100% TARIFFS: US president Joe Biden on Tuesday announced tariffs on “$18bn” in Chinese clean technologies and critical minerals, Reuters reported. According to the newswire, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) will quadruple to 100% (plus a separate 2.5% tariff), while solar cell tariffs will double to 50%, lithium-ion EV battery tariffs will increase from 7.5% to 25% and tariffs on critical minerals rise from nothing to 25% this year.
SOLAR PANELS: On Friday, the Biden administration announced further tariffs on double-sided solar panel imports, which largely come from southeast Asia, the Financial Times reported. Economist Joe Brusuelas told CNN that the changes “foreshadow what is going to be a long, cold winter of economic conflict between the US and China”.
CALL AND RESPONSE: In the New York Times, economist Paul Krugman said the tariffs were all about “political economy”. He explained: “If those subsidies [under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act] are seen as creating jobs in China instead, our last, best hope of avoiding climate catastrophe will be lost.” State-run newspaper China Daily quoted foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin saying that the US is “making double standards by justifying its own subsidies and exports, while accusing other countries’ subsidies and exports as ‘unfair’ and ‘overcapacity’”.
‘CATASTROPHIC’ FLOODING: Flash flooding hit Baghlan province in north Afghanistan last Friday, leaving more than 300 people dead and villages cut off, Fox Weather reported. The outlet said that the flooding washed away “vast landscapes” of communities and farms. It added that the World Health Organization described the floods as “catastrophic” and stated the country “lacks the necessary resources to manage a disaster of this magnitude”, including health facilities, especially as waterborne diseases emerge.
AID CALL: A survivor of the floods in a district of Baghlan told Xinhua that victims fled to the mountain in search of refuge and scores of them are still stranded in the hilltops. The newswire spoke to another survivor who said: “No one has assisted us, the women are living in the open ground, there is no tent and no one has provided assistance.
The amount spent each year by the EU on nature-harming activities, according to a new report covered by Carbon Brief.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
The administration of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has boosted coal mining and coal power since 2014. Carbon Brief published an interactive piece analysing the impact on Indian communities and climate change, as well how this year’s general election could change things. The map above shows that India’s coal reserves are concentrated in seven south-central and eastern states, regions that have significant Indigenous populations. Indigenous peoples and local communities told Carbon Brief that they have been displaced and suffered environmental impacts as a result of coal mining projects.
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about why recent heat in Mexico was so deadly.
Mexico recently experienced a heatwave from 3 to 13 May, leaving 14 dead and driving temperatures above 40C in several states, Forbes Mexico reported. The health services in the state of San Luis Potosí, in eastern and central Mexico, reported 10 deaths from heat stroke and other similar deaths in southern and northern states.
Milenio reported that the heatwave also killed birds, such as parrots and toucans, in San Luis Potosí. N+ news added that owls, parrots, stake birds and bats also died because of the heat, and other species, such as squirrels and turkeys, were also affected.
The heatwave is the second major deadly event in Mexico’s heat season, which began in March, Reuters reported.
Mexico is no exception. A recent report by the World Meteorological Organization stated that 2023 was the hottest year in Latin America and the Caribbean, with temperatures 1.39C above the 1961-1990 period.
There were 3,405 heatwave-associated deaths annually in the region between 1990 and 2019, according to a new study published in PLOS Medicine.
Dr Lucía Gabriela Rosales, director of public health at the Health Services of San Luis Potosí, told Carbon Brief that this second heatwave was very “atypical” and caused four confirmed deaths from heat stroke – mostly in adults over the age of 60 – as well as cases of dehydration and heat stroke.
Rosales pointed out that there was no specific alert for this heatwave, but there was a warning about the heat season from the Civil Protection authorities.
She added that the health sector has carried out some actions to deal with the high temperatures in the state, such as community campaigns and hydration points. She called on the population to take care of their health.
Dr José Antonio Ávalos, head of the Laboratory of Climate Variability, Remote Sensing and Assessment of Risks at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, told Carbon Brief that May is the hottest month of the year in the state. Since 2023, the country as a whole has been experiencing levels of drought not seen since 1941, he added.
Ávalos pointed out that the authorities were aware of the municipalities most at risk from heatwaves, yet failed to effectively alert the population. He recommended the creation of a heatwave surveillance mechanism, the implementation of heat indices and increased investment in climate science.
The experts explained that heat stroke causes, among other things, body temperature above 42C, headache and tachycardia. Deaths from heat stroke are caused by an increase in the atmospheric temperature and humidity, which prevents the body’s sweat from evaporating, causing it to accumulate heat, they added.
THREATENED PARKS: An Agence France-Presse video looked at how climate change is threatening many features of US national parks.
CHOCOLATE DILEMMA: A National Public Radio podcast explored how climate change is decreasing cocoa production worldwide and what solutions are available.
STELLAR CHANGE: The New York Times covered the challenges climate change poses to astronomers, who are considering “using their expertise” to address it.
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The research, published in Nature Cities, looks at historically “redlined” neighbourhoods – those deemed highly risky for lenders, broadly due to the race and economic profile of those in the area – and compares them to neighbourhoods that were seen as less risky.
The scientists find that, across more than 200 US cities, once-redlined neighbourhoods are at higher risk of heat exposure and flooding.
Even homes just tens of metres apart have different climate risks, they find, with those located on the redlined side of a boundary at higher risk than those living on the other side of the boundary.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that the work underscores the historical legacy of planning decisions made in the last century, adding that she hopes that current policymakers can better consider the “impact of different planning policies and the unintended consequences”.
One researcher who was not involved in the study tells Carbon Brief that the work makes several significant contributions, but cautions that the authors were “pretty bold” in some of their conclusions.
“Redlining” refers to a discriminatory historical practice in the US, whereby neighbourhoods were graded as too “risky” for investment based on race, income levels and housing quality. These grades were used as justification for the denial of long-term mortgages and exacerbated existing racial segregation.
One of the most recognisable remnants of redlining is the set of maps produced by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), established in 1933 as part of US president Franklin D Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. The HOLC refinanced foreclosed mortgages at lower interest rates with the intention of preserving and expanding homeownership.
The HOLC created maps of “riskiness” of investment in an attempt to guarantee that the loans would be paid back and that the burden on the taxpayer would be minimal.
The maps created by the HOLC classified neighbourhoods based on a four-point risk scale, with A-grades – the “best”, or least-risky, investments – outlined in green and D-grades – the most risky, termed “hazardous” – outlined in red, giving rise to the term.
B-graded neighbourhoods, outlined in blue, were termed “still desirable”, while C-graded ones, in yellow, were “declining”.
The HOLC created maps for more than 200 cities across at least 40 states. Other federal agencies and private companies later made their own “risk-assessment” maps, further cementing the practice into policy.
Although redlining was formally outlawed in 1968 by the US Fair Housing Act, the inequalities created and exacerbated by the practice persist in many places to this day, says Dr Arianna Salazar-Miranda, an urban planner and data scientist at Yale University.
Salazar-Miranda, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“There are many social and economic dimensions for which we should be worried about this long-standing legacy of redlining.”
For example, previous research has shown that redlined neighbourhoods have lower rates of homeownership, lower credit scores and lower home values. There are also associations between historically redlined neighbourhoods and prevalence of cancer and asthma, air pollution and proximity to hazardous waste, among other dimensions of health inequality and environmental racism.
Prof Shannon Van Zandt, an urban planner at Texas A&M University, who was a reviewer of the new paper, but not involved in the study itself, tells Carbon Brief:
“Segregation is still so relevant in the experiences of families of colour and, in particular, Black or African American households, because of the very indelible lines that we literally drew [on the map].”
Using maps from 202 cities across the US, Salazar-Miranda and her colleagues examine the risk of heat extremes and flooding for homes in differently graded neighbourhoods. These factors, each graded on a 1-10 scale from least to most hazardous, were developed by the climate research and technology firm First Street.
The heat risk factor combines temperature and humidity to determine a “feels-like” temperature, averaged across the month of July for each location.
The flood risk factor uses flooding factors, such as rainfall and high tide levels, as well as variables that affect water runoff, including elevation and ground permeability. It also incorporates existing community flood defences. The risk is defined by both depth and likelihood of flooding.
Both the heat and flood risk scores also factor in projections of future climate change, including higher temperatures and sea level rise.
The researchers focused specifically on homes within 100 metres of a boundary between two different grades. Salazar-Miranda tells Carbon Brief:
“We’re trying to narrow down on a subset of properties that are very comparable, where they have the same underlying conditions and the only thing that changed is whether they’re on one side of the border or the other.”
The maps below show the digitised redlining map of Baltimore (left), with the colours indicating the different grades and the bold lines depicting boundaries between different grades.
On the right, a zoomed-in portion of the map shows the 100-metre buffer zones drawn around each boundary. Locations of houses are coloured according to which side of the border they fall on – grey for the lower-graded side and black for the higher-graded side.
Geographical and climatic features, such as elevation and amount of rainfall, did not vary significantly across the boundaries because the researchers were only looking at homes close to a grade boundary.
They find that, aggregated across all cities, D-graded neighbourhoods have a flood risk factor that is 0.245 points higher than A-graded ones – more than three times higher than the additional risk of a C-graded neighbourhood.
The heat risk effect is smaller, but still significant, with D-graded neighbourhoods scoring 0.033 points higher than A-graded neighbourhoods.
The chart below shows the flood and heat exposure risks for neighbourhoods graded B, C and D, relative to the average risk for A-graded neighbourhoods. While both risk factors increase as the grade decreases, the effect is much more pronounced for flood risk.
They also find that flood risk factor increases by 0.1 points, or about 5.5% on average, for homes that are on the lower-graded side of a border, as compared to homes on the higher-graded sides. For the heat risk factor, this figure is 0.011 points.
Although the absolute change in the heat risk factor is relatively small, Salazar-Miranda tells Carbon Brief that these “very small changes…can really harm your health”. She adds:
“It really depends on your pre-determinants of health – how healthy you are, how well you eat, whether you have diabetes or an underlying health condition. And we know that these are particularly worse in disadvantaged communities.”
Doing the analysis on a parcel-scale – namely, house-by-house – is one of the most significant contributions of the new work, says Prof Vivek Shandas, a professor of geography focusing on urban climate at Portland State University in Oregon, who was not involved in the new research. However, Shandas adds:
“There’s a lot that happens across 200 or 100 metres in a city…If we’re doing parcel-scale assessments, we need to get parcel-scale understanding of movement of water and the way that heat is distributed.”
The researchers then investigate a potential mechanism for how historical redlining could still be impacting vulnerability to current and future climate risks.
They propose that lower-graded neighbourhoods had less investment in what they call “environmental capital”, such as trees, public parks and drainage systems.
This, they say, could be due to a combination of factors: lower property values in the neighbourhoods reduces the communities’ tax income that could be invested in such projects; places with high levels of income inequality tend to have lower community engagement; and low homeownership rates can lead to reduced community investment in public goods, such as parks.
As a proxy for environmental capital investment, the authors look at four measurable factors of environmental quality: tree canopy, street-level vegetation, ground-surface perviousness and home foundation height. Tree cover and street-level vegetation can both mitigate heat risk by providing shade and inducing a cooling effect. More pervious ground surfaces allow more drainage, while higher foundations can decrease an individual home’s risk of flooding.
They find that for each measure of environmental quality, lower-graded neighbourhoods score progressively worse than higher-graded ones, as seen in the chart below.
Houses in D-graded neighbourhoods are, on average, nearly 5.7 percentage points less pervious and have 3.4 percentage points less tree cover than those in A-graded areas.
Similarly, homes on the lower-graded side of a border have lower perviousness and foundations closer to the ground level than homes on the higher-graded side, by 1.9 and 2 percentage points, respectively. Tree canopy and street-level vegetation differ between the two by 1.03 and 1.2 percentage points.
Shandas tells Carbon Brief that introducing the idea of capital into this type of analysis is “really interesting”, but the claims the authors make about their proposed mechanism are “pretty bold”. He adds:
“Each city is so unique…We can find an association, but getting a mechanism has to be [on] a case-by-case basis.”
Van Zandt adds that the redlined maps are a “good proxy”, but not necessarily the driver of inequity. The important part, she says, is “that we identified neighbourhoods that banks should not invest in – and that those patterns persist to today”.
Given the disparities identified in the work, Salazar-Miranda says she hopes that policymakers can incorporate this type of information into funding and other policy decisions. As an added benefit, she says, many of the investments in environmental capital – such as additional green spaces – can improve mental and physical well-being. She adds:
“One of the conversations that would be interesting, from a policy point of view, is how do we bring the types of resources to these communities that can be helpful in mitigating these environmental risks, but also from a social point of view.”
While the findings themselves are not surprising, “it’s great to have systematic assessments” and scientific evidence to back up people’s firsthand knowledge, Shandas says. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Historically disinvested parts of cities tend to be at the frontline of extreme climate events – including flooding and heat. I know the communities that live in the cities that I [have worked with] regularly have brought this up for many, many years.
“The most significant part of this study is that it’s corroborating what the lived experiences of communities have been for quite some time.”
Van Zandt adds:
“It’s not a historical study. It’s a study of what’s happening today and what’s going to continue to happen in the future.”
At an International Energy Agency (IEA) summit attended on Tuesday by heads of state and ministers from 27 countries, a total of $2.2bn was pledged to boost uptake of clean cooking technologies.
The summit focused on improving access to clean cooking in sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly four out of five people still rely on open fires to prepare food.
Ensuring global access to clean cooking by 2030 could save 2.5 million people – mostly women and children – from premature deaths associated with breathing fire smoke, the IEA says. It could also save 1.5bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e), around the same as a year of global shipping and aviation emissions.
But while the case for achieving universal clean cooking is clear, questions remain over how finance should be leveraged and what kind of solutions should be pursued.
The conference featured speeches from a number of fossil-fuel executives, who argued that cookstoves using liquified petroleum gas (LPG) offer the quickest and “cleanest” solution for boosting cooking access.
This drew criticism from African commentators, who noted that fossil-fuel representatives actually outnumbered African women, who made up just 17% of the people at the summit.
The role that carbon offsets should play in helping to distribute clean cookstoves in Africa was also much touted by heads of state and industry representatives.
Academic research has found that the “carbon credits” issued by cookstove projects in the past have been “largely worthless”. But advocates told the conference that new guidelines could enable the development of “high integrity” credits for projects in Africa.
Carbon Brief attended the summit at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris and spoke to experts about what the new global pledge could mean for climate, energy, nature and gender goals.
Around 2.3 billion people – close to a third of the global population – lack access to clean cooking facilities, relying instead on wood, kerosene or coal as their primary cooking fuel.
The number of people without access to clean cooking is declining in Asia and Latin America. But in sub-Saharan Africa, continued population growth means the number of people without clean cooking access is still increasing.
Household air pollution, mostly from the inhalation of cooking smoke, is linked to around 3.7 million premature deaths each year, the IEA says. In Africa, women and children, who spend the most time at home, account for 60% of early deaths related to smoke inhalation and indoor air pollution.
Ensuring global access to clean cooking by 2030 is a key component of goal seven of the Sustainable Development Goals.
According to IEA projections, meeting this target could save 2.5 million people – mostly women and children – from premature deaths associated with breathing fire smoke.
In sub-Saharan Africa, many women and children are burdened with collecting firewood for hours each day in order to prepare a meal. The IEA projects that universal access to clean cooking could save the average household nearly 1.5 hours a day, which would likely, in turn, increase female participation in schooling and employment.
In addition to this, the IEA estimates that universal access to clean cooking – achieved in the way their scenario suggests – could save a total of 1.5bntCO2e from a combination of reduced combustion emissions and avoided deforestation for firewood.
At the summit in Paris on 14 May, heads of state and high-level private-industry figures repeatedly emphasised the clear benefits of improving clean cooking access in Africa – with many admitting they had neglected the issue for too long.
In his opening remarks to the summit, Akinwumi Adesina, a former Nigerian agricultural minister who is now president of the African Development Bank Group, spoke candidly of his experiences growing up in a low-income neighbourhood without access to clean cooking.
“I don’t wear glasses just because I went to university,” he told the summit, explaining that, as a child, he spent years standing over fire smoke, which likely damaged his vision.
He told the story of a female friend that died in a kerosene accident after fetching the fuel for use in cooking. Her family could not afford to buy a gas stove.
“How can we let these things happen?” he asked the conference.
Many speakers emphasised that, compared to other parts of the energy sector, such as heavy industry, improving access to clean cooking is “solvable”, as the technology needed is already available at a relatively low cost.
The IEA estimates that $4bn will need to be leveraged annually until 2030 in order to achieve universal clean cooking access. By comparison, total clean energy technology investment will need to reach $4tn per year by 2030 to meet net-zero, IEA says.
The clean cooking summit itself raised $2.2bn for clean cooking, the IEA said. IEA executive director Dr Fatih Birol promised that his agency would track where each penny was spent and reveal the results in a year.
Despite the new financial pledges and renewed focus, some lamented the lack of inclusion of African women at the conference.
Writing for African Arguments, the Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate noted that the number of fossil-fuel executives outnumbered African women, who made up just 17% of the people in attendance.
One male session chair even cracked a joke about the lack of women speaking at the summit, telling the audience that the IEA should be pleased that clean cooking will no longer be viewed as “just a women’s issue”.
Later on at the summit, Graça Machel, a former Mozambican education minister and deputy chair of the Elders, a group of global leaders started by former South African president Nelson Mandela, appealed for African women to be directly involved in high-level decision making on clean cooking. She told the conference:
“We need to build the capacity of women themselves so they aren’t just recipients. African women – we want to be investors, entrepreneurs, managers and customers. Any policy has to have the face of women, taking into account the magnitude [of our presence]. In our countries, we are millions. Clean cooking is about African women.”
More than 238 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in informal housing, making the distribution of clean cooking technologies challenging.
Traditional “unclean” cooking involves a pot perched on top of a simple fire burning wood or waste products, or a kerosene dispenser.
According to the IEA, the main options for clean cooking include:
The IEA infographic below demonstrates how each of these methods work.
At the summit, fossil-fuel executives from companies such as TotalEnergies, Shell, Eni, Indian Oil and Equinor were keen to stress the role that LPG cookstoves should play in providing clean cooking access in Africa.
Patrick Pouyanné, chairman of the board and chief executive officer at TotalEnergies – one of the fossil fuel companies behind the controversial East African oil pipeline project – told the summit that his company will invest more than $400m in the development of LPG for cooking by 2030.
Eirik Wærness, senior vice president and chief economist at Equinor – a key funder of the controversial Rosebank oil field in UK waters – boasted that his company already supplies 10% of India’s LPG. He told the conference:
“We should not let the best – which is renewable energy – stand in the way of the good [LPG]. We will do all that we can to provide LPG – and also LNG [liquified natural gas] – as a viable, clean fuel.”
The IEA’s scenario for achieving universal clean cooking access sees a key role of LPG cookstoves. It notes that, in the last decade, 70% of people who gained “clean” cooking access globally did so through LPG.
In its scenario, LPG remains the “primary solution to deliver clean cooking access”, representing nearly half of new household access in 2030.
Below, an IEA graphic breaks down the numbers of households gaining access to different types of clean cooking in 2022 (left) and how its scenario expects households to gain access from 2023-2030.
At the sidelines of the summit, Carbon Brief spoke to Dr Donnee Alexander, chief science officer for the Clean Cooking Alliance, a UN-backed NGO which helped to coordinate the summit.
Asked about whether a focus on LPG cookstoves over renewable-energy methods could risk locking African nations into further fossil-fuel dependency, she responded:
“I think Africa should be able to transition however they so desire. Because they have no energy. For me to say, ‘you need to transition in a certain way’, when a woman is cooking over an open fire and dying prematurely because she’s experiencing smoke inhalation every day of her life, who am I to say that she should not be transitioning to a much cleaner option compared to the baseline?”
But several African commentators reject the idea that fossil fuels are the key solution to Africa’s clean cooking crisis.
In her commentary on the summit, Nakate says:
“Natural gas is not clean…burning LPG or methane at home emits nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and benzene, all [of] which can potentially trigger respiratory complications, including childhood asthma…Instead of trying to make gas affordable, the summit should seek to unlock investments that establish and scale ambitious and people-centred energy programmes. This is the most reasonable way to deliver decentralised energy to communities on the continent.”
Her thoughts are echoed by Mohamed Adow, founder and director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank in Kenya.
In a statement, he said there is “no evidence” that gas is the solution to providing clean cooking access in Africa, adding:
“What we need is a woman-centred approach that puts their needs first, not those of a greedy private sector looking to make profits. Rather than subsidies for private companies, that money would be better used investing in high efficiency, low-cost electric cookers for Africans.”
While most of the speakers at the summit focused on LPG, there was some recognition that renewable energy could be a way forward for providing clean cooking.
Stanlake Samkange, assistant executive director at the World Food Programme, said that his organisation had traditionally focused on supplying cleaner fuel stoves, but that “2024 is a departure”. He added:
“We are not just focusing on fuel efficient stoves but clean cooking…We are looking at electronic stoves and e-cooking. In Madagascar, we are looking to link that to solar panels.”
The IEA estimates that $4bn will need to be leveraged annually until 2030 in order to achieve universal clean cooking access.
The clean cooking summit raised $2.2bn from public and private sources. This included new pledges from the EU, France, Denmark, the US, the UK and firms, including fossil-fuel companies.
It follows on from a high-level clean cooking event at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, where the African Development Bank pledged to allocate a separate $2bn for clean cooking over the next decade.
At the Paris summit, Birol pledged that the IEA will closely monitor where the finance is spent and reveal the results in a year.
Throughout the conference, heads of state, ministers and company CEOs made it clear that they saw clean cookstove carbon-offset projects as key for leveraging finance and distributing new technologies in Africa.
Offsetting involves developed nations or companies paying for projects that distribute clean cookstoves, allowing them to then claim they have reduced their own emissions by paying to cut carbon in another country. (For a full breakdown, see Carbon Brief’s carbon offsets explainer.)
Stephanie Mbombo, presidential special envoy for the new climate economy for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said that her president saw carbon offsets as the “key driver” for access to clean cooking, telling the summit:
“[With] carbon credits, we will save the world, but we will also save ourselves.”
The CEOs of clean cookstove carbon-offset companies were invited to speak alongside senior political figures and made bold claims about how they could play a pivotal role.
“With carbon credits, it’s solved, it’s done,” said Peter Scott, the CEO of the cookstove company BURN Manufacturing.
This sentiment was echoed in the declaration issued from the summit.
It said that participants “acknowledge the significant role that carbon credits and climate finance have already played in scaling clean cooking efforts, recognising the potential for further expansion of this support”.
But academic research has found that clean cookstove carbon-offset projects are “largely worthless” in emissions reductions terms.
A study in the journal Nature Sustainability found that nine in 10 of the 96m cookstove credits certified by leading carbon registries do not avoid the emissions they claim.
What is more, investigations by journalists, including at Climate Home News, have uncovered serious faults with clean cookstove projects, such as faulty stoves being distributed without communities being given access to repairs or replacements.
Gilles Dufrasne, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, a watchdog of carbon offsets, told Carbon Brief that cookstove projects have “perhaps” been the least successful at achieving emissions reductions out of all types of carbon-offset projects. He added:
“This is a case of projects that very likely have significant positive impacts for sustainable development, and likely also positive climate impacts, but where the quantification of these impacts is extremely shaky. Most projects issue many more credits than they should, and that’s a problem if countries use it to meet their nationally determined contributions – as this [clean cooking summit declaration] suggests they could.”
Acknowledging the need for more “high integrity” cookstove credits, the conference saw the Clean Cooking Alliance launch new “principles for responsible carbon finance in clean cooking”.
Alexander told Carbon Brief the goal of the principles was to “address the challenges in the carbon market to ensure that we have both higher integrity but also higher demand”.
She said that the new principles could bring about tangible ways of improving the outcomes of cookstove carbon-offsets projects:
“We’re saying let’s measure reduction in fuel use [from distributing clean cookstoves], utilising standard methodologies. Or let’s have digital monitoring and verification so we know exactly when the stove is used. Things like that start to bring more integrity into the system.”
Dufrasne added to Carbon Brief that, with current projects offering little guarantee that promised emissions reductions will be achieved, there is a risk that the sale of more carbon credits to developed nations will lead to these countries reducing their emissions by less than if they had invested in alternative climate measures:
“Getting countries and companies to pledge finance to a fund, which then finances cookstove projects – with or without credits – is likely to be a better way.”
China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here.
FIRST MEETING: The recently appointed Chinese and US climate envoys Liu Zhenmin and John Podesta met in Washington last week with an aim to build on the “Sunnylands statement” that had restored engagement between presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden at their summit last year, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported. At the meeting, Podesta raised issues with Liu including “Chinese overcapacity in solar and battery manufacturing, steel production and coal power”, according to Reuters, adding that “the tone of the talks continued to be cordial”. State-run newspaper China Youth Daily reported comments from Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin saying that the US “expresses willingness to strengthen cooperation with China in addressing climate change”.
100% TARIFFS: Just after Liu’s US visit concluded, Biden announced significant new tariffs on a range of Chinese imports, reported Bloomberg. The outlet quoted Biden saying: “When you [China] make tactics like this, you’re not competing, it’s not competition, it’s cheating. And we’ve seen damage here in America.” According to a breakdown published by Reuters, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) will quadruple to 100% (plus a separate 2.5% tariff), while solar cell tariffs will double to 50%, lithium-ion EV battery tariffs will increase from 7.5% to 25% and tariffs on critical minerals rise from nothing to 25% this year.
MEDIA REACTION: New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman supported the increased tariffs, saying: “Why not just buy cheap Chinese batteries? Political economy…The Biden administration was able to get large subsidies for renewable energy only by tying those subsidies to the creation of domestic manufacturing jobs. If those subsidies are seen as creating jobs in China instead, our last, best hope of avoiding climate catastrophe will be lost.” However, another New York Times’ comment article by economists Gernot Wagner and Conor Walsh asked the US to not “slam the door on inexpensive Chinese electric vehicles”. Bloomberg columnist David Fickling commented that “Chinese clean tech is not the enemy”, adding “from all the talk of Chinese ‘overcapacity’ coming out of Washington, you might think that the problem of addressing climate change had already been solved…We’ll need all [western nations’] industrial might – plus that of China, and a whole host of countries besides – to get there.” An editorial in the Economist called the tariffs a “bad policy, worse leadership”, saying they “will bring underappreciated economic harms to America and the world”.
CHINA REACTION: The Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said that the tariffs are the “most typical form of bullying in the world today”, adding “it shows that some people in the US have reached the point of losing their minds in order to maintain their unipolar hegemony”, Reuters reported. State-run newspaper China Daily quoted foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin saying that the US is “making double standards by justifying its own subsidies and exports, while accusing other countries’ subsidies and exports as ‘unfair’ and ‘overcapacity’”. State broadcaster CCTV reposted a statement by the Ministry of Commerce which says that the US move is “a clear example of political manipulation”.
PEOPLE’S DAILY: The Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily published comments under the nom-de-plume “Zhong Caiwen”, which is likely linked to the party’s Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, on 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13 May about China’s manufacturing production capacity under the background of “the US trying its best to exaggerate the so-called ‘overcapacity’ of China’s new energy resources”. The articles claimed that the “overcapacity arguments are designed to ‘curb and suppress China’s superior industries’”, “ignore[ing] the benefits that Chinese products bring to global consumers”, while stressing the contributions China made to tackling climate change.
ECONOMIC DAILY: Meanwhile, state-run media outlets Xinhua, Guangming Daily and Economic Daily carried similar opinions. The Economic Daily, which according to its own introduction, plays an “important role for the communist party’s Central Committee and the State Council in guiding the public opinion towards economy”, ran the headline, “Refuting ‘the theory of overcapacity in new energy’”, on its 6 May frontpage and, “Refuting ‘the theory of overcapacity in new energy’ again”, on the frontpage of 13 May. The two articles argued that the rapid growth in China is “not blind expansion”, but is based on the “urgent need to reduce global carbon emissions” and that the US uses it as “an excuse for more trade barriers”.
DOMESTIC FACTORS: Founder of H&S Capital and former news editor of BBC News Chinese Howard Zhang told Carbon Brief that this “sudden media storm” came “at a time of rising discontent over economic downturn and huge youth unemployment [in China]”. He added that “these anti-West reports help to divert public opinions and reinforce the government’s conspiracy theory that the West, led by the US, is trying to ‘stop China from rising up’ and is trying to ‘choke China off’”. Zhang acknowledged that China “does have a point”, but added it was “worth noting that these reports do not really report on Western concerns objectively and these reports are still mainly targeting the domestic audience”.
INTERNATIONAL OUTLOOK: Isabel Hilton, founder of London-based NGO Dialogue Earth (formerly China Dialogue) told Carbon Brief that the reason behind China arguing its “predominance in key industrial areas was not the result of unfair subsidies”, but because “it is unlikely that either the EU or the US will allow important industrial sectors to be undermined in what they see as unfair completion, with all the political and economic damage that would follow. Hence, the Chinese need to argue that it is not unfair.” Hilton, a visiting professor at King’s College London, added that a key point made by the Chinese media commentary was “China’s model of industrial development is no different from that of Western industrialised countries and that, further, they obey WTO rules and do not restrict or protect their own market…we can debate quite a lot of this, especially the market access point”.
OVERCAPACITY TENSIONS: On 5 May, president Xi commenced a five-day visit to Europe, which he began by meeting French president Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Agence France-Presse reported. The newswire quoted von der Leyen saying the EU “cannot absorb massive over-production of Chinese industrial goods”. In comments covered by the People’s Daily, Xi responded that “there is no such thing as ‘China’s overcapacity problem’”. Meanwhile, China and France signed the “Sino-French joint declaration on strengthening cooperation on biodiversity and the oceans: Kunming-Montreal to Nice”, to deepen cooperation on biodiversity protection, People’s Daily reported.
PRE-READ: Le Figaro published an article by Xi ahead of his arrival in France, in which he noted that Sino-French cooperation “spearheaded cooperation in aviation and nuclear energy”. He added: “Our two countries can deepen cooperation on innovation and jointly promote green development…The Chinese government supports more Chinese companies in investing in France. And we hope that France will ensure that they operate in a fair and equitable business environment.” State newswire Xinhua published an official English translation of the piece.
OTHER COUNTRIES: Meanwhile, Xi also visited Serbia and Hungary, where the South China Morning Post said he “upgraded relations with China’s two closest allies in Europe”. German chancellor Olaf Scholz did not meet Xi in person, but told journalists at a press conference that there are “many overlaps” between China and western automotive manufacturers, Reuters reported. State-run outlet Reference News quoted the German federal minister for digital affairs and transport saying “we don’t want to close off markets” to Chinese EVs.
EU SOLAR PROBE: Following the EU’s launching of a probe into Chinese solar companies last month, Longi and Shanghai Electric withdrew tenders to supply a Romanian solar park in “the latest sign that the EU’s new anti-subsidy powers are having a deterrent effect” on companies suspected of receiving Chinese subsidies, the Financial Times said. It quoted the EU internal markets commissioner saying the regulation ensures “foreign companies which participate in the European economy do so by abiding [by] our rules”.
NEW DATA: China’s state broadcaster CCTV reported that China’s electricity generation from wind and solar increased 25% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024. In the same period, electricity generated from coal declined. According to data from National Energy Administration (NEA), the total solar capacity in the first quarter of 2024 reached 45.7 gigawatts (GW), China Energy Net reported. In addition, China’s low-carbon electricity capacity will be enlarged with the State Council approving the construction of a 2GW offshore solar project at Lianyungang city, economic newswire Jiemian reports. Once being constructed, it will connect with eight existing nuclear power plants and become a 10GW “mega” renewable energy project, added the outlet.
NEW RESEARCH: A new paper covered by Carbon Brief found that China’s rising electricity demand can be met more cheaply through a combination of solar plus battery storage than by building new coal capacity. Carbon Brief also covered a study by the China Energy Transformation Program, a project under China’s Energy Research Institute, that finds electrification, greater energy efficiency and a low-carbon power system could help China develop a net-zero emissions energy system by 2055, five years earlier than its “dual carbon” goal planned.
A new report by Australia-based thinktank Climate Energy Finance argues that China could reach its “dual carbon” climate goals earlier than planned.
Carbon Brief interviews the author of the report to find out more. The questions and their answers are edited for length and clarity. The whole interview is available on Carbon Brief’s website.
Carbon Brief: Your report concluded that China’s coal power output will soon peak and decline – despite rising coal capacity – thanks to the rapid rise of clean energy sources. How widely do you think that potential tipping point is understood, both within China and internationally?
Xuyang Dong: This potential is not being understood or acknowledged enough both within China and internationally. China is prioritising energy security over the need to reduce coal-use…Concurrently, China is increasing renewable energy capacity at a staggering pace that far outstrips every other nation on the planet.
Internationally, news headlines continue to emphasise that China is building new coal-fired power plants, leading to a lack of confidence about China’s commitment to decarbonising its national electricity grid…However, the picture is more positive when we look at installed capacity. At the end of March this year, 53% of China’s installed capacity was zero-emissions.
CB: If China is to announce more ambitious climate goals and expand renewable energy like you suggested in the report, in your opinion, what are the barriers?
XD: We are aware there are concerns over China’s land use as a major constraint for building more wind and solar farms. We have run a case study on a 1.5GW solar project being built in the Tengger Desert in Ningxia Province. The project has 3.5 million solar modules installed, and only took up 0.1% of the total desert. In our model, we estimate that China needs to install a total of 5,405GW of new solar capacity to reach its dual-carbon targets and that may require only 11% of a total land area of the Gobi Desert, a neighbouring desert to Tengger.
The real challenge is that… more transmission lines are needed to maximise the renewable energy generation potential of China’s desert areas, and to resolve China’s land use constraints in the east coast.
CB: What do you think about policy support?
XD: I think being more ambitious in the overall climate target would be a good start… Considering its political system is “top-down”, a more ambitious target could help the central government to give out more mandates, build better transmission lines and distribute the generated power into the areas that are needed.
Internationally, China needs to align with other developed countries to take its responsibilities as the leading renewable superpower, and the carbon price would be an important policy lever… A further driver would be for other nations to also catch up with China’s staggering renewable expansion, and start to emulate its speed and scale, so there will be no excuse left for China to do less.
CB: What do you think about China’s “new three” – solar, batteries and EV – and how they help China in energy transition and economy?
XD: The “new three” has played a very huge part in China’s economic growth [in 2023]…I know there are a lot of concerns about this overcapacity in the industry, such as in the EU and the US, and I think for China to address the concerns over industrial overcapacity, it needs to, first, stimulate domestic demand and deployment of solar and wind farms, energy storage systems buildout and EV sales. Secondly, China could use its cheap renewable exports to help emerging markets and developing economies to build more renewable energy capacity, boosting and accelerating the global energy transition. Finally, it should be collaborating on joint ventures with European and US investors to build local factories.
ENVIRONMENT ‘SPY’: The South China Morning Post reported that China’s top spy agency claimed two foreign NGOs and foundations had stolen “environmental data” from China.
FLOODING AI: A new artificial intelligence (AI) model was developed by Chinese scientists to forecast flood risks and monitor hydrological conditions even in basins lacking hydrological records, another South China Morning Post article reported.
NEA COMMENT: The Communist party-affiliated magazine Current Affairs Report published an article written by the head of China’s National Energy Administration (NEA), Zhang Jianhua, about “high-quality development of new energy”.
G7’S STRATEGIES: EU-China environmental cooperation specialist Arvea Marieni wrote a comment on G7’s climate strategies for China’s state broadcaster CGTN.
In April 2024, nearly half of cars sold in China were electric vehicles (EVs) or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), which are known collectively as “new-energy vehicles” (NEVs). According to figures from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA), NEVs made up 44% of sales in April, up from 34% a year earlier and just 4% during the same month in 2020.
Impact of flowering temperature on lychee yield under climate change: a case study in Taiwan
Climate Services
A decline in the number of cooler days as a result of climate change could make existing varieties of lychee “unsuitable for cultivation in production areas in southern Taiwan”, a new study says. With some lychee farmers in Taiwan already experiencing economic losses as the climate warms, the researchers project a decline in lychee yields per hectare of 12-35% by the end of the century.
China Briefing is compiled by Wanyuan Song and Anika Patel. It is edited by Wanyuan Song and Dr Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org
The report, published by Australia-based thinktank Climate Energy Finance, says that, if this rate of renewables growth is maintained, then China could reach its “dual carbon” climate goals earlier than planned.
Here, Carbon Brief interviews the author of the report, Xuyang Dong. The questions and Dong’s answers are reproduced in full, below.
(An abridged version of this interview was published in the 16 May edition of China Briefing, Carbon Brief’s fortnightly email newsletter focusing on climate and energy developments relating to China. Sign up for free.)
Carbon Brief: Your report concluded that China’s coal power output will soon peak and decline – despite rising coal capacity – thanks to the rapid rise of clean energy sources. How widely do you think that potential tipping point is understood, both within China and internationally?
Xuyang Dong: This potential is not being understood or acknowledged enough both within China and internationally. China is prioritising energy security over the need to reduce coal-use. It has positioned thermal power as the backup energy source to ensure energy security, as electricity demand continues to grow and boost the economy. This strategy is being emphasised after the downturn in hydropower generation last year caused by droughts, as well as blackouts in different parts of the country due to the unmet rising electricity demand. I think there is a pressure domestically of not wanting to admit it, as they really want to ensure energy security first. Concurrently, China is increasing renewable energy capacity at a staggering pace that far outstrips every other nation on the planet.
Internationally, news headlines continue to emphasise that China is building new coal-fired power plants, leading to a lack of confidence about China’s commitment to decarbonising its national electricity grid, although the expansion in renewable energy additions in China is at an unprecedented speed and scale.
However, the picture is more positive when we look at installed capacity. At the end of March this year, 53% of China’s installed capacity is zero-emissions. This paves the way for China to reduce its reliance on coal and to do so rapidly – as we map in our report. China now needs to be more ambitious in its climate targets and it is well positioned to do so.
CB: If China is to announce more ambitious climate goals and expand renewable energy like you suggested in the report, in your opinion, what are the barriers?
XD: We are aware there are concerns over China’s land-use as a major constraint for building more wind and solar farms. We have run a case study on a 1.5 gigawatt (GW) solar project being built in the Tengger Desert in Ningxia province. The project has 3.5m solar modules installed and only took up 0.1% of the total desert. In our model, we estimate that China needs to install a total of 5,405GW of new solar capacity to reach its dual-carbon targets and that may require only 11% of a total land area of the Gobi Desert, a neighbouring desert to Tengger.
The real challenge is that more transmission lines are needed. China recently started construction of an ultra-high-voltage power line project, which will cover three provinces – Shaanxi, Hubei and Anhui – to send 36 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity to Anhui per annum and help boost renewable energy consumption by more than 18TWh per annum. More transmission lines like this are needed to maximise the renewable energy generation potential of China’s desert areas and to resolve China’s land use constraints in the east coast.
CB: What do you think about policy support?
XD: I think being more ambitious in the overall climate target would be a good start because China has the capacity, the money and the technology to deploy the renewable energy at the speed and scale it requires.
Considering its political system is “top-down”, a more ambitious target could help the central government to give out more mandates, build better transmission lines and distribute the generated power into the areas that are needed.
Internationally, China needs to align with other developed countries to take its responsibilities as the leading renewable superpower and the carbon price would be an important policy lever. The external incentives and penalties, such as [having a Chinese version of] the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), would also help. CBAM encourages the EU’s trading partners, especially China, to reduce the emissions of their exports. A further driver would be for other nations to also catch up with China’s staggering renewable expansion and start to emulate its speed and scale, so there will be no excuse left for China to do less.
CB: Speaking of CBAM, your report recommended China to have one of its own. Can you explain how introducing one would help, politically, to enable greater ambition from China’s leaders?
XD: Having one itself could incentivise China to increase the price of carbon, which currently is significantly lower than the EU and the rest of the developed world, although there is a deflation in China and most of the commodities are a lot lower than the rest of the world. But a higher price on carbon could be a good incentive, especially limiting the emission in the manufacturing industry. It could also match China’s carbon price with the EU and lead to less trade barriers. For other trading partners, for example, Australia. Australia has been exporting raw materials. It could also incentivise Australia to do an embedded decarbonisation on its exports as well.
CB: Wouldn’t you worry the CBAM would make trading with some countries, such as developing countries, harder with China?
XD: The Chinese CBAM could list different categories and for different countries. It can have a higher standard for the developed countries and encourage the developed world to help the emerging market and developing economy to decarbonise. In the Asia-Pacific region, China, Japan, South Korea and Australia could work together to decarbonise.
CB: In the future you described, what role do you think solar and wind energy will play?
XD: As our report mapped out, wind and solar will be the leading energy sources in the future. China’s manufacturing capacity is driving down the cost for solar panels, modules and wind turbines. The cost of deploying them is lower, too. In the meantime, they have the world’s leading technology, which can increase the utilisation rates. However, it needs to be accompanied by a better sort of combination in the energy storage system, and better energy storage, so the renewable energy it generates doesn’t go to waste and it can also help with China’s entire curtailment issues.
CB: What do you think about the current energy storage situation in China?
XD: It has become a priority compared to a year ago. Most of the policy before is supporting more build out for solar and wind power projects, progressively, and now we can see more documents focusing on storage systems. In fact, there is more and more manufacturing capacity for batteries as well, so we can see a dropping price in the batteries, which will be beneficial for a larger deployment of energy storage systems.
CB: Speaking of solar and battery, what do you think about China’s “new three” – solar, batteries and EV – and how they help China in energy transition and economy?
XD: The “new three” has played a very huge part in China’s economic growth. In 2023, 40% of China’s total 5.2% GDP growth last year was driven by it. [Read more on Carbon Brief’s analysis on clean energy and China’s economic growth in 2023]. This is very significant, especially because China is facing multiple headwinds in different areas, including the housing sector, population decline and deflation.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the first quarter of 2024 saw China sell nearly 1.9m electric cars, more than the rest of the world combined. I think it’s inevitable that China’s solar manufacturing overcapacity continues to lead the global renewable market. China’s solar manufacturing overcapacity has been a big topic and it is posing a threat to the industry as it is resulting in price slump for the solar panels and making a lot of business non-profitable. However, there are still some major players remaining financially healthy.
I know there are a lot of concerns about this overcapacity in the industry, such as in the EU and the US, and I think for China to address the concerns over industrial overcapacity, it needs to, first, stimulate domestic demand and deployment of solar and windfarms, energy storage systems buildout and EV sales. Secondly, China could use its cheap renewable exports to help emerging markets and developing economies to build more renewable energy capacity, boosting and accelerating the global energy transition. Finally, it should be collaborating on joint ventures with European and US investors to build local factories.
CB: You mentioned there are some “financially healthy” Chinese companies and they have often been accused of using state subsidies to win “unfair” competition. What’s your view on the accusations?
XD: It’s a very classic way of the Chinese government doing things. When they see an opportunity, they build the capacity first and they will even run at a loss-making state to just dominate the market. Once they have taken over the market, they can profit from that. China has shown this sort of a pattern of doing business in the past.
However, in the meantime, China has shown it has the labour capacity, resources and the capital to deploy or develop the manufacturing capacity at this rate. It drives down the prices of a solar panel and module, wind turbine, as well as battery and EV prices, so I think it is good news to the global energy transition overall, especially for countries from the emerging market and developing economies when they really need more capital and more cost-efficient materials for them. So I guess it really depends on how you look at it and how you work with China instead of working against it.
]]>Despite a series of major policy developments since then, however, it is still not clear what the new energy system will look like and which pathways are the most efficient for China to reach its carbon neutrality goal.
Our latest research models three scenarios for China’s energy transition: one in which China develops a net-zero emissions energy system before 2055; one in which it achieves this around 2055; and a baseline scenario that extrapolates current development trends.
We find that a combination of energy efficiency measures, electrification of end-use consumption and a low-carbon power supply based on various renewable energy sources – such as solar and wind – can greatly help the country to achieve its decarbonisation goals by 2055.
In the most ambitious scenario, China’s power sector will be fossil fuel-free by 2055, while some industries will continue to use a small amount of coal and gas. However, this will be balanced by negative emissions from biomass power plants fitted with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
When Xi began his speech at the UN General Assembly in September 2020, few had expected him to deliver such a ground-breaking announcement.
In his words: “We aim to have CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”
This policy is now more commonly known as the “dual carbon” goals.
That one sentence changed the whole understanding of the energy transformation in China.
Until then, China’s target was to “promote a revolution in energy production and consumption, and build an energy sector that is clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient”, as Xi had said at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in China (CPC) in October 2017.
Xi’s 2020 speech shifted China’s priorities from reaching “low-carbon” to reaching “carbon neutrality”, from an energy sector that includes at least some fossil fuel consumption, to an energy sector which leaves little room for coal, oil and gas once carbon neutrality is reached.
The difference required a genuine change of mindset throughout China’s political system and stakeholders within the energy system, such as major power producers.
China started this immediately after the announcement: the State Council, China’s top administrative body, introduced the 1+N policy strategy, which is comprised of an overarching guideline for reaching the “dual carbon” goals (the “1”) and a number of more concrete guidelines and regulations to implement the strategy (the “N”).
So far, the policies have mainly focused on reaching the carbon peak before 2030 – but the long-term goal of carbon neutrality by 2060 is ever-present.
The National Energy Administration (NEA) has launched a blueprint for a new type of power system. At a broader level, several government departments have outlined efforts to transform the entire energy system, as opposed to just the power system, in the effort to reach carbon neutrality.
Hence, the foundation for China’s energy transformation is much more solid and precise today than it was before Xi’s announcement. The question now is: what will the new type of energy system look like and how will China reach it?
To answer these questions, our programme modelled three scenarios for China’s energy transformation: one in which China develops a net-zero emissions energy system before 2055; one in which it achieves this around 2055; and a baseline scenario that extrapolates current development trends.
The analysis is based on a detailed bottom-up modelling approach, while, at the same time, using visions for a “Beautiful China” – an official initiative for “the nation’s green and high-quality growth” – as guidelines for the transformation.
In our modelling, the overarching strategy for the energy transformation consists of three intertwined actions:
(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment report showed that these are key elements of all global pathways that limit warming to 1.5C or 2C.)
A consequence of following this strategy would be that the Chinese energy system would be able to provide energy for sustainable economic growth in China with net-zero carbon emissions, improved air quality and a high level of energy security.
In the most ambitious scenario, the Chinese power system would be carbon-neutral from 2045 – and the whole energy system before 2055.
Compared to today, total primary energy consumption would be lower in 2060 despite economic growth. Moreover, coal, oil and gas would be practically phased out of the system – and dependence on imported fossil fuels would be eliminated.
The figure below shows the energy flowing through China’s economy in 2021 (upper panel) compared with the energy flow in 2060 under this most ambitious scenario (lower panel).
On the left, each panel shows sources of primary energy flowing into the economy such as coal (black), gas (pink), oil (shades of grey) and non-fossil fuels such as nuclear (brown), hydro (dark blue), wind (light blue) and solar (yellow).
The centre of each panel illustrates the transformation of primary energy into more useful forms, such as electricity or refined oil products. Much of the primary energy contained in fossil fuels is wasted at this stage (“losses”) in the form of waste heat.
On the right, the users of final energy are broken down by sector.
Most notably, fossil fuels – particularly coal – are the largest sources of energy in 2021, whereas in the ambitious 2060 scenario, below, low-carbon sources dominate.
Our study suggests the transformation pathway will have three main phases. The first phase is the peaking phase until 2030.
During this period, the deployment of wind and solar power would continue to increase, while electrification of the industry and transport sectors would gain momentum.
However, coal and oil would remain the dominant energy sources in terms of total primary energy consumption.
Next is the “energy revolution” phase, from 2030 to 2050. During this phase, solar and wind power would become the main energy sources for electricity supply, and the electrification of the end-use sectors would be substantial.
The shift away from fossil fuels minimises the loss of waste heat in electricity generation and refining. Meanwhile, “green hydrogen” made from renewable power would become increasingly important in the industrial sectors.
The third phase is the consolidation phase, from 2050 to 2060. Decarbonisation occurs in sub-sectors that are challenging to electrify, such as the steel and chemicals industries, the old solar and wind power plants are replaced by new solar and wind power, and remaining fossil fuels in the energy mix are nearly phased out.
Although the Chinese government plans to “phase down” coal from 2025, based on the current policy guidelines and market situation, we estimate that coal power capacity would not be rapidly removed in any of our three scenarios.
Instead, coal power plants would gradually become providers of energy security and capacity to meet peaks in electricity demand, and not generate large amounts of electricity.
By the time they reach the end of their expected lifetime of around 30 years, the plants would be shut down and not replaced with new coal capacity. In our most ambitious scenario, the last coal power plants are closed in 2055, as shown in the figure below.
The upper panel in the figure shows the installed capacity of coal power plants and the lower panel their electricity production from 2021 to 2060.
Meanwhile, gas does not play a significant role in the power sector in our scenarios, as solar and wind can provide cheaper electricity while existing coal power plants – together with scaled-up expansion of energy storage and demand-side response facilities – can provide sufficient flexibility and peak-load capacity.
An energy system that relies on solar and wind power as main suppliers of power requires special flexibility measures to match production and demand.
The figure below shows a modelled example of an hourly electricity balance in a week in the summer of 2060 under our more ambitious scenario of achieving carbon neutrality before 2055.
The top panel shows electricity production on the supply side. In the daytime solar power (yellow) dominates the production of electricity, while wind power plants (light blue) have a more stable output throughout the 24-hour period.
In the evening and at night, electricity storage is discharged (purple) and hydropower production (dark blue) is higher than in the daytime.
The lower panel shows electricity use on the demand side. Storage (purple) is charged in the daytime and electric vehicle (EV) smart charging (blue) provides flexibility throughout the week.
As a backup, vehicle-to-grid supply plays an important role – not necessarily as a significant energy provider but as a last-resort capacity that can be activated if necessary, when wind and solar output is low. This solution is a cheap and efficient way to ensure sufficient capacity in the power system.
Before 2055, coal power plants could be equally reliable and affordable providers of capacity for the power system, even though they would not generate much electricity on average, as mentioned earlier.
This way of creating flexibility might seem complicated to manage in terms of daily dispatch (the process of managing supply and demand). However, an efficient and well-functioning electricity market, including consumers and producers, can do the job.
Removing the barriers to electricity trading among provinces and constructing a unified national electricity market would be a key enabler of this.
The scenarios from our China Energy Transformation Outlook give a range of quantified visions of the long-term future in a net-zero energy system.
Our detailed model of the power system and other energy end-use sectors make it possible to link the development of this new energy system with policy measures that could bring about this transformation.
One key insight from our work relates to the timing of the different phases of China’s energy transformation, mentioned above. Our modelling suggests that successful coordination of these phases will be crucial, in order to maintain energy security while avoiding unnecessary investments in energy infrastructure.
Other key enablers in our scenarios are the investments needed to expand the electricity grid, the development of a national electricity market and support for energy system flexibility.
Even with the best visions, and insights from pathways such as ours, there will be many challenges and barriers ahead to overcome if China is to reach its 2060 goal.
Our scenarios show, however, that there are feasible and cost-efficient pathways which can be implemented without waiting for new technological breakthroughs.
From 2025, flights taking off from the UK must use a fixed share of SAFs, which are largely made from waste products. This share will gradually rise from 2% next year to 22% in 2040.
The government says its “SAF mandate” will cut aviation emissions by 6.3m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2040.
However, Carbon Brief analysis of government forecasts shows this being almost entirely wiped out by rising demand for air travel, meaning emissions would only fall by 0.8% overall.
The SAF mandate is the most substantial policy to date under the UK government’s “jet-zero” strategy for decarbonising air travel, which eschewed efforts to limit demand. The mandate relies heavily on fuels made from used cooking oil and other waste products, which are in limited supply.
The SAF mandate will require jet fuel suppliers to ensure that an increasing share of the product they supply is “sustainable”. This is meant to encourage investment in new facilities to produce SAFs.
Fuels described as SAFs include those made from waste, such as used cooking oil, household waste and offcuts from the forestry sector.
Despite their name, SAFs produce just as many emissions as fossil fuels when burned to power planes.
However, they generally – although not always – have a lower overall “lifecycle” carbon footprint than petroleum-based jet fuel. This is due to CO2 emissions absorbed from the atmosphere when growing plants for biofuels, or emissions that are avoided by diverting waste products to be used as fuels.
These emissions savings are counted towards the UK’s aviation sector as a whole.
(The government says that, for the time being, it will not support SAFs made directly from crops, which tend to have relatively high carbon footprints due to changes in land use.)
The new UK mandate starts in 2025 with a requirement that 2% of total jet fuel demand is SAF, increasing to 10% in 2030 and 22% in 2040. The government says there is currently not enough certainty in the SAF market to set targets beyond that date.
These measures will cut overall aviation emissions by 2.7MtCO2e in 2030 and 6.3MtCO2e in 2040, according to the government.
Based on government forecasts for jet fuel use, this change will be almost totally offset by a growth in flights, leaving UK aviation emissions virtually unchanged between now and 2040.
Emissions in 2025 are expected to be 36.0MtCO2e, while 15 years later they are set to be 35.7MtCO2e, according to Carbon Brief analysis. This is a drop of just 0.3MtCO2e, or 0.8%. This is illustrated in the chart below, with the SAF mandate merely preventing an increase in emissions resulting from higher jet fuel use in 2040.
These figures are derived from the government’s “central case”, cited in its underlying analysis for the SAF mandate, which sees jet fuel use increasing from 11.5m tonnes (Mt) in 2025 to 13.3Mt in 2040. This, in turn, is based on policies in the government’s “continuation of current trends” scenario, with the SAF mandate included.
The government expects far more flights to take off from the UK in the coming years, resulting in higher jet fuel use. It has resisted pressure to curb the demand for air travel, despite warnings from experts that such actions are vital for reducing aviation emissions.
In its jet-zero strategy, the government stated that it is aiming for a “high ambition” scenario, which would see aviation emissions fall faster in the coming years. However, as it stands, it has not introduced policies to drive further emissions reductions in planes.
The SAF mandate assumes that SAFs reduce lifecycle emissions from jet fuel by 70%. Certificates will be issued to fuel suppliers for each tonne of SAF produced, using this baseline emissions reduction goal as the standard.
However, Prof Bill Rutherford, an Imperial College London biochemist who contributed to two major assessments of low-carbon aviation fuels in the UK last year, tells Carbon Brief he is sceptical about lifecycle emissions analysis that shows such high emissions benefits:
“Lifecycle analysis is a very fuzzy science…You can basically get what you want out of it.”
For example, in its analysis, the government assumes that SAFs made from used cooking oil – which are expected to make up virtually the entire UK supply in the short-term – cut lifecycle emissions by roughly 95-98% compared to conventional jet fuel.
Dr Andrea Fantuzzi, another Imperial College London chemist who also worked on the low-carbon fuel assessments with Rutherford, says such figures seem “way too high”. He estimates that the savings would be closer to 70%.
Fantuzzi adds that even this does not account for the land originally used to produce the oil, and assumes that the oil would otherwise be thrown away – rather than used to power road vehicles, for example. (For more on waste oils, see: More cooking oil.)
Additionally, Rutherford points out that the use of SAFs has no impact on non-CO2 emissions from planes, which could account for up to two-thirds of their climate impact. He concludes:
“The only way you can make aviation any more sustainable is to do less of it.”
The only SAFs that are currently available in the UK are fuels made from used cooking oil and other waste oils, which are collected from restaurants and factories.
However, the SAF mandate includes a limit on the amount of waste oil-based fuels within its overall targets. This is partly to “incentivise the development of new technologies” and partly due to concerns that waste oil supplies will be insufficient.
For the first two years, these fuels will be allowed to make up 100% of UK SAFs. This then falls to 71% in 2030 and 33% in 2040. Overall, waste oil-based SAFs would account for 2% of total jet fuel use in 2025 and up to 7.8% in 2040.
Despite these limits, waste oil-based SAF use is expected to rise around 15-fold from current levels within a decade. This huge increase in demand for waste cooking oil under the SAF mandate is illustrated in the figure below.
The Aviation Environment Federation said in a statement that the amount of waste oil being allowed into UK jet fuel under the UK’s SAF mandate is “much higher than we, and many others, were expecting, and appears to be the result of airline pressure”. The looser cap on these fuels was “welcomed” by industry body Airlines UK.
It raises the question of where the UK will source the required volume of waste oil to meet SAF targets.
Studies have shown that there is nowhere near enough waste cooking oil produced domestically, within the UK, to supply jet fuel demand. “We’re not about to start eating more chips, so we will have to start importing more waste oil,” Matt Finch, UK policy manager at the NGO Transport and Environment, tells Carbon Brief.
The government itself acknowledges this, saying that production of these SAFs within the UK is likely to be constrained by the availability of waste cooking oil from 2029 onwards.
It notes that their availability will therefore be “highly dependent” on how much waste oil the UK can import.
As of 2023, waste cooking oil collected in the UK only accounted for 7% of the country’s SAF production. This share has shrunk in recent years, such that imports from other countries – particularly China – have driven most of the growth in production, as the chart below shows.
There is mounting evidence that the demand for imported cooking oil in the UK and Europe is being met with virgin palm oil that has been fraudulently passed off as waste. This would cancel out the fuel’s emissions savings, due to the land clearances for oil palm plantations.
The UK’s aviation sector will have to compete not only with other countries for a limited pool of waste cooking oil, but also with other sectors.
Most of the UK’s waste cooking oil supplies are currently used to make biofuels for trucks and other road transport. Again, diverting resources from road fuel use would undermine the emissions savings from using them in SAFs.
The government acknowledges this, noting that “the SAF mandate may divert feedstocks which would have been utilised in other sectors of the economy and this may increase emissions in other sectors”. However, it says this is justified because “there are limited alternatives to decarbonise aviation by 2050”.
One of the scenarios modelled by the government assumes that SAF targets are met, but insufficient waste cooking oil means there is not enough biodiesel for road vehicles. This reduces the cumulative emissions savings between 2025-40 from 53.9MtCO2e to 43.0MtCO2e.
The government is also supporting new types of SAF production in the UK, including fuels made from “black bin bag waste” and residues from farming or forestry.
In the newly released documents, the government says the UK will be a “leader” and a “first mover” in these technologies, spurred on by the cap on waste oil fuels and supported by the Advanced Fuel Fund.
Unlike waste oil-based fuels, the government says there will be “sufficient” materials available to meet production demand for these advanced fuels until at least 2040. From that point onwards, it says lack of materials “may become a constraining factor”.
However, a 2023 report by the Royal Society highlighted the limited availability of some waste materials to produce SAFs. It estimated that forest offcuts, for example, would be able to provide no more than 1.7% of current jet fuel demand.
Moreover, many waste sources are already recycled or burned to generate electricity and the government has targets in place to cut household waste in the coming years. “Most waste is already used for something that’s not jet fuel, so we know supplies of waste-based SAF will be limited,” Finch tells Carbon Brief.
Finally, the government’s mandate also includes another target, within the overarching SAF goal, for scaling up the production of “power-to-liquid” fuels.
These fuels can be made using green hydrogen and carbon captured from the air. Unlike most SAFs, they could cut up to 100% of CO2 emissions compared to conventional jet fuel, but they are currently less developed than other options.
The target for power-to-liquid fuels will start in 2028 at 0.2% of total jet fuel demand, reaching 0.5% in 2030 and 3.5% in 2040.
These targets are lower than the ones introduced in the EU, which is aiming for 35% of its jet fuel to be power-to-liquid by 2050. The bloc is also targeting 70% of aviation demand to be met with SAFs by 2050, whereas the UK’s targets stop at 22% by 2040.
In its “balanced net-zero pathway” for UK aviation, government advisors the Climate Change Committee (CCC) proposed that SAFs should make up 25% of jet fuel by 2050, with one-third of this made up of power-to-liquid fuels – roughly 8% of total jet fuel. The government targets are roughly in line with this trajectory.
Thinktank Green Alliance laid out three scenarios for SAF expansion in 2022, including higher ambition goals, with power-to-liquid fuels reaching 28% and 50% of total jet fuel by 2050.
However, it noted that such a rollout could be constrained by the large amounts of additional green hydrogen and renewable power required to produce these fuels.
The report stated:
“It could be argued that aviation should not be a priority use of renewables as there are other options to cut carbon in the sector, such as managing the number of flights taken.”
The study, published in Climate Risk Management, assesses the risk of overheating in around 20,000 schools across England, using data on the schools’ location, the type of building and the climate.
The authors identify the indoor temperature of 26C as the upper “comfortable” limit in classrooms. While the average school would be expected to surpass this limit for more than one-third of the academic year under 2C of warming, it rises to half of the year for 4C of warming.
The authors also investigate a 35C threshold, above which “important health impacts” are seen. They find that, currently, schools only exceed this temperature threshold once every year, on average.
However, under 4C warming, the average school is expected to exceed this threshold around nine times per year, accounting for 5% of the academic year.
Newer schools are more likely to overheat than their older counterparts, the authors say, because they typically have better insulation and lower ceilings. They add that schools in the south and east of England, as well as London, are at greatest risk of overheating.
The study shows the need for adaptation measures such as improved ventilation, a scientist not involved in the study tells Carbon Brief. She adds that “school buildings need to be designed today with tomorrow’s climate in mind”.
Over the past month, millions of children in the Philippines, Bangladesh and India stayed home as a record-breaking heatwave forced schools across southern Asia to shut.
However, schools in more temperate climates can also be affected by the heat. In July 2022, the UK experienced a record-breaking heatwave that saw temperatures exceed 40C for the first time on record. During this period, the UK put out its first red heat alert and many schools finished early or closed their doors entirely for the safety of their staff and students.
Extreme heat can be deadly. During a heatwave, the number of “heat-related deaths” – where exposure to heat either causes or significantly contributes to a death – tends to increase.
Children are particularly vulnerable to high temperatures. When it is hot, the human body produces sweat to cool itself down. However, children do not sweat as much as adults and are therefore less able to regulate their body temperature.
Even when temperatures do not reach headline-grabbing highs, any increase above the “optimal” temperature can be harmful. A recent World Bank report estimates that in “middle and high-income settings”, the ideal classroom temperature lies between 19.5C and 23.3C. The report says:
“In those settings, any temperature above 24C can compromise reaction time, processing speed and accuracy through changes in heart rate and respiratory rates…
“Across five experimental studies, high temperature produced declines in student performance ranging from 2 to 12% for each 1C increase in classroom temperature.”
Furthermore, when teachers work in classrooms that are too hot, they can become fatigued or lose concentration, making them more likely to put themselves and the children in their care at risk.
UK guidance suggests a minimum working temperature of 16C, if employees are not carrying out physical work. However, there are no legal maximum working temperatures for schools in the UK.
“Our children spend 30% of their lives in schools,” says Prof Lucelia Rodrigues – chair of sustainable and resilient cities at the University of Nottingham. Rodrigues, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that it is “imperative that we provide them with comfortable, healthy environments to thrive and achieve their best”.
The new study assesses how often English schools overheat, which schools are most at risk and how climate change could exacerbate the problem. The study authors define two temperature thresholds:
The authors use the open-access CLIMADA platform to simulate the risk of English schools overheating, combining information on hazard, exposure and vulnerability.
The authors use climate data from the UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) to determine annual variations in temperature across England over 1998-2017. They then model those temperatures in worlds with average global temperatures of 2C and 4C above pre-industrial levels. This provides the hazard data.
They then quantify exposure using data on the location of around 20,000 primary and secondary state schools in England. And vulnerability is assessed using “physics-based building models” to quantify the link between outdoor and indoor temperature for different types of buildings.
The plot below shows an example of the relationship between outdoor daily average temperature (blue) and indoors daily maximum temperature (red) in two different schools. The dashed and dotted lines indicate the 26C and 35C temperature thresholds, respectively.
The authors find that schools built before 1918 are generally most able to keep cool, while those built after 1967 overheat the most easily.
Dr Laura Dawkins – an “expert scientist” in climate risk and resilience at the UK Met Office, and lead author of the study – tells Carbon Brief that this is due to “differences in typical floor-to-ceiling heights”. Newer schools are typically built with lower ceilings, which cause the room to heat up more quickly, she explains.
Rodrigues adds that newer schools are built to “more stringent building regulations designed to reduce heating energy demand”, making them more airtight and well-insulated. Citing her 2010 study, she continues:
“In classrooms within schools built post-2010, overheating occurred for more than 40% of school hours, whilst in older schools with leakier and non-insulated envelopes overheating was rarely reported.”
Rodrigues says that ventilation is key, noting that it not only prevents buildings from overheating, but can also “improve air quality, which will have a significant impact on productivity” in pupils.
The study’s findings include a series of maps to show where the most at-risk schools are located.
The maps below show the expected total number of days in an academic year that each school will cross the 26C (left) and 35C (right) temperature thresholds. The top row uses the climate of 1998-2017, the middle row a 2C-warmer world and the bottom row a 4C-warmer world. Darker red indicates more overheating days.
The authors assume 195 days in a school year, to account for weekends and holidays. The analysis does not include August – the hottest part of the year – because schools are typically closed for the summer holidays during this time.
The authors find that schools in south and east of England, as well as London, are at greatest risk of overheating. They add that this is largely due to the urban heat island effect – in which a combination of factors, such as buildings, reduced vegetation and high domestic energy use, cause urban areas to become hotter than more rural regions.
By combining the data from all 20,000 schools, the authors determine how many days the average school is expected to cross the 26C and 35C warming thresholds under different global warming levels. The authors also calculate values for “at-risk” schools – which rank in the highest 10% on their risk metric.
These results are shown in the table below.
| 26C threshold, average school | 26C threshold, at-risk school | 35C threshold, average school | 35C threshold, at-risk school | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recent climate | 59 | 59 | 1 | 1 |
| 2C warming | 71 | 75 | 3 | 5 |
| 4C warming | 89 | 92 | 9 | 13 |
The average school currently exceeds the 26C threshold for 59 days – accounting for around one-third of the academic year – according to the study. However, the authors warn that this could rise to 71 and 89 days under the 2C and 4C scenarios, respectively.
Meanwhile, England’s most at-risk schools currently face one day per year of indoor temperatures above 35C. This could rise to five days per year under a 2C warming scenario, and 13 under a 4C scenario.
This study is “a first attempt at applying the novel spatial risk assessment framework to this real world problem”, according to Dr Dan Bernie climate resilience science manager and health science lead at the UK Met Office and an author on the study.
Bernie tells Carbon Brief that he is currently working on “generating more robust results using individual school building models and higher resolution climate projections”.
Prof David Bresch is a professor at the department of environmental systems science at ETH Zurich and is the founder and senior scientific advisor at CLIMADA. He tells Carbon Brief that the authors have used the platform well, providing a good “prototype” for this type of study.
The biggest “challenge” in the study is the team’s use of fixed temperature thresholds, he says. However, he calls the paper an “important contribution” to the literature, and says that it will allow schools and governments to start thinking about adaptation measures.
Bresch emphasises the importance of adaptation. He tells Carbon Brief that it is crucial to “take a forward looking view of risk”, adding that it comes with the win-win situation of limiting impacts and likely coming with a lower price tag than waiting for major impacts to hit.
Every five years, the UK government publishes its Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), which assesses the “current and future risks to and opportunities for the UK from climate change”.
The National Adaptation Programme (NAP) is published shortly afterwards, allowing administrations such as the Department of Education (DfE) to outline how they are planning to adapt to climate change.
In July 2023, the UK government published its third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3). In this report, the DfE recognised the “significant threat” of rising overheating in schools, and highlighted the need for further research to better understand this risk.
The new study was carried out partly in response to this call for research and has experts from both the UK Met Office and DfE in its author list. Bernie tells Carbon Brief that this study was a collaboration between “climate science, data science, building performance models and stakeholder insights”.
The DfE tells Carbon Brief that it has already allocated £138m to make education buildings more sustainable or more resilient to the impacts of climate change. The UK government’s “strategy for the education and children’s services systems” adds:
“All new school buildings delivered by DfE (not already contracted) will be net-zero in operation. They will be designed for a 2C rise in average global temperatures and future-proofed for a 4C rise, to adapt to the risks of climate change, including increased flooding and higher indoor temperatures.”
However, Rodrigues tells Carbon Brief that “there is still no requirement to design for future climate conditions, even though schools typically have at least a 50-year lifespan, with many occupied continuously for over 100 years”. She adds that “school buildings need to be designed today with tomorrow’s climate in mind”.
The DfE tells Carbon Brief that they are working with partners including the Met Office on the next iteration of this research and will provide more information about it later this year.
With biodiversity declining at an unprecedented rate around the world, the EU intends to put nature on a “path to recovery” by 2030, in line with global goals.
Finance is a key part of this and the bloc has pledged to raise at least €20bn in nature funding each year by the end of the decade.
However, a new report estimates that EU countries could be spending between €34-48bn each year on projects that can end up damaging biodiversity in sectors such as agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
It is “pretty shocking” to see the potential scale of funding that EU countries are “pouring into harmful practices”, the lead author of the report tells Carbon Brief.
A policy expert, who was not involved in the report, says the findings may increase pressure on the EU to track its harmful subsidies, but criticised some of what the report counted as ‘“harmful”.
There is no standard definition for “biodiversity-harmful subsidies”, but, essentially, they are government incentives that supplement income or lower costs for certain activities that end up damaging biodiversity.
Agriculture, fishery and energy subsidies are most commonly termed “harmful”, but damage can also be caused by subsidies for other sectors, including forestry, infrastructure, transport, construction and water.
Subsidies that harm nature and the environment cost the world around $1.8tn each year, according to a 2022 report from two coalition industry groups – equivalent to the entire GDP of Canada.
There are a number of global goals in place to reduce these harmful subsidies.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the global deal for nature signed at the UN COP15 biodiversity summit in 2022, includes a target to cut biodiversity-harming incentives, including subsidies, by at least $500bn per year by 2030. The target also aims to identify such incentives by 2025, although the EU has so far not done so.
The new analysis finds that the EU is allocating between €34-48bn every year to subsidise activities that harm biodiversity. The table below shows the upper and lower estimates for each sector examined.
| Sector | Lower estimate of biodiversity harmful subsidies (€) | Upper estimate of biodiversity harmful subsidies (€) |
|---|---|---|
| Agriculture and forestry | 31.35bn | 32.57bn |
| Fisheries | 60m | 140m |
| Transport infrastructure | 1.69bn | 14.07bn |
| Water | 1.33bn | 2.09bn |
| Total | 34.43bn | 48.87bn |
This largest proportion of funding comes from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU’s farming-subsidy programme, which accounts for almost one-third of the bloc’s total budget. (See “agricultural impact” below.)
The subsidies include funds that support “unsustainable” farming, land-use changes, river fragmentation and deforestation, according to the report. It adds that these activities can have knock-on effects on biodiversity, including habitat loss, ecosystem degradation and species extinction.
Prof Alan Matthews, a European agricultural policy expert at Trinity College Dublin, says the findings start a “good debate” about measuring these subsidies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“I see the report as contributing to the pressure on the EU…to actually come up with its own identification of what the subsidies are, so that they can begin then in the next few years to actually reduce them.”
The study, conducted by the Netherlands-based economics consultancy Trinomics for WWF, looks at the biodiversity-harming elements of the EU’s long-term budget, the 2021-27 Multiannual Financial Framework.
It focuses on direct financing for the agricultural, forestry, fishery, transport and water sectors that may be damaging to biodiversity. This financing includes grants, loans and direct payments.
It does not look at indirect subsidies, such as tax breaks, or infrastructure investments that disproportionately benefit certain industries, such as tax reductions on fertilisers.
Tycho Vandermaesen, the policy and strategy director at WWF EU and lead author of the report, says there is an overlap between subsidies that damage biodiversity and those that exacerbate climate change, such as fossil fuel subsidies. But the climate impacts were not examined in the report. He says:
“We have taken a very conscious choice here to only look at biodiversity-harmful subsidies because this is one of the most under-highlighted environmentally harmful subsidies – in contrast to climate or fossil-fuel subsidies, which have by now been well researched.”
Matthews notes that the overall findings of the report are in line with previous research, but he criticises some parts of the methodology, such as including a very wide range of direct payments for farmers, as potentially harmful.
In response, Vandermaesen says the assumption on the harmful nature of direct payments for farmers is based on findings in existing studies.
On Monday, the EU Council approved a targeted review of the CAP to assess, among other things, plans to give farmers “greater flexibility” to comply with environmental terms for their direct payments.
The report is clear that there are uncertainties and a lack of up-to-date information on EU spending in some sectors. It says the findings are estimates and that more comprehensive analysis would be required to fully measure these subsidies.
Agriculture and forestry receive the most funding for biodiversity-damaging activities out of any sector examined in the report, as shown in the chart below.
The report notes that several EU funds “allocate money in a way that encourages large-scale unsustainable farming or forestry practices”.
These include direct farmer payments based on farm size, which can incentivise boosting industrial livestock numbers and expanding conventional crop production – “both of which harm the environment”, according to the report.
It estimates that around 60% of CAP funding – meaning more than €30bn each year – can be considered harmful to biodiversity.
The current CAP plan, which took effect in 2023 and will remain until 2027, included more environmental measures than previous iterations of the policy. But critics told Carbon Brief in 2021 that the plan was riddled with “loopholes” and unlikely to bring significant change to the sector.
Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the sector is also a key driver of forest loss, causing 80% of deforestation as forest lands are cleared to make space for livestock, palm oil and soya beans.
Looking at other sectors, the report outlines that 5-12% of the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund – a fishery funding programme – is put towards biodiversity-harmful subsidies.
This is up to 2.5 times higher than the money from this fund aiming to protect and restore biodiversity, the report says.
The report says it is “challenging” to accurately estimate the impact that building transport infrastructure can have on biodiversity, noting that it can fragment habitats and ecosystems. It estimates that the EU spends anywhere between €1.7bn and €14bn each year on roads, railways and other transport infrastructure that could be harmful to biodiversity.
Funds used for certain water infrastructure, such as flood control dams, could also harm biodiversity, the research notes.
The report contains a number of recommendations to put an end to these subsidies, including implementing a legally binding framework to phase out biodiversity-harmful subsidies on both EU and national levels. It adds:
“Inclusiveness and social awareness need to be included in the phase-out of biodiversity-harmful subsidies to avoid regions or industries being left behind or struggling with the transition.”
Vandermaesen says that consulting with the impacted sectors and giving a clear pathway to diverting these subsidies is a “really important” step. He adds:
“We do not want to see a situation where, from one day to the next, these subsidies are basically stopped without the involvement of these communities.”
The report recommends diverting the funding instead for public investments to protect and restore ecosystems and to put in place “ambitious” national biodiversity plans ahead of the COP16 biodiversity summit, which is scheduled to be hosted by Colombia later this year.
WWF recently asked European political parties whether they would commit to redirecting fossil fuel and other environmentally harmful subsidies towards the “green transition”. All parties that responded expressed a readiness to redirect these subsidies, but the NGO says that “only a few have committed to enshrining this redirection into law”.
The subsidies report includes a number of case studies of nature-harming subsidies across Europe.
A forest recovery plan in France, financed partly by the EU, has had “adverse effects” on forests, the report outlines. Almost nine out of 10 projects financed by the plan in 2021 and 2022 involved clearcutting of trees, which can weaken ecosystems.
The report details another example in Bulgaria, where farmers were permitted to let animals graze in areas of the country’s national parks to help preserve open areas.
This led to “vegetation being trampled, water being polluted and wildlife being disturbed”, the report says. To mitigate these effects, park administrations requested €760,000 from the country’s EU-funded environment programme.
These examples “illustrate how complex it can be actually on the ground to deliver these positive results”, Matthews says, adding:
]]>“In quite a number of the case studies, actually the subsidies were intended to be positive for biodiversity. But it seems that the way they were implemented…They had these sort of perverse outcomes.”
That expansion since 2014 has come with impacts on coal communities and the environment, from forced evictions and deforestation through to rising emissions.
The Modi government has plans for continued expansion, with 93 gigawatts (GW) of coal generation capacity expected to be built by 2032.
At the same time as expanding coal, Modi has projected himself as a global climate leader with grand renewable ambitions: he signed the Paris Agreement for India, pledged a net-zero target and has significantly expanded the country’s renewable capacity.
Modi’s confidence in securing a third term in India’s ongoing general election has been evident in his climate pledges: in Dubai last year, he bid for India to host the COP33 UN climate talks in 2028, while his party’s manifesto has pledged that India will achieve energy independence in 2047.
From 13 May to 1 June, at least 29 constituencies with existing or expanding coal and lignite mines, power plants and ports will go to the polls to have their say on the incoming government.
Here, Carbon Brief looks back at Modi’s first two terms and asks what another might mean for coal communities and climate change.
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