§ This week

Cyclone Chido ravages south-east Africa

DEVASTATING STORM: Hundreds or even thousands of people were feared dead after Cyclone Chido hit the French overseas island territory of Mayotte and then continental Africa, Reuters reported. At least 69 people have been confirmed dead across Mayotte, Mozambique and Malawi, according to Al Jazeera. More than 1,400 people had been injured in the storm and about 8,000 people had taken shelter in schools, the New York Times reported. France will observe a day of national mourning on Monday, reported Le Monde.

POOR DATA: Cyclone Chido is the most intense storm to hit Mayotte in 90 years, the Associated Press reported. The storm carried winds of at least 140mph (225km/h) when it reached Mayotte, which lies between Mozambique and Madagascar, the Guardian said. Scientists have long suggested that climate change is making cyclones worse in the region, but a lack of weather data has hindered more conclusive claims, the Associated Press said.

Coal use to climb in 2024

NEW HEIGHTS: The world’s coal use is expected to reach a new high of 8.7bn tonnes this year and could remain at near-record levels until 2027, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Guardian reported. The newspaper added that the IEA blamed power plants, particularly in China, for the growth. Bloomberg reported that the IEA’s latest forecast “overwrites last year’s estimate that coal demand would begin a steady decline this decade”.

MOVING ON: Meanwhile, the IEA notes that in developed economies, such as the US and the EU, coal power generation continued to see a steady decline and is forecast to fall by 5% and 12%, respectively, in 2024, the Guardian reported. A new Carbon Brief analysis revealed that the number of proposed coal plants in the 38 mainly developed members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has decreased from 142 in 2015 to five today – a 96% drop.

§ Around the world

• NEW PLEDGE: The Biden administration has committed the US to cutting its emissions by 61-66% below 2005 levels by 2035 in a “significant update” to its climate plans, the New York Times reported. However, it adds that the pledge will “almost certainly be disregarded” by the incoming president Donald Trump.
• MAKING CONNECTIONS: A new report published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) said governments are underestimating the link between biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change, BBC News reported. Carbon Brief also covered the findings.
• NO DEAL: The UN desertification COP16 summit hosted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ended without an agreement on a legally-binding response to drought, the Financial Times reported.
• ARID CONDITIONS: A drought has been linked to the death of 80 elephants at the Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa, the Mail and Guardian reported.
• RENEWABLE POWER: The IEA said tapping less than 1% of Africa’s potential for enhanced geothermal systems could meet the continent’s electricity needs in 2050, Semafor reported.
• FOSSIL PHASEOUT: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved California’s “landmark plan” to end the sale of petrol-only vehicles by 2035, Reuters reported.

§ 8 million

The number of homes in England that could face flood risks by 2050, according to the UK’s Environment Agency, the Financial Times reported. This means one in four English homes could be at risk of flooding by the middle of the century. The government body said 6.3 million homes already face flood risk in England.

§ Latest climate research

• Major declines in Antarctic sea ice in 2023 increased ocean heat loss and storm frequency in previously ice-covered regions, a new study in Nature found.
• A new paper in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control found that the global cement sector could produce “net-negative” cement and meet its 2050 carbon neutrality target early if bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is integrated into cement operations.
• A new study in Science found that more than half of Alaska’s population of common murres, also known as common guillemots, died during an “extreme” marine heatwave event over 2014-16, with an estimated four million of the seabirds lost.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

The number of new coal plants under development in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) region has reached record lows since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to the latest data from Global Energy Monitor’s Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT). Proposed coal-fired capacity in the OECD has fallen from 142 in 2015 to just five today, shown in the map above.

§ Spotlight

Unpacking the political economy of Africa’s energy transition

This week, Carbon Brief reports from a conference in Chicago on how Africa can transition to low-carbon energy and boost access to electricity.

Earlier this month, a panel of academics convened at the African Studies Association conference in Chicago to discuss the political economy of Africa’s energy transition.

The conference papers highlighted the role of national governments, resource endowments, and sovereignty in the continent’s adoption of non-hydro renewable energy.

Africa’s energy transition is contested. Amid the continent’s energy poverty – at least 600 million people live without electricity – calls for the defunding of fossil fuel projects have been met with sharp criticism.

While Africa’s significant solar and wind resources mean it does not have to follow the high-carbon practices of the past to produce electricity, funding for clean energy on the continent remains starkly inadequate.

‘Politicised’ decisions

One of the papers presented at the Chicago conference, focusing on Tanzania, noted that decision-making around energy projects is routinely politicised.

While the east African country has long pushed to diversify its energy mix, the ruling party has often prioritised projects with short-term deliverability and impact.

Focusing on solar and wind energy projects can be viewed as “politically risky”, said Dr Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and one of the paper’s authors.

The scenario is similar in Ghana where politicians have turned to fossil fuel sources as quick fixes to the problem of energy security, paying less attention to sustainability or decarbonisation – issues that are less popular with voters.

Meanwhile, the discovery and development of gas reserves in Tanzania and Ghana has inspired a nationalist pushback against the notion of abandoning fossil fuels.

This is despite analysis showing that a push to reach net-zero by 2070 in Ghana by deploying renewables, low-carbon hydrogen, electric vehicles and clean cookstoves could present a $550bn international investment opportunity and create a net 400,000 jobs. 

Countries that are rich in fossil fuels generally push for using such fuel sources for their power sectors, while others are more open to developing renewable energy capacity.

For example, Kenya, an African country with limited fossil fuel resources, has become one of the world’s fastest-growing developers of geothermal energy. 

Moving forward with renewables

Given the political weight of energy security in Africa, Pedersen said that pushing for non-hydro renewable energy should fit into the dominant ideas about development held by African political elites.

In his opinion, this could include the use of gas “in the short to medium term”, but he added “there is discussion” about “how to use it in the best way”.

Dr Matthew Tyce, a researcher at King’s College London who has studied the role of the Kenyan government in geothermal energy development, told Carbon Brief that African countries need to be “cautious about adopting the kinds of institutional configurations that are often promoted by international actors”, which emphasise market-based solutions.

He also urged international donors and development finance institutions “to be less dogmatic about promoting modes of energy transition that rely disproportionately on private investment”. 

The Asian model

For Anne Marx Lorenzen, a PhD candidate researching the sustainability of Chinese and Japanese renewable energy projects in Cambodia, Indonesia and Ethiopia, global north countries can learn a lot from the Asian approach.

By working with the Ethiopian government’s developmental vision, China and Japan have invested heavily in the country’s energy resources, becoming a viable alternative to global north partners, Lorenzen argued in a paper presented at the conference.

The global north “needs to listen more to our African partners and what they want their own development trajectory to be”, Lorenzen told Carbon Brief, adding: “I think in the past, we’ve been focused on setting terms and conditions, focused on liberalisation and privatisation.”

Tanzanians “want an energy transition that recognises their energy access and security needs”, Dr Japhace Poncian, a senior lecturer at the Mkwawa University College of Education, said. He added: “Ensuring access to energy is a primary goal and this does not care much about the greenness of the source.”

§ Watch, read, listen

ENVIRONMENT ADVOCATES: The New Yorker‘s Elizabeth Kolbert highlighted Vauatu’s role in the International Court of Justice’s decision to rule on climate change.

EV REVOLUTION: In a new edition of Sinica, host Kaiser Kuo discussed China’s rapid surge in electric vehicle manufacturing, adoption and export with Illaria Mazzocco, deputy director and senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

A NEW WORLD: During a trip to South Africa, United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said Africa needs financial, climate and technological justice.

§ Coming up

• 29 December: Croatia Presidential elections, Croatia
• 15 January: Oil Market Report launch, IEA.
• 16 – 17 January: First Sustainable Finance Working Group Meeting, G20.

Pick of the jobs

• Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, Head of Public Engagement and Communications | Salary: £50,000. Location: Horncastle, Lincolnshire.
• ProPublica, Reporter, Climate | Salary: $95,000-$170,000. Location: New York or remote.
• Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, Climate and Energy Officer | Salary: £38,626-£43,693. Location: Tameside, Greater Manchester.
• Octopus Energy, Energy Specialist | Salary: £24,300. Location: Central Brighton.
• Grist, Climate News Fellow | Salary: $58,750. Location: US.

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 OECD and no new coal

Of the 13 OECD countries with coal plant proposals in 2015, all but Turkey have since pledged to stop building new coal plants. 

Indeed, since 2015, proposed coal-fired capacity in the OECD has fallen from 142 coal proposals totalling 111 gigawatts (GW) to just five proposals totalling 3GW, GCPT data shows. 

However, there are exceptions for coal plants that significantly lessen or “abate” carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions through the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

Four of the five proposals – shown in the map below – include plans for CCS.

Moreover, none of the five proposals currently have the necessary permits for construction. This means it will likely be several years before construction begins – if they are built at all, as most of the proposals in the OECD since 2015 have been abandoned entirely. 

Of the 111GW of new coal capacity that was proposed in 2015, 82% (91GW) has since been shelved or cancelled, compared to 17% (19GW) commissioned.

This is a large part of the reduction in the coal pipeline in the OECD, shown in the figure below.

The most recent coal plants to enter the construction phase in the OECD broke ground in 2019. Its 1GW of capacity remains under construction today. 

The 111GW of proposals in 2015 listed in the GCPT were located across 13 countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the US. 

Since 2015, 12 of the 13 countries have pledged support for no new coal, whether as part of the international Powering Past Coal Alliance or through a domestic moratorium on new coal plant permits. The UK phased out coal power entirely this year.

These commitments to no new coal have been aided by the decreasing costs of competing power sources, including gas and – increasingly – solar and wind power.

Additionally, many countries have seen sustained opposition campaigns to new coal plants over the pollution they would cause, their high energy costs and population displacement.

As the OECD turns away from new coal, coal power capacity in the region peaked in 2010 at 655GW and has since declined by about one-third to 443GW, as countries shut down ageing coal plants.

§ Turkey resists no new coal

To date, the government of Turkey has resisted calls for no new coal, despite repeated rollbacks in its coal plans.

The vast majority of the country’s proposed coal plants have never materialised, as shown in the figure below.

Specifically, since 2015, more than 70GW of planned coal plant capacity in Turkey has been called off, compared to 6GW commissioned, translating into a cancellation rate of 92% since 2015. This is one of the highest cancellation rates in the world, GCPT data shows. 

Coal plant proposals in Turkey face a myriad of challenges, including strong public opposition over coal plant pollution and coal industry privatisation. Additionally, domestic lignite coal is low-quality and unreliable, often leading many plants to use higher-cost imported coal instead, weakening the economic case for continued reliance on coal.

In the third quarter of 2024, the licenses for two coal plants – Karaburun and Kirazlıdere – were cancelled due to irregularities in the environmental permitting process and the loss of interest in the investment by plant sponsors. Another plant, Malkara, was shelved due to a lack of activity, GCPT notes.

The developments have left Turkey with only one coal plant proposal – a remarkable development after being among the top 10 countries with proposed coal-powered capacity for nearly a decade.

Despite this, Turkey has not committed to ending new coal plant proposals. Indeed, its recently updated enhanced climate plan, known as a nationally determined contribution submitted during COP29, makes no mention of coal phaseout.

The country’s remaining proposal is a 688MW two-unit expansion of the sizable Afşin-Elbistan power station complex in the city of Kahramanmaraş.

Local residents have opposed the project, saying the increase in pollution in the densely populated city will lead to thousands of premature deaths and cost billions of dollars. 

§ Australia, Japan, the US and ‘clean coal’ 

The remaining four coal plant proposals in the OECD are located in Australia, Japan and the US. 

While the government of Australia recently pledged support for no new coal and the Japanese and US governments were part of the recent G7 commitment to coal phaseout, the three countries also support CCS to lessen or “abate” emissions from coal plants.

Abated coal plants may be considered compatible with no new coal pledges if they “substantially reduce” carbon emissions enough to meet Paris-aligned targets. 

Critics argue that coal CCS proposals are more expensive and polluting than cleaner electricity alternatives, often relying heavily on government subsidies in order to be economically viable.

Only a handful of CCS coal plants have ever reached commercial operation – and none have captured as much of the resulting CO2 as they were targeting.

The Japanese government signed on to a G7 agreement earlier this year to phase out unabated coal power by the mid-2030s and continues to promote a suite of “clean coal” technologies, both domestically and abroad. 

The country’s single remaining coal plant proposal is a new coal “gasification” unit at J-Power’s Matsushima power station, dubbed GENESIS. The plant would gasify the coal, then co-fire the resulting gases with biomass, ammonia and hydrogen, before using CCS to abate the resulting emissions.

Under outgoing president Joe Biden, the US also signed on to the G7 agreement and was one of twelve countries that joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance during COP28 in 2023.

The country has two Department of Energy (DOE)-backed coal-fired power plant proposals that include plans for CCS, as required under pending Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  regulations for new coal power plants. 

While the future of both the coal pledges and regulations are uncertain, given the recent re-election of Donald Trump, to date the former president has been unable to turn the tide for coal. More coal power capacity was retired under Trump’s first term than either Barack Obama or Biden, and no new coal plants have been built in the US for over a decade. 

Australia’s Labor party voted into power in 2022 recently joined a COP29 call for no new unabated coal. The country has not commissioned a new coal plant since 2012, with over 13GW of proposed coal-fired capacity cancelled since 2010.

The country’s remaining coal proposal, the Collinsville (Shine Energy) power station, has been touted by its sponsors as a “high efficiency, low emissions” (HELE) coal project with plans to include CCS.

Despite these sparse plans for the development of further coal projects, therefore, it seems clear that the end is in sight for coal power in the OECD. 

§ Key developments

Brazil agri investigations

BOATLOAD OF BEEF: Major shipping firms transported more than half a million tonnes of beef and leather from slaughterhouses “linked to tropical forest destruction in Brazil” over the course of two years, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported. Data showed that 12 meat plants run by Brazil’s top three beef companies were linked to an area of forest loss “three times the size of London” from 2021-23. Shipping firms then moved “hundreds of consignments” of beef and leather from these meat plants to Europe, the US and China in 2022-23, TBIJ found. Alex Wijeratna from environmental campaign group Mighty Earth told the outlet: “Major shipping companies are the silent enablers in the billion-dollar global trade of deforestation-risk commodities.”

DEFORESTATION LINKS: Separately, a report found that around 80% of Brazil’s major beef and leather organisations, plus their financiers, “have made no commitments to stop deforestation”, the Associated Press said. The report from nonprofit Global Canopy ranked meat giant JBS as the “most likely to be buying cattle and cow leather from recently deforested land” – despite the company being one of the few that have made public pledges to halt supply chain deforestation in future. JBS told the newswire that the report’s methodology provided a simplistic and inaccurate assessment of deforestation risk and ignored other factors, such as corporate policies. 

MULTIPLE CRISES: Elsewhere, a new report covered by Carbon Brief found that “siloed” approaches to tackling the interconnected issues of biodiversity, climate change, food, water and health are not “fully effective”. The report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that focusing on a single element of these issues at the expense of the others will have negative impacts for humans and the planet. A second IPBES report looked at the “urgent and necessary” need for “transformative change” to tackle biodiversity loss and nature decline. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said it “offers a roadmap for addressing the drivers of the nature crisis with tools for action across sectors and society”, Down to Earth reported. 

Desertification COP ends in disarray

NO DROUGHT DEAL: The COP16 desertification summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ended with no agreement on a “legally binding response to drought”, the Financial Times reported. Countries need more time to agree on the “best way” to deal with this “critical issue”, the head of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Ibrahim Thiaw, said. The FT noted: “African countries in particular pushed for the establishment of a legally binding drought protocol, while the US and EU bloc sought a framework that was less economically onerous, but was ready to be operational.” This outcome follows the recent “failure” to reach key agreements at biodiversity talks in Colombia and plastics talks in South Korea, the newspaper said.

ENDING: Countries signed off on some outcomes at the Riyadh COP, including to set up “official groupings for Indigenous peoples and local communities”, Climate Home News reported. Governments also agreed to extend the desertification convention’s remit “beyond drylands, to cover grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, savanna and tundra”, the outlet said. On the other hand, the summit left a “lot of loose ends”, including on finance, according to Think Landscape. In total, $12bn was pledged at COP16 to tackle desertification, drought and land degradation – but an estimated $355bn will be needed each year by 2030, the outlet noted. 

DRY LAND: Almost 78% of land around the world “likely became permanently drier” between 1990 and 2020, according to a UN report covered by Down to Earth. The report, released during COP16, said that 4.3m square kilometres of “previously humid landscapes” have turned into drylands over those three decades. The outlet said: “This transition has dire implications for agriculture, ecosystems and the livelihoods of those dependent on these regions, as reduced rainfall affects crops, pastures, people and nature.” 

§ Spotlight

The top five food, land and nature stories of 2024 

For the final Cropped issue of the year, Carbon Brief rounds up our selection of the five food, land and nature stories that marked 2024. Cropped will return to your inbox on 15 January 2025.

SEVERE DROUGHT: In February, Carbon Brief covered research revealing that half of the Amazon will face “unprecedented” stress that could lead to a tipping point by 2050. Such stress – the result of a combination of factors, including climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss and extreme weather – may convert vast rainforest areas into savannas. In October, Brazil’s Globo Rural reported that the drought in the southern Amazon – ongoing since 2023 – reached “critical levels”, hindering river navigation and isolating riverside communities.

SKYROCKETING FOOD COSTS: This year saw a global rise in food prices, from olive oil and oranges through to cocoa and coffee. Carbon Brief consulted a range of scientists and policy experts to best understand the factors behind the spiking prices, including extreme weather events, high input costs, geopolitical conflicts and increasing demand. The Financial Times reported that climate change is a major trigger for these prices, as it is “reducing crop yields, squeezing supplies and driving up prices”. Carbon Brief produced five charts that highlight climate impacts on food production and prices for various crops in the EU, UK, US and China.

DE- AND REFORESTATION: A report by the Forest Declaration Assessment noted that the world is “not on track to meet” its goals to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. According to the report, the world has “barely made a dent in curbing deforestation”. In June this year, the EU Council gave the final sign-off to a nature law aiming to restore 30% of degraded habitats, including forests, rivers and wetlands by 2030, as Carbon Brief reported. EU countries will start implementing their restoration plans in July 2026, according to Earth.org.

MASS BLEACHING: This year also saw the “most extensive on record” event of coral bleaching, Reuters reported, citing the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Satellite data revealed 77% of the world’s coral reef areas have undergone heat stress, leading to bleaching events, against a backdrop of “near-record ocean temperatures across the world”. Scientists dubbed this the “fourth global coral bleaching”. 

THREE COPS: Three COPs in a row closed out the year. Carbon Brief covered the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, which will resume in Rome in February 2025 to address unresolved issues, such as creating a new fund under the COP and a monitoring framework for countries’ progress in tackling biodiversity loss. Carbon Brief also reported on the COP29 climate talks in Baku, where food and nature featured “pretty weakly” in the negotiations, according to observers. The year ended with the UN desertification conference in Riyadh, which ended last week and failed to agree on a legally binding drought protocol, Inter Press Service reported.

§ News and views

‘EPIC’ MIGRATION: Climate change may have led a humpback whale to undertake “one of the longest and most unusual migrations ever recorded”, BBC News reported. The whale traveled from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean, covering a distance of 13,000 kilometres. Scientists described it as an “epic” migration and said it could have been driven by a reduction of food availability due to climate change or the search for a mate. 

PRICING BIODIVERSITY: Investors are “increasingly interested in addressing biodiversity risks in their portfolios” and putting a price on biodiversity through the creation of “green” funds, the Financial Times reported. The outlet cited experts in biodiversity investments who said the sector is becoming more aware of the impacts of biodiversity loss on inflation and GDP. It also said that the topic drew more attention at the COP16 biodiversity summit, held in Colombia this year, than at previous biodiversity summits. Separately, a recent study outlined a new framework for defining what a unit of nature is, as well as the risks of biodiversity credits.

FARMER FRUSTRATIONS: In Spain, tens of thousands of farmers took to the streets of Madrid to protest against a trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur countries in South America, Euractiv reported. The deal, which has been in the works for 25 years, would “create a free-trade zone spanning more than 700m people”, Politico said. It was given the final green light on 6 December, but has not yet taken effect, the outlet noted, adding that it is “furiously opposed by France, which fears that a glut of cheap poultry and beef imports would undercut its farmers”. Elsewhere, DeSmog and other outlets compiled a database of interests and “side jobs” of politicians on an EU agriculture committee. In the UK, farmers protested in London over tax changes, according to Reuters. 

RISKY BUSINESS: Bloomberg reported on the risks of an “unusual insurance policy” to aid disaster recovery that is “gaining ground” in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. The policy, known as parametric insurance, provides a payout only when a “specific metric is triggered”, such as low rainfall levels harming crop growth. The outlet spoke to people in a small Malawi village which has received “only a trickle” of a payout from this policy. Chilimani has been hit by floods, cyclones and now its “worst drought in decades”, which has “obliterated the harvest of corn, the main food”, Bloomberg said. One villager told the outlet: “It’s the worst time of our lives…Everything has become unpredictable.” 

§ Watch, read, listen

LAND RIGHTS: The Africa Daily podcast from the BBC World Service explored whether a recent “major land policy shift” in Zimbabwe will “empower black farmers”. 

‘SACRED’ CENOTES: An Associated Press video covered the Indigenous Mayans’ quest to obtain personhood status for their “sacred cenotes”, a group of subterranean lakes in Mexico.

RISKY SHIFT: Farmers and fishermen are starting to work at night in response to extreme heat. Grist navigated the “new dangers” these changes may lead to. 

HOPEFUL NOTE: The Guardian detailed “five UK biodiversity success stories” – including butterfly comebacks and helping a river “start from scratch”. 

§ New science

• A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that less than a quarter of tropical rainforests are of “high integrity”, meaning they are “intact and undisturbed”. The researchers analysed forest areas inhabited by 16,396 species of terrestrial vertebrates, finding that species threatened with extinction were especially affected by the loss of habitat.
• Species extinctions will “accelerate rapidly” if global temperatures go beyond 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, a Science meta-analysis study suggested. The research synthesised the findings of 485 studies and more than 5m projections of future extinctions.
• Deforestation-induced climate change has made soybean and maize crop shortages “more frequent and severe”, according to new research published in Nature Sustainability. The authors examined the effects of climate change on these crops in the Cerrado, a vast savanna in eastern Brazil.

§ In the diary

• 16-20 December: 68th meeting of the Global Environment Facility Council | Online 
• 25-27 February: Resumed session of Convention on Biological Diversity COP16 | Rome, Italy

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org

§ 1. Biodiversity loss puts food and water systems, human health and the climate at risk

The report explores how the decline of biodiversity in “all regions of the world” has serious consequences for food, water, health and climate change.

It stresses that biodiversity is “essential” to human existence, because it supports water and food supplies, underpins public health and contributes to the stability of the climate.

But over the last 30-50 years, biodiversity has declined by an average of 2-6% each decade across “all of the assessed indicators”, according to the report.

It notes that the ongoing decline has been caused by an intensification of the direct drivers of biodiversity loss: land- and sea-use change, climate change, overexploitation of resources, invasive alien species and pollution.

These trends have, in turn, been caused by “a wide range of indirect drivers”, including economic, demographic, cultural and technological changes, the report argues.

When these “direct” and “indirect” drivers of biodiversity loss interact with each other, they cause “cascading impacts among the nexus elements”, the report warns. In particular, it notes that climate change and biodiversity loss “interact and compound each other to negatively impact ecosystem resilience and all the other nexus elements”.

The document points to “fragmented governance” of biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change as a major obstacle preventing effective action on the issues.

While environmental regulations have been “partially successful”, they are “unlikely to be fully effective without more concerted efforts to address interlinkages among the nexus elements and their direct and indirect drivers”, it warns.

Prof Paula Harrison, co-chair of the report and a scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, says that governance systems need to reflect the interconnections between biodiversity, food, health, water and climate change. She told a press briefing on 16 December:

“Because our current governance systems are often different departments, they are working in silos. They are very fragmented, and they are working and developing policy in isolation – often these links [between climate, health, biodiversity, water and food] are not even acknowledged or ignored. 

“What that actually means is that you can just get unintended consequences or trade-offs that emerge because people just weren’t thinking in the holistic way.”

For example, unsustainable agricultural practices introduced to increase food production result in biodiversity loss, unsustainable water usage, reduced food diversity and quality, and increased pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the report says.

The graphic below provides an illustration of how unsustainable agriculture can impact all five of the nexus elements.

Moreover, the report finds that over the last 50 years, decision makers have prioritised “short-term benefits and financial returns for a small number of people”, while ignoring the negative impacts of their actions on the five nexus elements. 

This oversight exacerbates societal inequalities, according to the report, given that communities in developing countries and Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, climate change and health risks.

Overall, it says that “dominant economic systems” are causing “unsustainable and inequitable economic growth”, noting that $7tn a year is invested in activities detrimental to nexus elements.

§ 2. Focusing solely on food security leads to ‘severe trade-offs’ with climate, water and biodiversity

To assess how the five nexus elements – biodiversity, water, food, health and climate – will interact with each other over the 21st century, the authors used 186 scenarios from 52 studies to develop six “nexus scenario archetypes”.

The table below shows the overall projected impact on each nexus element under the different archetypes. The graphic beneath shows how the different nexus elements impact each other under each archetype. 

In both graphics, blue arrows show a positive impact, red a negative impact and grey a variable impact. More arrows, or thicker lines, indicate a stronger impact.

The report calls archetypes one and two “sustainability scenarios”. 

These are associated with sustainable consumption and production, healthy diets, reduced food waste and lower water use. These archetypes project positive long-term outcomes across all of the nexus elements. 

Additionally, the benefits of economic growth are more evenly distributed across different “societal groups”, and multiple actors and knowledge systems – including Indigenous knowledge – are involved in decision-making.

The “nature-oriented nexus” – the first archetype – focuses on increasing protected areas and improving their effectiveness, with a focus on areas with high biodiversity. This takes “deliberate efforts to address existing and emerging injustices and inequality”. 

The report finds evidence that “protecting up to 30% of terrestrial, freshwater and marine areas can provide nexus-wide benefits, if these are effectively managed for nature and people”.

The archetype also sees a transformation of global food systems, through changes including increased sustainable agricultural practices, reducing food waste, developing new food sources and promoting healthy, sustainable diets. 

Archetype two, called the “balanced nexus”, is characterised by stronger environmental regulation and less reliance on technologies than the nature-oriented nexus. This archetype has a strong focus on restoration and sustainable use of natural resources. It has fewer positive impacts on biodiversity, water and climate and slightly more positive impacts for food and human health, compared to archetype one. 

Meanwhile, archetypes three, four and five each prioritise a specific nexus element. These archetypes force “severe trade-offs among the nexus elements” and result in “unsustainable and inequitable economic growth”.

For example, archetype five – “food first” – uses “unsustainable” agricultural processes, which result in higher greenhouse gas emissions, land-use change, water use and nitrate pollution. This scenario sees nutritional health improve, but has negative impacts on biodiversity, water and climate change.

Archetypes five and six are “business-as-usual” scenarios, which represent the continuation of current trends. These are characterised by “intensive…material and energy consumption, increased greenhouse gas emissions, intensive land use and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources”. 

The sixth archetype is called “nature overexploitation” and is characterised by negative impacts across all five nexus elements. This archetype sees overconsumption of natural resources, unsustainable energy demand and “weak environmental regulation exacerbated by delayed action”. 

The report warns that these business-as-usual scenarios result in “declining outcomes for biodiversity, mainly driven by unsustainable food production and resource extraction as well as climate change”. 

The report concludes: 

“Maximising all nexus elements simultaneously is unlikely to be possible, but achieving balance across policy goals will likely lead to beneficial outcomes for nature and people.”

§ 3. Shifting to sustainable healthy diets will benefit people and the planet

The report says it is well established by scientists that shifting to sustainable healthy diets and reducing food waste would “benefit food security and health” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

This shift could also “free up land, providing in a range of cases co-benefits for nexus elements, such as biodiversity conservation and carbon sinks”, the report says.

The assessment examines 71 “response options” for tackling at least one element of the nexus between biodiversity, water, food security, health and climate change.

The report says that these responses “are not meant to be an exhaustive list”, but “represent a menu of options that can be applied in different contexts”, adding:

“Some response options may not be appropriate in all countries, and all would be implemented in accordance with national legislation and sovereignty and in accordance with relevant international obligations. Even within countries, effectiveness and acceptability depend critically on political, social and ecological context.”

The graphic below summarises the response options, which are grouped into 10 categories. The coloured tags indicate which element of the nexus the option addresses.

The graphic illustrates how most of the options for addressing food security involve consuming sustainably, managing ecosystem functions and ensuring Indigenous rights and equity.

Measures to consume sustainably in order to boost food security include shifting to sustainable healthy diets and reducing food waste.

The diagram also notes that human health could be improved by reducing meat overconsumption.

The report says it is well established that “behaviour change will be necessary to shift consumption practices”.

It says this can be enabled by the “increasing accessibility and desirability” of sustainable healthy diets. It also says that implementing food-based dietary guidelines to the public, “particularly targeting public school feeding programmes”, can create a “structured demand” for healthy and sustainable food.

This measure could also “increase opportunities for on-farm diversification aimed at increasing supply and consumption of local seasonal foods”, the report says.

The report also says that improving the sustainable use and management of ecosystems is “particularly important for the agricultural sector”.

This is because “the way food is produced, what foods are produced and consumed, where they are produced, and how much food is lost and wasted impact both nature and people”. It says the “ecological intensification” of croplands, rangelands and aquaculture can help to address food security while having benefits for people and nature.

“Ecological intensification” refers to the idea of using natural functions of an ecosystem to produce more food in a sustainable way – for example, by allowing wild insects to pollinate crops.

The report also says “agroecology” could have positive effects for biodiversity and addressing climate change. It says:

“Agroecology represents a shift to production systems where equitable access to land and a blend of scientific and Indigenous and local knowledge guide the sustainable management of biodiversity, crops and other resources.” 

§ 4. All available options for restoring nature would also help to tackle and adapt to climate change

All of the available options for restoring biodiversity examined by the report would come with co-benefits for tackling and adapting to climate change, although the size of this positive impact varies with each technique.

The figure below shows the positive (dark blue) and negative (red) impacts associated with the report’s 71 “response options” for tackling at least one element of the nexus between biodiversity, food security, health and climate change (see previous section for more on these options).

In the figure, positive and negative impacts are shown for biodiversity (butterfly icon), water (droplet), food security (wheat), health (heart) and climate change (thermometer). The size of the circle represents the relative size of the effect.

The figure shows that all of the options for addressing biodiversity loss (B01-14) come with a positive impact on efforts to tackle and adapt to climate change.

Furthermore, the report says, implementing multiple response options together can have a synergistic effect, “enhanc[ing] nexus-wide benefits”. Current approaches, it adds, “have failed to harness the full potential…because they have been designed and implemented in isolation”.

The report says it is well established that addressing nature loss by protecting natural ecosystems from further destruction could come with benefits for all elements of the nexus, adding:

“Conserving or halting conversion of forests and other ecosystems protects human health and wellbeing by combating climate change, reducing the impact of extreme weather events, such as storms, droughts and landslides, increasing water and air quality and reducing disease risk.”

It is also well established that restoring degraded ecosystems can help to tackle climate change “when it targets carbon storage in forests, peatlands, seagrass beds, salt marshes and marine and coastal ecosystems that contribute to carbon sequestration”, the report says.

Restoration is “most effective” when it is inclusive of the knowledge and rights of Indigenous peoples and when it covers large areas, according to the report.

Many of the response options offered in the report support the implementation or achievement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.

The report says:

“The capacity to contribute to multiple goals simultaneously is a common and powerful feature of nexus approaches. These response options are therefore a promising mechanism for integrating efforts and accelerating progress towards multiple policy goals and frameworks.”

However, it says, in order to achieve these goals within a nexus framework, “new types of indicators, data and processes may need to be put into place”. It adds that current, siloed methods of governance “have resulted in misaligned, duplicative and inconsistent governance and have failed to address direct and indirect drivers of change”.

§ 5. Reforming global financial systems can help close the biodiversity funding gap

The report identifies the gap in finance needed to meet the needs for biodiversity action as between $300bn and $1tn per year. 

Additionally, it says, achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals related to the nexus will require at least another $4tn in investment annually in water, food, health and climate change.

Given those large sums, the report calls for “urgent action” to “address the dominance of a narrow set of interests within economic and financial systems” and increase investment in biodiversity, food and water. It adds that these wider reforms could “amplif[y]” the additional investment made in the nexus. 

For example, regulatory reform could make investment in nature more attractive by increasing the costs of biodiversity-harming activities. This is closely linked to target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls on countries to “eliminate, phase out or reform incentives” that are harmful to biodiversity.

According to the report, there is established but incomplete evidence that the world’s current economic and financial systems are contributing to biodiversity loss and resulting in increased “nature-related risks”, which, it adds, are “mutually reinforcing with risks from climate change”.

These risks are estimated to be “in the trillions of dollars”. 

Spending “aimed at improving the status of biodiversity” is estimated at around $200bn per year. 

Currently, the world spends 35 times more resources on activities that directly damage biodiversity than it does on preserving nature. This is exacerbated by an additional $300bn spent on illegal activities that harm nature, such as illegal deforestation and wildlife trafficking.

The report identifies three pathways that could help better align global financial flows for biodiversity and the rest of the nexus:

1. Improving the availability and use of information on the “diverse values of nature”, such as by updating transparency and reporting requirements to reflect the nexus elements.
2. Improving access to finance through multiple different financial instruments, including green bonds, reformed tax policies and payments for ecosystem services.
3. Reducing negative incentives, including by improved investment safeguards and addressing harmful subsidies.

The graphic below shows the current state of funding for the nexus, with biodiversity-harming financial flows shown in red and biodiversity-positive finance in blue. The icons denote the funding that is directed to each element of the nexus: biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.

The graphic also shows how financial reforms could benefit the nexus by reducing negative finance and increasing biodiversity-supporting finance. 

Of the finance that is currently directed towards biodiversity and the other components of the nexus, there are “some existing synergies”, the report suggests. However, more than half of the funding identified in the report goes solely to addressing a single element of the nexus: 48% for biodiversity, 8% for water and 1% for climate change.

Additionally, there is a “clear bias” in the distribution of biodiversity finance, with public funds primarily concentrated in North America, Europe and China, the report says. At the same time, only 5% of global private biodiversity finance is allocated to least-developed countries.

Addressing related concerns, such as the unsustainable debt burden faced by developing countries and striving for just and equitable transitions, can help support financing the nexus as well. The report concludes:

“Collectively, these efforts could reform the relationship between the economy and nature, enhance equity and deliver sustainable development outcomes.”

§ This week

Eyes on the Arctic

SOURCE, NOT SINK: The Arctic tundra has become a net emitter of greenhouse gases, rather than a “carbon sink”, for the first time, according to the Arctic Report Card issued this week by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Alaska Beacon wrote that this shift is “result of permafrost warming, increased wildfires and other effects of climate change”.

ARCTIC ACREAGE: E&E News reported that the US Bureau of Land Management will open 400,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, despite promises to the contrary during Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. The area represents the minimum that was required to be put up for sale by Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which opened the preserve to development, Reuters said.

UK’s path to ‘clean power’

ACTION PLAN: The UK government published a 136-page “action plan” for reaching its goal for low-carbon sources to meet 100% of electricity demand and 95% of generation by 2030, BBC News reported. It includes various reforms that ministers will introduce over 2025 to boost renewables, change the planning system, increase flexibility in the electricity grid and support energy storage projects, according to the broadcaster.

RECORD RENEWABLES: The Financial Times said that the government is considering weakening the rights of communities to object to new pylons or windfarms in their neighbourhoods as part of the plans. It added that, in a bid to meet its goals, the government is “preparing a record-breaking auction of renewable subsidy contracts next year”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth run down of the plan’s key details.

§ Around the world

• BRONZE MEDAL HEAT: The UK Met Office has predicted that 2025 will likely be in the top three warmest years on record, “falling in line just behind 2024 and 2023”.
• CANADA TARGET: Canada has a new target to cut its emissions to 45-50% below 2005 levels by 2035, a less ambitious pledge than its climate advisers suggested, Climate Home News reported. A statement from Canada said the pledge will be submitted to the UN in 2025 and act as its “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.
• HIGHLY DRY: More than three-quarters of Earth’s land is “permanently drying”, according to a report released at the UN desertification summit in Riyadh. AfricaNews reported that nearly five billion people will be affected by drying by the end of the century, if current warming trends continue.
• DENGUE ON THE RISE: The Pan-American Health Organization announced that, this year, the Americas have “faced the largest dengue epidemic since records began” more than 40 years ago. It said “the situation is linked to climate events favouring mosquito proliferation”.
• ‘NO WINNERS’: “Tariff wars, trade wars and sci-tech wars” will have “no winners”, Chinese president Xi Jinping said in a recent meeting with representatives from “major international economic organisations”, according to Xinhua.
• GEOENGINEERING GUIDANCE: The EU’s scientific advisory group recommended that the bloc should move to “prohibit solar geoengineering technologies…and push for a worldwide ban”, Politico reported.

§ £57.5 million

The record amount of funding provided to farmers in England who were impacted by last winter’s severe flooding, according to figures released to Carbon Brief.

§ Latest climate research

• According to research in Science, the 2014-16 marine heatwave in the Pacific Ocean killed at least half of Alaska’s common murre, an abundant seabird species. 
• Climate-change-driven shifts in atmospheric circulation will result in increased turbulence over Europe, especially during the winter months, a study in Geophysical Research Letters found.
• A rapid attribution analysis by the World Weather Attribution service found that this year’s record-setting typhoon season that battered the Philippines was “supercharged” by climate change. Carbon Brief covered the findings.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

Ahead of Donald Trump’s second term as US president, a rerun of his first trade war with China is firmly on the cards – and minerals key to the energy transition may end up in the crossfire. Carbon Brief took an in-depth look at what US-China tensions over critical minerals could mean for the stability of their supply chains and for the transition to cleaner energy. The Venn diagram above – put together by the Chinese government and translated to English by Carbon Brief – shows where China expects there to be overlap between itself, the EU and the US when it comes to minerals and materials considered to be “critical” for energy and industry.

§ Spotlight

What concerns climate scientists

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to scientists at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC about what is on their minds as 2024 draws to a close, and what they think the biggest climate stories of 2025 might be.

Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Prof David Ho, professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and co-founder and chief science officer at [c]worthy

All I seem to think about these days is CDR – carbon dioxide removal. Normally I say that it doesn’t make sense to deploy [CDR] until we decarbonise drastically, because it is useless when we’re still emitting more than 40bn tonnes of CO2 every year…But if we don’t start now, we might not be able to scale [up] fast enough.

I’m thinking about that because it does have to go from something that most people have never heard of, to the biggest thing we’ve ever done, in a short time.

It’s really hard to know with the new administration in the US [what the biggest story will be]. 

But the overarching story, of course, is that we’re emitting more CO2 – things are getting worse, and we’re not doing anything about it. And whether that remains the biggest story or not, I don’t know, because it seems like everything that we do is small compared to the fact that we don’t do anything about the continued use of fossil fuels.

Dr Sahra Kacimi, a polar scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

There are a couple things that have been on my mind. My research is really focused on sea ice and how can we better monitor it from space, which means providing better estimates of sea ice thickness, including the snow on top of it, and then trying to use a combination of satellite observations to really better understand the state of sea ice and how it’s changing in the context of global warming. 

I’m really interested in this new satellite mission called SWOT [Surface Water and Ocean Topography]. To me, it really marks the beginning of a new era…Everyone you can talk to – people working on hydrology, oceanography, sea ice – what we’re seeing is just incredible.

Antarctic sea ice is a really hot topic, because there’s still a lot of things that we don’t know about it and about why it’s been changing so much in the past few years…Not necessarily next year, but in the next few years, the Southern Ocean and Antarctic sea ice and Antarctic climate is going to be a major, major climate story.

Dr Cynthia Rosenzweig, senior research scientist and head of the Climate Impacts Group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and winner of the 2022 World Food Prize

When AgMIP [the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project] started and we started holding these sessions at AGU on the effects of climate change on agriculture and food, they would be very small. And now you can see how this area is growing in importance and [in] the science.

The work is going beyond the “big four” crops – wheat, rice, maize and soya beans. Of course they will always be very important, but you can see a role for a much broader range of crops…I would also say [there’s a growing focus on] mitigation and adaptation together.

It’s wonderful to see all this wonderful work. But unless you coordinate it and actually then bring it to the policymakers, where does it go? And so that’s really the meaning of AgMIP. [We’re holding] the 10th global workshop in March-April. We’ll be bringing together teams of people who actually do the work, and they work together at the workshop. I really believe in putting “work” back in workshops.

Dr Erich Fischer, a climate scientist and lecturer at ETH Zürich 

We have now seen the first year with 1.5C of global temperature rise, but that’s just the first one. So most places haven’t yet seen anything close to the highest local temperature, precipitation or drought conditions possible under today’s climate – even without any further warming. I expect to see a lot more records being broken in 2025.

And then the big question is whether global temperatures will continue to rise at these rates. This has implications for all regions of the globe – including the oceans, which are warming very rapidly themselves.

§ Watch, read, listen

SURVIVAL STORY?: The Washington Post’s Post Reports podcast asked whether the Inflation Reduction Act can survive the term of incoming president Donald Trump.

WORKING THE NIGHT SHIFT: Grist examined how fisherfolk and farmworkers are adjusting to overnight shifts to escape extreme daytime temperatures.
(RE)WILD THING: A comic in Vox explained how rewilding your lawn can help boost biodiversity and contribute to mitigating climate change.

§ Coming up

• 9-16 December: Plenary session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Windhoek, Namibia
• 16-20 December: 68th meeting of the Global Environment Facility Council, Online
• 17 December: Launch of IPBES nexus assessment 
• 17 December: 168th meeting of the committee of permanent representatives of the UN Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya 
• 18 December: Launch of IPBES transformative change assessment

§ Pick of the jobs

• International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, Living Mountain Lab outreach specialist | Salary: $33,720. Location: Kathmandu, Nepal
• Sustainability Research Group at the University of Basel, funded PhD in sustainable agri-food system governance (two roles) | Salary: Unknown. Location: Basel, Switzerland
• Wired, senior writer, climate | Salary: $95,000-$127,000. Location: San Francisco, New York, London or remote

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.

§ Where the clean power 2030 target comes from

The Labour party fought the 2024 UK election campaign on a manifesto pledging to “make Britain a clean energy superpower…with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030”.

This was an advance on the previous Conservative government’s 2021 pledge to “fully decarbonise” the power system by 2035.

Both parties had identified the need for clean power in order to help decarbonise the rest of the UK economy, as heat and transport are increasingly electrified with heat pumps and electric vehicles.

However, the Labour party has explicitly tied its clean power “mission” not just to the UK’s climate goals, but to energy security and bills in the wake of the global energy crisis, as well as jobs.

In a press statement launching the report, secretary of state for energy and climate change Ed Miliband says:

“A new era of clean electricity for our country offers a positive vision of Britain’s future with energy security, lower bills, good jobs and climate action. This can only happen with big, bold change and that is why the government is embarking on the most ambitious reforms to our energy system in generations. ”

Just after taking office at the start of July 2024, Miliband reiterated his commitment to the clean power 2030 target when setting out his priorities for government.

He then appointed Chris Stark, the former chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, to head up a new “mission control” function within government, as well as informally asking NESO for independent advice on how to reach the clean power 2030 target.

(NESO was created as part of the Energy Act 2023, having already been hived off from National Grid. It was officially launched on 1 October 2024 as a new independent organisation responsible for planning the entire energy system in Britain, including operating the electricity network and offering “expert advice to the energy sector’s decision makers”.)

Speaking to UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) director Prof Rob Gross on the Talking Energy podcast, NESO chief economist Mike Thompson said the body had begun working on its advice to government in July 2024, soon after the election result became clear.

The government had then formally requested NESO’s guidance in an August 2024 letter, which asked for “practical advice on achieving clean power by 2030”.

It asked for different pathways to reach this goal, as well as key requirements for electricity grids, high-level analysis of costs and benefits, and suggested actions to get on track.

The NESO advice, published on 5 November 2024, said the 2030 target was “achievable…without increasing costs” and that it would insulate the UK from “volatile international gas prices”.

A key element of the NESO advice was to offer a working definition of clean power by 2030.

It adopted a definition with two parts. It said clean power should cover 100% of electricity demand by 2030, in a year with average weather conditions. In addition, it said at least 95% of the electricity generated within the country’s borders should come from low-carbon sources, with up to 5% coming from unabated gas. This means the country would become a net electricity exporter.

(The national electricity grid – and the clean power 2030 target – technically only covers the island of Great Britain, whereas Northern Ireland is part of the separate all-Ireland network.)

Thompson explained on the Talking Energy podcast:

“We think that there should be enough clean power to cover all of GB demand over the year…But of course, a lot of that generation is coming from wind power, from solar, and you can’t control when it is outputting…So we adopted this definition that actually you cover all of demand [with clean power], but you would also allow up to no more than 5% of generation to come from unabated gas.”

The government formally adopted the NESO definition of clean power when prime minister Keir Starmer announced his milestones for delivering a “decade of national renewal”.

This definition, for clean power to meet 100% of demand in 2030 but only 95% of generation, was widely reported as a “watering down” of Labour’s manifesto pledge. A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said this was “categorically untrue”.

Labour’s manifesto had not defined its clean power by 2030 target and had made clear reference to a “strategic reserve of gas power”.

An earlier Labour policy document had said that the country would “run on 100% clean…power”, which is consistent with the government’s target for clean power to meet 100% of demand.

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§ What clean power 2030 will look like

The government’s action plan accepts the NESO advice as its starting point.

While NESO offered two different pathways to clean power in 2030, they share many of the same features, with wind and solar making up the largest share of electricity in both cases.

In 2023, fossil fuels made up a third of electricity generation in the country, with wind and solar making up another third, and the remainder coming from nuclear, biomass and imports.

By 2030, if the clean power target is met, unabated fossil fuels would make up less than 5% of generation, with wind and solar making up around 80% of the mix, as shown in the figure below.

Offshore wind would form the backbone of the GB electricity mix in 2030, meeting around half of demand under either the NESO “new dispatch” scenario or under “further flex and renewables”.

The difference between the two NESO pathways lies in the way that they manage gaps in the output of variable wind and solar power.

The “new dispatch” pathway relies more on low-carbon “dispatchable” power, meaning capacity that can be turned on and off at will. This includes gas-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS), or turbines that burn low-carbon hydrogen fuel.

The “further flex and renewables” pathway relies on larger amounts of wind and solar capacity, coupled with a more flexible grid and higher levels of battery or long-duration energy storage.

The government’s action plan targets a range of clean power capacity by 2030 that would leave the door open to pursuing either of these scenarios, shown in the table below.

Crucially, the plan relies on keeping almost all of the country’s existing gas-fired power stations open for the rest of the decade, to help bridge those gaps in wind and solar output, until alternative low-carbon sources of flexibility become more widely available.

Thompson told the Talking Energy podcast:

“You keep something like a fleet around the size of the current gas fleet open [in 2030], but it would operate much, much less.”

While the existing gas fleet remains in place, the government will need to rapidly expand the amount of clean power capacity available to meet the 2030 target.

The action plan says the long timelines for new offshore wind projects mean there will only be time to bring forward schemes that are already or at least part-way through the planning process.

It also means that the next two “contracts for difference” (CfD) auctions, due to be held in 2025 and 2026, will need to secure the bulk of the offshore wind capacity required for 2030.

The UK currently has 15 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity, with another 16GW under construction or firmly committed. To meet the level required for clean power by 2030, the plan says that this would need to expand by at least another 12GW by 2030.

Similarly, at least an additional 8GW of onshore wind and 22GW of solar would be needed.

The Financial Times quoted a “government figure” saying that next year’s auction will need to be “huge” and the biggest ever for the country:

“When you think about the long lead times for a project like an offshore wind farm it makes sense to get going with the CfDs now and throw the book at this with a huge auction round as soon as possible, probably next year…It would be the biggest we’ve seen so far.”

In addition to building that new capacity, the plan relies on significantly enhancing the electricity transmission grid that sends power around the country, reforming the planning system so that new infrastructure can be built and ensuring the supply chains and workers are in place to deliver.

In a foreword to the action plan, Stark says the wider economic benefits of meeting the target are a “prize” worth around £40bn in investment every year until 2030.

The plan describes this as “once-in-a-generation levels of energy investment” that will “spread…the economic benefits of clean energy investment throughout the UK”. It adds:

“These investments will protect electricity consumers from volatile gas prices and be the foundation of a UK energy system that can bring down consumer bills for good. Every choice we make will be scrutinised to maximise the impact it can have in reducing consumer bills.”

The plan says that the clean power plan will “provide…the foundation to build an energy system that can bring down bills for households and businesses for good.” It adds: 

“In their advice, NESO set out their analysis of potential impacts of delivering clean power on electricity costs in 2030. This indicated it could be delivered with similar costs to today, with scope for lower electricity costs and bills by 2030 as wider changes are taken into account.”

Ahead of the general election, Labour had promised that its clean power plan would cut energy bills by up to £300. The opposition Conservatives have disputed this.

On the question of how it would be possible to reduce bills while building large amounts of new infrastructure, UKERC’s Gross explained on the Talking Energy podcast that instead of spending large amounts on imported fossil fuels that are burned to generate electricity, billpayers would be investing in new clean power capacity, which would be paid back over many years.

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§ How the government plans to reach clean power 2030

Achieving the clean power 2030 target would be a major undertaking. The government’s action plan sets out its approach to delivering this across a series of key areas.

Actions include reforming and expanding the government’s auctions for new clean power capacity, significantly expanding the country’s electricity grid and speeding up the process of connecting new projects, changing the planning system so that all this new infrastructure can be consented and built, and ensuring a supply chain with skilled workers is in place to deliver it.

Grid enhancement

The action plan outlines steps to expand and improve the electricity grid, saying that a failure to strengthen it "risks holding back our energy security, economic growth and other important infrastructure with lengthy delays”.

For example, it notes that, if no action is taken to address the annual “constraint costs” caused when networks are unable to carry all of the clean power being generated to where it is needed, then those costs are projected to increase from the “already high level” of £2bn per year in 2022 to around £8bn per year (or £80 per household) by the late 2020s.

An “unprecedented expansion” is therefore needed to deliver decarbonisation, energy security and affordability, with around twice as much new transmission infrastructure needed by 2030 as has been delivered in the past decade.

To enable this, the plan sets out several key actions, including reforming the connections process, reforming regulations, improving planning and consenting, and engaging with communities. 

In the last five years, the grid “connection queue” of projects waiting to hook up to the electricity network has grown tenfold. Many of the projects within the queue are speculative or do not necessarily have the funding or planning permissions to progress, the action plan notes. 

It says this means that fundamental reform is needed. Work has already begun on this. For example, in November the government, together with energy regulator Ofgem, outlined a series of changes in a joint letter that would fast-track renewable, clean power and storage projects. 

In a statement, Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley said the energy crisis highlighted the reason the UK needs to switch to clean power, and pointed to work already taken to tackle grid connections. He added:

“Getting to clean power by 2030 is tough but achievable; it will require unprecedented pace by government, industry and regulators. We’re already helping to speed things up and unlock the investment needed by cutting red tape, fast-tracking grid expansion and getting more clean power projects connected. We’re taking a tough line and will hold the industry to account when it comes to the sector delivering on time and on budget."

The action plan includes further reform to the current “first come, first served” process for the queue. The government says it will go beyond previous plans to simply remove slow or stalled projects from the queue and prioritise readiness alone. 

It will now also consider technological and locational factors, remove unviable projects, re-order the queue and accelerate connection timescales, the action plan states. 

In a foreword to the plan, Miliband says:

“Ultimately, we need to move fast and build things to deliver the once-in-a-generation upgrade of our energy infrastructure Britain needs.”

Following consultations with Ofgem, NESO and network companies, there are now detailed methodologies for filtering the queue and prioritising connections for strategically important plans. 

These changes will take into account recommendations from both electricity networks commissioner Nick Winser’s report in 2023 – which set out recommendations to halve the connection times of projects – and NESO’s Clean Power 2030 advice, which confirmed the need for 80 new transmission grid projects to be built, if the target is to be achieved. 

Additionally, the action plan notes that, wherever renewable projects can be connected to the lower-voltage local distribution systems, instead of the high-voltage national transmission grid – known as the motorways of the electricity network – this should be encouraged. 

(Projects that have secured a CfD or “capacity market” contract, “nationally significant” projects and others that are considered well advanced will be included in the reformed connections queue, according to the plan.)

Beyond the connections queue, the action plan sets out regulatory reforms to support clean power by 2030. This includes amending the Strategy and Policy Statement, wherein the government’s strategic priorities for energy policy are outlined, to ensure that 2030 clean power and decarbonisation more broadly are weighted in decision making. 

The government will also work with Ofgem to explore the appropriateness of tightening incentives and penalties for network operators, for the delivery of strategically important infrastructure. 

To accelerate the build out of both transmission and distribution networks required for the 2030 target, planning system changes will be required. (See: Planning reforms.)

Currently, it can take between two to four years to gain land rights in England and Wales, which can “lead to unnecessary delays”, the action plan notes.

To address these processes, the action plan says that planning consent exemptions will be expanded to include low-voltage connections and upgrades. 

There are also further opportunities to provide flexibilities on the consenting of electricity substations, it adds.

The final core part of action on the grid, outlined in the plan, focuses on community engagement, as “this government believes that it is a vital principle that communities that host clean energy infrastructure should benefit from it”. 

This will include publishing voluntary guidance to increase the amount and consistency of community benefit funds from transmissions networks. There will also be support for the launch of a public communications campaign around grid expansion, the plan says.

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Planning reforms

Since the election in July, the Labour government has taken several steps to help transition the electricity system towards net-zero.

This includes lifting the de-facto ban on onshore wind in England, which had been in place since 2015, within weeks of taking office.

Labour also approved three large solar farms in its first few weeks in government. In total, these sites – Gate Burton in Lincolnshire, Mallard Pass in Lincolnshire and Sunnica in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire – have a capacity of over 1.3GW.

Given their size, all three solar sites are considered nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs), and as such require a development consent order from the energy secretary, as opposed to planning permission from the local planning authority.

One day before the action plan was released, the government published its response to a consultation on proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

This includes plans to bring onshore wind back under the NSIP regime, in line with other types of major infrastructure. It also intends to raise the threshold above which onshore wind and solar projects will need central government NSIP consent to 100 megawatts (MW).

The government is planning to introduce legislation in the spring of 2025 to bring in these changes. 

The action plan builds on these changes in an effort to improve the planning process. 

It states that the planning system is “not working at the pace required” to meet the 2030 target and that this “urgent need for change” necessitates “a wide-ranging reform programme”.

To enable clean power by 2030, most new transmission grid and offshore wind projects will need all relevant planning permissions to be in place by 2026, the report notes.

While onshore wind, solar and battery energy storage projects have shorter construction timelines, they will still likely need to have received planning consent by 2028.

The report states that the government has identified pathways for delivery for “firm” generation – such as nuclear – as well as for sources of low-carbon flexibility, but does not give a date by which they must be consented. 

Other changes outlined in the report include equipping organisations such as the Planning Inspectorate, statutory consultees such as the Environment Agency, local planning authorities and government consenting teams, with the “tools they need” to make decisions faster.

The report highlights that, in 2023-24, more than 60% of delayed responses to planning applications from the Environment Agency were due to resourcing constraints, and for nature regulator Natural England it was more than 80%. 

It promises changes including boosting local planning capacity, expanding cost-recovery mechanisms – which see developers pay for the work needed to give them planning consent – and longer-term reforms. In particular, the changes will allow them to “better flex and prioritise their resources” so that “mission-critical projects” can be processed faster, it says.

The action plan includes updating “national policy statements” (NPSs) for energy and planning policy guidance in 2025, along with the changes to the NPPF already announced. 

A programme of legislative reform will be undertaken by the government, including through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which will be brought forward next year. This will include NPSs being updated every five years, through a “quicker and easier process”.

Further reforms to the NSIP planning system in England and Wales will be undertaken, as well as changes to infrastructure consenting in Scotland. 

(There is executive devolution in Scotland with regards to the infrastructure planning system, however under the Electricity Act, reserved to Westminster, the UK government will be able to bring in changes to deliver a “streamlined and efficient framework”, the plan says.)

The report highlights the importance of a coordinated approach to planning and notes that, to support this, NESO will deliver a “strategic spatial energy plan” in 2026, setting out a long-term approach to planning to deliver net-zero by 2050.

Under the NSIP process, the government will undertake a review of the lawfulness of challenges to development consent for major infrastructure. While judicial review is a “constitutionally important mechanism”, the action plan notes, most are unsuccessful and can take many years, significantly delaying new infrastructure and increasing costs to consumers.

As such, the plan includes a commitment to reform the judicial review process for NSIPs, following the Banner report on why such legal challenges arise. 

Additional actions announced within the plan include changes to ensure communities can directly benefit from the clean energy infrastructure they host. 

It notes that locally-consented energy infrastructure can take up to 12 months to receive a decision on a planning application, despite a four-month limit on projects that require an environmental impact assessment 

Finally, the plan says that, by delivering a “marine recovery fund” for offshore wind, as well as using development to fund nature recovery, the government will look to use the action plan to protect nature and ensure that it is embedded in the transition to clean power by 2030. 

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Renewable energy auctions

The action plan announces further changes to the CfD support scheme for new renewable energy. 

This follows action by the current government earlier in the year to bolster the sixth CfD auction, including increasing its budget by over 50% from the level set in March under the previous Conservative government to £1.56bn.

(The previous fifth auction, held in 2023, had not secured any new offshore wind.)

This year’s sixth auction contracted more than 130 new wind, solar and tidal energy projects, amounting to 9.6GW of capacity. Still, some cautioned at the time that a “big step-up” would still be required if the power sector is to be decarbonised by the end of the decade. 

The government is introducing a number of changes to the CfDs ahead of the seventh auction, due to be held in 2025. This includes allowing onshore wind farms that are “repowering” – meaning replacing old turbines as they retire with newer models – an extension to the “phasing” process for floating offshore wind and streamlining the appeals process to take place ahead of the auction. 

There is currently around 31GW of offshore wind built, under construction or contracted. However, this needs to rise to 43-50GW in 2030. (See: What clean power 2030 will look like).

The government will therefore aim to secure at least 12GW of new projects over the next two allocation rounds. To enable this, the action plan sets out further reform to the CfD process. 

Changes will include a relaxation of the CfD eligibility criteria for fixed-bottom offshore wind projects to allow projects to bid even if they have not obtained full planning consent.

To avoid a repeat of the fifth auction, there will also be changes to the information the secretary of state uses to inform the final budget for fixed-bottom offshore wind. 

There will also be a review of auction parameters, following “industry concerns” around the way the notional “budget” of each round is calculated.

(The “budget” for each auction round is an artificial construct, set by the government and designed to limit the impact of CfDs on consumer bills. Any support for CfD projects is paid for by billpayers rather than from government budgets. Moreover, a larger “budget” may not translate into higher bills, because CfD projects also push down wholesale electricity prices.)

Specifically, the government will look at the “reference price” against which each new CfD scheme is valued. Recent auction rounds have used very low reference prices, which inflate the notional budget impact of new projects, even if they are likely to lower consumer costs.

The government is also considering changes to the CfD contract terms to give longer market security, once the contracts are awarded. This could see the length of the contracts increased from the current 15-year standard term. 

Consultations will take place in early 2025, ahead of the seventh allocation round, with a view to implementing them in the summer of 2025.

Beyond the CfD reforms, the action plan includes a number of commitments to improve renewable energy project delivery. These include facilitating greater coordination between wind turbines, civil aviation and defence infrastructure. 

Further detail on Great British Energy’s (GBE) project development is included, including promises that the state-owned energy company – a core part of the Labour manifesto – will align its projects on private land with NESOs location suggestions, and develop further projects on public land. 

The action plan states that GBE will provide support to deliver the Local Power Plan, to put “local authorities and communities at the heart of restructuring our energy economy”. Additional work will be done to support the deployment of rooftop solar, assess the potential of solar “canopies” on outdoor carparks and support programmes such as the Warm Homes Local Grant. 

First introduced in 2002, the UK-wide renewables obligation (RO) scheme currently supports around 30% of the UK’s electricity supply. From 2027, it will start to come to an end, with around 9GW of capacity reaching the end of the subsidy by December 2030. 

The action plan commits the government to conduct further analysis to inform the possible policy options needed to manage the risk that RO-supported projects might stop operating.

For the work being undertaken on renewables and nuclear, the action plan includes a list of key upcoming milestones, including: 

• Spring 2025: Solar Roadmap and the Onshore Wind Industry Taskforce report.
• Early 2025: Consultation on relevant reforms to the CfD scheme.
• “In due course”: Consultation response on the Future Homes and Buildings Standards.
• After the spending review: Further details on the Warm Homes Plan.
• In 2025: A call for evidence on the potential to drive solar canopies on carparks.
• “In due course”: Consultation response on transitional support for large-scale biomass.

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Flexibility and ‘dispatchable’ clean power

Beyond renewables, the plan includes a number of actions to reform the electricity market to support energy security, through flexibility and “dispatchable” power. 

As with the other core areas, the government has taken a number of actions in its first six months to support this, including signing the contracts for the first gas CCS project in the UK. 

French utility firm EDF has also announced plans to keep four existing nuclear power stations open for longer, meaning 4.6GW of nuclear capacity will remain on the grid in 2030.

The action plan includes support for investor certainty through wholesale electricity market reforms, reforming the capacity market and accelerating reforms to the balancing markets through which supply and demand are matched in real time, which it says will help unlock consumer-led flexibility.  It notes:

“While the state must play a role as system architect, markets are, and will remain, central to the development, delivery, and operation of the power system.”

The action plan promises to set a clear “direction of travel” for wholesale market reform. As part of this, it is continuing to conduct further analysis as part of the long-running review of electricity market arrangements (REMA), which began in 2022 under the previous government. The action plan says that its work so far has made clear that “no change” is not an option.

The government says it will conclude the REMA process by “around mid-2025”, including whether to bring in “zonal pricing” or whether electricity prices will continue to be set at national level.

Currently, Britain uses a national pricing system whereby generators are paid the same regardless of where they are. Zonal pricing is a form of “locational pricing” that would see the country divided into zones, in an effort to reduce grid constraints and energy costs.

There is a "bruising debate” around locational pricing that has left the UK’s electricity industry “divided”, the Guardian reported in October.

Some argue it is the only way to secure lower electricity bills, while others say it risks “undermin[ing] investment in low-carbon energy” and raising the cost of building new capacity.

In order to limit the impact of any changes on the investment needed in new clean power capacity, the government pledges to “align” the process with the next CfD auction. It also flags the potential for “transitional or legacy arrangements” that could protect existing investments from future changes:

“We plan, therefore, to announce the final decisions on REMA and the timetable for their implementation, particularly in relation to wholesale market reform and any transitional or legacy arrangements, before the AR7 auctions open, giving investors clarity for prospective bids.”

Other actions include NESO promising an electricity system operability strategy for 2030, improved forecasting of medium to long-term grid operability needs and improved emissions reporting from NESO across all electricity markets. 

To support greater flexibility in the electricity system, the government plans to publish a “low carbon flexibility roadmap” in 2025. This will consolidate existing and future actions to drive short and long-duration flexibility. 

Currently, there is 4.5GW of battery storage in Great Britain, the majority of which is grid-scale assets. By 2030, 23-27GW of battery storage is expected to be needed to meet the demands of a clean power system.

The action plan includes specific measures to overcome “hurdles” in the rollout of battery storage, such as working with Ofgem to ease network connections. (See: Grid enhancement.)

It says it will bring in incremental market reforms to provide batteries and consumer-led flexibility with access to relevant markets. This could include, for example, households shifting demand from electric vehicle charging at home, to use abundant renewable generation late at night instead of during peak hours when the grid is strained.

To support this, the action plan suggests enhancing rewards for consumers who choose to participate in flexibility, as well as the need for changes to market access for flexibility providers and support for the rollout of smart appliances. 

Finally, work will be undertaken to enable portfolios of projects and activities to deliver consumer-led flexibility. Among other things, this builds on the rollout of the demand flexibility mechanism, whereby households are paid to reduce energy consumption during tight periods.

The action plan identifies the need for further long-duration flexibility technologies and announces support for the development of a hydrogen power business model to derisk investment and speed up the rate of deployment.

Additionally, Ofgem will introduce a “cap and floor scheme” to support investment in long-duration electricity storage. It says it is aiming to publish an open letter on specific aspects of the scheme soon, and in the first quarter of next year, DESNZ and Ofgem will publish the technical decisions undertaken to provide clarity on any outstanding areas of its design. 

NESO has agreed to provide further advice as to the range of technologies needed. The scheme is expected to open to applications in the second quarter of next year.

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§ Key developments

Tariffs and trade restrictions

US BAN: China has placed an export ban on shipments to the US of gallium, germanium and antimony, plus further restricted exports of certain types of graphite to the country, in a “rapid retaliation by Beijing against new export controls from Washington”, the Financial Times said. It added that “the immediate impact of the measures was unclear, given that the US had been diversifying its supply chains”. Analysis by Carbon Brief found that previous country-agnostic export controls on the minerals, all of which are used in low-carbon technologies, had a limited impact on supply chains, with Chinese exports either resuming after a short dip or remaining stable. Analysis by consultancy Trivium China stated that one of China’s motives with the ban could be to “warn the incoming Trump administration” against “ramping up economic and trade pressure”.

SOLAR TARIFFS: Meanwhile, the US has also imposed a “new round of tariffs on solar panel imports” from Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, following accusations by a US industry lobby of Chinese-owned factories in the four nations “dumping products into the [global] market”, Reuters reported. In response, China’s commerce ministry expressed its “concern over the US’ intention to politicise and weaponise trade investigations”, the state-run newspaper China Daily said. It cited a commerce ministry spokesperson saying that Chinese solar companies in southeast Asia have made “positive contributions to the local economic and social development”. Another Reuters article noted that Malaysia has “urged” Chinese companies not to use it “as a base to rebadge products to avoid US tariffs”.

CHINA ‘HAWK’: On 6 December, president-elect Donald Trump nominated China “hawk” senator David Perdue for US ambassador to China, BBC News reported. Perdue wrote in the Washington Examiner in September 2024: “China continues to laugh at US attempts to partner with it on climate change…We should withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, as it commits the US to fund it primarily while giving China a free pass.”

CONTENT REQUIREMENTS: Meanwhile, according to Nikkei Asia, the EU is “adding restrictions to its [European Hydrogen Bank] subsidy program for ‘green’ hydrogen production that effectively lock out Chinese-made equipment” by stating that projects “will not be eligible if electrolyser stacks…sourced from China account for more than 25% of output capacity”. The Financial Times reported that the EU’s new €4.6bn tender for “technologies for decarbonisation” will only be accessible to Chinese companies that “agree to transfer intellectual property rights to the EU”, according to Teresa Ribera, the EU’s new executive vice president for a “clean, just and competitive transition”.

Carbon concentrations reporting

CLIMBING CO2: The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere above China’s land area rose in 2023, reaching approximately 421 parts per million (ppm), according to the country’s newly released greenhouse gas bulletin for 2023, reported the Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily. This rise of 2.3ppm was “slightly lower” than the average annual growth in concentrations of 2.4ppm over the past decade, the newspaper added. The 21st Century Herald, a business newspaper, also covered the bulletin’s launch, noting that the average concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide in 2023 rose year-on-year at a rate “lower than the global [average]”.

EXPERT WARNING: Separately, a new report found that, “while the civil sector has achieved significant synergistic emission reductions of CO2 and air pollutants”, the power and heating sectors are seeing “dual-growth” of carbon emissions and air pollution, while the emissions reductions of industry and transport “need to be further unleashed”, finance newspaper the Economic Daily reported. The study, released by the China Clean Air Policy Partnership – a consortium of leading universities, government-linked research institutes, industry associations and other stakeholders – assesses the “challenges China faces on the road to carbon neutrality and clean air synergy and proposes solutions”, current affairs news outlet China News said. It quoted professor He Kebin, dean of the Tsinghua University Institute for Carbon Neutrality, saying at the launch event that the upcoming shift from “dual-control of energy” to “dual-control of carbon” marks a “critical period” in China’s “green transformation”.

WEATHER IMPACT: Meanwhile, China “reported its warmest autumn this year since records began”, with average temperatures standing at “1.5C higher than the average year”, Agence-France Presse said. Scientists in China are searching for ways to develop climate-resilient potatoes – given the plants are “particularly vulnerable to heat” – in order to “protect [the country’s] food supplies”, Reuters reported. Also, “continued rains followed by extreme high temperatures” have severely damaged China’s kiwi harvest, according to Bloomberg.

Grid reform efforts continue

UNIFIED GRID: The China Electricity Council (CEC) launched a “blue book” – the term used for research reports or policy proposals issued by government departments or government-affiliated organisations – outlining a “strategic roadmap for future development” of a national unified power market, industry news outlet International Energy Net reported. It quoted a deputy director of the National Energy Administration (NEA) saying a unified power market is crucial for “deepening power sector reforms” and promoting the energy transition. Energy news outlet BJX News also covered the document’s release, which outlined a timetable for the plan: namely, that “preliminary construction [of a unified market] will be completed in 2025, full construction will be completed in 2029, and improvements and upgrading will be completed in 2035”. It added that key elements of the plan include “convergence” of provincial mechanisms, “participation” of large-scale renewable energy bases and “market adaptation” to the energy transition. 

GREEN GRID: Separately, the CEC also reported that China’s electrification rate – the share of energy demand met by electricity – was “expected to reach 34% by 2030”, financial news outlet Yicai reported. Separately, China will “set another record” for solar capacity growth this year, with new installations expected to climb from last year’s 217 gigawatts (GW) to reach 230-260GW in 2024, according to an announcement by the China Photovoltaic Industry Association covered by Bloomberg. In addition, China’s installed wind capacity has exceeded 500 gigawatts (GW) and now accounts for 50% of the global total, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

STABLE GRID: The NEA released guiding opinions that aim to “clarify the scope of new businesses” in the energy sector and “facilitate [their] connection to the grid and operation”, following the rapid expansion of China’s renewable energy sector, an NEA official told International Energy Net. Finance newspaper Securities Times quoted Lin Boqiang, dean of the China Energy Policy Research Institute at Xiamen University, saying the new rules “aim to lessen pressure on the grid and ensure safe and stable operation of the power system”.

‘Green growth’ at the fore of key economic meeting

XI’S ‘KEY TASKS’: President Xi Jinping told policymakers that “synergistically promoting carbon reduction, pollution reduction and green growth” was one of nine “key tasks” for 2025 at the central economic work conference (CEWC), an annual high-level economic policy meeting that ended on 12 December, Xinhua reported. The state news agency added that Xi’s speech underscored the need to “step up the overall green transformation of economic and social development” and “deepen reform of the ecological civilisation system”, in part by creating a “healthy ecosystem” for low-carbon industries and “cultivating new growth points, such as green buildings”. It said the speech also mentioned that China will “establish a number of zero-carbon parks, promote the construction of a national carbon market, and establish a product carbon footprint management system and a carbon labelling certification system”. These themes had been raised in a meeting of the Politburo, the decision-making body of the Chinese communist party, a few days prior, according to China Daily. 

GROWING PAINS: The CEWC meeting included “pledges to take a more proactive approach” in stimulating economic growth, “but gave no details on new stimulus measures”, the Associated Press reported, adding that China would “raise its fiscal deficit”, “stabilise the property market” and “boost consumer spending”. The International Energy Agency “lifted next year’s oil-demand estimates” in response to the anticipated “impact of China’s stimulus measures”, although it added “the pace of growth is expected to remain subdued”, the Wall Street Journal said. Reuters reported that “Chinese leaders signalled…they are ready to deploy whatever stimulus is needed to counter the impact of expected US trade tariffs on next year’s economic growth”, adding that the exact size of the stimulus will “depend on” the Trump administration’s tariffs and other policy measures against China.

HIGH-QUALITY GROWTH: China is “planning a fresh set of policies to propel growth in the equipment manufacturing sector, focusing on nurturing new growth engines such as new energy vehicles”, China Daily said, in tandem with calls from the CEWC and Politburo meetings to “nurture technological innovation”. A China Daily editorial argued that “Chinese policymakers are exercising tremendous prudence” to minimise risks and uncertainties while pursuing “new quality productive forces and innovation”.

§ Spotlight

How China’s renewables rollout boosts its ‘war on sand’

At the ongoing COP16 UN summit on desertification in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Carbon Brief hears from experts on the links between China’s rapidly expanding desert solar farms and Beijing’s decades-long efforts to keep sand in check.

China’s effort to build large solar power “bases” in and around the desert is a major part of its current renewable plan.

The initiative, which has expanded rapidly in the country’s arid north and northwest, is also part of its campaign to combat desertification, an issue increasingly exacerbated by climate change. 

For more than four decades, Beijing has been trying to prevent sand from degrading its land with an afforestation programme called the “Three-North Shelterbelt” (三北防护林).

Over the past two years, the programme – described as China’s “war on sand” by the media – has been boosted by the development of large-scale solar bases in far-flung regions, such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

Installing solar panels in the desert can not only generate power, but also help prevent sand dunes from moving, according to Dr He Jijiang, executive deputy director of the Research Center for Energy Transition and Social Development at Tsinghua University, Beijing. 

Energy companies’ investments also provide financial support to many regions’ sand-control campaigns – an apparent obstacle in the past – Dr He told Carbon Brief at a side event in the China pavilion at the ongoing COP16 talks.

Taming of the sand

China is one of the worst-hit countries by desertification, which essentially means land degradation in dry lands.

Nearly 18% of China’s landmass – roughly seven times the size of the UK – is affected by the issue, according to statistics reported by Guan Zhi’ou, director of China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration and the head of the Chinese delegation to COP16, in November. 

China’s effort to combat desertification has a strong link with its – and the world’s – climate actions.

Soil is the second largest natural carbon sink on Earth after oceans and stores a large amount of carbon. When land degrades, not only does it lose the ability to store as much carbon, it can also release carbon into the atmosphere, driving further climate change.

On the other hand, climate change accelerates land degradation and China is on the front line. The country has seen the largest total area shift from non-dryland into drylands over the past three decades, according to a major scientific report published by the UNCCD at COP16.

Since the introduction of the Three-North Shelterbelt programme in 1978, China has adopted a series of measures to fight desertification, from planting sand-blocking vegetation to laying straw on the ground in the shape of checkerboards to prevent its vast deserts from expanding.

Solar solution

China’s plan for renewable energy from 2021 to 2025 calls for the “large-scale development” of its sand-plus-solar anti-desertification method. 

The concept centres around managing arid areas via building and maintaining solar farms. It stems from years of experience accumulated by Chinese solar developers, which have built solar farms in the desert for more than a decade – with varying degrees of success.

“Building solar farms needs a lot of space. China has vast deserts, so [companies] wanted to take advantage of it,” Dr He explained.

But to operate solar farms in such harsh conditions, these companies must first take various protective measures – and these measures helped combat desertification, too.

For example, companies need to put up fences around their solar farms to stop animals from entering, install anti-dust nets to prevent sand from gathering on equipment and make straw checkerboards around their bases to prevent nearby sand dunes from shifting, Dr He said. 

Solar panels also bring benefits to the ground underneath. For example, they can reduce water evaporation by blocking out direct sunshine, according to Dr Chen Siyu, a professor at the college of atmospheric sciences at Lanzhou University in Lanzhou, a city situated on the edge of the Gobi desert in China. 

Solar panels can “significantly increase” the soil moisture of dry regions and, therefore, help plants to grow, Dr Chen told Carbon Brief. A 2021 study conducted in northwest China projected that the soil moisture would increase by up to 113.6% when it is sheltered. 

“Solar panels can also form a natural barrier, helping to shed wind speed and prevent dust storms from occurring and spreading,” she said. 

Ramping up transition

The construction of solar farms also injects financial support to many regions’ sand-control campaigns, providing incentives for them to carry on, Dr He noted. 

“In the past, planting trees only brought ecological benefits, not economic returns,” he said. “Now, if a company wants to build a solar power station, it needs to cover all related costs, from hiring equipment to growing plants.”

Ramping up the solar-plus-sand method can scale up China’s renewable deployment, as well as improving soil conditions by bringing greenery, vegetable plots and livestock to the desert and barren land. Because of this, dryland has become “a type of resource”, Dr He said. 

This Spotlight is by freelance climate journalist Xiaoying You for Carbon Brief. A full-length version of the article is available on the Carbon Brief website.

§ Watch, read, listen

LOW-BALLING: Chinese climate envoy Liu Zhenmin, in a lengthy interview with China Newsweek, reflected on the “disappoint[ing]” $300bn finance goal and pushed back against questions of China “playing a stronger leadership role” in climate negotiations.

LOOKING AHEAD: The Asia Society Policy Institute wrote that, against the backdrop of an economic slowdown, China’s international climate pledge next year, coal trajectory and renewables buildout are “key things to watch” in a forecast for 2025.

PUTIN’S PIPELINE: State news agency Xinhua visited a hub of the recently completed China-Russia east-route gas pipeline to explore how it supplies Shanghai and other eastern provinces.  

TRUMP EFFECT: A podcast by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies discussed how the next Trump administration’s China policy could affect China’s own energy activities and climate action.

§ 17%

The share of China’s greenhouse gas emissions produced by the steel industry, according to Reuters. The newswire added that China has published draft rules for comment on greenhouse gas emissions reporting for steel-makers, in preparation for the industry’s entry into the national emissions trading scheme.

§ New science

Large ensemble simulations indicate increases in spatial compounding of droughts and hot extremes across multiple croplands in China

Global and Planetary Change

Compound drought and hot extremes (CDHEs) will increase across many regions of China over the coming century, especially in the eastern and central Songnen Plain and northern Sichuan Basin, a new study found. The authors evaluated changes in CDHEs across multiple croplands in China between 1961-2010 and 2031-80, using a large ensemble model, rainfall data and temperature data. “These results underscore the high risk of the spatial compounding of extremes at multiple croplands in China in the future,” the study said.

Impact of computing infrastructure on carbon emissions in China

Scientific Reports

A new paper found an upside-down “U” shaped relationship between carbon emission intensity – the emissions per unit of economic output – and computing infrastructure in Chinese cities, with emissions intensity initially increasing with a rise in computing infrastructure, before plateauing and then decreasing. The authors used data from 279 prefecture-level cities collected between 2008 to 2021. The findings are “particularly pronounced in central regions, hub cities and moderately digitally developed cities”, they said.

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

§ ‘Unprecedented’ typhoon season

On 22 October 2024, severe Tropical Storm Trami made landfall on the Filipino island of Luzon – the country’s largest and populous island. The storm rapidly dumped one month’s worth of rain over parts of the island, with floods sweeping the country.

However, the residents were given little time to recover. Just days after Storm Trami subsided, the Philippines was hit by Super Typhoon Kong-Rey. More than nine million people were affected by the two storms and almost 300,000 displaced.

As the weeks progressed, the Philippines was hit by Typhoon Yinxing, Typhoon Toraji and Typhoon Usagi. Finally, Tropical Storm Man-Yi made landfall on 16 November, marking the end of the record-breaking month. 

Afrhill Rances works at the Asia-Pacific regional office of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and is an author on the WWA study. She told a press briefing that, even for a disaster-prone country, the rapid “clustering” of typhoons in 2024 was “unprecedented”.

Dr Claire Barnes – a research associate at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and an author on the study – added that in the Philippines, “in November we would expect to see only three named storms in the entire basin at any point, with only one of those reaching super typhoon status”. A super typhoon is defined as any typhoon with winds above 58 metres per second (130 miles per hour).

The back-to-back storms formed so rapidly that November saw four named storms forming in the Pacific basin simultaneously. Japan’s meteorological agency said this was the first time in seven years – and the first November in recorded history – where four named storms have formed in the Pacific at the same time.

§ Typhoon intensity

Typhoons are complex events, which can be intensified by climate change in many different ways, including their rainfall intensity, storm surge height and wind speed.

The authors of this study focus on a metric called “potential intensity”, which looks at temperature, humidity levels and sea level pressure over the Philippine Sea where the typhoons formed.

Ben Clarke, a study author from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, told the press briefing that potential intensity indicates the “theoretical maximum intensity for a tropical cyclone”. He explains that the metric is “based on the conditions in the atmosphere and the ocean which are crucial for cyclone development”.

The map below shows the average potential intensity of the Philippine Sea between September and November 2024, where red indicates high potential intensity and blue indicates low potential intensity.

The dotted lines show the tracks of different storms. The black square indicates the study area. Potential intensity is calculated as the potential wind speed of the typhoon in metres per second.

To put this year’s record-breaking typhoon season into its historical context, the authors analysed a time series of average potential intensity in the Philippine Sea, using an observational reanalysis dataset stretching back to the year 1940.

The study says:

“Our best estimate is that the observed potential intensity has become about 7 times more likely and the maximum intensity of a potential typhoon has increased by about 4 metres per second.”

The authors also carried out attribution analysis to assess whether the increase in potential intensity can be linked to human-caused climate change.

Attribution is a fast-growing field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme-weather events, such as heatwaves and droughts. To conduct attribution studies, scientists use models to compare the world as it is today to a “counterfactual” world without human-caused climate change.

The authors find that the potential intensity in the Philippine Sea in 2024 was 1.7 times higher than it would have been in a world without climate change. They add that the maximum potential intensity of a typhoon has increased by about 2 metres per second due to climate change.

(These findings are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the methods used in the analysis have been published in previous attribution studies.)

§ Landfall

Climate change is exacerbating the conditions needed for tropical cyclones to form. However, tropical cyclones are still fairly infrequent and there is a “short period of reliable observations” of tropical cyclones that make landfall, according to the study.

This can make it challenging for scientists to assess the impact of climate change on the frequency of tropical cyclones using traditional methods.

To address this problem, researchers from Imperial College London developed a “synthetic tropical cyclone dataset” called IRIS earlier this year. This dataset uses observations from 42 years of observed tropical cyclones to create a “10,000-year synthetic dataset of wind speed”.

The database includes millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks. Each track maps the wind speed of the tropical cyclone from its formation to its landfall, to describe how its power changes throughout its lifetime.

The team has already used this method to attribute the extreme winds of Typhoon Geami and Hurricane Beryl, which hit China and Jamaica, respectively, earlier this year. 

Of the six major storms that affected the Philippines in the month-long period, three made landfall as “major typhoons”, according to the WWA. The authors define a major typhoon as a category three or above, indicating sustained wind speeds above 50 metres per second.

Using the IRIS dataset, the authors assessed how likely it is for three typhoons to make landfall in the Philippines in a single year under different warming levels. They find that in today’s climate – which has already warmed by 1.3C as a result of climate change – the Philippines could expect three major typhoons to make landfall in a single month roughly once every 15 years. This is 25% more frequent than in a world without climate change.

They add that if the planet warms to 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, “we expect at least three major typhoons hitting in a single year every 12 years”.

§ ‘Supermarket of disasters’

The Philippines is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to extreme weather events and natural disasters, and is already facing deadly impacts from climate change.

The country’s location in the Pacific ocean makes it highly vulnerable to typhoons, volcanoes and earthquakes. The WWA study adds that the country “is experiencing sea level rise more than three times faster than the global average”. And the Philippines is facing deadly heatwaves, which have been made more intense as a result of climate change. 

Rances told the press briefing:

“In the Red Cross we call the Philippines a ‘supermarket of disasters’, because you name it – we have it.”

The Philippines is struck by more typhoons every year than almost any other country in the world. It has “gradually shifted its approach from reactive to proactive risk management with a significant focus on preparedness and resilience building”, according to the World Bank.

For example, warning and pre-emptive evacuation orders were sent out ahead of many of the typhoons this year. Schools, ports and airports were closed in many regions. And disaster response teams were mobilised. 

However, the unrelenting barrage of typhoons this year overwhelmed many of the country’s disaster preparedness systems, exhausting supplies and overstretching emergency responders. It also left communities with little time between storms to recover and prepare.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that, at the end of November 2024, more than 200,000 individuals were displaced across six regions, hundreds of fatalities and injuries had been reported and more than 250,000 homes had been damaged. The damage to livestock, agriculture and infrastructure was estimated to be around $47m at the end of November.

The Filipino government spent more than $17m on food and other aid for the hundreds of thousands of storm victims. It has also sought help from neighbouring countries, the US and the United Nations. 

The consecutive typhoons “highlight the challenges of adapting to back-to-back extreme weather events”, the study says. It adds:

“With 13 million people impacted and some areas hit at least three times, repeated storms have created a constant state of insecurity, worsening the region’s vulnerability and exposure.”

The authors warn that “major investment is needed to help the Philippines adapt to extreme weather”.

§ Taming of the sand

China is one of the worst-hit countries by desertification, which essentially means land degradation in dry lands. When land degrades, it becomes less healthy and productive.

Nearly 18% of China’s landmass – roughly seven times the size of the UK – is affected by the issue, according to statistics reported by Guan Zhi’ou, director of China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration and the head of the Chinese delegation to COP16, in November. 

China’s effort to combat desertification has a strong link with its – and the world’s – climate actions.

Soil is the second largest natural carbon sink on Earth after oceans and stores a large amount of carbon. When land degrades, not only does it lose the ability to store as much carbon, it can also release carbon into the atmosphere, driving further climate change.

On the other hand, climate change accelerates land degradation and China is on the front line. The country has seen the largest total area shift from non-dryland into drylands over the past three decades, according to a major scientific report published by the UNCCD at COP16. This means more parts of China are now prone to land degradation.

Since the introduction of the Three-North Shelterbelt programme in 1978, China has adopted a series of measures to fight desertification, from planting sand-blocking vegetation to laying straw on the ground in the shape of checkerboards to prevent its vast deserts from expanding. These solutions have enabled the country to protect about 360,000km2 of desertified land and to rehabilitate 79,000km2 of it, Guan said.

The ancient Chinese people built the Great Wall and Beijing now intends to build a “Green Great Wall”. According to the plan, the Three-North programme will see a total of 350,000km2 of trees planted in northern regions over the space of 73 years – until 2050 – to block out dust storms, stabilise the soil and improve land fertility. 

Research by the Chinese Academy of Sciences showed that emissions averaging 213m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent were absorbed by forest, land and the environment every year between 1980 and 2015, due to the Three-North Shelterbelt programme, according to a release published by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.

§ Solar solution

China’s plan for renewable energy from 2021 to 2025 calls for the “large-scale development” of its sand-plus-solar anti-desertification method, a concept Beijing started promoting around two years ago. 

The concept centres around managing arid areas via building and maintaining solar farms. It stems from years of experience accumulated by Chinese solar developers, which have built solar farms in the desert for more than a decade – with varying degrees of success.

“Building solar farms needs a lot of space. China has vast deserts, so [companies] wanted to take advantage of it,” Dr He explains.

But to operate solar farms in such harsh conditions, these companies must first take various protective measures – and these measures helped combat desertification, too.

For example, companies need to put up fences around their solar farms to stop animals from entering, install anti-dust nets to prevent sand from gathering on equipment and make straw checkerboards around their bases to prevent nearby sand dunes from shifting, Dr He says. 

Solar panels also bring benefits to the ground underneath. For example, they can reduce water evaporation by blocking out direct sunshine, according to Dr Chen Siyu, a professor at the college of atmospheric sciences at Lanzhou University in Lanzhou, a city situated on the edge of the Gobi desert in China. 

Solar panels can “significantly increase” the soil moisture of dry regions and, therefore, help plants to grow, Dr Chen tells Carbon Brief. A 2021 study conducted in northwest China projected that the soil moisture would increase by up to 113.6% when it is sheltered. 

“Solar panels can also form a natural barrier, helping to shed wind speed and prevent dust storms from occurring and spreading,” she says. 

§ Ramping up transition

The construction of solar farms also injects financial support to many regions’ sand-control campaigns, providing incentives for them to carry on, Dr He notes. 

“In the past, planting trees only brought ecological benefits, not economic returns,” he says. “Now, if a company wants to build a solar power station, it needs to cover all related costs, from hiring equipment to growing plants.”

Ramping up the solar-plus-sand method can scale up China’s renewable deployment, as well as improving soil conditions by bringing greenery, vegetable plots and livestock to the desert and barren land. Because of this, dryland has become “a type of resource”, Dr He says. 

The Chinese government has been pushing the concept as a way to upscale the development of desert-based solar.

But there are concerns over whether the country’s grid is ready to transport such a large amount of solar power from remote areas to big cities on the eastern coast thousands of kilometres away. 

Dr He recognises the challenge. “We don’t have enough long-distance transmission lines, but we are building many,” he says. 

A shorter version of this article appeared in Carbon Brief’s China Briefing newsletter on 12 December 2024.