During a virtual closed meeting of 17 heads of state and government, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and UN secretary general António Guterres “called for countries to speed up the presentation of their new climate targets”, Folha de São Paulo reports. Most countries that signed the Paris Agreement have failed to meet the deadline to submit their updated climate commitments, also known as nationally determined contributions (as noted by Carbon Brief analysis), the outlet says. Brazil – which will host COP30 in November – is working to ensure that countries release their NDCs in time for the summit, the outlet adds. Sources tell Reuters that, at the meeting, Brazil inferred that it has a “main goal of persuading Europe, China and other developing economies to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep global warming well below 2C”. The two-hour meeting was attended by Chinese president Xi Jinping, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron and leaders of small islands directly affected by climate change, the newswire continues. Bloomberg notes that the meeting took place “without the US”. According to Agence France Press, Guterres said at the meeting that “no group or government” could stop the transition to low-carbon energy. Elsewhere, E&E News reports that Brazil plans to launch South America’s first nationwide carbon market. It continues: “South America’s largest nation will start requiring major emitters in 2026 to submit monitoring plans and report their greenhouse gas emissions to a national oversight body, making it the first in the continent to begin developing a carbon market. The market will limit the biggest polluters’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2029 at the latest.”

In other Latin American news, drought has intensified in 64% of Mexico’s territory, Excélsior reports. The newspaper cites the country’s national water commission, which highlights that drought has “drastically” increased since last month, when 58% of the territory was affected by drought. It adds that this year Mexico registered 44% more wildfires than the previous year. In a comment piece for the outlet, two experts write that, against the backdrop of rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns in the country, it is “urgent to strengthen the legal framework to protect water and the ecosystems that sustain it”, since more than 70% of its surface water is of “bad” or “medium-quality”.

Elsewhere, Dialogue Earth reports on how a “huge expansion of distributed energy” is “transforming consumers into producers of clean energy” in Latin America and the Caribbean. Distributed energy – producing electricity close to where it is used, rather than via large, centralised power plants – “went from one gigawatt (GW) of installed capacity in 2017 to 31.8GW by 2023” in the region, the outlet says. It adds that “virtually all of these installations use solar panels”. 

Finally, La Nación covers the announcement of a carbon offset programme that will improve 3m hectares of grasslands in Argentina’s Patagonia. The programme aims to expand regenerative agriculture to recover soils and halt desertification, the outlet says. It adds that the project would be the first-of-its-kind carbon offset programme in South America to hold a Verra certification. (Read more about Verra in Carbon Brief’s analysis of how some of the world’s largest companies rely on carbon offsets to help meet their climate goals.)

Chinese president Xi Jinping has said his country’s actions to address climate change will not slow down despite global political developments, reports Reuters, citing “the official Xinhua news agency”. Xi “made the remarks in a speech to a video summit initiated by the UN and Brazil to discuss climate change”, the newswire says. It quotes Xi as saying: “Although some major countries are keen on unilateralism and protectionism, which have led to severe impacts on international rules and international order, history will always advance in twists and turns…The more turbulent and chaotic the international situation is, the more solidly must we uphold the international system with the UN at its heart.” State news agency Xinhua says Xi’s speech emphasised on four aspects – “adher[ing] to multilateralism”, “deepening international cooperation”, “promoting a just transition” and “strengthen[ing] practical actions”. The Guardian also covers Xi’s remarks at the Brazil summit, noting he “appeared to criticise the ‘protectionism’ of Donald Trump’s tariff policies”. Reuters carries another article under the headline: “China’s President Xi says tariffs and trade wars hurt world economic order.” 

Meanwhile, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) repeated timelines for the national emission trading system’s (ETS) at its press conference yesterday, reports China News. (Read Carbon Brief’s China Briefing on 17 April.) The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports that China’s energy storage sector will be facing a “challenging outlook” in 2025 due to the escalating US-China trade war and weaker government support. The news outlet adds that the industry is also facing “cutthroat” price competition after “years of overproduction”. Nikkei Asia publishes an article under the headline: “How China’s rare-Earth curbs complicate west’s diversification push.”

In other news, state-run newspaper China Daily reports that Guangxi province in south-western China is taking measures to “tackle a lingering drought that has severely affected rural communities”. It adds that rainfall in the region since last November has dropped to its lowest level since 1961. Xinhua’s report on Earth Day says: “China has been decarbonising its power system by not only increasing consumption of renewable sources, but also by painstakingly tackling emissions caused by coal power.” Another Xinhua article says that China is now investing in next-generation “experimental technologies” to speed up its transition to a “zero-carbon future”.

The UK is hosting a high-level energy security summit over the next two days and has “kicked off” the meeting by pledging to invest £300m in the domestic supply chain for onshore wind projects, Reuters reports. The newswire says that prime minister Keir Starmer, von der Leyen, ministers and energy industry leaders will meet at the summit jointly organised by the UK government and International Energy Agency. The Press Association has more details on the UK’s wind energy pledge, saying: “Funding through publicly owned company Great British Energy, brought forward as an initial investment ahead of the spending review, will be invested in a domestic supply chain for components such as floating platforms and cables for the offshore wind industry.” Bloomberg adds that the investment is part of an £8.3bn package promised by the Labour Party during the recent election. The Guardian reports that the finance is part of a bid to “woo global green investors, including those scared away from the US by the actions of Donald Trump”. It adds: “Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has written to dozens of global investors citing the UK’s industrial strategy and commitment to moving to low-carbon electricity by 2030.” The Financial Times reports that, at the summit today, the UK government and Italian energy company Eni is expected to announce the “final go-ahead” for a 38-mile pipeline to gather carbon dioxide from industrial plants around Liverpool and Manchester and bury it offshore.

Meanwhile, the Guardian’s politics live blog notes that Reform UK leader Nigel Farage appeared on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme yesterday, where he “made a series of untrue claims which came close to denying climate science”. Farage doubted that humans are responsible for climate change, said China should tackle its emissions before the UK and falsely claimed the country could be self-sufficient on gas, it says. The blog cites Carbon Brief analysis from 2021 showing that the UK is “the eighth largest country in terms of cumulative emissions”. [Subsequent Carbon Brief analysis shows that the UK rises to fourth when accounting for colonial emissions.] The blog continues: “Official projections by the North Sea Transition Authority show a steep decline in North Sea production, regardless of government policy and intervention, thanks to the ageing nature of the basin.” On the ITV current affairs show Peston, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch was presented with Carbon Brief charts illustrating how gas prices are driving up electricity bills rather than net-zero policies, following her attack on the legal target.

Elsewhere, in a frontpage story, the Daily Telegraph reports that Miliband “has been weighing up whether to push ahead with zonal pricing, which would split the country’s single national power market into different regions”. It reports the news with the misleading headline: “Miliband poised to charge homes in south more for electricity.” The Guardian notes that, according to industry sources, a decision on zonal pricing has not yet been made. The Daily Telegraph also reports that the government has relaxed the planning rules for railways and wind farms, meaning communities will no longer need to be consulted before applications for new infrastructure. In addition, it continues its run of comment pieces attacking Miliband with a column titled: “Could Miliband get any worse?” 

Finally, BBC News reports that the Scottish government is dropping a key climate target to cut car use in Scotland by 20% by the end of the decade. The Times reports that a UK enhanced rock weathering company has won a share of Elon Musk’s X Prize. The Press Association says a UK green-focused bank has made its first annual profit amid “a wave of consumers buying heat pumps and solar panels and switching to electric cars”. And the i newspaper reports that heat pumps could be sold “smart ready” to save households money.

Several publications cover a new study in the journal Nature (see below) finding that the world’s biggest corporations have caused $28tn in climate damage. The Associated Press says the study “came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co, Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation”. It adds: “Shell declined to comment. Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP did not respond to requests for comment.” The New York Times says the findings “could bolster climate laws to make polluters pay”. The Washington Post expands on this, saying: “Oil and gas companies are facing hundreds of lawsuits around the world testing whether they can be held responsible for their role in causing climate change. Now, two scientists say they’ve built a tool that can calculate how much damage each company’s planet-warming pollution has caused – and how much money they could be forced to pay if they’re successfully sued.”

In the Guardian, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, co-founders of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now, write that there should be more recognition of large-scale public support for taking action on climate change. They say: “A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies – want their governments to take stronger climate action…We believe the current mismatch between public will and government action amounts to a deficit in democracy.” A separate Guardian piece examines why the figure is not higher than 89%. 

Elsewhere, a New York Times newsletter from climate writer David Wallace-Wells also notes that the majority of public citizens support climate change, but catalogues how action from politicians and financers has waned in the last few years. He says: “Climate optimists look at all that and say, whatever the politics, economics has made the energy transition unstoppable. In the long run, over generations, that still seems like a safe bet to me. But it’s in the short run, just decades, that the pathways to what we once identified as relatively livable futures will be made or broken. And there I find myself wondering: How unstoppable is the transition, really?”

Greenhouse gas emissions linked to oil and gas company Chevron “very likely” caused between $791bn and $3.6tn in heat-related economic losses over 1991-2020, according to a new study. The researchers outline an attribution framework which estimates the harms caused by specific companies, using emissions data, attribution methods and other information. The authors find: “The global economy would be $28tn richer…were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors considered here”. They conclude that quantitatively linking emitters to specific harms is “now feasible, making science no longer an obstacle to the justiciability of climate liability claims”.