A new study warns that drought and heat driven by climate change and other factors threaten to cause the collapse of the Amazon’s lush rainforest system, reports Reuters. The researchers find that “the region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system”. The study – which is also covered by Carbon Brief – estimates that 10% to 47% of the Amazon will face these combined stressors by 2050, the newswire explains, putting the forest at risk of crossing a “tipping point”. The article quotes lead author Dr Bernardo Flores from the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, who said: “Once we cross this tipping point, maybe we cannot do anything anymore. The forest will die by itself.” Flores added that it is time to declare a “red alert” for the Amazon, Reuters notes. The study is the “most comprehensive to date in its analysis of the compounding impacts of local human activity and the global climate crisis, warned that the forest had already passed a safe boundary and urged remedial action to restore degraded areas and improve the resilience of the ecosystem”, the Guardian says. The research overlapped data on forest cover, temperature and rainfall patterns, and then factored in other variables that could make sections of the Amazon more or less fragile, reports the New York Times. Previous studies have assessed the individual effects of climate change and deforestation on the rainforest, but this is the “first major research to focus on the cumulative effects of a range of threats”, the article notes. If a tipping point was reached, it would be “calamitous for the rich array of animals, plants and the 2.2 million indigenous people who live in the Amazon”, reports the Times. Additionally, it would remove a significant “brake on climate change”, as the rainforest’s estimated nearly 400bn individual trees absorb carbon, the article adds. The story was also covered by New Scientist, the Daily Mail and others.

The world could miss its climate targets due to surging demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Asia, reports the Daily Telegraph, in a article trailed on its frontpage. Demand for LNG is likely to continue to grow until at least 2040, according to Shell’s LNG Outlook for 2024, it continues. “This increase is incompatible with the decline in emissions needed to keep global temperature rises below the 2C target agreed in UN climate accords”, notes the article. Shell has predicted LNG demand will rise by 50% by 2040, before peaking in that decade, due to big Asian economies offsetting declines in the US and Europe, reports the Times. The oil major is predicting an increase to between 625m tonnes to 685m tonnes a year in 2040, from 404m tonnes last year; however, this is below 2023’s prediction of 700m tonnes, the article notes. LNG has “grown in importance” since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the Kremlin “slashed its pipeline gas supplies to Europe”, reports the Financial Times. Steve Hill, executive vice president for Shell Energy told analysts: “While things are relatively balanced and seemed relatively comfortable today, the market is still quite fragile. We have a structurally tight market that’s been balanced by near-term market weakness for where we see fragility and volatility continuing,” notes Reuters. This story was also covered by Bloomberg, City AM and others.

UK Labour party’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves accepted a £10,000 donation from a former trustee of a thinktank that has questioned the science behind human-caused climate change, reports the Times. She accepted the money from Lord Donoughue, a Labour peer who is a former chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a thinktank “set up by  former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson in 2009 to scrutinise the economics of climate change”, it continues. “The timing of the donation is embarrassing for Reeves as it was accepted shortly before Labour abandoned its flagship £28bn green energy spending pledge”, the article notes. Donoughue donated to the shadow chancellor’s office late last month, three weeks before Labour “formally ditched its spending plan”, reports the Daily Telegraph. The article quotes Donoughue, who said: “The donation was totally unrelated. I haven’t been involved in those £28bn discussions at all.” Donoughue described himself as “never a denier”, but “kind of an oddball sceptic”, adding: “I did believe the globe was warming and I did believe the emissions problem was generated by industrial human activity. But I couldn’t be in the flag-waving green blob. What worried me was how we would pay for dealing with climate change.”

In other Labour news, the party’s leader Keir Starmer is being urged to more than double its investment in publicly owned renewable energy to save consumers billions of pounds on their bills, reports the Guardian. In an intervention following Starmer cutting back of its £28bn green investment pledge “in the most controversial U-turn of his leadership”, the Common Wealth thinktank said a “step-change in government backing for clean energy generation was still required” the article adds. The Labour party’s plan to retain an initial cash injection into a state-owned renewable power generation company planned if the party is elected was an important “down payment”, but should be increased to £30bn over the course of a first term in office, it says. Finally, Labour’s plans to invest £8.3bn in public funds through the new energy company dubbed GB Energy could save up to £1bn in interest savings over a five-year parliamentary term, reports BusinessGreen. 

The Just Energy Transition Partnership climate finance framework is struggling to raise capital, a new report has found, resulting in coal plants staying open, says the Financial Times. The US, EU and UK are among the donors that promised to help mobilise “vast sums for the green transition under the auspices” of the “landmark” climate finance framework, it continues. Pledges so far have included a $20bn package for Indonesia to pay for the coal-dependent country’s shift to renewable energy, with similar projects in South Africa, Vietnam and Senegal, it adds. Just Energy Transition Partnerships were pitched by leaders including US president Joe Biden, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at the COP28 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, as a mechanism to plug the financing gap hampering the green transition in developing countries, notes the FT. But, according to the report from the Rockefeller Foundation, frustration has grown and the model “may not be scalable” in its current form, it adds.

Ministers from the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 31 member countries “have begun talks with India on its application to become a full member” in “recognition of the country’s strategic importance in tackling global energy and climate challenges”, the Press Trust of India reports. The article quotes Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who said: “I am sure that the IEA will benefit when India plays a bigger role in it…Inclusivity boosts the credibility and capability of any institution.” Modi added that India was “firmly committed to combating climate change”, noting: “In one decade, we went from the 11th largest economy to the fifth largest. In the same period, our solar energy capacity grew twenty sixfold. Our renewable energy capacity also doubled. We exceeded our Paris commitments in this regard, ahead of timelines.” The story notes that India sent a formal request for full membership in October 2023.

Elsewhere, a longread in The Hindu looks at “how Indian voters perceive climate change, where it ranks in their list of electoral concerns, and the tide of ‘green’ agendas in India’s 2024 political wars”. Researchers told the paper that “all issues on the ballot in India in 2024 – unemployment, education, healthcare, economic growth, caste inequality – are linked to climate change” and that parties “weaved green policies, renewable energy targets and pollution-free mandates into their election manifestos” in 2019, climate change still “does not rank highly against other top concerns like inflation and unemployment.” In addition, Bloomberg reports on the Modi government’s $9bn “rooftop solar push” to power 10m homes as elections loom. Separately, Scroll.in examines a decade of “environmental dilutions” under the Modi government and how it has fared on climate, forests, governance, and renewable energy. 

In energy news, the chairman of Coal India PM Prasad has told Reuters that the state-run coal behemoth plans to start operations at five new coal mines and expand the capacity of 16 existing mines to address growing demand. Prasad said that he “expects higher outsourcing of mining”, having already awarded nine projects worth 83m tonnes per annum (MTPA) coal annually to private companies, with another two projects “likely to be awarded” before the end of March. While Prasad told the newswire that he expected a “natural” average annual attrition of “12,000-13,000 employees to help manage expenses”, MoneyControl reports that central trade unions have called “an all-India one-day strike at establishments of the state-run Coal India on February 16”. However “the exact reason” behind the strike is unclear, it added.

The global energy transition would cost an “extra $6tn” if countries tried to “completely decouple from made-in-China clean tech products”, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, reports Quartz. This would be added to the “$29tn worth of capital expenditures [the consultancy] estimates would be required through 2050” to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, or “an additional 20% of the original energy transition bill”, it says. 

Meanwhile, the state-run newspaper China Daily quotes the deputy director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Gauri Singh saying that “China has always played a very important role in renewable energy” by allowing “a large number of countries” to manage the energy transition “more smoothly”. Euractiv covers comments by EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra that Europe “lost its position [as a leader in solar manufacturing] to China more than 10 years ago” and that Europe’s increasing dependency on China for the energy transition is “problematic”. US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm says that the US is “very concerned about China’s grip on the global supply chain for critical minerals”, according to CNBC. The Guardian reports that Oliver Griffiths, chief executive of the “post-Brexit trade watchdog” trade remedies authority (TRA), says that the body “is ready to follow Brussels in launching an investigation into Chinese companies flooding the market for electric cars”, but that the UK government “has not asked it to do so”. 

Meanwhile, energy outlet IN-EN.com reports that, in December 2023, the utilisation rates of wind and solar power nationwide were 97% and 97.1%, respectively, according to the national new energy consumption monitoring and early warning centre. It adds that the two renewable energy source’s respective utilisation rates between January and December 2023 were 97.3% and 98%, respectively. China Daily reports that the six “mega hydropower stations” on China’s Yangtze River that form the world’s largest clean energy corridor generated 276 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023. Reuters carries a commentary by columnist Gavin Maguire, who writes that if Chinese authorities release “stimulus packages aimed at reviving industrial output in the spring”, China’s “mammoth” power and manufacturing systems may “single-handedly reverse historical pollution trends”. Finally, Caixin posts the final article in its series on power market reform, which says that “as growing economic headwinds intersect with rising energy prices” regulators may become concerned about “further burdening business”, which could mean that marketisation of the power sector may be more challenging. 

The current wave of farmer protests in Europe “endangers environmental progress”, says an editorial in the Guardian, but “imaginative politics can get the green deal back on track”.  Farmers have been hit by “a perfect storm of factors – including rising energy costs, competition from lightly regulated foreign imports and supermarket profit-gouging”, the article notes, but there is a growing danger that the EU’s green deal could “take the rap for a crisis incubated elsewhere”. What is needed is a persuasive strategic vision for European agriculture, one with sustainable farming at its centre, but one that also tackles “the injustices that have fuelled discontent”, argues the Guardian. The European Commission has launched its new “dialogue” on the future of EU agriculture, a central theme of which will be the provision of proper support for rural communities, it adds. “If the vital goals of the green deal are to be protected, the talk will need to swiftly translate into action,” the newspaper concludes. [see Carbon Brief’s analysis on the farmer protests for more.]

Both the Conservative and Labour parties are vulnerable to small parties luring dissatisfied voters – and not just in this election, writes James Kanagasooriam chief research officer at Focaldata in the Times. There are 7m voters in the UK who are “Green-curious” and have underlying warmth for the Greens, of which only 15% intend to vote for the Green party and 43% will go for Labour, he writes. But these votes could shift en masse, with the “left-wing backlash to scrapping the £28bn of annual green investment is a hint of what might lie ahead”, says Kanagasooriam. 

In another comment piece in the Times, business columnist Alistair Osborne discusses the “restraint” used by the cross-party House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) in describing the government’s  nuclear strategy this week as “lacking clarity”. He writes: “You can think of better ways to describe the financially radioactive shambles, complete with Rishi Sunak’s fantasy “road map’. He’s glibly promising 24 gigawatts of capacity by 2050 – either another seven Hinkley Point Cs or a mix of them and SMRs.” Meanwhile a Lex Opinion piece in the Financial Times explores how hydrogen is navigating the “hype cycle”.

Desert locusts contribute to famine and threaten food security, yet a clear understanding of the factors that drive outbreaks remains elusive, according to new research. Among the findings of the study are that individual locusts in the Middle East and North Africa are more prone to infest arid areas that have been affected by extreme rainfall and that locust invasions are strongly modulated by climate variability such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The paper concludes that a warming climate “will lead to widespread increases in locust outbreaks with emerging hotspots in west central Asia, posing additional challenges to the global coordination of locust control“. [Carbon Brief has previously covered the role played by the climate in the locust swarms in east Africa in 2019-20.]

New research finds a “robust increasing trend” in methane emissions from wetlands in the Boreal-Arctic region over the past two decades. Using the largest dataset for this region compiled to date, the study finds an 8.9% increase in methane emissions since 2002, with warming temperatures in the region accounting for more than half of the observed trend (52%). The authors warn that the current-generation models from the Global Carbon Project “fail to capture the emission magnitude and trend” and may lead to an underestimate of methane emissions from Boreal-Arctic wetlands in the future.