where Greenland lost ice overall, with 105bn tonnes of ice lost over the 12 months from September 2024 to August 2025. Greenland last saw an annual net gain of ice in 1996.
The figure below shows the cumulative mass balance change – that is, the net ice loss – from Greenland between 1970 and 2025. The authors find that Greenland has lost around 6tn tonnes of ice over the past 50 years – more than 700 tonnes lost per person for every person on the planet.
Arctic sea ice saw its lowest winter peak on record as well as its 10th-lowest summer minimum extent, while Antarctic sea ice saw its third-lowest minimum extent.
Both the Arctic and Antarctic were at the low end of the historical (1979-2010) range for most of 2025, with new daily lows recorded for Arctic sea ice extent in January, February, March, June and December.
The figure below shows both Arctic (red line) and Antarctic (blue line) sea ice extent for each day of the year, along with how it compares to the historical range (corresponding shading).
There is reason for caution when estimating likely temperatures for 2026.
In 2023, temperatures were significantly higher than predictions made at the start of the year, while 2024 temperatures were towards the high end of annual predictions. Temperatures in 2025 were more in-line with predictions, albeit still on the higher side for three out of the four predictions included above.
There are currently weak La Niña conditions currently present in the tropical Pacific, which are expected to extend through February. This would somewhat suppress temperatures in the first half of the year. However, the latest forecasts suggest a growing likelihood of El Niño conditions developing by June, which may lead to warmer temperatures in late 2026 – and potentially much warmer temperatures in 2027.
Carbon Brief predicts that global average surface temperatures in 2026 are likely to be between the second and fourth warmest on record, similar to 2023 and 2025, at around 1.4C above pre-industrial levels.
This is the fourth published temperature prediction for 2026, after those already produced by the Met Office, NASA’s Dr Gavin Shmidt and Berkeley Earth.
The figure below shows the four different 2026 predictions compared to the average of eight different temperature records explored in this article. (These have been “normalised” to show 2026 warming relative to the 2023-25 average to allow a clear comparison, given that each of the predictions was originally presented for a different temperature record.)
Carbon Brief’s prediction of likely 2026 temperatures is based on a statistical model using the average temperature of the past year, the latest monthly temperature and projections of ENSO conditions over the first three months of 2026.
The Met Office, Dr Schmidt, Berkeley Earth and Carbon Brief estimates all have 2026 ending up as somewhere between the second- and fourth-warmest year on record, with the best estimate as being more or less tied with 2023 and 2025.
There is a very small chance that 2026 could end up beating 2024 as the warmest year on record, or end up below 2016 as the fifth or sixth warmest year.
However, with the growing likelihood of El Niño conditions developing in the second half of 2026, it is increasingly likely that 2027 will challenge 2024 for the title of the warmest year on record. The rate of warming has notably accelerated over the past 15 years and the period of exceptionally warm years that started in 2023 shows no signs of abating.
Amid the biggest stories of the year, climate change research continued to feature prominently in news and social media feeds.
Using data from Altmetric, which scores research papers according to the attention they receive online, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate-related studies of the past year.
The top 10 – shown in the infographic above and list below – include research into declining butterflies, heat-related deaths, sugar intake and the massive loss of ice from the world’s glaciers:
Later in this article, Carbon Brief looks at the rest of the top 25 and provides analysis of the most featured journals, as well as the gender diversity and country of origin of authors.
New for this year is the inclusion of Altmetric’s new “sentiment analysis”, which scores how positive or negative a paper’s social media attention has been.
(For Carbon Brief’s previous Altmetric articles, see the links for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.)
The top-scoring climate paper of 2025, ranking 24th of any research paper on any topic, is the annual update of the “Indicators of Global Climate Change” (IGCC) report.
The report was established in 2023 to help fill the gap in climate information between assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which can take up to seven years to complete. It includes the latest data on global temperatures, the remaining carbon budget, greenhouse gas emissions and – for the first time – sea level rise.
The paper, published in Earth System Science Data, has an Altmetric score of 4,099. This makes it the lowest top-scoring climate paper in Carbon Brief’s list since 2017.
(An Altmetric score combines the mentions that published peer-reviewed research has received from online news articles, blogs, Wikipedia and on social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and Bluesky. See an earlier Carbon Brief article for more on how Altmetric’s scoring system works.)
Previous editions of the IGCC have also appeared in Carbon Brief’s list – the 2024 and 2023 iterations ranked 17th and 18th, respectively.
This year’s paper was mentioned 556 times in online news stories, including in the Associated Press, Guardian, Independent, Hill and BBC News.
Many outlets led their coverage with the study’s findings on the global “carbon budget”. This warned that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C will be exhausted in just three years if global emissions continue at their current rate.
In a Carbon Brief guest post about the study, authors Prof Piers Forster and Dr Debbie Rosen from the University of Leeds wrote:
“It is also now inevitable that global temperatures will reach 1.5C of long-term warming in the next few years unless society takes drastic, transformative action…Every year of delay brings reaching 1.5C – or even higher temperatures – closer.”
Forster, who was awarded a CBE in the 2026 new year honours list, tells Carbon Brief that media coverage of the study was “great” at “putting recent extreme weather in the context of rapid long-term rates of global warming”.
However, he adds:
“Climate stories are not getting the coverage they deserve or need at the moment so the community needs to get all the help we can for getting clear consistent messages out there.”
The paper was tweeted more than 300 times and posted on Bluesky more than 950 times. It also appeared in 22 blogs.
Using AI, Altmetric now analyses the “sentiment” of this social media attention. As the summary figure below shows, the posts about this paper were largely positive, with an approximate 3:1 split of positive and negative attention.
With an Altmetric score of 3,828, the second-highest scoring climate paper warns of “widespread” declines in butterfly numbers across the US since the turn of the century.
The paper, titled “Rapid butterfly declines across the US during the 21st century” and published in Science, identifies a 22% fall in butterfly numbers across more than 500 species between 2000 and 2020.
(There is a higher-scoring paper, “The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink”, in the journal BioScience, but it is a “special report” and was not formally peer reviewed.)
The scale of the decline suggests “multiple and broadly acting threats, including habitat loss, climate change and pesticide use”, the paper says. The authors find that “species generally had stronger declines in more southerly parts of their ranges”, with some of the most negative trends in the driest and “most rapidly warming” US states.
The research was covered in 560 news articles, including the New York Times, Guardian, Associated Press, NPR, El País and BBC News. Much of the news coverage led with the 22% decline figure.
The paper was also mentioned in 13 blogs, more than 750 Bluesky posts and more than 600 tweets.
The sentiment analysis reveals that social media posts about the paper were largely negative. However, closer inspection reveals that this negativity is predominantly towards the findings of the paper, not the research itself.
For example, a Bluesky post on the “distressing” findings by one of the study’s authors is designated as “neutral negative” by Altmetric’s AI analysis.
In a response to a query from Carbon Brief, Altmetric explains that the “goal is to measure how people feel about the research paper itself, not the topic it discusses”. However, in some cases the line can be “blurred” as the AI “sometimes struggles to separate the subject matter from the critique”. The organisation adds that it is “continuously working on improving our models to better distinguish between the post’s content and the research output”.
On the attention that the paper received, lead author Dr Collin Edwards of the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife says that “first and foremost, people care about butterflies and our results are broad-reaching, unequivocal and, unfortunately, very concerning”.
Edwards tells Carbon Brief he hopes the clarity of the writing made the paper accessible to readers, noting that he and his co-authors “sweat[ed] over every word”.
The resulting news coverage “accurately captured the science”, Edwards says:
“Much as I wish our results were less consistently grim, the consistency and simplicity of our findings mean that even if a news story only provides the highest level summary, it isn’t misleading readers by skipping some key caveat or nuance that changes the interpretation.”
In third place in Carbon Brief’s list for 2025 is the latest scientific paper from veteran climatologist Dr James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and now adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
The paper, titled “Global warming has accelerated: Are the UN and the public well-informed?” was published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. It generated an Altmetric score of 3,474.
The study estimates that the record-high global temperatures in the last few years were caused by a combination of El Niño and a reduction in air pollution from international shipping.
The findings suggest that the cooling effect of aerosols – tiny, light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – has masked more of the warming driven by greenhouse gases than previously estimated by the IPCC.
As efforts to tackle air pollution continue to reduce aerosol emissions, warming will accelerate further – reaching 2C by 2045, according to the research.
The paper was covered by almost 400 news stories – driven, in part, by Hansen’s comments in a press briefing that the Paris Agreement’s 2C warming limit was already “dead”.
Hansen’s analysis received a sceptical response from some scientists. For example, Dr Valerie Masson-Delmotte, an IPCC co-chair for its most recent assessment report on climate science, told Agence France-Presse the research “is not published in a climate science journal and it formulates a certain number of hypotheses that are not consistent with all the available observations”.
In addition, other estimates, including by Carbon Brief, suggest new shipping regulations have made a smaller contribution to warming than estimated by Hansen.
Hansen tells Carbon Brief that the paper “did ok” in terms of media coverage, although notes “it’s on [scientists] to do a better job of making clear what the core issues are in the physics of climate change”.
With more than 1,000 tweets, the paper scored highest in the top 25 for posts on Twitter. It was also mentioned in more than 800 Bluesky posts and on 27 blogs.
The sentiment analysis suggests that these posts were largely positive, with just a small percentage of negative comments.
Ranking fourth in Carbon Brief’s analysis is a Nature paper calculating changes in global glacier mass over 2000-23. The study finds glaciers worldwide lost 273bn tonnes of ice annually over that time – with losses increasing by 36% between 2000-11 and 2012-23.
The study has an Altmetric score of 3,199. It received more news coverage than any other paper in this year’s top 25, amassing 1,187 mentions. with outlets including the Guardian, Associated Press and Economic Times.
At number five, with an Altmetric score of 2,860, is the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable and just food systems.
Carbon Brief’s coverage of the report highlights that “a global shift towards ‘healthier’ diets could cut non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, such as methane, from agriculture by 15% by 2050”. It adds:
“The findings build on the widely cited 2019 report from the EAT-Lancet Commission – a group of leading experts in nutrition, climate, economics, health, social sciences and agriculture from around the world.”
Also making the top 10 – ranking sixth and eighth – are a pair of papers published in Nature, which both link extreme heat to the emissions of specific “carbon majors” – large producers of fossil fuels, such as ExxonMobil, Shell and Saudi Aramco,.
The first is a perspective, titled “Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability”, published in April. It begins:
“Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate? Twenty years after this question was first posed, we argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed. Here we detail the scientific and legal implications of an ‘end-to-end’ attribution that links fossil fuel producers to specific damages from warming.”
The authors find “trillions (of US$) in economic losses attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from individual companies”.
The paper was mentioned 1,329 times on Bluesky – the highest in this year’s top 25. It was also mentioned in around 270 news stories.
Published four months later, the second paper uses extreme event attribution to assess the impact of climate change on more than 200 heatwaves recorded since the year 2000.
The authors find one-quarter of the heatwaves would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused global warming. They add that the heatwaves were, on average, 1.7C hotter due to climate change, with half of this increase due to emissions stemming from the operations and production of carbon majors.
This study was mentioned in almost 300 news stories – including by Carbon Brief – as well as 222 tweets and 823 posts on Bluesky.
In seventh place is a Nature Medicine study, which quantifies how heat-related and cold-related deaths will change over the coming century as the climate warms.
A related research briefing explains the main findings of the paper:
“Heat-related deaths are estimated to increase more rapidly than cold-related deaths are estimated to decrease under future climate change scenarios across European cities. An unrealistic degree of adaptation to heat would be required to revert this trend, indicating the need for strong policies to reduce greenhouse gases emissions.”
The paper was mentioned 345 times in the news, including in the Financial Times, New Scientist, Guardian and Bloomberg.
The paper in ninth place also analyses the health impacts of extreme heat. The study, published in Science Advances, finds that extreme heat can speed up biological ageing in older people.
Rounding out the top 10 is a Nature Climate Change study, titled “Rising temperatures increase added sugar intake disproportionately in disadvantaged groups in the US”.
The study finds that at higher temperatures, people in the US consume more sugar – mainly due to “higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and frozen desserts”. The authors project that warming of 5C would drive additional sugar consumption of around 3 grams per day, “with vulnerable groups at an even higher risk”.
The rest of the top 25 includes a wide range of research, from “glacier extinction” and wildfires to Amazon drought and penguin guano.
In 13th place is a Nature Climate Change study that finds the wealthiest 10% of people – defined as those who earn at least €42,980 (£36,605) per year – contributed seven times more to the rise in monthly heat extremes around the world than the global average.
The authors also explore country-level emissions, finding that the wealthiest 10% in the US produced the emissions that caused a doubling in heat extremes across “vulnerable regions” globally.
(See Carbon Brief’s coverage of the paper for more details.)
In 15th place is the annual Lancet Countdown on health and climate change – a lengthy report with more than 120 authors.
The study warns that “climate change is increasingly destabilising the planetary systems and environmental conditions on which human life depends”.
This annual analysis from the Lancet often features in Carbon Brief’s top 25 analysis. After three years in the Carbon Brief’s top 10 over 2020-23, the report landed in 20th place in 2023 and missed out on a spot in the top 25 altogether in 2024.
In 16th place is a Science Advances study, titled “Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanisation and human population”. The study uses public complaint and inspection data from 16 cities around the world to estimate changes in rat populations.
It finds that “warming temperatures and more people living in cities may be expanding the seasonal activity periods and food availability for urban rats”.
The study received 320 new mentions, including in the Washington Post, New Scientist and National Geographic.
In 21st place is a Nature Climate Change paper, titled “Peak glacier extinction in the mid-21st century”. The study authors “project a sharp rise in the number of glaciers disappearing worldwide, peaking between 2041 and 2055 with up to ~4,000 glaciers vanishing annually”.
Completing the top 25 is a Nature study on the “prudent planetary limit for geological carbon storage” – where captured CO2 is injected deep underground, where it can stay trapped for thousands of years.
In a Carbon Brief guest post, study authors Dr Matthew Gidden and Prof Joeri Rogelj explain that carbon dioxide removal will only be effective at limiting global temperature rise if captured CO2 is injected “deep underground, where it can stay trapped for thousands of years”.
The guest post warns that “geological carbon storage is not limitless”. It states that “if all available safe carbon storage capacity were used for CO2 removal, this would contribute to only a 0.7C reduction in global warming”.
The journal Nature dominates Carbon Brief’s top 25, with seven papers featured.
Many other journals in the Springer Nature stable also feature, including Nature Climate Change (three), Communications Earth & Environment (two), as well as Nature Ecology & Evolution, Nature Medicine and Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (one each).
Also appearing more than once in the top 25 are Science Advances (three), Science (two) and the Lancet (two).
This is shown in the graphic below.
All the final scores for 2025 can be found in this spreadsheet.
The top 25 climate papers of 2025 cover a huge range of topics and scope. However, analysis of their authors reveals a distinct lack of diversity.
In total, the top 25 includes more than 650 authors – the highest number since Carbon Brief began this analysis in 2022.
This is largely due to a few publications with an exceptionally high number of authors. For example, the 2025 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change has almost 130 authors alone, accounting for almost one-fifth of authors in this analysis.
Carbon Brief recorded the gender and country of affiliation for each of these authors. (The methodology used was developed by Carbon Brief for analysis presented in a special 2021 series on climate justice.)
The analysis reveals that 88% of the authors of the climate papers most featured in the media in 2025 are from institutions in the global north.
Carbon Brief defines the global north as North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It defines the global south as Asia (excluding Japan), Africa, Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand), Latin America and the Caribbean.
The analysis shows that 53% of authors are from European institutions, while only 1% of authors are from institutions in Africa.
Further data analysis shows that there are also inequalities within continents. The map below shows the percentage of authors from each country, where dark blue indicates a higher percentage. Countries that are not represented by any authors in the analysis are shown in grey.
The top-ranking countries on this map are the US and the UK, which account for 26% and 16% of the authors, respectively.
Carbon Brief also analysed the gender of the authors.
Only one-third of authors from the top 25 climate papers of 2025 are women and only five of the 25 papers list a woman as lead author.
The plot below shows the number of authors from each continent, separated into men (dark blue) and women (light blue).
The full spreadsheet showing the results of this data analysis can be found here. For more on the biases in climate publishing, see Carbon Brief’s article on the lack of diversity in climate-science research.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that electricity generation from coal in India fell by 3.0% year-on-year (57 terawatt hours, TWh) and in China by 1.6% (58TWh).
The last time both countries registered a drop in coal power output was in 1973.
The fall in 2025 is a sign of things to come, as both countries added a record amount of new clean-power generation last year, which was more than sufficient to meet rising demand.
Both countries now have the preconditions in place for peaking coal-fired power, if China is able to sustain clean-energy growth and India meets its renewable energy targets.
These shifts have international implications, as the power sectors of these two countries drove 93% of the rise in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from 2015-2024.
While many challenges remain, the decline in their coal-power output marks a historic moment, which could help lead to a peak in global emissions.
The new analysis shows that power generation from coal fell by 1.6% in China and by 3.0% in India in 2025, as non-fossil energy sources grew quickly enough in both countries to cover electricity consumption growth. This is illustrated in the figure below.
China achieved this feat even as electricity demand growth remained rapid at 5% year-on-year. In India, the drop in coal was due to record clean-energy growth combined with slower demand growth, resulting from mild weather and a longer-term slowdown.
The simultaneous drop for coal power in both countries in 2025 is the first since 1973, when much of the world was rocked by the oil crisis. Both China and India saw weak power demand growth that year, combined with increases in power generation from other sources – hydro and nuclear in the case of India and oil in the case of China.
China’s recent clean-energy generation growth, if sustained, is already sufficient to secure a peak in coal power. Similarly, India’s clean-energy targets, if they are met, will enable a peak in coal before 2030, even if electricity demand growth accelerates again.
In 2025, China will likely have added more than 300 gigawatts (GW) of solar and 100GW of wind power, both clear new records for China and, therefore, for any country ever.
Power generation from solar and wind increased by 450TWh in the first 11 months of the year and nuclear power delivering another 35TWh. This put the growth of non-fossil power generation, excluding hydropower, squarely above the 460TWh increase in demand.
Growth in clean-power generation has kept ahead of demand growth and, as a result, power-sector coal use and CO2 emissions have been falling since early 2024.
Coal use outside the power sector is falling, too, mostly driven by falling output of steel, cement and other construction materials, the largest coal-consuming sectors after power.
In India’s case, the fall in coal-fired power in 2025 was a result of accelerated clean-energy growth, a longer-term slowdown in power demand growth and milder weather, which resulted in a reduction in power demand for air conditioning.
Faster clean-energy growth contributed 44% of the reduction in coal and gas, compared to the trend in 2019-24, while 36% was contributed by milder weather and 20% by slower underlying demand growth. This is the first time that clean-energy growth has played a significant role in driving down India’s coal-fired power generation, as shown below.
India added 35GW of solar, 6GW wind and 3.5GW hydropower in the first 11 months of 2025, with renewable energy capacity additions picking up 44% year-on-year.
Power generation from non-fossil sources grew 71TWh, led by solar at 33TWh, while total generation increased 21TWh, similarly pushing down power generation from coal and gas.
The increase in clean power is, however, below the average demand growth recorded from 2019 to 2024, at 85TWh per year, as well as below the projection for 2026-30.
This means that clean-energy growth would need to accelerate in order for coal power to see a structural peak and decline in output, rather than a short-term blip.
Meeting the government’s target for 500GW of non-fossil power capacity by 2030, set by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi in 2021, requires just such an acceleration.
While the accelerated clean-energy growth in China and India has upended the outlook for their coal use, locking in declines would depend on meeting a series of challenges.
First, the power grids would need to be operated much more flexibly to accommodate increasing renewable shares. This would mean updating old power market structures – built to serve coal-fired power plants – both in China and India.
Second, both countries have continued to add new coal-fired power capacity. In the short term, this is leading to a fall in capacity utilisation – the number of hours each coal unit is able to operate – as power generation from coal falls.
(Both China and India have been adding new coal-power capacity in response to increases in peak electricity demand. This includes rising demand for air conditioning, in part resulting from extreme heat driven by the historical emissions that have caused climate change.)
If under-construction and permitted coal-power projects are completed, they would increase coal-power capacity by 28% in China and 23% in India. Without marked growth in power generation from coal, the utilisation of this capacity would fall significantly, causing financial distress for generators and adding costs for power users.
In the longer term, new coal-power capacity additions would have to be slowed down substantially and retirements accelerated, to make space for further expansion of clean energy in the power system.
Despite these challenges ahead, the drop in coal power and record increase in clean energy in China and India marks a historic moment.
Power generation in these two countries drove more than 90% of the increase in global CO2 emissions from all sources between 2015-2024 – with 78% from China and 16% from India – making their power sectors the key to peaking global emissions.
China’s coal-fired power generation until November 2025 is calculated from monthly data on the capacity and utilisation of coal-fired power plants from China Electricity Council (CEC), accessed through Wind Financial Terminal.
For December, year-on-year growth is based on a weekly survey of power generation at China’s coal plants by CEC, with data up to 25 December. This data closely predicts CEC numbers for the full month.
Other power generation and capacity data is derived from CEC and National Bureau of Statistics data, following the methodology of CREA’s monthly snapshot of energy and emissions trends in China.
For India, the analysis uses daily power generation data and monthly capacity data from the Central Electricity Authority, accessed through a dashboard published by government thinktank Niti Aayog.
The role of coal-fired power in China and India in driving global CO2 emissions is calculated from the International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Balances until 2023, applying default CO2 emission factors from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
To extend the calculation to 2024, the year-on-year growth of coal-fired power generation in China and India is taken from the sources above, and the growth of global fossil-fuel CO2 emissions was taken from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
The time series of coal-fired power generation since 1971, used to establish the fact that the previous time there was a drop in both countries was 1973, was taken from the IEA World Energy Balances. This dataset uses fiscal years ending in March for India. Calendar-year data was available starting from 2000 from Ember’s yearly electricity data.
