Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. 
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

UK considers cuts

EMISSIONS ADVICE: New recommendations from the UK’s climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee, said the nation should reduce its emissions to 87% below 1990 levels by 2040. This would keep the country on track for reaching net-zero by 2050 and take £1,400 off household bills by the same year, according to the advice. Read Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of the findings, which show that the estimated cost of reaching net-zero is now 73% lower than thought just five years earlier.

‘Y BOTHER’: Despite not being a major focus of the new analysis, much of the UK media coverage zoned in on how achieving the emissions cut might affect people’s lives. The Guardian reported that the average person might need to skip “two kebabs’ worth of meat a week”, while a frontpage Daily Telegraph story raged at the idea that frequent fliers may need to pay a higher rate of tax, which was not a recommendation. It comes shortly after a satirical Private Eye piece by correspondent Y Bother reported that “getting net-zero done might be a massive faff”, asking: “Shall we just not do it?”

UK AID CUT: Elsewhere, prime minister Keir Starmer announced plans to cut the UK aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of national income and spend more on defence, the Guardian reported, just as officials entered international finance negotiations in Rome (more on this below). The newspaper said it understood the UK’s £11.6bn climate finance would be “ringfenced” from cuts, but Climate Home News reported that climate groups were “dismayed” by the move. 

Around the world

• BIG VOTE: The centre-right Christian Democrats party won Germany’s federal election, with far-right Alternative for Germany in second place, Al Jazeera reported. Clean Energy Wire said the future government would still be committed to climate neutrality by 2045 but is likely to have a “reduced focus on climate policies”. 
• REGULATORY REVERSAL: The US Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to reverse the “endangerment finding”, a key legal ruling that required the agency to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Washington Post. 
• SETBACK: Energy company BP announced it will slash investment in renewables, while boosting oil and gas spending by 20%, the Associated Press reported. 
• UKRAINE-US PACT: Ukraine made an agreement with the US to jointly explore its mineral resources – including oil and gas, according to a frontpage story in the Financial Times.

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45%

The proportion by which Tesla’s electric vehicle sales have fallen in Europe since Elon Musk’s “political meddling”, reported Bloomberg.

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Latest climate research

• A new Nature study suggested that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a system of ocean currents that moves water, heat and nutrients around the Atlantic Ocean and the globe –  is unlikely to collapse this century. The research has promoted discussion around what AMOC “collapse” means.
• Climate change could lead to the creation of new carbon sinks in some ice-free areas of Antarctica, according to a study in Communications Earth and Environment.
• Peatland fires in the UK released 800,000 tonnes of carbon from 2000-21, a study in Environmental Research Letters found, accounting for 90% of the country’s total fire emissions.

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

Captured

In December 2022, nearly all countries agreed to a flagship global target to protect 30% of Earth by the end of the decade. But a new investigation of hundreds of country plans submitted to the UN by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that more than half of nations are not willing to commit to protecting 30% of their own land and seas. It comes as nations met in Rome this week to try to find agreement on outstanding biodiversity issues (more on this below). The chart above shows the various pledges made by countries when it comes to protecting a proportion of their land for nature, illustrating how less than half have committed to the key 30% figure.

Spotlight

COP16 talks reach finance deal

This week, Carbon Brief reports from COP16 nature talks in Rome, where countries landed a landmark finance deal in the early hours of Friday morning.

Last year saw a run of fraught and fractious environmental talks play out around the world.

Talks on reversing biodiversity loss, plastic pollution and desertification all ended in failure, while a UN climate summit in Azerbaijan produced a finance deal that was bitterly disappointing for many developing countries.

However, in the early hours of Friday morning at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome, countries delivered what they described as a signal of hope for multilateralism in uncertain times.  

Against a backdrop of foreign aid freezes and cutbacks in the US and Europe, nations agreed to a “permanent arrangement” to pay to help developing countries conserve biodiversity and a strategy to “mobilise” at least $200bn per year by 2030.

Striking a deal

The decision came after finance dominated discussions during the three-day resumed session of COP16 in Rome. Countries agreed to meet again in the Italian capital after failing to reach consensus at COP16 in Colombia in October 2024.

Different versions of the financing texts were negotiated throughout the week. Most countries agreed on the need to find a solution, but key disagreements still fractured the path to a deal until the summit’s final plenary. 

In the end, two proposals – one from the COP16 presidency and another from Brazil on behalf of the BRICs – were merged to enable countries to find consensus on finance.

A UK official told Carbon Brief that Brazil’s leading role in the negotiations is a “very positive sign” of its commitment to working with countries ahead of hosting the COP30 climate summit in November.

Biodiversity in the balance

Colombian politician and COP16 president Susana Muhamad received a lengthy standing ovation for her role in guiding parties to consensus in the early hours of Friday morning in Rome.

But, amid celebrations, some speakers noted that nations are still far off track for meeting the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The GBF is a landmark deal, first made in 2022, aiming to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.

Some three-quarters of nations have still not submitted their UN biodiversity plans for how they will achieve the targets of the GBF – four months after the deadline.

And a recent investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian revealed that more than half of nations that have submitted UN biodiversity plans do not commit to the GBF’s flagship target of protecting 30% of land and seas for nature by 2030.

Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of all of the key outcomes from the COP16 talks in Rome has just been published.

Watch, read, listen

CLIMATE DATA: A short video report by ABC News explained how the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses automated techniques to record climate data. 

‘FIRE AND FURY’: An editorial in Nature urged the global science community to resist Donald Trump’s “assault on science and international institutions”.

UNLOCK LOVELOCK: A BBC Sounds podcast told the life of James Lovelock, the co-author of the Gaia scientific theory and a former advisor to Shell who in 1966 warned the company about the risks of fossil fuels. 

Coming up

• 3-4 March: First G20 agriculture working group meeting | South Africa 
• 3-14 March: International Seabed Authority 30th session, legal and technical commission meeting | Kingston, Jamaica
• 4-6 March: Regional workshop on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) | Mombasa, Kenya

Pick of the jobs

• Associated Press, climate social video producer | Salary: $52,046-$82,934. Location: New York
• Imperial College London, deputy director of Undaunted | Salary: £68,005-£77,703. Location: London (hybrid)
• Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, senior economist, climate policy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Beijing

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to [email protected].

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